Work.

Work. There's so much of it.

It's weird having to be in a situation where you just can't get A's
and B's. You have to settle for a pass. A C or a D. And sometimes you
have to skip class to get some sleep. It's bad.

First solo flight tomorrow!

Need. Sleep.

I keep thinking things are going to be better next week. I'm not sure why I keep thinking that and I guess I've finally reduced myself to stop thinking that.

It was a pretty tough week. Barely got sleep. Thursday night I didn't actually get sleep (thank God I slept an hour during lunch), and I went to bed at 12 on Friday night. We have so much work it's crazy. But that's college, right? Luckily I was mostly in an ok/good mood during the week....Thursday night I worked almost all night  on the MIT Clean Energy competition. We have so much work to do with that but it's all fun and such a priceless learning experience. I'm really learning more through that than any of my classes right now. The deadline for submission is the 26th...oh man how close that is!

Flying last weekend was fun! Did touch and goes with one go around and one simulated engine out when we were flying past the runway to turn around and land. That was pretty fun because I had to fly over the airport and do a sharp turn right over the runway and land. Good stuff!

Today we went up again and did touch and goes at the airport but this time I was controlling the radio as well. I still need work on talking over the radio but oh well. It got pretty busy up there! There was also a student flying....I believe it was a Cessna, and he made a mistake and ended up about 50 or 75 meters away from me, flying parallel to me. There were lots of times when the controller told me "no delay on the go" (basically after you touch your wheels on the ground, get your ass up in the air) and to go as fast as possible on the approach because there would be a jet coming in to land on my tail. Oh man, it's crazy sometimes. Also, something that was pretty funny...I was aligned with the runway and number 3 for landing. I was pretty far from number 2 so I wasn't too worried, but number 1 and 2 were so close! Number 1 landed, and number 2 was almost over the runway. Then we hear "3 Yankee go around." We see him going around, but number 1 is doing a touch and go so he took off immediately. Anyways in the end they were both pretty much flying one on top of the other until the controller had one of them side step to the right a bit.

Well, here's the good news.

The next time I fly I'll be going SOLO!!!!

w00t!!

Looks like blogger doesn’t support HTML over email. I email my blog posts now. So much easier than logging in. And I’m not going to take time to log in and edit the past posts.

Correction*

First fatality in <b>3</b> years in America.

Bleh

So I had kind of a bad week. Not much sleep, and a combination of not so great things. I need the weekend, but even this weekend isn’t going to be so great. Starting to feel sick. America’s first death in a commercial airplane crash in two (can’t give you a source on that) years. Lots of homework. Missing home.

 

On the flip side I’m looking at studying abroad in the UK or Japan. More to come on that later, as in when I actually do heavy research into that.

 

Well, I have a biology essay to finish. Blegh.

I don't get it

This is weird.

 

I did 300 diamond pushups throughout the course of the day today. Something’s going on. Weird.

I still enjoy photography

Portraits of two of my friends. Used my 50 mm F1.8 lens

6 pictures for you

So I've been getting into photography a lot more in the past. I love
it. It allows me to express myself *ahem BS*. No, it allows me just to
have fun. It does not express myself at all. Really, I'm not trying to
be sarcastic. It's just plain old fun. And my friend showed me how to
do macro photography two nights ago.

Oh, and I just found out I can email things to my account and it'll
post it. SO COOL!!!

Back at Olin

It's been a while since I've blogged! Sorry.

So the general happenings of nowadays:

New Classes

MIT Clean Energy Prize Competition

Flying

Other general stuff.

