Friday, December 18, 2009

On checking grades

One always has the sinking feeling before checking grades that they will all be lower than expected. Sometimes it happens too. Sadness. I really did enjoy my embedded control class, but they did have to schedule everything to coincide with my propulsions systems exams and boundary layers exams and after that, no matter how much I pulled my brain together, it was just too tired. And programming on command with a tired brain is actually rather difficult.

But all that is at last behind me. Hurrah!
And the semester has drawn to a close.

Friday, December 11, 2009

I want a blimp pet!

Today is the last day of classes. It has been a fast semester with plenty of work and swine flu and no heat and leaking ceilings and discoveries of webcomics. And a fun semester of choir pieces, math, coding, webcomics, NaNoWriMo, and friends.

But my mostest favoritist part has been the beautiful blimp we worked on for my intro to embedded control class (a class that has one building circuits and programming them to do stuff). Blimps are awesome things, I think. And this class was an amazing class even though I typically spent 3 hours open shop and once 5 hours besides the two three-hour class times. And the exams were hard. But we programmed a short memory game, built an electronic car that drove in the direction you told it too at varying speeds, and then we moved onto the blimps.

The blimps are funny blimpy things that I could reach up and put my arms around about half on the smaller ends. It floated and danced and had three fans we used to control where it went and how far it stayed above the ground. The coding, though, took some time and had many problems. So, while the TAs investigated our code with my compsys lab partner, I invented: THE BLIMP DANCE (in which I danced with and around the blimp, holding onto the two leads that were attached to either end in case we gave it enough thrust to send it shooting up to the tall ceiling).

And I now want to have a pet blimp that I could take on a walk like a dog except mine floats and is graceful, though somewhat slow to turn.
My lab partner thinks I am crazy.