Just as an FYI, I’m going to basically dropping off planet earth for the next week (not like I did this past weekend though). As I’ve mentioned a few times, my Ph.D qualifying exam is coming up next Tuesday at 2pm. Put mildly, I need to get my sh*t together or I’m f*cked. That being said, I’m going to scatter my hard drives to the far corners of the earth and hole up in my room or downstairs infront of the fire place or in the library. Cell Phone: Off. Email: Not checking it. Fires: Letting them burn. We’ll see how long this lasts. I’m betting that in 36 hours I’ll be crawling up the walls, crazy as a shit house rat. Should be fun. I’ll probably post sometime over the next few days but be prepared, I’m going to bitch and complain but just come over and punch me. Funny thought just occured to me: I bet herion addicts find it easier to quit then I find it to start studying. Anyway, see you on the other side (or when I just decide to say the hell with it).

Well, Jason and I headed down to Bruce Crossing (about 60 miles south of here) this afternoon to pick up the heater. I settled on this one. It is the 8kW electric wall mount model. They cut me such a great deal on it I almost couldn’t believe it. Far cheeper then I could find anywhere else on the internet. Thanks to a lot of help from Jason, Zak and Jeb, the ceiling is complete. What remains now are the benches and the walls. In truth, the walls only need to be 1/2 done for the sauna to be operational. I can’t wait.

[Warning !!!!! This entry contains a twisted tale of decite, intrigue and corruption. Actually, it's just the tale of a random sequence of events that culminates in a late night road trip (so just the usual questionable practices and binge drinking so mom, dad, don't read this)].

So the thruster test mentioned on Thursday didn’t go so hot. The entire electrical infrastructure of the thrust stand was destroyed by some stray discharge. It looked cool as well when it was happening (imagine a cubic yard of blazing blue plasma) but when the fun stopped, stuff was broke. Lukily, my previous screw-ups didn’t contribute to the explosion. Anyway, I spent most of Friday re-wiring the thrust stand to my specs this time (no more god damn junction blocks). Around 4pm, I elected to call it a day since some tool was using collec I needed for the mill.

So I walked out to my truck and headed over to the post office. After roughing up my electric bill a bit (a day past due, made it look like it went through hell) I sent those on their merry way. After that, traffic was bad so I stopped by Jason, Zak and Jeb’s after work.
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Well, its 3:58 am, and I’m bringing the vacuum chamber back up to atmosphere. Why you ask? The story starts a few weeks ago . . . . one of our keen eyed lab groupies noticed a plasma discharge in one of the electrical junction blocks on the thruster. As you suspected, that’s a bad thing. (tanks up to atm, brb). [4:53am - pumping down again] So the solution seemed obvious: encase the junction block. Simple enough, I ordered this stuff called Uralane 5753. It showed up about three weeks late(er) so this puts us to after break. Anyway, I put a couple of coats of that stuff on the various junction blocks on the thrust stand and life is good. A few days ago, I went to put the thrust stand back in the tank and with that comes the whole process of squaring different things up. Long story short, I broke one of the leveling bolts and was forced to run the machine shop and cobble together some kind of fix. On a side note, my milling skills continue to improve. With the fix in place, the thrust stand was finally put back in the tank (for good? not likely) yesterday. Last night, we walked through the usual electrical checks and the cooling lines. One of the cooling lines in the back was only finger tight so water dripped freely from that. Once that was fixed, Brad turned the water back on and there were no leaks. WRONG! I came at 2am as usual to start the process. After two hours, I still wasn’t anywhere near the 50 milliTorr needed to turn on the cryopump. It usually takes about 60min. Immediatly I suspected the thrust stand coolent lines. After several weeks of me jumping around that thing, it is absolutly possible I created a small leak. So I shut off all the pumps, brought the tank back up to atmosphere and found the problem. It was coming from under the cover (there’s this copper cover that covers the aluminum under structure). To my horror, I again, instantly knew where the problem was. Usually when I work on this stuff, I always try and tighten down all the fittings right after I get done. Apparently, I didn’t or someone else had it apart. However, it is most likely my fault. So I tightened it down, put the shrowd back on re-ran some electrical tests and zipped the tank back up. After 26 minutes, it is now way closer to vacuum then it ever got in the preceeding two hours.

So the thought of today - it’s easy enough to learn from your mistakes, what is hard is owning up to them. Now if anything goes wrong with this test, it is more or less my ass. I guess the graveyard shift has its disadvantages.

Work continues on the sauna - another $1400 and it should be done. So, watch out kids, these do-it-yourself projects are cheaper, but by no means cheap. Here’s today’s pictures : [sauna2-1.jpg][sauna2-2.jpg]. The new bathroom is included in there too. Me sleep now.

Well, we put in another good session today. Due to an unscheduled trip to Menards today, we ended up getting a bit of a late start, but that didn’t stop us. Jeb and I put in the second glass block window (much quicker then yesterday’s) and Zack and Jason worked on framing in the sauna door and the cedar on the ceiling. I uploaded a few pictures as a preview of what is to come when the whole thing is finished and I upload the entire series. Here: [sauna1-1] [sauna1-2] [sauna1-3]. One thing for certain - I was not a mason in any of my past lives. Today I actually manged to procure another injury by allowing the rather corosive morter to eat through my middle finger (in two spots). Katie hooked me up with some smelly stuff that stopped it from itching and burning but the damage was done - I wore a hole clean through my finger tip. Oh well.

Enough about getting hurt today, let’s talk tomorrow - we’ll be back at it again. This almost feels like the home stretch. Tomorrow we’ll hopefully get the ceiling done, the water pipes installed for the new bathroom and the interior sauna walls framed up. Beyond that, all that will remain is to bend the cedar for the walls (we’re going to keep it circular), build the benches and take care of the window area.