So classes. Here they are:

• Principles of Modern Biology - Just as it sounds. Normal biology class. It's hard, but I actually like my professor. He's a really cool guy. He tries hard to get to know the students. We have two parts to this class. On Tuesdays, I have two hours of lecture from Bram (my professor), and then three hours of lab, which is taught by Bram but more by Sadie, another professor. Sadie's not a great teacher. Really nice woman, but she doesn't understand the fact that some of us have only had a semester of biology in high school. Lab is pretty cool, but I wouldn't say I'm interested in it. We cloned something though this past lab. I'm not sure what it was. Bacteria maybe? But cool! I cloned something!!
• Electricity and Magnetism Theory - I had the option of being in the Modeling and Simulation section which would be implementing E&M Theory into simulations of cool situations. But I decided since I'm terrible at coding, and coding wouldn't help towards going for a mechanical engineering degree, and the professor in the Theory section was supposedly really cool, I switched into Theory. Every week we have a problem set due, so it's a pretty typical college class. The professor really is hilarious. She's Russian. Shhhh, but she brought in a Guiness to demonstrate an electrical effect with a can. She didn't open it, but still!
• Vector Calculus - Another standard class. Problem sets due every week or every other week. It's not too bad but it took me a while to integrate sin(pi*t) today. That was bad.
• Engineering of Distributed Systems - Same class as Mod Con last semester but just different people in the class. Same classrom. Same teachers. Although now we're doing a bit more complicated things. The lab writeups are sucky in general, but this pasts week was especially hard. Took two long nights of work, and I still only finished part of it.
• Principles of Engineering - A class which mixes electrical engineering with mechanical engineering. This is the cool class. First day of class we took apart printers/VCRs in groups and we tried to understand exactly how each thing works. There were some pretty amazing mechanisms in something as simple as a printer! We're not working with devices called PIC microprocessors, in which we write code in C and upload it to the microprocessor, and then that microprocessor will do whatever you told it to without any need for a computer connection. So for this class, there have been some pretty amazing projects that have come out of it. I'm thinking of creating an autonomous remote controlled airplane as my final project. Yup, you read that right. The sky is really the limit for this class. For past projects, go here...and I really encourage you to, there's some pretty amazing things.

http://ece.olin.edu/poe/projects.html

So those are my classes. Definitely not as great as last year, but not too bad. 5 hours of biology on Tuesdays is a killer.

So the MIT Clean Energy Prize competition is a 200K grand prize competition in which you submit just the executive summary of a business proposal. The final document is due on February 26th, so it's really crunch time right now. We've split up into two teams but we're still working together. We have two ideas, but I really can't say here on the internet what the ideas are - first of all it's a competition - second of all we might patent one of our ideas. Anyways, it's a very time consuming thing, but we're making progress on it. And if you're reading this and you've helped on it (you definitely know who you are), here's a public shout out to you. THANK YOU!!!

Flying. I've only flown two times since I got back from the break. The first flight we just did sharp turns and slow flight (flying at 60 knots, full flaps). The second flight, which was yesterday, we went out to Fitchberg airport which is a small uncontrolled airport about 10 minutes away. We did two full stop landings. On the second landing, there was a flock of bird crossing the area just before the runway. I told Maurice (my instructor) and he was like don't worry about the birds. But then as we got closer I became more aware that they were right in my flight path. In the end, all of them got out of the way, but one came probably 20 feet right in front of my propeller! And he was going in the direction of the airplane! Ahh I hate stupid animals. Nothing happened, thankfully. Anyways, it was really busy in the sky. Oh and when we were pulling out of our spot to taxi to the runway, we had to wait for a single engine taildragger being towed by a truck with a firetruck following it. Wow. Turned out that it was a brand new airplane, they forgot to pull off something or remove something before the flight, and they ended up with a low oil pressure and high oil temperature warning - aka no oil fllow. Oops. Everybody was ok though.

Anyways - here's the shibang of it all. My instructor said that next time we'll be doing touch and goes at Hanscom (once again, it gets as busy as Logan), and then the next time, if I do well, will be my first solo flight! AHH!! Exciting!

Well, besides that things have been going well. I've been really busy lately, so I should go now. Went to the ABC party last night in Man Hall. Errr - Anything But Clothes party. That was tons of fun. Pictures of my escapades at Olin are on Facebook, I don't have time to upload them to here.

