Something from the Summer

This is from the second time I went to see a great big supercomputer in the summer. This time, I turned one of the computers on. Dad took a picture of me doing so with the camera on his phone.

It is my dear Mum and Dad's anniversary!
















Happy Anniversary!












I hope you have a wonderful day!

The Quote of Wednesday (except on Saturday instead)

This is what I heard while sitting in my room:

Dave: It's hot!

Laura: I concur.

Laura is one of my roommates and Dave is her fiance. They were playing a card game in the living room. It was a hot day - about 29 degree C outside, but terribly humid so it felt hotter.

Crosstrainer 1

Whew!
I am now smelly and sweaty and you really wouldn't want to come too close to me. But I have just been on an elliptical trainer which is really interesting.

So, I am now living in an apartment close to college. I share it with four other girls, three of whom are here and one we are expecting to arrive Sunday.

And I am learning all the things one learns when living away from home and parents and siblings.

I have my own room (something I only had when I was quite little before our family grew so much). I have to do my own shopping (good thing I already knew about unit prices). And there are so many things I can now do such as:
Go to the campus gym!

I went there this morning with a roommate and her friend. That was good, because I would probably never enter one of those places by myself. I love exercising, but a roomful of exercising people who probably come here every week, if not every day, is rather intimidating to myself who dislikes large groups of people.

Anyway, the initial going is past, and I now feel like an old pro, at least on the elliptical trainer. As long as you don't watch me stepping off it...
Hopefully now I shall be able to go once a week...or month...or something like that.

For those who don't know what an elliptical trainer is, it is a machine that you climb onto and it kind of imitates walking up and down different things. It's not like a flat treadmill where you run and hurt your feet and slide off of because you can't keep up with it. And it's similar, though not quite, like a Nordic track which is supposed to make you feel like you are skiing and you put these long sticks on your feet which run in two smooth tracks. It's got two shoe sized platform things and it just bobs up and down with you on top.

I was on it for 35 minutes. 30 minutes for exercising and 5 for cooling down.
And now I am hungry.

The Quote of Wednesday

Here is another quote from The City of God from Book I, chapter 8.

For though some of these men, taking thought of this, repent of their wickedness and reform, some, as the apostle says, "despising the riches of His goodness and long suffering, after their hardness and impenitent heart, treasure up unto themselves wrath against the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God, who will render to every man according to his deeds": nevertheless does the patience of God still invite the wicked to repentance, even as the scourge of God educates the good to patience.

This is about why "divine compassion" is bestowed even on those who do not love God and why sometimes terrible things come upon those who do.

What an Extraordinary Friday I Had!

This past Friday was most unusual in that I got to see and observe some very large and important pieces of equipment that very few people get to see, much less young sophomore engineering students. They were equipment especially used for research in various fields.
On Friday morning, I was able to see and walk in the room that contained one of the top ten largest supercomputers in the world. This was only possible because of certain connections I had...
Actually, I ran my fingers down one of the large racks. They are interesting because they look like big black boxes that have been tipped. Like a parallelogram. And they make quite a lot of noise, though not as much as the chillers do.
Then, I went to my lab thinking that was a great deal of excitement for the day.
But then,
my professor came in at four and asked the only other student in the lab, Mike, and I if we wished to go with him right then to the SEM. Of course we said yes, even though that meant I had to stick around a little bit longer than I normally do.
So we walked down to the clean room and put some really funny looking costumes that reminded me of the costumes the kids were wearing in the old version of Willy Wonka where they all went to see the large chocolate bar made small. Except our suits weren't white. They were blue striped. And they were rather baggy. Mine was especially baggy because my professor thought I was about 2XL in suit size because I was so tall, but that was way too big. We had to put on boots that went over our sneakers, gloves, hoods, and suits. And Mike had to wear something over his beard and mustache.
After all that preparation, we shuffled into the clean room which is actually a whole section of rooms each dedicated to some sort of equipment. The SEM room actually has two SEM's. Now I will explain what SEM means. SEM stands for Scanning Electron Microscope. It's basically a large microscope that shoots electrons at whatever you are looking at. That enables you to see things on the nano-particle level. Mike and I couldn't touch it because we hadn't had three hours of training plus a test. But our professor could. So I spent over an hour in the clean room looking at things no one can see with their naked eye. My experiments turned out to have failed in accomplishing our project goals, but I didn't really care. Who can think of things like that sitting in the clean room with such amazing pieces of equipment?

The Quote of Wednesday

This quote of Wednesday is from Saint Augustine's work The City of God, Book I, Preface.

The glorious city of God is my theme in this work, which you, my dearest son Marcellinus, suggested, and which is due to you by my promise. I have undertaken its defense against those who prefer their own gods to the Founder of this city, - a city surpassingly glorious, whether we view it as it still lives by faith in this fleeting course of time, and sojourns as a stranger in the midst of the ungodly, or as it shall dwell in the fixed stability of its eternal seat, which it now with patience waits for, expecting until "righteousness shall return unto judgement," and it obtain, by virtue of its excellence, final victory and perfect peace.

Augustine likes to write long sentences, I think. It is best to read this out loud to fully get the meaning. And he is referring to the city of God when he speaks or "it". So it is living by faith and it sojourns in the midst of the ungodly. And it shall dwell in fixed stability, but it is waiting with patience for that time.
I hope that makes it a little more clear. I had to read it thrice to fully grasp its meaning.