People Suck -Friday, December 26, 2003 -10:23 pm-
Or at least they suck all the goodness out of the power grid. Or maybe they put bad harmonics in. Or maybe we recently got an equipment upgrade somewhere up the line. For whatever reason (I suspect it's because I'm nearly the only one in the building), the power is clean enough that the stereo sounds better than it ever has since moving here. It's nice to site and listen to pretty music. This is the first time in a long time that I haven't been disappointed in my stereo. Though I am now very sad because I scratched my Tracy Chapman New Beginnings CD while sanding it. Well, polishing compound tomorrow.
I spent the day up at my dad's. I went up because the rocket he's working on was at a point where he could stack the pieces together and stand them up for the first time. We carried the pieces outside and set the up against the house. I was surprised how much thinner it all looked outside. I think it's because inside you never got to see more than a 6ft section of it at once, which made the 16.5 inch diameter look much fatter. Getting it outside and standing it up, the proportions are much slimmer. At 21 feet, it reached just above the 2nd story eaves. It's going to launch off of a M and 2 L motors. Think roughly enough thrust to lob a Volkswagen Beetle over the Empire State Building. It's definitely a big rocket.
He had some questions to ask me about RockSim, which is a program that designs and simulates rockets. The things the program will do are amazing. Unfortunately, it is only easy to understand the build screen if you're familiar with class/function hierarch. So he had a lot of problems with it telling him the motors wouldn't fit because he had accidently defined the motor tubes as part of the class Nose_cone. The annoying thing is that the program still drew everything correctly, so there was no visual feedback that something was wrong. Dad, like me, has problems actually processing information (read: instruction manuals) off the computer screen. He downloaded the RockSim instruction manual off the internet, a task which took him several hours (sucky dial-up). Turns out it's 80 pages. After 5 minutes, it's 20 pages into the job. Spooling the job, not printing it. So I use my laptop to spoof his XP laptop into thinking it's connected to an ftp server and get the manual on mine. 30 seconds late, all 80 pages are spooled and it takes the printer about an hour and a half to get through the job.
And I just re-discovered how much nicer sarongs are w/o underwear underneath. Yay for laundry.
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