One More Day

Only one more day before I graduate from college with a bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering. Only one more night (tonight) before my last presentation for an undergraduate class. Maybe I should be sleeping so that I'm rested for my very important presentation? Nah!

Instead I am up listening to the Suns game. They are destroying Portland right now. I may be drowsy tomorrow in my final, but just hearing Al McCoy put the game "In the Deep Freeze" makes it all worth it. The other part that makes it worth it is that Shanna let me stay up and listen to it, which means that she won't be mad at me for making her go to bed alone.

I must say, I'm pretty lucky that Shanna lets me watch/participate in as many sports as she does. She's awesome! and she got a new haircut today that looks really good.

Sorry, boring post. If you want something interesting to read, click here.

School and Work Update

I know that a lot of you know what I do at work, but you probably don't know what I do. I'm posting a video of an application that I recently wrote. I wrote it for a class that I am in, but the class that I am in is sponsored by the company that I do research for. So basically, my class teaches how to do things that I do in research.

What I tell people that I do is CAD (Computer Aided Design) Tool Customization. What that means is I write computer programs that can do various things inside of the CAD programs. The program that we use most is Nx, which was formerly Unigraphics. So we find the CAD program's API, which is a set of programming functions that do the things that clicking the mouse on buttons usually does. (for example, your internet browser has a back button and a refresh button and a home button. Each button probably has at least one function associated with it that tells your computer what to do when it is pushed) Once we have all of the functions that we need, we can use them to do things automatically in our CAD program. This saves engineering companies time and money.

Anyways, this video shows a program that I wrote that builds an airfoil (airplane wing shape). It asks the user to input several values that will define the geometry and then when the user hits "OK" it builds it up automatically. The video shows me running the program twice with different inputs, some pretty normal ones and then some more extreme values. I rotate the part around manually after it builds so that you can see the built parts from different angles. This is probably boring all of you. But it's basically my life...Sad, huh? (but I like it)...(most of the time)...

CO Close Call

Had a scary experience today. I was working downstairs in the PARACad lab today with some other people when we heard a siren-type noise. It sounded like a police car but inside the Clyde Building. I looked at the person next to me and said, "I wonder what that was...". She later left for a class and returned about 2 hours later.

When she got back she told me what had happened. This is how I heard it. I don't know for sure if it is true or not. She said that there is a lab in the Clyde basement that has Carbon Monoxide tanks that exploded. The alarm was the carbon monoxide alarm. Apparently, the people from that lab evacuated everybody from the basement,.....except for us. I mean, what's the deal? If you're going to evacuate the basement,...evacuate the whole basement. In the mean time, I was studying and I got a huge headache and felt really drowsy. Luckily I'm ok. If I had died, nobody would have heard my story.

Next Week's Police Beat

At nine o'clock AM on Tuesday Nov. 4th, police were called to investigate reported gun shots behind the Clyde Building. Cautiously, two patrol cars investigated the situation. As they poked their car nose around the corner, they saw nothing but a group of students huddled in a circle. Slowly they approached using all of their investigative skills. As they drew close to the group, the students looked up and laughed. The huddle parted to reveal a formula one race car. It was found that the "gunshots" were actually caused by the student built race car backfiring repeatedly. The officers told the students to try to get the engine timing problems worked out.

Don't be surprised if you see this in the Police Beat next week. It happened to us today. It was really funny. The officers were being so cautious. Then they were really relieved to see it was just us. Eventually a ME faculty member told us that we had to stop the engine because there were too many people around without earplugs even though there was a whole cubby full of earplugs in the facility. He said not to run it again until we had the problems worked out. The only thing is, we have to run it to iron out the problems.

Well, the car is running now anyway.

Hey Everybody,

Here is a video that my lab group made last week. It's of a water balloon popping. We had to film at 12,000 frames per second to get this shot. It's pretty amazing how the balloon just gets pulled off from around the water. The water kind of sticks to the rubber too. It's just a cool video. Enjoy!