Bureaucracy, Interpolation, and Compensation
Work continues.
I'm finally registered for next semester's classes. The rough breakdown is 8 hours of hardcore engineering, 4 hours of random ECE lab I have to take, and 9 of music stuff. 21 in all. Very much buisness as usual. Now, the fun part is... Until now, I've been proclaiming to anyone that will listen that I'm double majoring. Turns out that isn't quite accurate. What I'm really doing is pursuing a double degree, which is somewhat more complicated. Basically, I have to transfer my enrollment from the College of Engineering to the College of Fine and Applied Arts for at least a year so I can get the music degree. So, as of right now, I am now a music major first and foremost. What impact does this have on my everyday life? None whatsoever. Engineering will continue to be harder and will continue to get the majority of my concentration. But I think the fees they asses work out in such a way that I'll be paying slightly less as a fine arts major. Let's call it the Kevin Huckshold "My Life Is Needlessly Complicated" Award. This will, of course, be offset by the tuition hike next year. Whatever.
The big project for the weekend is for AE 312, interestingly enough. This class has cooperated so far this year, so I guess it's entitled to have a big project. Basically, I have to plot a bunch of very complicated functions. My Matlab skills have improved greatly, and for a while, all was well. However, there's this one thing called the Prandtl-Meyer function. This spits out an angle, Greek letter nu, as a function of a Mach number in a fairly well-behaved manner. However, as a step towards my plotting, I need Mach number as a function of nu. And as far as I can tell, inverting that sucker is a mess and I can't get it written out for free. So, I got to spend the evening cranking out post-wave Mach numbers for three different initial Mach numbers evaluated at 20 different deflection angles. There's a table for this sort of thing in the back of the book, but of course, all the values I need aren't on the table, so I have to do that long annoying interpolation thing they taught us in thermo last year. Ugh. But that's all done, so I should be able to crank this sucker tomorrow. More later. And that's your needlessly detailed look into the engineering world for the week.
Finally, I glued a few more floors to the tower today. It's taller than me now. For this set, the thing narrowed down in such a way that I had to somehow negate all the stacking irregularities that have accumulated over the past 15 floors. Solution: Set floor 16 at the height of the most irregular can in the layer beneath, and make there be gaps. And there are gaps, but they can't be seen from far away. So why the heck am I building this thing? Well, it's fairly known that your typical guy has a "conversation piece" in his room that he can show various girls he might be interested in, this theoretically being the first step in a sequence of events that bears no mention here. For most guys, this will be a plant or a goldfish of a funny-shaped paperweight. I need the gosh-friggin' 8th Wonder of the World. And it still hasn't worked. Owell. It's impressive nonetheless. And you can see it from Green Street. So you know which room is mine now. Which is fine, because it's my standing assumption that no one gives enough of a crap to do me any harm. And I have yet to be proven wrong. And so it shall be.
Back to work. I think the epoxy fumes are getting to me. Try to figure that one out.
I'm finally registered for next semester's classes. The rough breakdown is 8 hours of hardcore engineering, 4 hours of random ECE lab I have to take, and 9 of music stuff. 21 in all. Very much buisness as usual. Now, the fun part is... Until now, I've been proclaiming to anyone that will listen that I'm double majoring. Turns out that isn't quite accurate. What I'm really doing is pursuing a double degree, which is somewhat more complicated. Basically, I have to transfer my enrollment from the College of Engineering to the College of Fine and Applied Arts for at least a year so I can get the music degree. So, as of right now, I am now a music major first and foremost. What impact does this have on my everyday life? None whatsoever. Engineering will continue to be harder and will continue to get the majority of my concentration. But I think the fees they asses work out in such a way that I'll be paying slightly less as a fine arts major. Let's call it the Kevin Huckshold "My Life Is Needlessly Complicated" Award. This will, of course, be offset by the tuition hike next year. Whatever.
The big project for the weekend is for AE 312, interestingly enough. This class has cooperated so far this year, so I guess it's entitled to have a big project. Basically, I have to plot a bunch of very complicated functions. My Matlab skills have improved greatly, and for a while, all was well. However, there's this one thing called the Prandtl-Meyer function. This spits out an angle, Greek letter nu, as a function of a Mach number in a fairly well-behaved manner. However, as a step towards my plotting, I need Mach number as a function of nu. And as far as I can tell, inverting that sucker is a mess and I can't get it written out for free. So, I got to spend the evening cranking out post-wave Mach numbers for three different initial Mach numbers evaluated at 20 different deflection angles. There's a table for this sort of thing in the back of the book, but of course, all the values I need aren't on the table, so I have to do that long annoying interpolation thing they taught us in thermo last year. Ugh. But that's all done, so I should be able to crank this sucker tomorrow. More later. And that's your needlessly detailed look into the engineering world for the week.
Finally, I glued a few more floors to the tower today. It's taller than me now. For this set, the thing narrowed down in such a way that I had to somehow negate all the stacking irregularities that have accumulated over the past 15 floors. Solution: Set floor 16 at the height of the most irregular can in the layer beneath, and make there be gaps. And there are gaps, but they can't be seen from far away. So why the heck am I building this thing? Well, it's fairly known that your typical guy has a "conversation piece" in his room that he can show various girls he might be interested in, this theoretically being the first step in a sequence of events that bears no mention here. For most guys, this will be a plant or a goldfish of a funny-shaped paperweight. I need the gosh-friggin' 8th Wonder of the World. And it still hasn't worked. Owell. It's impressive nonetheless. And you can see it from Green Street. So you know which room is mine now. Which is fine, because it's my standing assumption that no one gives enough of a crap to do me any harm. And I have yet to be proven wrong. And so it shall be.
Back to work. I think the epoxy fumes are getting to me. Try to figure that one out.
posted by Kevin H | 12:10 AM
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