WOOT!

we flew the plane today. i slapped together a video from some of the footage.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9G5KES5FjE

 

here is a picture.

 

an update! whoah!

it occured to me a few minutes ago as i was having my before-bed shower that i could comfortably talk freely about aerodesign here. it's probably not a big deal at all, but we're holding out on posting much on our website as far as the overall design and configuration are concerned. we took second place last year, and competition is really stiff this year. we're one of 51 teams competing in the regular class. until we get closer to the design report deadline, we're not making much public because we're wary of who might come looking. our design is fairly conventional, but we don't need to be giving anyone any good ideas.

 so here's a picture of my baby thus far. it's actually not quite 100% as pictured, but pretty close. for some perspective, the wingspan is very nearly 10ft. at the tips, the wing is only 4in wide. it is indeed a very slender bird.  we have to have a team name when we register for competition, and we picked Odonata. it's the family name for dragonflies.

 

it's windsday, see?!

i had to reset some things, but it looks like my comments are finally back and working again. that means i'll be much more inclined to post here, these things are a lot more fun when the communication goes both ways. i see i've posted about 7 times in the last year, that kinda makes me laugh. i guess getting married turned me into a married old guy.

 

today is horendously windy. it started last night around 4am. i know this 'cause i was lying in bed wondering why i wasn't asleep. it's windier out than it was when hurricaine Rita rolled through. no rain or anything - so it seems odd. sounds like a huge storm outside, but when you go out nothing is coming down. all i can think of is my old winnie the pooh tape where gopher says to piglet, "it's windsday, see?!" you know how he whistles whenever he says an 's'. 

think i'll go for a walk now!

i'm not dead yet - and i haven't abandoned this thing. summer was amazing. dara is sharing some pictures here. i dunno if you need to sign up to see them or not.

 i see they've done something to lose all the comments and how they're posted. i'm trying to figure out where they went, but it was a bit daunting to get back from the summer and see that this thing was a mess.  i'll see what i can do about fixing this thing and updating it a bit.

 summer was awesome, and school is insano busy. that's basically the quick version right now. i'm taking 18 senior hours which is a lot and i'm also leading the aero design team this year. i've been working hard and it seems rewarding and feels like it's paying off, so i don't have much to complain about. i could easily have enough stuff to do to take up every single minute of every day, but i did manage to take it easy all weekend long. i've got my schedul and work load worked out so that i basically have one day a week to relax. that does mean that i have to work pretty hard the rest of the time.

there's not much on the website yet but, the plane is pretty much going to be my life until grad.

http://www.letu.edu/aerodesign/ 

well lots i could/want to share but i'm more interested in fixing this place. maybe there'll be more time for stories later.  

potatoes, fire ants, and finals
i dug up my potatoes and put them in a beef stew yesterday. i know i've been here for the better part of five years, but i still find it hard to believe i harvested potatoes on may 1st. i was expecting little baby spring potatoes like we eat at home when we can't wait any more, but two of them were actually full sized.

last sunday (10 days ago) dara and i were walking around enjoying the sun when i was attacked (angry mob of villagers with torches and pitch-forks style) by fire ants. i was wearing flip-flops (or zories as my guamish friend tells me they are called, just as my friends trust me that a "beanie" or a "toboggan" is called a "toque" because i'm canadian) and very suddenly my left foot was swarming with ants. this happened near the pond on campus. i can still count 15 little sores on my foot, although they are finally starting to fade away and not itch and hurt anymore.
(this paragraph has been brought to you by things in parantheses)

finals week is going well. had a lab final last thursday which went satisfacorily. then i had a crazy digital electronics lab project due friday. me and my partner spent a rediculous amount of time on it and ran into all sorts of little glitches and bugs and stupid things, but managed to have it working 100% as designed before the end of lab. it was really rewarding to me as the material in that class was completely new to me and the final project was a tangibal thing. it was very nice to see the results of some learning and work this semester pay off. i had a final yesterday which was supposed to just be an easy last test but turned out to be a whopper of a 2 hour final for me. i believe i got a pretty good grade on it though. tomorrow's exam should be no problem. it's calc 2. this is my fourth semester taking some version of calc 2 so it had better be no problem. last time i did this though, i thought i had passed, so i guess we'll find out when grades are posted. my worst final is 7:30am on thursday, with another exam following immediately afterward at 9:45. there was much talk of the dynamics final being moved to wednesday evening rather than at a time of day when i'm lucky to even get my pants on, however since we're now within 24 hours of wednesday evening and i haven't heard anything concrete, it looks like i'm stuck with 7:30am.

