Snow

So a couple of days ago it snowed the first real snow.  That means it stuck to the ground and boy, is it stuck real good.  I'd been enjoying the fact that I was in Utah, it had gotten to be December, and the ground was still devoid of snow.  Then one Sunday morning there was snow all over the ground.  "Lame!" I thought.  But since then, this is what the snow has brought me to think about.  (Nothing too exciting, sorry.)

For anyone unaware, I'm afraid of ice.  I can't explain why because I don't actually hate falling down, it hurts yes, but nothing terrible has ever happened to me because I fell down.  When the snow starts to fall, I start to anticipate ice being absolutely everywhere.  I walk super slow; stare at the ground; go through the puffy snow rather than the packed whenever possible; that sort of thing, you know.  When I think about it, it doesn't really make sense.  That's probably the thing I'm afraid of most, ice, with no explanation as to why. 

A year or two ago I decided I was going to rid myself of this silly fear and so I registered for a hockey class.  (I got permission to take hockey although I had no idea how to ice skate.  I know.  What kind of a Canadian am I?)  Anyhow, the class began and they taught us how to stop.  That frustrated me, since everyone else would hurry to the center of the court and stop and I'd be at the beginning trying to figure out why my roller-blading motions didn't work very well.  Things got better, but for a good portion of those first few weeks of class I was terrified to stand on the ice.  (I don't know why.  I was fully padded.)  After a while I got really comfortable ice skating, but I was not so comfortable with people skating toward me.  Then one day some guy and I accidentally body checked each other.  That's when I learned that it's not scary for a short person to play hockey.  I can just bend over a little and anyone trying to body check me will go over me and I'll probably lose my balance and fall, but it won't be by force.  Eventually I could skate and stop and hit a puck (I wasn't very good, but I could do it).  After all was done, I wasn't that great at hockey, but I could ice skate, and despite my desires and dedication, I was still terrified of ice.  (Hockey was probably one of my favorite classes ever.  Not only was it super fun, but for me it was inspiring because nobody hated me for being bad at hockey.  Also, except for this hockey course, I had never been in a class where I was honestly the worst at the subject.  That was a new experience and I liked it.)

Sorry that was a much longer hockey story than I meant to tell.

Ice is my greatest fear, my next greatest fear is cars, which is weird.  I really like them.  I think it would be fun to design them.  I even like to drive them (when the road conditions are perfect - clear of bad weather and people).  I guess what I'm really trying to say is that riding in vehicles in the snow makes me the most annoying person in the entire world and I apologize for that.

That's All.  I don't know where this was going, but this is where it went.  :) 

Nostalgia

I was thinking today that I've been married for merely 3 months, which is really not very long at all, but anyhow I've come to a few conclusions.  First, I like being married.  It's fun and highly suggested by anyone who is happily married, as far as I'm aware.  Another conclusion I've come to is that although I really think that Ryan is the same person today as the person I married 3 months ago (I've heard people say that you really don't know a person until you marry them and well, I haven't felt that way at all.) there's a lot we don't know about each other's pasts.  This brings me to the title of this post and the real reason why I'm writing at all...nostalgia.  For any of you who are not aware, and it seems weird that anyone could be unaware of this because of my extensive past with this, but I play the violin.  I was minding my own business doing "fabulously entertaining" homework when I thought of playing my violin and entertained the idea.  I found a familiar yearning, one I've been ignoring (mostly) since I decided to be an engineering student.  It reminded me of some conversations Ryan and I have had since being married, learning a little more about each others pasts.  To his surprise, I told him about some of my violin students I used to have.  I told him how I used to teach Jr. High orchestra classes, individual students, substitute for my own orchestra class when my teacher was gone, teach after school orchestra classes to elementary aged children, participate in Utah All-State Orchestra and off-and-on in the Brigham City Youth Symphony.  While doing all of that I still made it a priority to practice 6 to 9 hours each day.  Really I was crazy...but sometimes, like now, I miss that.  Love the violin.  That was really the whole point of this.  :)  Since this whole post is basically about me, 2 things I was thinking that are kind of funny, one being, in Jr. High and High School I was actively involved in the MESA club (essentially the engineering club) and I mocked people who wanted to be engineers.  (Kind of ironic.  :)  No worries, my mocking really wasn't rude at all.)  The other is that engineering has screwed up my brain.  I couldn't find a sock I was looking for the other day and I kept saying, "I'm deficient a sock and I can't find it anywhere!"  Um...deficient?  Okay, I'll do more homework now.

