Birthday Weekend!

My birthday was on Saturday, woohoo! I'm 18 now...and it feels so weird! But also so good! I can sign for myself and buy lottery tickets and smoke cigarettes and the whole shibang! Not that I would. I still can't drink alcohol which is kind of weird but whatever.

Saturday, I woke up early and went into Boston to meet my mom's friend Bridie, her husband, and her sister at 10:30. We went to an Irish pub for breakfast/lunch/brunch/breakfast bagel which was really good and talked. Then we walked around Quincy a bit, and then went to the old US customs building (Now its a Mariott hotel, 26 floors) and we got to go to the very top because Bridie's husband owns some small part of a Mariott somewhere in California), and we got a pretty amazing view of the city from up there.

Then they left, and two friends met up with me and we went to the aquarium to study the motion of penguins in the water for our Design Nature swimmers project. In the end we chose to make a toy based on a penguin by the way...Anyways I found out that nobody...NOBODY smart is at the aquarium on Sundays. The woman working with penguins tried to convince me that the wings flap straight up and down without any rotational movements. Way to go. Well we had a fun time at the aquarium and then we left.

Me and Natalie then went to Mike's Pastry and each got a free canole cause they didn't take credit and we didn't have any cash on us. Nice little surprise birthday present.

On the way I saw Andrew D's university music group tour bus, the Tamburitzans from Duquesne University. I was really excited and tried to get his phone number through various methods so I could see him but I never did in the end. Never got to see him, but oh well.

Then some people met up with us and we went to the Hard Rock cafe which was pretty cool. I was exhausted at that point so dinner was a bit unenergetic, but it was nice that the waiter made me stand up in front of the restaurant and made everybody in the restaurants scream happy birthday to me. Well at least I got a free ice cream!

Then went to Urban Outfitters and bought a new t-shirt that I love, as displayed here

[I'll take a photo and put it here later]

And then went on the Babson Shuttle back to Olin. Slept the entire way, walked back to my room, and went to sleep at 9:30 pm. Told Natalie to wake me up at 10, and supposedly she shoved me but I just rolled over in bed and didn't wake up. Next thing I know my Sibb is in my room and telling me that it's 11:30 pm, it's my birthday, and I'm wanted at the party. So I got up and headed over, and had a lot of fun! I definitely needed the 2 hours of sleep though!

Well it was a fun night overall. Decided I'm not going to drink at Olin any time soon at least, and if I do drink, it'll be with old friends who I know don't binge drink like crazy.

So for our swimmers project, we're at the stage where we're supposed to be doing initial sketches of our toy, but to be honest, I can't think well on paper and pencil with complex mechanisms. So I SolidWorks-ed it, and now I have the exact motion of the wing that I want and the motion of the beak up and down (so that the little kids can catch toy fish in the pool with the mouth!).

And here it is! Kind of interesting, considering I hated using SolidWorks about a month ago. Now I can do a whole lot...even sophomores here were impressed with what I did, so that made me feel a bit less stupid and a bit more qualified to be at this school I guess.

So I flew today for an hour, and turns out my Logbook isn't completely in ruins. I don't need it to get resent from Europe with a different format or anything, I just need to make some changes by myself and it's good. My instructor's very precise, and it's making me work very hard while flying! Which basically meant, after flying, I was exhaustedly tired. And I still am. So goodnight!

I'm Legal

I'm finally legal! I'm legal in the worst country to not be legal, YES! Now I don't need parents' signatures for stupid things, and now I can go to some bars and pubs and clubs. But only 18+ ones...stupid America.

So in the first 10 minutes of my birthday, I got my finger actually stuck in a plastic ramune candy bottle.

Fail.

Anyways, hopefully it'll be a fun day tomorrow!!

Mod Con Labs

Mod Con labs take so long. Modeling and Control of the Physical World.

So in high school we'd have to do a lab and investigate one property of something or one concept.

Here, we have several things to investigate in each lab.

And then, we have to simulate the concept using computer software....This includes getting graphs and all that and overlaying those on experimental data.

Ah, they take forever.

Still sick

Hallo. Still sick. Hurts to swallow and coughing.

