Textual Update: A Ported Entry

Photos, I believe people love to see photos..
Some updates concerning proposed blog entries/project topics.

Team isn't doing the car buying analysis. We're pretending to finance a fake toy operation now. We just grabbed/sky-blued numbers for raw materials needed from around the interweb and we plan to do a series of present worth analysis-s on it based on assumed minimum acceptable rate of return (MARR) values. Our progress report isn't due for another week or two (need to double check on this). Basically, we're mass producing a differential-drive toy robots on two assumptions (labor intensive and with capital investments on some hardware). Again, it's a fake on-paper analysis made with many assumptions. Professor basically told us to sky blue any numbers we have a hard time getting access to and to focus more on the analysis/spreadsheet comparisons. Let it be so.

The ratchet group project for my ME440 class is done and over with. I'm not particularly proud of it, and am somewhat reluctant to even speak of it more. I think our group got the highest score on it, but this was more or less based on our presentation (write-up/ and group presentation) of it as opposed to its real world functionality. I brought a carrot in during presentation day (this is irreverent information). A week ago (or two?) we made a 1:2 scale model with a rapid prototype with ABS plastic. It had.. issues. Which were addressed, but like stated, I'm not particularly proud of it.We did however, make springs. Almost "hand-made" with the assistance of a power drill. These weren't heat tempered or anything, we just rolled up guitar strings around a metal (bronze) stick with a hole in it. Working on the prototype in the Mendenhall/Machine Shop in TBE was pretty neat. I rarely go in there these days, and this gave me an excuse to look through the hardware and play around with the drill press some. A flesh wound on my right pointer finger now gives memories of this recent experience.

We do have a nice, privileged machine shop for the "elite" to use. But undergrads aren't allowed in there. Personally, I was told it's usually us who break stuff. I think in the past I've been guilty of having destroyed one or two drill bits, but nothing beyond that. It would be nice to access some of this hardware.. and not pay for it, but I guess those operations have to be financed somehow.

Oh, and I'm now suppose to do a 10 minute presentation for my microbiology class sometime within the upcoming month. It was originally going to focus on pig whip worms and their relation to autoimmune diseases, but I officially changed this "proposal" to the topic of genechip technology. It was mentioned during today's* lecture, and I just so happen to have one sitting on my desktop for no apparent reason. I believe it was Shelby's gift to me after attending that SWE conference back in '09 or '10?  I've had it since and never really did any research on it. I guess I'll be killing birds with stones.

So really, I've nothing but some short storys to share. I'll update on the aforementioned projects with photos in the near future. My camera/phone is sort of not reliable at the moment. I can take photos, but in a very blind manner. I'm still under my parent's contract, but  I can't say I'm a fan of Sprint's phone services or phone updates. I've definitely been looking into that new Nexus 4 that's about to come out, but I'm not sure if our plan will cover it. In fact, I'm almost doubtful. Sprint likes to keep control of what our phones do, they likely enjoy restricting the updates provided for us. Oh, and they keep spamming us with ads through their SMS system.. It is horrible, and I'm almost certain Sprint probably skins puppies for their fur and stuff. Also,  I've been considering getting a tattoo for the longest time. Right now, this comes to mind. Really digging the spiky spiral concept. It reminds me much of a zerg theme; and yes, caffeine is my favorite chemical. <3

This is starting to seem more like a personal blog than a project-blog type of thing. It guess it doesn't matter. It's just an update. I had some problems with my Ubuntu OS a few days ago. For some reason my memory was starting to get used like crazy. Haven't been able to troubleshoot it. It got so bad that start up wouldn't let me log in without calling out some errors with graphic settings (lack of memory) not being configured right. It's an issue with the 30 Gb installation (easy enough). Luckily, most of my important data is saved on a different partition than the root install, so I simply uninstalled the OS and I'm currently in the process of a fresh install v12.1 (brute force solution). Oh, and my laptop doesn't have a CD tray. Also not relevant in a way, but I haven't been able to do a "full" installation since I never bothered to redo this with a big enough flash drive. I assume this process could lead to a partition greater than the standard 30 Gb, or there's probably a way to increase the size after allocating of the space? This could use some more looking into.