Meltdown Imminent

It has been well over a month since I last posted anything on here, so I will give a quick recap of what has happened since February 3rd.

• I got into ASU.
• I went to Wyoming for a job that is in the middle of nowhere, that would be interesting, good experience and pay well. However, it is in the middle of nowhere.

That is about it. I have also assembled a really sweet gun. It is a .308 and I haven't taken it out yet. I plan on eventually hitting something at 1000 yards. Just for a point of reference, if you shoot completely horizontal, it will take the bullet more than a second to fly that distance and will drop more than 35 feet. It will be a challenge, but I have 40 rounds to try and pull it off. If I can't do it with those, I will just buy more.

I have also spent a liberal amount of time this past month playing a game called "Fallout." It is set in post apocalyptic Washington DC and is massive. I have been checking some walkthroughs on the internet as I go mostly because I don't want to waste exorbitant amounts of time doing things that don't really matter. Fun game overall. I think that if I do decide to go up to Wyoming, I will buy the next one to spend my free time on this summer.

Derek is currently on "operation: don't look so damn fat" and I've decided to join him. Mostly because I feel like crap and don't exercise and I'm gaining weight. I ran a mile and lifted a bit today, but not a whole lot. We'll see how long I keep it up. I figure that if somebody else is doing it as well, I might be more motivated to actually keep up with it instead of quitting like I do every time.

Thanks to my geophysics class, I know exactly how many Joules of energy were released in the 9.0 Japan earthquake from a few days ago. Correction: I know where to look up the equation. I don't have it memorized. I have better equations to memorize to be honest.

There remain 36 days between me and the end of my BYU career. I am very excited to finish up and get out of there. Overall, they have been really good to me. I am just sick of the SSDD outine that I go through there. I am hoping that by not spending much time at ASU, I don't develop the same feelings for that university.

Current shows:

Dexter: Just finished season 4.

Rescue Me: Middle of season 4.

There really isn't anything else on right now. Everything is taking sporadic breaks and I never know when it is on. I think that I am going to start saving entire seasons until they are done. I will definitely burn through them faster but I think that I would enjoy them more. I will likely still acquire them as they come out though.

Anyway, my room looks like total crap and I have resolved to clean it today. Something smells like fire. Better check it out.

...or Puff the Magic Dragon

Today is Thursday. This means:

• Community
• 30 Rock
• It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
• Burn Notice
• The Office
• Bones

It is a horrible night for productivity (which is a lie). I don't usually watch any of these shows on Thursday night. I usually "DVR" them and watch them on Friday and Saturday.

So I just took a three hour break from writing this to finish up some homework. I don't know where it came from, but I suddenly realized what I had to do to finish a project that I've already spent about 7 hours on. Myself and some comrades at school had to do some work with supersonic flow and produce some experimental and theoretical results. Experimental was easy; theoretical wasn't. We couldn't figure out how to get the data we needed from what we had. I realized in about one second tonight what I tried to figure out for two hours yesterday. However, after realizing it, it took me three hours to do it.

Speaking of school projects, here are some images of some of the cooler things I've had to do at school so far this year.

• This is an analysis showing the speed of air coming off of an airfoil (wing). The redder, the faster. You see all the blue? That is where the air pretty much is stopped and just hangs out behind the wing. This is for Mach 8, and and 8 degree angle of attack. That means that it is moving 8x the speed of sound and pointed 8 degrees above the horizon.

• This is what I just did. These are contour lines showing air pressure as it moves across a shock wave. Shock waves happen as supersonic air (Mach > 1) suddenly goes subsonic (Mach <>

• These are little, tiny switches. We made them by depositing various liquids, selectively hardening parts of those liquids and desolving other parts, over and over. Each of the longer switches is about 100 microns long (which is less than 0.005 inches). There really isn't even anything you can give for comparison. Just imagine that if you stacked 200 of these switches from end to end, you'd still be under an inch.

There has also been a lot of code writing, but nobody wants to see that. Nobody wanted to see this either, but this is what you get.

Call of Duty: Black Ops came out last Tuesday. Since getting it, Derek, David and I have wasted quite a bit of time with it. I'm currently enjoying it more than I remember enjoying modern warfare, which is saying a lot. The campaign is confusing, but it is supposed to be. There's a bunch of shadowy crap going on and you're supposed to figure out the over-arching theme. Its fun. Also, it has uncle gazpacho, which is fun.