It's parent's weekend this weekend so pretty much everybody's parents are here. But mine. But that's ok cause they're coming for Thanksgiving! Yesterday I tabled for SERV and told various parents about what we do and what kinds of things I've done. Honestly, it was half BSing because I still haven't done an actual service activity.

Also talked to Will on the phone for a while last night, it was good to hear from him.

Oh, and we had the hopper demonstration day. Mine jumped about a foot and a quarter, but meh. Next we're going to be starting on swimmers, but for this project we're working in groups. The first assignment is to upload a picture of the animal you want to mimic for the swimmer, and make a video of how the animal swims, using whatever you want. I decided to use myself, yay.

I also helped my friend with his, and he did a mermaid. Let's just say it was hilarious.

Anyways, I'm going to bed. And it'll be the first time I went to sleep before 2 am in forever...

Goodnight!

I'm sick

No fair. Being sick isn't much fun when you have school. Went to the doctor's office at Babson today and she told me it was a virus so it just needs time. Good stuff.

This morning CNN wasn't working for some reason, so I decided to watch some Fox news. Holy CRAP they're uber mega conservative. Sure, CNN is more on the liberal side, but it's not too bad. And what is up with Fox news and their love of yelling at each other? Good God, it's not news. Let me note that I'm not very liberal. I guess I'm more independent...

Well, today's the voter registration deadline, so I'm going to head over to the mail room when it opens at 12 and mail off my reigstration form. Hooray!!

Anyways, I'm going to head over to the dining hall and see if I can get something in my stomach.

Weekend!

Helloooo all.

So it's Sunday. Let's see what has happened since the last time. On Friday night, we were disappointed to hear that there aren't any parties going on at Olin this weekend, and my Deutchish friend went back home to NJ for the long weekend. So me and 2 other girls and 1 other guy went to Harvard Square just to hang around, so we went, got kind of bored, and then I ran into a girl I know from Wellesley and she was with 2 other girls so we hung around together and had fun. We found a Harvard party and we were going to 

go but then when we got there everybody was leaving for some reason (it was 1 am...not sure why it was ending. Maybe it's them Harvard geeks that have to get 8 hours of sleep). Anyways we went back at 2 ish and in the end it was a fun night!

Next morning I woke up, and for the 3rd straight week in a row, we took the 3:40 pm bus to Boston. Went with about 10 people or so and the plan was Quincy Market exploring, MIT Asian Night Market, MIT Frat party at Sigma Phi. Shweet. Well we go to Quincy, I buy myself some 7 dollar sunglasses for flying, I buy a pair of jeans, we watch a street magician make extremely crude gay jokes in front of little kids (why are there such messed up people in our world), and then start heading over to MIT. We get off the T at Kendall, and follow Jacob who's been to MIT and all that before. We end up walking in a huge square and end up at Kendall again, before he realizes exactly where we were. Then we finally found the place after lots of walking, and it was pretty cool. 4 bucks to get in, you get 5 tickets, and one ticket will get you one portion of food or drink. So not bad! What really ruined the night was that there was no Japanese food! I was going in hoping for takoyaki and okonomiyaki, but all I got was Chinese chicken and some dumplings. Oh well. I did get these ice cream mochis which were pretty amazing I must say. They also had some performances put on like a Chinese dragon dance. Cool cool, I'm heading over to the frat.

Well, everybody decides to bail on going to the frat because we did so much walking that day and we were all tired, except for one girl. So her and I walk back to Kendall to pick up some other friends, and then we walk across the bridge, go to the right after the bridge, and realize we were on the wrong bridge. So we ended up having to walk a few miles south which was kind of annoying. Anyways we got there and in the end we could only get me and the other girl in because they were really strict that you have to know a brother at the frat and not too many in at once. We go in and it's kind of ok, but we didn't know anybody...then Jacob came by himself and we hung around and we met a brother and he took us upstairs to the private party which was ok, but still nothing special. Anyways we were going to leave and then the cops came, and they were at the main party and had no idea about the private party, so we weren't allowed to go downstairs otherwise the police would find out. We waited about 30 min or an hour and then finally we were allowed to leave. Then trying to find the bus that takes us back to Wellesley college took a while. We found it, went home on it, and then had a friend pick us up from Wellesley college. In the end we got back at 4:30 ish. Ugh.

