Tuesday, October 26, 2004
Sonata for Two Screwdrivers and an L-Bracket
I planned last night on getting an extra hour and a half of sleep this morning, as I don't have class until 10. But for some reason I could not sleep as well through Kevin's getting up at a quarter to 7 for his 8:00 class. I was pretty groggy all day until I came home after lunch for a nap in the brief time before Kevin's class ended and he came back to the room. I'm still kind of tired, and now that I think about it I'm pretty anxious to go to bed tonight. My sheets are so soft! Sleeping is good...
Anywho, I left earlier than I usually do on Tuesdays so that I could go to my physics professor's office hour, which ends at 9:30. I got there with time to spare and asked him about the lecture I missed on Friday. He dug out his notes and I copied them, and long story short I'm all caught up. The chapter that we're currently working on is not too difficult; we finished it in class on Monday. With the notes I got from Dr. Poling this morning I was able to do all of the questions/problems for the chapter. (I said I was able to do them...I'll get around to actually doing them tomorrow. Hey, I did half of them...that's pretty good.) Just in case any of you are interested, we're learning about light waves and why they produce certain patterns when you shine them through narrow openings. Well I'm interested in it.
After calculus I went to my EE lab professor's office hour to ask him some questions about the parts of last week's lab that I didn't understand. I don't really like this class. The subject matter is interesting to me but the manner in which it is presented keeps me from learning anything really valuable. I think the point of the class is to show me how to use equipment rather than to understand what the equipment actually does. Every week there's some new element to a circuit that I have to connect to an oscilloscope and take some readings. You'd think that by building a circuit I'd learn what all the components do, but really I'm just taking the circuit diagram they give me and building the actual thing. I push the buttons they tell me to push, and if I get the readings they say I should get then I'm done. I really don't like just blindly building things without understanding them; I wish we could slow down and actually learn about what we're seeing. But, again, I guess that's not the point of this class. Oh well...Dr. Gerfen says that we'll "go into more detail" about most of these things in EE 112. I guess we'll see.
From Dr. Gerfen's office hour I went to the Vista Grande Restaurant. (The Vista Grande Restaurant is NOT to be confused with the VG Cafe. They may be in the same building, but one is an actual restaurant with actual waiters and waitresses who serve actual food, and one is...well...we all know how I feel about VG's.) Anywho, it was Sandra's birthday so we wanted to take her to a nice lunch. I don't know Sandra that well, but she plays piccolo in the band and so a lot of people I know were going. The lunch was good, albeit a bit lengthy. I had "the engineering club sandwich," which, despite its name, was very good. All in all the meal cost me $10, which is relatively cheap for what I got. I realized as I paid with my meal plan plus dollars that I have about 60% of them remaining, and we're halfway through the quarter. I'm going on a major shopping spree just before winter break. At least, as I'm going on as much of a spree as I can in the campus food establishments.
After lunch I came home and tried to nap, but it wasn't too long before Kevin came home. So I got up and did physics. Then I went to marching band rehearsal, which was rained out. "Hooray!" you may be thinking, but I really do need these rehearsals. I'm marching a show on Saturday that I've marched only once before, and that was with someone marching the same spot as me, telling me where to go next. So yeah, I need some practice. Oh well...we played four about ninety minutes before the orchestra came in and kicked us out. Oh, and I asked Tyson, our librarian, if he could get me the music for "Sell Out," but he thinks that's against some sort of copyright law. Sorry, Jenna. I'll try to get it from our director but it doesn't look good.
From there I came home and did a little more homework, and then went and had dinner by myself at Back Stage Pizza. From there I had to go to a meeting with my intro to music theory composition group. This week we were all supposed to bring the instruments we wanted to play for the piece, but I was the only one who brought anything. (I brought two screwdrivers and a metal L-bracket. I can produce about five completely different sounds with them. Aren't I the talented one?) After 45 minutes of sitting around (waiting for all six people to show up), we decided that our next step in this project was to go to Home Depot next week to get everyone's instruments. We haven't made much progress, but some of the people in this group do seem a little motivated, so I'm sure we'll pull through in the end.
On the way home from that I ran into Singh (pronounced "sing"), who writes the drill for the marching band. He pulled me into the drill-writing meeting that was going on. I stayed for a few minutes, listening to "Everybody's Everything" and making a few suggestions of where we should move and where we should halt. This wasn't a huge part of my day, but it was something new, to say the least.
And then I came home and wrote in my blog, as I tend to do when I come home at night. All glory told, it was a slightly more interesting day than usual.
