A Little Late now, but... I graduated and stuff too!

Partly because I just read Tyler's post and partly because I just watched the last ever episode of the Office, I decided to make a semi-sentimental post about graduation stuff. Here goes nothing. 

Graduation felt pretty weird, I will say that for sure. Standing around with folks from my department in our gowns and stuff I found myself snapping a couple of random pictures on my phone before we marched in just because it felt so surreal. 

Here's a picture of Dave. Hi Dave!

Anyways, my whole family came up for the graduation marathon (literally an entire day full of stuff). Even my grandmother was able to make it which was totally awesome because she is 90 and not only was it awesome to have her there but it was a huge milestone for her personally. Lawrence Bender, the guy who produced a bunch of Quentin Tarantino films (including pulp fiction and Django) was the speaker at our ceremony which was kinda cool. There was a ceremony in the morning where us engineer types got fancy metals because everyone has to have additional bling at graduation, that's just standard now. There was also a luncheon for the ECE department where we were awarded 3rd place for our senior project, wahoo! We even got $50. Nice. 

The one weird thing about graduation was that after the ceremony, I walked out and didn't realize that it was the last time I would see a lot of folks. So, I just straight up forgot to say any good-byes what so ever. Too bad really, a couple of the guys are older and have families so my chances of running into them is pretty damn small. Most people I will see though because Maine.

After that was all over, my folks left and I stuck around Orono. Thinking something might happen, it actually didn't... so I ordered a pizza and fell asleep. Graduating is tiring. The next day our friend Asa had a grad party out at his place on Schoodic Lake where he grew up. Just a small gathering of friends and family out in the middle of nowhere Maine.

Looks kind of like a hobbit house, am I right?

Asa's dad also had a beautiful timber frame garage/workshop he built where we stayed for the night. There was lots of great good, beer and laughing. It was a great time. 

Fast forward a week or so and I almost kinda sorta have a place to live. After looking at about half a dozen places (and a bazillion craigslist ads) in southern Maine I finally found one that appears to work. I definitely saw some weird stuff and a lady who is wayyyy too into her dogs. Let this also be a lesson to you, just because there is an ad on craigslist does NOT mean the person will respond to you. Also, just straight up call someone if you find an ad you like. Do not fiddle around with e-mailing them, rely on e-mail only as an additional route to contact the person. I found this out the hard way. 

I'll be living in Westbrook with two girls, both recent graduates who are working in the area. The place is pretty nice and it's actually brand new, we're the first people that will be living there. The girls have been there for a few months and needed a new roommate. It's only a few miles from work, which is sweet but it is further from Portland than I was initially intending on. Anyways, I'm pumped about it and it technically even has a garage.... but right now they just park in it. I'm not saying anything yet, but hopefully I'll slowly convince them to hand the garage over to me. It's kinda small though so maybe not but we'll see. The whole finding a place thing is MUCH easier if you already have roommates by the way. Just word of advice on that. 

Now I'm cleaning out my room at home and forcing myself to throw away junk that I've kept for umpteen years. Question. What is a 22 year old supposed to do with a bunch of die-cast model cars? Honestly. They're like 10+ years old and have been on display (collecting dust) in my room since then. They aren't valuable enough to sell, they aren't cool enough to give away and they're awkward and fragile enough to be a pain in the arse. Never buy your kids die cast models man. Just don't do it. I have found some pretty cool stuff and there are a couple of sweet toys that I am having a hard time parting with. Yes, I am looking at you Super Armatron. That thing is so cool, I even took it apart one time and it's all mechanical. The joysticks are actually on linkages that shift gears to make the arm change position and every joint is just on a slipping clutch thing so when you get to the end of its range of motion the whole arm just shakes and rattles while it slips.

SO YEAH. Oh, my sister got engaged too. Hooray! Man, that life thing... that happens quickly. Anyways, with the summer now officially in full swing and a new life chapter emerging, I will make a better effort to blog my exploits with you gents. Now, to southern Maine and beyond! 

Final Days

Looks like I'm going to graduate boys. Got my grades in and as it turns out C's really do earn degrees. I was really on the edge the past few weeks and I'm happy I was able to pull myself back from it.