Then today I woke up at 11:00 am for flying. Went to the airport with John, a senior, who's going for his commercial rating. Met the instructor, talked to him about my training, and his first impression was basically that I'm a trainwreck student. See, in Hungary, there's no such things as regulations. So my instructor didn't teach me accordin

g to a syllabus, nor did he do things like sign my logbook after every flight. So at this point, I'm not sure if the FAA will take my hours from Hungary. Which...would....you know....So yeah. I'm flying out of Hanscom Field, and it's pretty intense. Business jets flying in and out, and there was even a 757 and an A319 parked on the tarmac. If you don't know what those are, those are the big commercial airplanes you fly on to go home to grandmas. So me, flying a little propeller airplane, was very scary when there are jets all around me. Tons of traffic at the airport, the air traffic controllers speak so fast! But I actually could understand most of it, because at our club we can borrow headsets! It makes talking to my instructor much more clear and easy, as well as listening to the air traffic control. Also, I flew in a Piper Warrior, which is Piper's answer to the famous Cessna 172. Well, to be honest, I like the 172 better. It flies much easier. The Piper requires a lot of control input, so my flare for landing wasn't so much a flare as a nosedive to the ground. Ok well not that bad, but you know what I mean. I definitely didn't pull up enough. Anyways, in the air we went up to 4500 feet (wow! never been so high in a prop plane...in Hungary we'd always be below 2000 feet or so) and did some steep turns, did a power off maneuver, and a forward slip. Instructor was impressed at how well I did the forward slip, and I just said "gliders." Definitely explained a lot to him! So overall the lesson went well. This guy's very strict which is good, and wants you to do exactly as he says. I definitely miss Endre (my old Hungarian instructor) more though, and would fly with him any day.

So tonight, my hallway threw a party. First party hosted by freshman this year, and to be honest I wasn't too fond of the idea. The organizers kind of bitched me into letting them use the very front of my room for the bar. I wasn't too happy when they brought 3 refridgerators full of jello shots into the back of my room as well as coolers and stuff, but I couldn't really say no. In my point of view, if I said no to this, I would be the...you know...idiot, especially after Matt picked us up at 3:30 am last night. Anyways, I didn't stay for the party. Seriously, hmm...how do I say this? Americans drink so amazingly irresponsibly. It's terrible. They do shots together, and do shots together, and do shots together. So I didn't want to stay with the irresponsible freshman. Instead, I went to East Hall for a techno party which, once me and a few other people got people to come, was pretty fun! I had a good time and I was glad I didn't have to stay at the freshman party!

So that was tonight. And like all other posts, it's 3 am! Off to sleep...soon.

One last thing, YES!! I got ice skates today at Sports Authority. They're pretty comfortable (as comfortable as ice skates will ever get), and they only costed 46 dollars! Nice!

At that rate, if I go ice skating 9 times in the next 4 years, I will have paid them off. Skating is free at the rink that's literally a 5 minute walk from my dorm, but rentals are $5. So hooray for saving money, because I'll definitely be going a lot more than 9 times, and I get comfortable skates as opposed to hard old crappy blue rubber ones.

I need to buy my own headset for flying eventually. Guess how much they cost, minimum.

$119

And it's kind of like any other technology product. The headphones sold at the cornerstore cost 4 dollars, but when you want a decent pair, it runs up to about 70 dollars. So a decent one goes up to about $300. CRAZY.

If only money grew on trees. Or at least in a plant hidden under my bed.

Tomorrow I'm having dinner with my Uncle Claude from New Jersey! Score!

Goodnight!!

It jumps!!

So the parts came back for my second prototype of the mechanical hopper, and this time it actually jumps kind of! It only jumps about a foot or less, but still! So the main design change was to make the legs skinnier and shorter, so as to make them lighter compared to the base.

So there it is. It actually hops this time. It's smaller and lighter, and more 2.0 than the 1.0 prototype. Well anyways, 3 day weekend coming up, going ice skating again tomorrow, and I'm still enjoying the new HDTV in the lounge! Watching The Office in HD was incredible! Anyways, as usual with these posts it seems like, it's crazy late and I should go to sleep. Goodnight!

