The Packbats' Weblog

Ah, the disorganized list. What greater bloggoriffic staple could there be?

• Our house has a heat pump for both winter and summer ... and it's dead. Capacitor's blown, and wires of the condenser fused together. Whole new unit's needed, and won't arrive before, well:
  

  * PRECIPITATION TYPE...HEAVY SNOW.
  
  * ACCUMULATIONS...STORM TOTAL ACCUMULATIONS OF 18 TO 24 INCHES.
  
  * TIMING...SNOW WILL BEGIN MID-MORNING FRIDAY...AND WILL
    CONTINUE THROUGH SATURDAY EVENING. CONDITIONS WILL DETERIORATE
    RAPIDLY FRIDAY AFTERNOON...WITH HEAVIEST SNOWFALL OCCURRING
    BETWEEN SUNSET FRIDAY TO SUNRISE SATURDAY. THE MOST HAZARDOUS
    WINTER WEATHER CONDITIONS WILL OCCUR FRIDAY NIGHT.
  
  * VISIBILITIES...THE COMBINATION OF HEAVY SNOW AND STRONG WINDS
    WILL REDUCE VISIBILITIES TO BELOW ONE-QUARTER MILE...PRODUCING
    NEAR-BLIZZARD CONDITIONS AT TIMES FRIDAY NIGHT AND EARLY
    SATURDAY MORNING.
  
  * TEMPERATURES...HIGHS IN THE LOWER 30S FRIDAY. TEMPERATURES
    WILL BE IN THE MID TO UPPER 20S FRIDAY NIGHT AND SATURDAY.
  
  * WINDS...BECOMING NORTHEAST 10 TO 20 MPH FRIDAY WITH GUSTS TO
    30 MPH FRIDAY NIGHT AND SATURDAY.

  
  Joy to the world.
  
• I got a lucky break (alluded to in the prior post) with respect to a presentation I am to deliver; I now have a fair bit of time to actually produce that which I must present.
  
• The slide of the zipper on my leather jacket is brokened. However, the buttons on my blue slacks are fixted.
  
• I would be interested in purchasing this tee-shirt, should it ever be for sale.
  
• I am once again a TA for Heat Transfer Transfer Processes! (So called because the processes can transfer mass, as well ... and I have now taught you the entire mass-transfer curriculum of the course.) I come better equipped this time, as I have Asked A Professor For Advice On Running Discussion Sections. (Also, my student guide on the solution of nonlinear algebraic equations is much improved!)
  
• Prof. Orzel gave a talk today on campus!
  
• I reread The Moonstone (excellent! --although Ms. Clack danced a merry jig on one of my berserk buttons) and read for the first time World War Z, which my mom kindly lent me after I bought it for her (rollicking zombie fun!). I also read The Silent Tower by Barbara Hambly, and am now jonesing for the #2 in the series.

I fear I may pass out before finishing, s

In recognition of United Nations World Teachers Day, let us reflect on the subjects we hated most in school but must now grudgingly admit were useful. What subject will today’s students find most useful when they’re older? View other answers

...wow, the question has nothing to do with the setup.

Now, English was a pain in the butt, but I have to admit that it is extremely important.

• The other prof of my class was absent this Tuesday-Wednesday, so I had to cover the whole two hours. Plus, I misread the homework assignment as being due Monday, not Monday a week¹, so I thought I had to cover the entire thing, including the bits we haven't got to in class yet.
  
  Given that we bugged out half an hour early, I suspect I did not completely succeed. Discussion sections are the toughest audiences.


• Picked up a bug somewhere that kicked in Thursday morning - sore throat, runny nose², soreness of muscles ... well, no, actually that last is due to overstress on the "Lat Pulldown" machine at the school gym. Yay exercise!


• Went to chess club last night after the gym, ran into a guy from my FEM class there. He talked me into playing blitz - 10 minutes per player - and then wiped the floor with me as soon as I slipped up and dropped a knight in both games. So it goes.


• You see Friday's "Little Dee"? Panel four? So my brother.


• This is the most absurd thing I've ever seen. (Well, today. So far.)


• I'm seriously short of non-C items.

Well, that's mostly all. Cheers!

1. 2.8%, unless the missing "a" is highly significant³, in which case it might be as high as 11% or more. ^
2. I'd elaborate on the viscosity and color, but no-one wants to read that junk. ^
3. Or unless Irregular Webcomic readers are a nonrepresentative sample. Which, of course, they are. ^
4. Now with x% more meaninglessness, where x doesn't mean anything! ^

What are your plans for this weekend? View other answers

1. Type up solutions to example problems to send to the Heat Transfer class I'm a TA for.

2. Income taxes.

3. Homework (Finite Element Method class and Partial Differential Equations class).

4. Scan the micromechanics textbooks I borrowed to see if I want to do research in that direction.

5. Research the candidates for the primary on Tuesday.

Edit: Oh, and 6. Update the website for the UMD ASME chapter.