The family is now bunked up in the freshmen dorm near my apartment. We're going to Niagara Falls in the morning since it is two hours away and the relatives haven't been there. Having trouble sleeping so thought I'd make a quick post.

Really kind of avoiding bed since I know we're going to really dig into packing the apartment up tomorrow. As a result I know this apartment will not look the same when I go to bed next time and will be completely cleaned out come Saturday. I've lived here for the past two years so it's kind of a bummer to see it all go out. Had some very good times here, you can tell because we tend to hang good time souvenirs on the walls/ceilings. There are white boards covered in quotes, flags from the Civil War, a diagram of Wisconsin cheeses, a tea bag hanging from the ceiling, a plastic owl with sunglasses, a pencil drawing by a strange engineer type we all nicknamed "Capt. Gravity" and a giant cast iron metal ring referred to only as "The Inside Joke". Makes me think of all the Lower A relics. The thing is that this apartment, for the past year, has been a sort of nerd capital. Most people we hang out with just called it HQ. It is where you could be assured that the party would have an optimal number of obscure references and large drunk boffer games around 2 AM. Tomorrow it all comes down and moves out and I'm gonna miss it.

Oh well. So it goes.

Live Bloggin' It: Dem Hot Dogs Edition

11:30 PM - Went down to collect my paycheck. Stopped into the Unimart for an Arizona lemonade thing. All the corners of the store had the shelving removed and replaced with beer cubes like this one:

Hey guys, what's happening in Alfred this weekend?

12:00 PM - Heading off to a talk by some Physics grad students who graduated from Alfred a couple years ago. It's almost like there are a lot of alumni congregating on this valley, curious...

2:45 PM - A girl hanging out of a window yelled the following at me in slurred fashion "Nobodies gonna arrest me! You're not going to arrest me, are you boffer guy? Hey boffer guy, you wouldn't arrest me!".

5:00 PM - Pine Hill Derby, woooooooooot.

7:00 PM - To Hornell for Hot Dogs and Liquor.

9:00 PM - Back from Hornell. Have developed a cold, taking cough medicine in the form of jagermeister. I mean everyone says it tastes like cough syrup, probably has a similar function!

10:00 PM - Our counters are made of liquors. People are on their way, they're bringing their own shit.

10:30 PM - People are here, the atmosphere is merry.

11:00 PM - I apparently own a Jester's hat, bells and all, PARTY HAT!

11:10 PM - Jester's hat is duct taped to my head, how else can it be my headbanging hat.

11:30 PM - We are rewriting popular christmas carols to fit Hot Dog Day. Bitches, we are going carolling tonight.

Deck the halls with empty bottles
Falalalalalalalala
Show the freshmen good role models
Falalalalalalalala
Drink the lagers, pound the Keystone
Falalalalalalalala
Hope that you can find your way home
Falalalalalalalala

Grill the hot dogs, roast the wieners
Falalalalalalalala
Celebrate that we are seniors
Falalalalalalalala
Drown the brain cells, kill the liver
Falalalalalalalala
Alex's Pizza does deliver
Falalalalalalalala

12:08 AM - Keyboards, hard. World, wobbly. Liquor, plentiful.

Note: Okay blogging on the phone didn't work since it only lets you edit in HTML mode and drunk me couldn't understand it.Short version is sober didn't happen much, got into several roman candle battles in the middle of an intersection with a mug full of liquor in the other hand and then finished off the night by peeing in Elliot's shoes.

Happy Hot Dog Day!

Hot Dog Day is Coming

Gentlemen. The day is upon us. The Hot Dog Day. Alfred University's designated wreck shit holiday. Every college has wreck shit day. In Alfred it seems to be a little exponential as a result of our isolation and the fact that the only people who live here are either students or faculty. Shit will hit the fan, hopefully not literally. Unfortunately pooping on fans is an idea in my subconscious. That could end badly. I'm a little tipsy already and I'll probably be a little tipsy in class tomorrow. I'll most likely be full on drunk right into Sunday since the alcohol flows like the waters of Niagara on Hot Dog Day. As a public service I am installing Blogger on my phone. I am going to live blog Hot Dog Day.