Some of the things I do

So, I'm a mechanical engineering student, and as such, I make projects.  :)  So I thought I'd share some pictures of projects with you all.

This is an anemometer (an instrument that tests wind speed and direction).  We tested it in the wind tunnel.  It worked, but not really that great.  Weconnected our ping-pong ball contraption to the rest of the instrument with hot glue.  That may be part of the reason it doesn't work so well.  We were impressed, however, that it endured a maximum speed of 30 m/s before breaking.

I designed the hat on this man.  It had to interface with his head.  Obviously, you can't see that part, but that part was really hard.  There are several reasons why you would never want to buy this hat though.  1) It's kind of goofy, 2) The way it was designed, (although it is specific to each persons head), it will be really really tight, 3) the surface touching your head is cork.  I don't think that would be comfortable.

This is a Wankel Rotary Engine, which happens to be my absolute favorite engine of all times.  I just like it.  Maybe because I understand how it works a lot better than all other engines.  Um...most people think this
picture looks like a door knob.  Sad day.

This is a gyroscope.  It is entirely made of aluminum.  I take that back.  The stand is made of steel.  Anyhow, this was a poor idea because aluminum rubbing against aluminum while spinning caused this thing to

ruin itself pretty quickly.  I guess that's why they make you do projects and then teach you about things like that, to ensure any project you make is really missing important elements.  ;)

Once I wrote a a lathe manual for an english class with my friend Skyler.  We took pictures of everything to give a visible to the step-by-step instructions.  This was once of my favorite pictures.
(Drilling, in case you didn't know.)

I had some cool videos to explain why this circuit is cool, but blogger isn't letting me upload videos.  (Maybe another time.)  Anyhow, this circuit is a triggering circuit with no particular name.  It was supposed to be a Schmitt Trigger, but my professor messed up the instructions on how to build one and everybody built this instead.  It still triggers though.

How it works, in case you are interested:  You connect a positive and negative input voltage to their respective places on the bread board.  The photo transistor (blue pin thing) and the IR transistor (white pin

thing) face each other and are connected with a beam made from the circuit.  When the beam is blocked, it triggers the system and (in this configuration) the red LED closest to us in the picture lights up confirming the trigger.  We used this in my class to trigger a high speed camera and video tape really fast

processes in slow motion.  My group taped popcorn popping.  We intended to trigger the circuit with the popping popcorn, but due to a weird refraction of the light through a beaker, we gave up and used our finger to trigger. The videos are cool.  I wish I could upload them.

This has nothing to do with engineering, but I made it.  It's a quilt piece for a quilt we made for my mother's parent's 50th wedding anniversary.  It was fun.  It'd been a long time since I'd done any cross-stitching.  (In case you can't tell, that's me and Ryan, and the building next to us is BYU.)

The following pictures are a series of pictures taken while building a carbon composite bridge for a competition last May.  It was a really cool design.  I think it had real potential, but after we thought we were done (and had no time to restart) we learned we were going off of the rules for the wrong year and had to somehow had to cut off 100 grams of material.   (In case you are not familiar with composites, they don't way much, so 100 grams is a lot.)  We managed to do it, throwing away our intended supports and hoping not to destroy the integrity of the bridge and the bridge placed pretty average in the competition, which do to the circumstances, we were VERY pleased with.

This was our mold.

This is release film.  Without it, the bridge would never come off of the mold.

