The gehennom server is back online, though I’m not exactly sure why it went down in the first place. Added a wiki page for Spring Break 2004. It contains up-to-date information about the trip. Since the hype is now long over, I decided to take some time of out the day and watch Matrix Revolutions. Sadly, it’s two hours of my life that I can never get back.
It’s all about good time management. Made an astonishing amount of progress on the design project critique. Juan and I met in the evening to work on our Professional Practice assignment on random sampling. It took much longer than expected to complete.
Nothing fabulous to report today unfortunately. The usual quiz in Thermodynamics. Turned in the degree petition application to the academic office. Wrote a few more sections for the design report critique. Hopefully it will be out of the way soon.
Dropped by the Registrar’s Office to pay the undergraduate degree petition application fee. Spent the day in the library studying for Thermodynamics, covering topics such as Bernoulli’s equation and basic fluid flow. Met with Christina in the afternoon to look over the design project critique. These long-term projects unfortunately leave little time for any non-class related academics. The Fundamentals of Engineering exam looms in the distance.
Guest speaker Arnold Stancell came in today and lectured on True Colors and leadership for Professional Practice. Worked on the design project critique in the afternoon. Writing is always difficult for me, so I’m starting well in advance this time around.
Dr. Mark Thornton, a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, gave an informative lecture in favor of legalizing hard drugs. The presentation was sponsored by the College Libertarians at Georgia Tech. Essentially, Dr. Thornton argues that it is the role of the market to regulate drugs, not the government.
In the evening I attended a presentation about ecstasy and designer drug use by Robert Stutman, one of America’s highest profile drug busters. Approximately 5,000 investigations were launched during his 25-year tenure with the Drug Enforcement Administration, leading to more than 15,000 arrests. I think he has many justified points, and consequently, I’m even more interested in the opposing presentation tomorrow.
Ordered study materials for the upcoming Fundamentals of Engineering exam. The Dell QuietKey keyboard that I recently ordered from Tiger Surplus came in the mail today. You can find some really great deals on items by shopping around on surplus and wholesale sites.
The lack of information about educational operating systems such as Minix is a bit appalling. I’ve prepared a short document on my experiences with setting up Minix on Bochs in the Debian/unstable operating system.
Turned in Problem Set 5 for Electromagnetics. Upgraded chronos to the stable 2.6.3 Linux kernel and performed a long overdue system backup. Re-configured VMWare using the usual any-any update-51 patch. Installed MINIX on top of Bochs.
Studied for Thermodynamics, primarily covering power and refrigeration cycles such as the Brayton cycle, Diesel cycle, Otto cycle, and Rankine cycle. It’s probably one of the more useful topics I’ve learned about in the course. I attended a study session by Dennis in the evening to reiterate those topics before studying with Chris in the library.