At last, it looks as though the HP 33s calculator has finally been released. It certainly would have been nice to have for the Fundamentals of Engineering exam this past Saturday. The suggested US retail price is sixty-five dollars.

Despite my best efforts, I woke up late and then spent the remainder of the day working on the last Electromagnetics homework of the term, meeting with Steven in the afternoon for an hour or so to compare solutions. My online banking access also mysteriously stopped functioning and I had to call customer support to reset the password. Having no classes today, you’d think that I could manage to be slightly more productive. I guess not.

It’s the last week of classes before final exams, and there are very few assignments due this week as a result. I e-mailed my resume off to David, who will hopefully forward it on to Polytron. Recitation is also cancelled tomorrow, leaving me the day to work on the final Electromagnetics homework. It looks like a doozy.

I found that the US Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics collects interesting statistics on wage data by occupation and other factors.

Calculator in hand, I left for school around seven in the morning for the longest, most difficult exam of my life. The morning four hour session went badly, and the four hour discipline specific afternoon session was worse. Both the breadth and depth required in each exam was simply astonishing. Unfortunately, it may take up to seventeen weeks to receive the results of the examination. Woe is me.

Turned in the final paper on the Therac-25 disaster for Computers and Society. The ECE department held its annual Spring Picnic in the afternoon. As usual, there was lots of free food and drinks. I socialized with quite a few of my colleagues and was introduced to quite a few new ones as well. Many of the faculty and staff, including Professor Collins, Professor Callen, and Christina, attended the event. It was a good way to wind down. The dreaded Fundamentals of Engineering exam is tomorrow.

I dropped by Office Depot in the morning to pick up a Casio FC-115MS Plus calculator. It’s one of the few NCEES approved calculators that support algebraic operations on complex numbers.

I met with Professor Callen in the afternoon during his office hours to learn three-phase circuits and basic trasmission line theory. The afternoon session was on engineering economy, and I learned a few things about interest rates and reviewed conversion factors. The evening review session on materials science by Professor Sanders was surprisingly helpful. We covered atomic theory, properties of common materials, phase diagrams, Gibbs free enery equation, and the lever rule. I spent the remainder of the day studying natural convection for Thermodynamics.

Professor Webster held the fluid mechanics session in the afternoon. We covered topics involving buoyancy, viscosity, and Reynold’s forces. Professor Callen again taught the afternoon session on circuit analysis. I learned a few things about transient switching circuits and second-order differential equations.

Recitation came and went. Adam and I had our usual lunch at Little Dino’s. Attended the afternoon review session on thermodynamics. I learned a few things about open and closed systems and various heat transfer cycles but didn’t really get anything spectacular out of it. The evening session was again taught by Professor Jacobs. We covered statics, such as wall reactions, and several shear and stress related problems.

Left for Spanish early to attend the review session by Professor Callen on mathematics. We covered matrix operations, such as transposition, adjoint, minor, and cofactor methods as well as first-order differential equations. The evening session was held by Professor Jacobs from the Civil Engineering department. We covered basic Physics problems involving forces, momentum, and moments of inertia. Both sessions were extremely useful.