Yeah, this is going to be ... fun.

Dear Self:

It's a sign error. It's always a sign error, when it's not a syntax error. F-ing put that minus sign there already so we can go home.

Your humble servant,
Self.

Methinks I have a wee bit of work ahead of me, but I liked the intermediate stage. Please forgive the poor photography – it's just sitting on my bed, here.

( 57.85 KB )

Wednesday, after reminding us to put our 'Split Complement' pieces on the board in the hall for all to see, gave us our final problem for the semester, the culmination of all we had worked on before – designing the cover for a new magazine.

There were three main things we had to consider.

• Subject. He recommended working an issue dear to our hearts, here.
  
• Format. Does it have a closure? Vertical or horizontal? Regular binding, spiral binding, some other binding? Does it have to be rectangular? Etc.
  
• Audience. Is this a mass circulation magazine a la Newsweek, or a 'boutique' magazine like 2600? (No, he didn't offer those examples.)

Anyway, I got an idea. You know how back in the 'pulp' days they had sci-fi on the shelves at drugstores?

Yes, exactly.

As far as decisions so far, I've come up with (a) it's going to be PG, non-SF-fandom friendly stories and essays, and (b) it's standard large format, like Sports Illustrated and Aboriginal Science Fiction.

So, the point of this post: I'm going to have to come up with some description-of-what's-inside text; does anyone want their name on the cover? (And if you have a story that fits the bill I can try to illustrate, still better.)

[Note: Will be away from computers for weekend, as laptop is dead and PC in dorm.]

I haven't mentioned it here, but one of the classes I'm in this semester is ARTT100 – "Fundamentals of 2-D Design". The latest assignment centers around making a piece with a single letter in a square. This reminded the teacher of a story from when he was in his freshman art class, and his teacher was introducing a similar assignment.

Now, I want you to choose a letter. R, say, or Q, or P. And I want you to really get into that letter, the essential R-ness of the letter, or Q-ness, or....

When I saw the cue this week, my mind went immediately to the most recent portrait I have drawn – the self-portrait final project for my Intro to Drawing class.

( The sketch )

In the actual scene, of course, there was stuff in the closet. Oh, and a bed, right in between the 'camera' and myself.

Strangely, my classmates thought the result was excellent.

The drawing class studio was ... disorderly is probably the word. There were the strange, rectangular frames stacked towards one wall (they looked like a modern art exhibit, but were probably some kind of stools), a strange miscellany of artifacts, mostly in unusable condition, littering another wall, and a sort of low, large table in the middle. My imagination suggested that the models might pose on that table when the time came for students to draw them.

One of the first things I tried to do, waiting in the room for class to start, was identify the purpose of the debris in the rear. My eye caught a skeleton - for anatomy lessons, perhaps, though it was broken. A tricycle, sans wheels, lay on its rusted frame several feet away, in the midst of another pile of things. I began to compose a sort of still-life in my head, of a broken skeleton (there was more than one, there may have been a skull I didn't see), lying as if it had fallen from driving the tricycle. It would be a post-apocalyptic scene, perhaps.

After a couple minutes of such contemplation, I decided to perch on one of the numerous round high stools in the room. They were those metal stools, four legs, a circular frame with wood in the middle, another circle acting as a support lower down. I was not even settled when another individual came in - one of those lucky, healthy people who could be thirty or could be fifty. A moment's exchange of words revealed him to be the professor. He advised me to sit in the other half of the room, telling me that he would be speaking from that end. I did so, grabbing for myself a chair with a hard back.

As I sat there, deciding whether to occupy myself with a few moments' drawing or with the reading of more online fiction, the teacher began to arrange the tables and easels for the class. Observing my laptop, he asked me how to connect to the local wireless internet - I answered in a somewhat muddled fashion, but told him what I thought he would need to know. Soon after, he suggested I review the handouts he had spread out before class, and moved on to arrange something else.

There were four handouts, neatly stacked. In a moment, I had gathered a copy of each, and returned to my stool. I was amused to see that the inventory of items I had found for the other drawing section did not apply. Reading through the others (skimming, rather) told me little that was unexpected, and less that I remember, although I was amused to see "John Cage" attributed as author of one of them.

That reading complete, I found myself again dithering over the two options, sketchbook or laptop. In the end, I found myself needing neither - the ten minutes I had to spend vanished well before I reached an conclusion. I grabbed my notebook for the class, and was ready when the teacher began.