For those of you who don't know, or who didn't think about it, the Cedar Fire broke out and burned so much of San Diego county a year ago today. (Actually, it broke out a year ago late yesterday.) I know everyone who reads this blog on a regular basis already knows this, but just in case there are new people out there reading my musings, I'll go ahead and tell you all that my dad and I lost the house we had been building in Ramona. It was about 95% complete at the time it burned down; we had just moved into it a few weeks before the fire. As somewhat of a memorial to the original house (which has since been rebuilt on the same lot), I'd like to share with you all some of the pictures taken of the house a year ago:
Josh
mood: reflective
music: stuff from Swan Lake that Kevin's listening to
location: dorm
Anywho, I left earlier than I usually do on Tuesdays so that I could go to my physics professor's office hour, which ends at 9:30. I got there with time to spare and asked him about the lecture I missed on Friday. He dug out his notes and I copied them, and long story short I'm all caught up. The chapter that we're currently working on is not too difficult; we finished it in class on Monday. With the notes I got from Dr. Poling this morning I was able to do all of the questions/problems for the chapter. (I said I was able to do them...I'll get around to actually doing them tomorrow. Hey, I did half of them...that's pretty good.) Just in case any of you are interested, we're learning about light waves and why they produce certain patterns when you shine them through narrow openings. Well I'm interested in it.
After calculus I went to my EE lab professor's office hour to ask him some questions about the parts of last week's lab that I didn't understand. I don't really like this class. The subject matter is interesting to me but the manner in which it is presented keeps me from learning anything really valuable. I think the point of the class is to show me how to use equipment rather than to understand what the equipment actually does. Every week there's some new element to a circuit that I have to connect to an oscilloscope and take some readings. You'd think that by building a circuit I'd learn what all the components do, but really I'm just taking the circuit diagram they give me and building the actual thing. I push the buttons they tell me to push, and if I get the readings they say I should get then I'm done. I really don't like just blindly building things without understanding them; I wish we could slow down and actually learn about what we're seeing. But, again, I guess that's not the point of this class. Oh well...Dr. Gerfen says that we'll "go into more detail" about most of these things in EE 112. I guess we'll see.
From Dr. Gerfen's office hour I went to the Vista Grande Restaurant. (The Vista Grande Restaurant is NOT to be confused with the VG Cafe. They may be in the same building, but one is an actual restaurant with actual waiters and waitresses who serve actual food, and one is...well...we all know how I feel about VG's.) Anywho, it was Sandra's birthday so we wanted to take her to a nice lunch. I don't know Sandra that well, but she plays piccolo in the band and so a lot of people I know were going. The lunch was good, albeit a bit lengthy. I had "the engineering club sandwich," which, despite its name, was very good. All in all the meal cost me $10, which is relatively cheap for what I got. I realized as I paid with my meal plan plus dollars that I have about 60% of them remaining, and we're halfway through the quarter. I'm going on a major shopping spree just before winter break. At least, as I'm going on as much of a spree as I can in the campus food establishments.
After lunch I came home and tried to nap, but it wasn't too long before Kevin came home. So I got up and did physics. Then I went to marching band rehearsal, which was rained out. "Hooray!" you may be thinking, but I really do need these rehearsals. I'm marching a show on Saturday that I've marched only once before, and that was with someone marching the same spot as me, telling me where to go next. So yeah, I need some practice. Oh well...we played four about ninety minutes before the orchestra came in and kicked us out. Oh, and I asked Tyson, our librarian, if he could get me the music for "Sell Out," but he thinks that's against some sort of copyright law. Sorry, Jenna. I'll try to get it from our director but it doesn't look good.
From there I came home and did a little more homework, and then went and had dinner by myself at Back Stage Pizza. From there I had to go to a meeting with my intro to music theory composition group. This week we were all supposed to bring the instruments we wanted to play for the piece, but I was the only one who brought anything. (I brought two screwdrivers and a metal L-bracket. I can produce about five completely different sounds with them. Aren't I the talented one?) After 45 minutes of sitting around (waiting for all six people to show up), we decided that our next step in this project was to go to Home Depot next week to get everyone's instruments. We haven't made much progress, but some of the people in this group do seem a little motivated, so I'm sure we'll pull through in the end.
On the way home from that I ran into Singh (pronounced "sing"), who writes the drill for the marching band. He pulled me into the drill-writing meeting that was going on. I stayed for a few minutes, listening to "Everybody's Everything" and making a few suggestions of where we should move and where we should halt. This wasn't a huge part of my day, but it was something new, to say the least.
And then I came home and wrote in my blog, as I tend to do when I come home at night. All glory told, it was a slightly more interesting day than usual.
For those of you who don't know, or who didn't think about it, the Cedar Fire broke out and burned so much of San Diego county a year ago today. (Actually, it broke out a year ago late yesterday.) I know everyone who reads this blog on a regular basis already knows this, but just in case there are new people out there reading my musings, I'll go ahead and tell you all that my dad and I lost the house we had been building in Ramona. It was about 95% complete at the time it burned down; we had just moved into it a few weeks before the fire. As somewhat of a memorial to the original house (which has since been rebuilt on the same lot), I'd like to share with you all some of the pictures taken of the house a year ago:
Josh
mood: reflective
music: stuff from Swan Lake that Kevin's listening to
location: dorm