Mrawwwrrr.

So several happenings:

West Hall 3rd floor lounge is now officially the best lounge in the school. We just got a 42" HDTV for the lounge. Dang, I love how rich Olin is. Basically the East Hall 4th floor lounge's TV broke, but nobody actually hangs out in the lounges in East Hall, so instead, we pushed to get a new, nice TV here in West Hall. Well, in the end, we got it! I set it up yesterday and immediately played GTA on it. Well, let's just say it was awesome. I hooked up cable, and for some reason which nobody knows, the cable here is reaaally really staticky, so watching cable on the big TV was a bit sad. So I brought out my TV antenna, hooked it up to the TV, and started kicking it in HD. The HD broadcast towers for Boston are right next to Olin so we get great reception. So yeah, 42" of beauty. One down side of HD: we were watching the presidential debate and we could actually see the wrinkles on McCain's face :D. Anyways, I'm excited to watch The Office tomorrow in HD!! Oh, and we only get the few local channels over the air, so we're just leaving cable plugged in to the TV.

So I built my hopper for Design Nature, and I found out how much it fails. The three legs are supposed to come down, hit the ground, and meet each other at the bottom of the hopper. The hopper then jumps up to Mars after the high impact collision of the legs again

st the ground. Instead, what really happens is the legs snap together. And the hopper jumps about 5 cm. Hooray! That's just a tad less than my two foot goal. I talked to my professor, Ozgur, about it, and he helped me through the problems and what's going on, and that definitely helped a lot. It's pretty cool to actually see it though. And I'm glad because everything works smoothly, it does exactly what it's supposed to do. It's just that the design is really lacking. Oh well. The model went from 3D to in my hands. K

ind of hard to describe the feeling, but it's really awesome! So now I have to make some changes to it, which includes shorter legs, heavier base, tighter rubber tubing, and stuff like that. I'm hoping it'll work in the end! The project is due Wednesday...eek.

So exciting stuff! This Monday my uncle will be in town and we'll probably go out somewhere for dinner which will be fun! And then next weekend my friend from California's going to be coming!! So hooray for that. Definitely. And other stuff...OH!

I have a class called "Seeing and Hearing." Let me repeat. "Seeing and Hearing." Let that stick in your head for a bit. Now what if I told you that my professer for that class's name is Helen Donis-Keller. HOW GREAT is that?

Everybody always gets a kick out of it. I definitely did. Anyways, she's gone all this week, so we aren't having any classes. We have class twice a week, but still! Tuesday at 10:00 am me and 3 other people went to the Babson ice skating rink to celebrate the fact that HDK (as she likes to call herself, but she doesn't want other people to call her) is gone. It's a 1 minute walk from campus, free admission, and skate rentals are 5 dollars. I'm thinking of buying my own pair of really crappy skates for like 40 or 50 dollars, because even if I go twice a year, they'll pay themselves off after 4 years.

Anyways it's sort of late. I should sleep. Got 4.5 hours last night...I was exhausted today.

Oh! Haha more things just keep coming. I'll be brief. I made a thermostat in class today. Yup. A thermostat.

Bye!!

Career Initiatives Day

Today was Career Initiatives Day at Olin!

That meant, no classes, and the chance to sell yourself to big name companies including:

EMC

Lime Brokerage (Limewire)

HP

Prismark

Intuit

iRobot

Boston Scientific

Google

Aurora Flight Sciences

MIT Lincoln LAboratory

Tyco Electronics

Raytheon

IBM

DRS Technologies

MITRE

Sun Microsystems

Microsoft

Rockwell

US Navy

Bose

Dassault Systemes SolidWorks Corporation

Textron Systems

National Instruments

and much more! CRAZY! Can you believe it? I always imagined a job fair to have small local companies like Dunder Mifflin paper company or Bob's Discount Furniture. But wait, I forgot (and I still forget), I'm at Olin!

