It is amazing how much work I can get done with there is nothing hanging over my head. I spent a solid 10 hours hanging drywall in my room yesterday (as well as insulating a bit). If I could keep that up for a month, this place would be amazing. The downside is that after I called it quits around 2am I stayed up until 7am working on my ?Year in Review? video. I have the sound track more or less done but I?m not sure if I like it or not. However, I don?t think I?ll have the entire video done until late next week (but it will be worth the wait).

Ug, feeling a bit sick . . . I think I drank too much hot water in the shower. Anyway, today I?m focusing my efforts on the staircase / second floor hallway. That has been a work in progress for way too long. I went out and bought a 24 foot extension ladder so now I can actually reach all those previously unattainable spots. The real problem with that project though is ripping the 4 layers of wall paper off and after speaking with my mom yesterday, I think I may have solved it. The solution is to only remove the stuff that comes off easily (the rest usually requires a chisel and a hand grenade) then do some fancy painting. And by fancy I mean use two different colors and do some sort of texture thing (it comes out looking like marble). Since the wall won?t just be a huge monochromatic field of nothingness it will be impossible to tell if you?re looking at residual wallpaper relief or just a nifty paint job.

So today?s picture is in my room looking to the south-west up in low earth orbit (the 3rd floor).

Update: 7:10pm Well, I’m calling it a day (work wise anyway). I just spent 3 hours scraping and I have to say, it is going to be hard to drink in Marquette tonight since my arms are dead and all. Why Marquette? Because I’m working my way to Zak’s wedding in lower Michigan. Get this though - the actual wedding is on New Year’s DAY! Who does that? Hopefully they are serving Bloody Mary’s in the church (the Blood of Christ probably isn’t going to cut it). So, I’ll be gone until Sunday. But everyone have a good New Year’s and if you see me standing on the road looking confused, just keep driving since I”m just downloading new instructions from the mothership in orbit.

Back in Houghton again being somewhat productive. I got back last night after a staggering 9 hour drive (US 2 was a disaster). I spent a lot of time over break fielding questions about how much snow was in Houghton and is it turns out ? a lot. It took about 45 minutes to dig my way to the front door but here?s a nice picture before I started. One thing to keep in mind, that railing ends on the second step so this stuff is deep.

And after I snapped that picture I look over at were my car used to be but has since been replaced by a lump of snow.

Well, back to being productive.

On Friday I departed Houghton and rotated back to the real world. Big buildings, multiple lanes of traffic all going the same direction, no snow . . . etc. For the first time in all the hundreds of years I?ve being making that same trip home for Christmas, the roads were perfect. No snow, no animals, no cops. Sweet.

On Saturday, I went back up to Minneapolis to see the Kottonmouth Kings play to a sold out crowd at The Quest downtown after hitting up Ragstock in the warehouse district (got a sweet new sweatshirt for $13). Now, the Kottonmouth Kings are a semi-underground band worshipped by every pot-smoking teenager on Earth; however they put on a good show too (as in, I don’t even smoke weed). I wish I would have smuggled my camera in there to take pictures, but I?ve had a bad track record concerning smuggling lately.

Yesterday, I totally veg?d out all day.

Today, I need to slide in to Rochester (it is sort of freezing raining here), and do some all my Christmas shopping. Then I figured I?d go visit the old crew at Texas Instruments and square up on some bets we made over the last year.

Cumulative statistics are always interesting. Of late I?ve been accused of exuding some sort of depraved indifference towards a lot of different things under the premise that I?m just spread too thin (that or I just don’t give a damn and really am just indifferent - varies situation to situation). (hmmm, wording getting a bit dicey here: can you actually exude indifference? I mean being indifferent would seem to indicate you?re not exuding anything. Bahh - literally philosophy always comes down to semantics so screw it.) Back to what I was talking about . . . despite having ?processed? untold amounts of dust, my computer hasn?t gone nova in over a year. Which means that my FreeCell stats have been intact that long. Since my next scheduled event doesn?t happen for another 20 minutes, I thought I?d sit down, check my mail and maybe play a game or two of FreeCell. Apparently, this processed has happened 332 times over the last year. Don?t know how this game is going to turn out yet, but things are looking up.

Update : A bit later
Yep, I won. Score!!!

Well, I’ve been going (strong?) since 10 am this morning and now that the end is in sight, I think I’m getting my 14th wind. Although, digging my truck out of the 2 feet of snow we recieved overnight may have helped a bit. My Advanced Fluids takehome exam proved to have been spawned directy from the the depths of hell. It is due at 10am (as in 5 hours) and I still have about another 1.5 hours left to go on it. After I slide that under the Price of Darkness’s door, it is off to a, yep you guessed it, 10am Controls exam. I really need to GHB that final so I can prove that if I actually study, I can actually learn and understand. Being up for 26 hours by the time it is over may cause a bit of a performance degredation, but actually being prepared should offset that. Either that or I’ll just be all giggley and everyone will think I’m absolutly wasted. So, when noon rolls around I’m checking out for the remainder of the day (heh, my body will finally join my mind). So, off to the 10th floor conference room to conjure up a solution to a non-interial reference frame solution.