this is my 10th finals week, and to be honest it's kinda "meh" i'm a little excited about being home in a week though. the current plan is to live and work in clear lake for the duration of the summer. clear lake is where we were married last summer and spent our first 6 weeks together. we're hoping and praying that the working and living situation will work out to something we can be happy and comfortable with for the summer.

mmmmm.... juice.
i don't really care about juice. i'd probably rather have water. dara likes juice, but it's expensive so we hardly ever have any - maybe a jug of orange juice. she is doing a two week juice fast with some friends of ours. they usually do it for about 30 days when they do it. so twice a day they throw a bunch of fruit through the juicer for their meals, and the rest of the time drink only 100% real fruit juice or water. this is day two of the juice fast and poor dara is pretty sick. at first i thought she was just turning into a little version of me, 'cause she slept in late, then got up and had a nap, then had another nap. but she's actually thrown up twice today and is just generally not feeling good. however, her stomach was pretty fluish for a full 48 hrs before she gave up on food. that makes it pretty hard to tell if her sickness is a flu bug or her body adjusting to no food. either way, today wasn't much fun. i try to cook and eat my meals when she's not here so she doesn't smell it the whole time. i know when i haven't eaten the smell of food reminds my stomach that it's empty. hopefully tomorrow is better, if she has another day or two like this she'll probably have to give up the juice fast.

ok, i think i fixed it
i guess my flaming pirate hat video required some goofy web cam codec in order to see the video. i was able to turn it into something windows media player should be fine with, and now the file is a whole lot smaller too. i might even try imbedding it in the blog here sometime just to see how that goes, but i'm guessing it'll just make for a long loading time on the page, so i'm not going to worry about it just now.

here it is.
watch
download

picture time!
mom sent me this from home. it really makes me wish i had snowboarding plans for spring break which starts on friday at 12:10. can you believe i haven't been snowboarding in 5 years? i can't... at one point in my life i got to go every day and it's one of my biggest loves in my life.

so i took this today, you can tell it's sunny and the tree outside our door is just about to blossom with nice little pink flowers. you can't tell how tanned dara is from getting to sit in the sun. she's pretty much the same colour as i am. really!

so you can fully appreciate our summery weather, when we got back after christmas i discovered that the couple of potatoes we left in the pantry were sprouting eyes. we have a bare little patch of dirt on our porch for planting in, so i put the potatoes there. we used to plant potatoes a lot when i was little - so the only really weird thing about this was that it was january 9th. this is a shot of my potatoes today.

since i'm posting pictures, here's some of roo's tattoo.

YARRRR, Me hat is on fire.
a long while ago i mentioned the time i made a pirate hat out of newspaper and then lit it on fire. the video is now available for your viewing pleasure. it ranks right up there with all the other junk you'll find on the internet.

i guess i'm a bigger nerd than i thought
after may of this year the school has said that it will start chargine people who use more than 3Gb of bandwidth per month. i know we have some crazy downloaders around here and stuff, and i totally expected i would be amongst the 90% of the students here who use less than half of that limit. well we can see where we stand so we are prepared once this limiting and charging comes into place and this is what i found, and boy did it make me laugh.

there are 8 days listed there, and i'm informed i've used 50% of my 3 Gb limit for the month so far. that's not really what i expected at all. if you look at the second chart you see that there's nothing until the 18th. that's because they replaced some network equipment in some of these apartments just for this purpose. before the 18th they couldn't track our usage with the current system. if you look at the first chart you see i used a ton of bandwidth on friday and sunday night of this last weekend. i figured out that's when i went on my video.google.com binges. so i guess i'll have to quit watching that stuff. but... oh, my. there's just so many gems out there to be had. not the least of which are
old lady pwnz mercedes guy
how men screw up romance
what old people do for fun
Some things women can't do in public
this one is amazing i watched it over and over