Most of it will not make sense. I will try and make clarifying edits. See you on the other side boys.

Now to Survive the Peace

Dearest Bitches,

I am currently in the process of coming out of quite possibly one of the most entertaining weekends of my life and into one of the most stressful weeks of schooling I have ever had. It is an interesting and intrinsically related juxtaposition. You see, this weekend was the Alfred Civil War. An event I lovingly crafted over the past six months. I made damn sure that no one in the village was not aware of what was coming to them last Saturday. We staged an attempted assassination of myself during Student Senate. Next Senate meeting I submitted my letter of secession to the President, which is still on the office door. Tonight I have to submit our surrender to Alfred State.

Pictured: Main Street Alfred, NY

The event pitted my army of Separatists, who seceded from AU, an army of Loyalists fighting to bring us back and a third army of Barbarians from the State school across the road. I would like to note that there were more Barbarians than both of our armies combined. That was not supposed to happen. Pete, our A-State contact, is apparently a PR mother fucking genius because we were swamped in state school foam. They don't even have an official club. Alfred State ended up winning even though the Loyalists successfully defeated me and united AU under one army. Then we pushed them back to one last territory out of 25. They then held that last scrap for 3 god damned hours. We had to surrender.

Pictured: PR genius.
Also pictured: His boffer chair, aka The Foam Throne.
Note: Yes you can sit in it.

The event attracted almost 100 people if you count non-combatants and medic staff. It apparently was one of the largest non-fundraising events ever at AU. I will note Boffer was not in Alfred's vocabulary last March. Now it's become a defining feature of village life. The thought that comes to mind when I cite those kind of stats is often "muahahhaha" or some variant.

Them troops, they need rallying.

As a result though, I am really really behind in my class work. This week I have two physics exams. I haven't done any of the homework leading up to them. That is two Particle Physics assignments and three E&M assignments. Also I have to do all my Senior Thesis work this week. In fact in Particle I haven't submitted any homework and got a 40 on the first test. My teacher is however a Saint and letting me make it all up in daily tutor session type things. That being said I had an incredibly amusing conversation with him today:

Me: Oh, so that is what the α and β matrices are, very good to know. 

Prof: We have used those in almost every homework assignment, in almost every problem. 

Me: Now I will too.

Prof: This is why you should ask questions! 

Me: Eh. 

Prof: It is moments like this where I think how much I would like to kill Tyler. Just run up and drive something sharp and pointy, not like a doll needle, but like a big wide nail or something. 

Me: Like a railroad spike? 

Prof: Pain. Lots of pain.

So now I'm going to get back to that. Was the whole war worth digging myself into a hole deeper than the deepest black of the Marianas trench? I'll let the pictures tell.

Aerial block. Bitches.

The Siege of Powell
The part that followed from me yelling "Fall back to the keep!"

The Siege of Fort Davis
Charge! (and repeat for 3 hours)

My good friend, Alfred University Tony, looking forlorn.

The Battle of King Alfred
For a good twenty minutes this was the only territory left at AU still under AU control.
I particularly relished bursting that bubble.

In case you were still wondering
Yes, it was worth it.

tl;dr War was the lulz, work now.

So, I Renewed this Domain Name....

I was getting "Hey Dude your domain names are expiring ASAP@!@!@!@!@!!!!" emails for the past couple months. Finally decided to renew them today and what do you know today is the day differentialpenguins.com expires.... nothing like the nick of time. 

Anyways, while I'm here might as well say some stuff. Yesterday I had my senior project presentation which went much better than I thought it might. For some reason I instantly became more comfortable presenting to a room full of people than when it was empty. Seriously, it's totally ass-backwards. Anyways, they always try to grill you with some tough questions at the end of the presentation and we were able to handle the questions really well which was great. It was good to see our hard work and all the time we spent preparing the presentation pay off. After it was all over, I basically deflated into a puddle of glory. 

