FE Exam
Engineering

11 hours last Saturday, 12 hours last Sunday, 5 hours Monday, 3 hours Tuesday. And probably 3 today, tomorrow, and maybe friday. All spent studying at Suzallo Library for the Fundamentals of Engineering exam. I seem to have lost a lot of my test-taking mojo that I had in undergrad, I should have taken this test 6 years ago. Oh well, I hope I will pass...120 questions in the first 4 hours and 60 questions in the next 4 is going to be difficult. Wish me luck!

Pentium Commercial Song
Music

There are these ads for pentium, featuring a collage of a single person dancing to music through an iPod. Anyways, I think there's this one song with a girl in red, with some 80's style new wave music with the lyrics "I can give you what you want/ I can make your heart beat short/ I can make you ice cream...". Well, I likey that song, and looking at the web a bit I found that the name of the song is "Ice Cream" by New Young Pony Club. Just FYI if you likey it too, and have a downloading program, and don't mind songs from a band that sounds as if it were named by a 10 year old girl with a unicorn lunchbox.

Medieval Monster Truck Rally
Entertainment, Seattle

Last weekend Esra, Matt and I headed up to Burlington, WA, and watched a bunch of hybrid hillbillies/dungeons and dragonners (some say like myself) fling a bunch of pumpkins using home built trebuchets, like the one shown. Most of them were about 12-15 ft high I think, with one exception maybe between 30-40 feet high. It was ostensibly a competition, but it was quite obvious the huge one was going to win...when it flung the pumpkins you can't really believe how far they go...I think what we saw was something close to 1300 feet. Methinks it pretty good entertainment, snacking on pumpkin pie and chilidogs whilst watching the spetacle of pumpkins dropping out of the sky and splattering everywhere. Each team had a little theme going...one was the 'Gourdinator', one was an UFO theme, one was a dinosaur (for some reason I keep remembering the name as Trannysaurus Rex), the big one was 'Tre Barbaric', and Team Canada. The second place one (first place out of the small ones) utilized an constant torque-linear motion design which I had just pitched to my uncomprehending neanderthal friend Matt for our future trebuchet team. We need a name, however, and suggestions could be useful. How about, 'Gourd of the Flings'?

Turning Over a New Page
Humor, Politics

the blogger titled his post: "Care to rephrase that?"
Quote of the day:
"Hastert and Boehner need to get on the same page or Republican troubles will continue to mount." -- From an editorial in The Hill, October 5, 2006. (Via Dale Carpenter)

Battlestar Iraq-tica
TV, Politics

Honestly, it was a little hard to get in the mood, to pick up where I left off in my BSG worship. Especially after my strategic failures in getting people to like it, including some of my nerdiest friends (you know who you are!) But Fridays' 2 hour intro successful was a solid start to what I think was the best show on TV.

So the human race and territory has been occupied by cylons. The humans fight back through insurgency. Some cylons want torture and extermination. Others want peace and co-existence. Some people start working for the cylons, not to enrich themselves, but because they think it's the only peaceful way. Many humans want to kill those humans, and would kill those humans if the cylons left. I find sympathetic characters on all sides. Of course they all hate the cylons, so they resort to suicide bombings. Probably the only TV to ever make me have sympathy for suicide bombers. It seems to make emotional sense to the people doing it, especially in the face of hopelessness...Up to this season, you never got a sense of what ideology the show was pushing. Plus all the personal dramas are pretty good. Too bad the constantly masterbating genius is now the most hated character on the show. For some reason, I have a lot of sympathy for him.