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If you hadn’t noticed by the crickets chirping around here, I’m on a bit of a writing sabbatical — and not the kind of writing you see here. Obviously checking in here to look for news is going to be disappointing, so you might as well just subscribe to the feed and save the trouble.

Things ought to pick up again in a few weeks once the dissertation pump is good and primed, and there will always be the weekly MTV pieces.

Wish me luck.

It’s 10:30pm. I’m still in the lab. I’m going blind from squinting through a microscope at a blinding light reflecting off a polished metal bar, and I’ve got a skull-splitting headache.

But at least I’ve finally started acquiring the data that will get my ass out of this hell-hole. And this is what it looks like:

Shot & edited on the N95. Don’t know why the sound got out of synch. :-(

Because this is the most interesting thing to happen to me all week at work, I bring you camels. You don’t have camels where you work, do you? I didn’t think so.

Yeah, that’s all I got. I mean unless you want to hear about tuning the gains and valve dither rates on a servohydraulic load frame for maximum cyclic actuator displacement in torsion.

Next month I’m presenting some of my research with NASA and Pratt & Whitney at the Propulsion Safety and Affordable Reliability conference. This isn’t like the other conferences I’ve attended or presented at, which have been largely organized and attended by professional societies and academics; this is a big tri-service meeting for the military to hear from industry and academia how we can keep their planes in the air longer, cheaper. And when I went to look at the agenda to see when in particular I was speaking and decide whether I wanted to go out for the whole blessed thing, I noticed something weird about this particular kind of research get-together.

On each of the three days, all of the sessions wrap up neatly at 2:30 in the afternoon.

In Myrtle Beach, there are over 70 golf courses, to say nothing of the ridiculous amount of putt-putt.

There are also close to twenty strip clubs.

Aim High, Air Force.

This is the kind of thing I’m spending a good portion of my time staring at this week.

No, I don’t know what you’re supposed to see in that. If I did, I’d be graduating like next week. You know how those CSI shows always have very exciting conclusive breaking evidence that shows under the microscope how they can catch the killer? Yeah, that doesn’t happen most of the time. And it’s not happening now.

So, I’ll just get back to drinking my half-caffeinated coffee and trying to figure out why that obviously looks like shear crack growth under constant tension.

My apartment may be a wreck, but my lab is an absolute craphole. Come take a tour of the suck!

Ironic addendum: turns out the Dremel was actually in a logical place, in the giant red tool case in the room I started and ended in. DUH! Why the hell was something where it was supposed to be?

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Waxing philosophical whilst preparing for another NASA teleconference.

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Tags: navlopomo, navlopomo07, engineering, research

A cheerful email from Georgia Tech’s Information Overlords this morning:

The tragedy that occurred at Virginia Tech earlier this year drove home a clear message — effective and efficient communication is an essential component of any emergency plan. …

Everyone who has a Georgia Tech e-mail address will now receive emergency e-mail alerts. However, in order to also receive text messages and voice mails, we are asking members of the campus community to provide a mobile phone number by going to Passport at the following link:

https://passport.gatech.edu.

Awesome!

Please come back later when the awesome emergency system is actually online. In the meantime, DON’T GET SHOT. Thank you.