Of course just like anything.... always more stuff on the horizon. Actually the Center for Undergraduate Research and Academic Showcase is alarmingly close. I'll be presenting a poster about my research with Professor Weise where we made a high power inverter for wave energy converter systems. I've gotta slam together a sweet poster for this coming Tuesday so I can show off the cool hardware we built. I've only got a couple of pictures of the stuff.... oh look here they are... 

Here's a picture of one of our extremely clean lab benches. That rig mounted to a bigass heatsink is the inverter I designed. It has a sweet film capacitor on it, which is a total nerdgasm. They're like the lowest effective series resistance capacitors (ESR) you can buy and that one in particular costs about $35 and it can't even store that much charge really. Capacitors with low ESR can respond quickly to transients which is important when you've got high currents and lots of switching going on. For the less electrically inclined, an inverter converts DC power to AC power. 

It's a bird, it's a plane, nawh it's just a bunch of sweet electrical stuff.

One of the awesome things about power electronics is that you get to build stuff that gets hot and on occasion even blows up. Also, with high power research you need a way to simulate large electrical loads. One way we can do this is using out awesome bank of ginormous wire wound resistors. We can dissipate a few kilowatts of power in this load which is pretty substantial.... also they get really freakin' hot. 

Wire wound resistor bank

Honestly wish I had more time to mess around with this stuff this semester but I actually have gotten a bunch of stuff built which is good. 

Anyways, now begins that awkward month long period between me and graduation. Time to hopefully tie up some loose ends, finish up strong and hopefully have some fun too. Heading to SNHU this friday to see my cousin get inducted into an honor's society for her program but don't tell anyone... it's supposed to be a surprise. 

Oh, and I've gotta get one of those cap and gown getups before they sell out too... 

Oh Hey MSSM....

So, I was informed like two days before it happened that the entirety of the MSSM student body was coming to do a tour on Saturday of the college of engineering at Umaine. Cool! I was asked to hang out and show the kids cool stuff and do a silly solar panel lab with them. The activities began around 10AM .... now let's think about this for a few minutes. If the activities begin at 10AM in Orono.... which is a three hourish ride from Limestone, factor in time for farting around, maybe one pitstop, etc, etc and you begin to realize that they made everyone wake up at like 6AM, cram onto 2 buses and ride for 3 hours on a Saturday morning....... Oh, I'm sure that went over well. I assumed many of the kids, in true MSSMer fashion, would simply forgo sleep entirely. The next morning, my suspicions were confirmed.

Oh, hello entire MSSM.

After a rousing speech by our fearless leader of the college of engineering with about half of the public speaking talent of Walt Warner, the kids were even more pumped to be here! Feeling their pain... but not really cause I had slept like 9 hours that night, I tried to be extra friendly and keep my eye out for awesome people. Recognized a couple of old campers, saw Kiri's brother and Renee's brother too which made me feel kind of old.

Gave our group a tour of the lab I work in and found out that almost no one knows anything about brushless motors. Actually generally lacking some electrical knowledge but I guess that is to be expected. Also a bunch of freshmen, apparently there are 20 freshmen there now.... eeeeks! Anyways, I did have a couple of good groups of kids that asked good questions and stuff. Met the new physics teacher who was the man and was totally into my tour, asked awesome questions and made star wars jokes. Solid dude.

Also totally introduced myself to a large group and asked them vote for Pika in the Launchpad competition. They were all on board and enthusiast about voting and talking to another MSSMer. One discussion went something like this.
Excited MSSM kid "What year did you graduate?"
Me: "Class of 2009."
Excited MSSM kid: "Wait, so were you there when the McCartney bot was there?
Me: "..... Bitch*, I built the McCartney bot, it's in pieces in my attic."

*Note I didn't actually call the kid a bitch, I just added that for dramatic effect....
Made me feel cool. Wouldn't it be cool to make a McCartney Bot Reloaded for some sort of alumni event sometime? Some day. Maybe.

Anyways, the day went pretty well I had to bail a little early but I got to talk to a couple of kids about college and how they should just continue to be a boss where ever they go. Heart-warming stuff.

Also, for the record Sam claims that recent senior videos are using things from our senior video. I can't confirm or deny this.... anybody?