I thought of composing a clever little ode to my finals, but there would be too many bad words contained within to merit publishing. I’ve been taking an unusually proactive approach this year to doing well (or at least better) in my classes as I handed in my lab key to Brad on Thursday. Of course, that didn’t stop him from asking to finish some thermal modeling so we can decided on a material for our next anode iteration, but you take what you get. Or, more elqoquently, when life gives you lemons, rather then wasting them on lemonade, you toss them in the freezer so you have some ammo for drunken retribution (sorry no spell check today). Wow, look at me stall. Ok, well I need to get back to work. But to answer some questions that have been posed of late:

A: No I didn’t die.
A: I’ll look over the DVD’s when I turn my computer back on.
A: Haven’t seen your pants.
A: 12 psi.
A: No, it is still too wet for that.

Well then, time to get smart or at least not loose any ground.

I may as well come right out and say it: I didn?t do a damn thing this weekend. After attending, nay getting shot out of a couple of senior barrels this past weekend I was more in recovery mode then work mode. And by recovering, I don?t mean from drinking too much beer, I mean literally healing. For some odd reason, I received some smiting on several fronts and although I?m not much for wear, its going to take a few days for all my war injuries to heal. I do have some great video though of me wrestling on of my friends and then he picks my 150 pound ass up and bounces me off a bunch of walls. What caused the most damage happened when I was talking on my phone outside, the ice . . . it got me good. I returned from my brief outdoor excursion bleeding and full of beer. The really strange thing though is that yesterday I slept all day. Like 18 hours. Never in my life have I ever slept so long. It?s not like I?ve been that sleep deprived or anything I just didn?t wake up. Oh well.

Now I?m back at it again, early in the morning. I?m attempting to try that heater wire one more time. I?ve already done a couple of tests on it this morning and now I?m doing the real thing. I?ll keep you posted.

Update: 6:01am Ok, it?s official, that crap sucks. It won?t get me about 400C with any sort of reliability.

I was sitting there with the wire cutters and screw driver inside of the vacuum chamber and I took a mental step back for a moment. What am I doing here? Not in the broader philisophical sense, but what is my goal for today? I had to laugh since my sole reason for pumping down this afternoon is to burn off the kapton tape that I used to hold the new heaters in place while I was screwing down the cover plate. Kapton is pretty neat stuff though. It is pretty much the highest temperature tape that is sold so that means I really have to get the fires of hell churning to burn it off. No problem though, I have a nice 10kW power supply just waiting to put the hurt on. It melts at 500F so I figure 1600F (~900C) should be enough to totally obliterate it. Oooo, the turbopumps are spinning up, I love it when they first start, they shake the whole floor. But what a strange concept, today I get to destroy things. All I can say is “bring on the electrons, daddy’s got some tape to smoke”.

Update: 4:47 pm Ok, take two. I smoked something all right - the heater wire. For some reason it broke clean in half. Whatever, so I packed another one in there and now we’re going to try it again. 320 Torr and counting (down to 5×10-6 Torr).

Update: 6:25 pm Hmmm, same problem as before. So I reduced the number of wraps to two (from 3). I think some of the wire was getting pinched by the cover. One more shot and then I’m calling it a day.

Update: 6:40pm Well, it would seem that the “new heater wire” sort of sucks. Looks like we have to go back to the other $280 /foot stuff. Anyway, its looking like beer thrity. Cheers.

As I did a controlled 4 wheel drive power slide around the entire Yooper Loop this morning I realized that although I hate winter, winter driving is so much more fun. [For the un-introduced, the Yooper Loop is this bizarre artifact of civil engineering gone wrong. It amounts to a 180 degree turn up hill that incites competition among the youth of America concerning who can maintain the fastest speed without getting crushed by a 90-ton logging truck.] I love sliding sideways out of the driveway onto US-41 (under control of course). The looks people give you when you come shooting out of the front yard, across the sidewalk, and then slide sideways onto the highway are priceless.

In honor of it having snowed for the last 4 days, I have created a new poll: How Long Until I Take My Truck Out of 4 Wheel Drive. Here’s the ground rules ? I’ll leave it in 4WD until the road from Tech to my house is dry or at least doesn’t have any snow on it. My tires don’t suck or anything, but 4WD is cheep insurance since the roads can change in an instant here (plus where I park on campus is a bit of an adventure land in itself).