Bai!!

BEEEEEEER!!!!

Last night was the Reel Big Fish concert in Worcester. It was absolutely crazy amazing. YUSSSSSS. So we left Olin at 5 pm. Drove up to Worcester, got there at 6. The line was already about 100 meters long so we decided instead of getting real dinner we just went to a cigarrette shop and got some snacks. Then we went to stand in line outside in the freezing cold. Doors opened at 7, and in the concert hall I was able to get kind of close to the front....maybe 5 or 6 people behind the fence. So first a small upcoming band called Tip the Van played and they weren't actually too bad. It was REALLY cool when one of the singers came down to the audience and put the microphone right in my face to sing, and then put it in some of my friends faces. Then with everybody pushing and shoving I was able to get to the very front (on the railing!!) in the very very middle during the middle of Tip the Van's set. Being on the railing was pretty painful. Even at Sziget, things weren't this crazy. Not just waves of being pushed against the rail, but a constant pressure from behind me pushing me into the railing. When Tip the Van finished I was happy that it was over and was hoping that the pressure would lay off, but it stayed. I also talked to the guys around me, they were all really cool people, not scary or anything like some of the people in the crowd (tons of lip piercings, real mohawks, etc).

Next band was Streetlight Manifesto. They're also a big ska band, so during that concert, the pushing got even worse. I actually thought that my ribs would break at some points....Oh the pain and the agony. But it was so much fun. One of the...long saxaphone, whatever those are called. That guy that played that instrument, he was so good! And he was able to pop his eyes really wide, it was so funny. Anyways that concert lasted of course longer than Tip the Van but still probably about 45 minutes. When that finished, I asked for the set list, and I was able to get it! I was so happyyyy!! To be honest though, that concert was good but not great, because of all the pushing and shoving and me trying to protect my ribs.

Oh and another thing. The bouncers that are in the front to pull people out who are crowdsurfing were pretty hilarious. After one of the bouncers pulled out a person from the crowd, he raised his arms in the air like a referree and yelled "TOUCHDOOOOOOOOOOWN!!!!"

Well, then it was Reel Big Fish. Their set list was AMAZING. They started off with Trendy (YES), then another FU song, and they played stuff like Good Thing and Your Guts (I Hate 'Em) and The New Version of You and yeah a lot more stuff that was awesome. Kind of towards the beginning, Aaron Barrett (lead singer/guitarist) threw his pick into the crowd but it didn't go far, so it only went to the front row area. It was kind of to my left, and uh, let's just say my baseball skills came in handy. I literally just yoinked it into the air at the very last second to catch the pick and quickly pulled it back. I couldn't believe I caught it!! Right after I caught it they played Nothin' But a Good Time and YES it was amazing. Funny things they also did were to play a bit of Enter Sandman, and in the pause during She Has a Girlfriend Now they stopped and Aaron said ok so I've been working on a sequel for a few years and I'm finally done with it. I don't know if it's good, but let me know what you think. And they played "I kissed a girl, and I liked it!" (song by Kate Perry, popular on the radio now) Bwahahahahahahaha. That was freakin hilarious. Oh, and I kept yelling out "BEEEEEER" as loud as I could in between a lot of the songs when it was quiet (it's one of their songs). And Aaron was like, NO! We don't drink beer anymore! And then after another song he was like "OK EVERYBODY. Time for the most requested song of the night. It's about a beverage, that I think we all love." And they started playing TEQUILA. Not a Reel Big Fish song, you know, the good ol' song tequila that's just a generally famous song? Yeah that was pretty funny. But then they stopped playing that after 30 seconds or so and they started playing Beer. And of course when the show ended they came out again and did an encore. I was REALLY happy because I realized they didn't play Sell Out or Take on Me! Sell Out is usually their last song, so when the played that without playing Take on Me I was kind of disappointed. But then they kept going! And for the last song they played Take on Me! It was awesome. Definitely. Definitely definitely awesome.

BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!