Well, I’m super tired since last night I could not fall back to sleep for hours after waking up at 5 am. 8:30 was the scheduled get up time and I’ll be damned if I didn’t nod off mere seconds before my alarm went off. I was having this dream - I went down to the basement and there was water everywhere, about shin deep. It wasn’t regular water like I’d would have expected - it was that tropical blue-green stuff they always have in travel shows - it wasn’t cold either. I walked over to the make-shift floor drain (looks like someone just blasted into the main drain pipe and threw a sheet of metal over it) and the water pressure was enough to make it seal tight (Ph.D qualifier coming up ini two weeks - fluids). So I gently nudged it out of the way, water began to drain and then BEEP, BEEP, BEEP stupid alarm clock brings me back to my unflooded house. So, any thoughts on that one? I think I was just thirsty.

In case you didn’t pick up on, I had a very thurough distaste for my classes last semester. Low level Mechanical Engineering classes hold no interest for me (my GPA proved it). Now that crap is out of the way, its time for the industrial strenght classes to start again. For example, one of my classes is PH 5310 - Statistical Mechanics (or Stat Mech as the physics drones call it). Syllabus day was Monday (my favoriate day of the semester short of the last day) and on the second page was something that was photocopied out of some other Stat Mech textbook. A passage was circled on it that read:

    "Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical
              mechanics, died in 1906  by his own hand.  Paul Ehrenfest,
              carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933.  Now it is our
              turn to study statistical mechanics.”

At first, I thought that was funny, but as the last chance to change classes passed at 4pm today, the world seemed to get a bit darker. In the rushing wind I could almost hear the universe say “hah hah you’re screwed now”. Dammit.

In any case, my other two class should serve as a respite from the mathematical hell that Stat Mech will undoubtably prove to be. MA 4410 - complex analysis should be cake since in EE land where I’m from, that’s basically that we do. MEEM 5990 - plasma dynamics is the class I’m most looking forward to. Brad is teaching it so I know at the very least it will be entertaining. More importantly though, I get to learn more about just exactally what the hell I’m supposed to be doing down in the lab besides drilling holes into reinforced concrete walls. (man my keyboard is filthy, I have to stop eating at my computer) That hammer drill is shaking me to pieces.

As I sat dorking around in the lab today, wasting away in front of the dull glow of a monitor, I wondered what my life would be like without the internet. I pondered this thought all the way to my truck (nearly falling down the stairs in the process) and actually in fact the entire way home. The conclusion: I’m pretty sure I would have been a drug dealer.

But seriously though, all the crap I read on slashdot and fark etc, where does it go? More importantly will it ever become useful? Likely not. I’m almost certain that somewhere near the base of my skull there is a big drain through which flows most of the crap that enters through my eyes. Speaking of which, just imagine how much stronger the reading skills of the internet generation are then say the baby boomers. My god, for the last 10 or so years every day I spend hours just reading stuff and I know I’m not alone in this. The effect of this is that people seem to develope different identities or perhaps even personalities. Look at me (I’m an easy example), in the real world, I largely keep to myself (except after someone feeds me like 20 beers - then I know everything and will share it too); I don’t talk much and I bought wireless headphones so I can walk around work and not be disturbed. Now lookie here, somedays I write here more then I talk. That coupled with my postings on slashdot and otherplaces indicate an entirely different person. Well, not like the movie Identity different, but there are two styles at work here. Anyone else notice this?

Moving on (since I keep catching my self staring at the lower left hand corner of my monitor as if it had all the answers), I did record a new injury. Unfortunatly, I nuked the whole body picture with some broken photo editor I was using (can you pull that off last Friday’s backup Dan? - /injuries/map.jpg). On top of that the drive that have my local site backup on as well as all my pictures is not functioning. The connector sort ripped off the back of the drive and i need a microscope or ideally a stereoscope to fix it correctly. But hey, at least its not a software problem, I can clearly see that something is wrong there.

Hello again everyone. I arrive, back from the dead (or something). It has been a great week around the house . . . a veritable flurry of activity. Ben and Jake now call this place home and a definatly a welcomed addition. In keeping with tradition, I’m moved rooms yet again (for the peeping toms, I’m now in the back northeast corner). Ben took over my old room since i was looking for something slightly more square (that turret is just hard to deal with).

Jason, Jeb and Zack have been putting in some serious time arond here. The four of us managed to tile the sauna floor this week. Its still curing but there are no broken tiles yet. Learning the hardway (like usual), I discovered that when you first turn on a tile saw, its sole function in the universe is to get the front of your pants as wet as possible; oh yeah, it also cuts tile too. Luckly, I had my windpants on. In keeping with our Winter Carnival goal, we’re going to party like rock stars on Friday, then frame the whole thing up on Saturday. On top of that, I’m going to bust out my 1337 masonary skillz and put the glass block in the windows (or freeze trying).

Ben and Jake have also expressed interest in working on the 1st floor bathroom this weekend and Katie said she’d pimp the paint brush in the adjacent room. In anycase, I should have a lot interesting pictures to post.

I just can’t get enough of the internet (either can you since you keep coming back here). So, I’m just waiting around for the Linux server at my dad’s office to stop hating me I can connect again (I pissed it off) and I thought I’d take a look at my bookmarks. I really never use the things except when I find something and don’t want to loose it. Anyway, I figured it was time to take another peak at the Urban Dictionary. I love that place. People from the all the darkest corners of the internet post definitions of slang words. Cracks me up. Check out crop dusting I had no idea The political views expressed there are also quite interesting see Democrat and Republican. I could go on for hours, but I just got connected so I have to work on making these two Linux boxen play nicer together.