So it was a dress up day (well, for most people) which I always like. Wearing a suit makes things fun. And feel like MUN. Which I actually find myself remeniscing about with other people who did it here. Each company had a booth all over the Academic Center, and they were all trying to catch the smartest people with the best past research experiences by throwing freebees at them. Mugs, high quality frisbees, bags, USB hubs, Screwdriver sets, ping pong balls, magnets, and other unnecessary crap! Unfortunately for me, the extent of my research experience has been the extended essay, where I investigated the relationship between angle of attack of an airfoil and the resultant lift force.

So I gave my resume to Aurora Flight Sciences, Textron, and for the hell of it, Bose. Besides that, nothing interested me too much. I'm trying to find an internship for the summer that has something to do with aerospace engineering. The guy I was talking to from Textron was very nice and seemed kind of interested, and he made my face light up when he said that Textron owns Cessna.

!!!

How cool would it be to intern at Cessna over the summer? I'm going to be starting my flying again pretty soon (heading over to Hanscom Field to set up some lessons tomorrow afternoon I think), and so far, the only kind of airplane with a propeller that I've flown or flown in has been a Cessna 172. So I'll gladly work for Cessna, even if it is in Middle of Nowhere, USA. I mean Kansas. 

Anyways, I became a member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics today. As in, I paid 20 dollars and now they're going to send me some stuff. But what I'm really in it for is to find internships and possibly found a chapter of the AIAA here at Olin, so I can look somewhat decent to a future employer.

Well, I have a Modeling and Simulation project due tomorrow, and my partner is nowhere to be found. I better get going on trying to get our code to work.

Adios.

(Seeing and Hearing self portrait 2nd draft)

Whats up.

A ton. Drama continues. Work continues.

Over the past few weeks we've been working on designs and 3D models for mechanical toy hoppers. We have a limited amount of materials to work with and a few different rules that we have to follow, but besides that, the entire thing is pretty much up to us. I had a design, made a prototype out of basic materials, created a 3D model of it, ran simulations on it, and saw how it would jump in 3D. That's a lot of work. Then that night I had a dream and thought of a much better design. So I basically redid it. That put a lot of work on me, but I finished, and I haven't gotten the simulation working or even make a prototype, but I'm hoping to god it works. The picture is showing the final 3D model, which I care not to explain in detail, but basically the yellow tubes are stretchy tubing that pulls on the 3 legs downwards. And then it jumps. Good stuff! So I submitted the part designs and they're hopefully being cut tomorrow morning, and I can make the actual hopper tomorrow afternoon. This is the first real prototype, so I guess the beta stage. We're then evaluating how these hoppers work and then making any necessary changes in the 3D model and remaking them for a final. Pretty cool class I must say! Lots of work though!


So here's something that you wouldn't see often if you know me.



Jeans, lacoste shoes, and a Hello Kitty carpet in the middle of my dorm room floor. Well, the Hello Kitty is for kicks, but yeah. I just thought this was kinda funny. I'm really happy with the shoes though. Got them today at the mall (going to the mall on a tuesday! score!). If you didn't know, I have 4E wide feet and custom orthodics, so it's kind of a pain for me to buy new shoes. But they're wide enough and they're pretty comfortable! Not as comfortable as my running shoes, but they definitely look better.


Oh, and another thing I love about college. Free stuff. I got a really big lamp for my desk from the 1st floor lounge. Shweet. I got the free hello kitty carpet from the 4th floor lounge. And people send out emails saying when they're giving out free stuff, so it's really convenient. Hm, that may be confusing to you.


Because Olin is 300 people, everybody has e-mail access to everybody. Staff, Faculty, Students, President Miller, etc. And there are also things called lists. You can sign up for lists, and whenever somebody sends an e-mail to that list, everybody in the list gets the e-mail. For example, Carpedium is a list for things such as announcing free stuff, announcing events such as "I'm going running in 10 and I want somebody to run with...does somebody want to come?", and other things like that. So yeah, that's how I got the free hello kitty rug.

I guess that's all from me for now. Room still isn't too decorated but oh well. I ordered a mouse for my laptop. I'm excited. It'll make 3D modeling a lot easier, as well as reading through documents (it has one of those almost-frictionless scroll wheels that just keep spinning if you let it go). And it's pretty small so it'll fit easily in my backpack. Hooray!

I guess that's all for now.