This was in-process.  What we were doing was questionable, but we'd done it before and it worked (despite all of my knowledge against doing this to composite material).  Mostly, we tried to hide what we were actually doing and later decided that cutting the top surface  into tons of different pieces didn't matter because of lots of reasons.  I was going to list them, but then decided this was getting long.  :)

We clamped it like this overnight to ensure that everything was being held in compression.

We wrapped it very tightly with shrink tape.

We also wrapped it a lot with shrink tape.  (This was experimental because when we'd done it before, we didn't have shrink tape.)

This is what it looks like before going in the oven.  The yellow bag is a vacuum bag and the spout thing is where you hook the vacuum up.  By cooking it in a vacuum, you increase the compression in the material, which is a good thing for all materials I've studied.  (Being in compression that is, not necessarily cooking them, although it usually has its benefits depending on how it's done.)

This is our bridge almost entirely out of its mold.  No pictures really did it justice.

This was us shaving LOTS and LOTS of materail off of our bridge to get it to fit into the testing requirements.

I suppose that's all for now.  Um...sorry that was so long.  :)

' s ' and ' f ' sound the same...

So I was in my instrumentation class today (a class I've come to enjoy although I don't usually like the material) and we were talking about low-pass and high-pass filters.  A low-pass filter only lets low frequency signals through whatever it is filtering while a high-pass filter only let high frequencies through.  We then listened to a song that had a series of low-pass filtering done to it.  It sounded really weird by the time we listened to the last one.  Anyhow, now I will tie the title and this all together...So telephone lines have a low-pass filter on them that only lets frequencies of 4 kHz and lower through.  When you are talking to someone, many of the sounds we hear (such as the difference between the sounds ' s ' and ' f ') are of a frequency higher than 4 kHz.  This is also why women and especially children are hard to understand on the telephone.  Their voices are simply made up of high frequencies.  So there you go...a short random blob on filtering.

Decisions Decisions (FEEDBACK PLEASE)

So, Me(lissa) and Me were discussing whether or not one or both of us will walk for graduation (in August). We are undecided so we are hoping for input from family and friends (aka the readers of this blog).
Pros:
An event we can invite a lot of people to and take pictures and have memories.
Cons:
We may have to come back to Utah early which would be a big problem if I am not done with my internship that soon.
There is the cost of renting a gown and such.

So that's our list
Melissa wants to walk a semester before she graduates so she can walk with me. This might be tricky. We were thinking we could just throw a graduation party for our friends and family at our own convenience and perhaps that would be just as good as an actual graduation ceremony.

Comments?
As I see it a big part of the graduation is for friends and family, so don't just tell us to do what we think is best, tell us what y'all prefer.
Thanks!

Blogs

I'm just wondering how in the world you make the title and picture centered and the size you want them.  I find the html messy and can't figure out where to insert more commands...so....let me know what y'all do to make it look better.

Internships

So recently Ryan Scott and I have both started looking for internships. We're having an interesting time figuring out who is going to follow who around because Ryan's internship is more important, but I would get paid more. Seeing whereas neither of us actually have an internship and are currently just looking, that's not really a problem. Also, because Ryan must have an internship to graduate, if we both can't have one, then he'll just have one and I'll do something else.

Anyhow, if anybody has any good ideas for internships for mechanical engineering (or closely related-aerospace, bio-medical, process development, ect.) or for therapeutic recreation (NCTRC Certified, National Council for Therapeutic Recreation Certification) please let us know. Or if you have something to say to this, that's fine too.

Thanks all! :)

Reflections of General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

I especially enjoyed Elder Ballard's talk about father-son relationships (priesthood session). This was the first time since my mission (4 years ago) that I didn't get to watch it with my father (for those of you who don't know, my parents are teaching at a women's university in Beijing). Luckily I had my surrogate father (my wonderful father-in-law) who is a very special person to me. So as soon as we got in the car I asked him first thing about how he chose to make computer science his career.

Million Point Quiz by Ryan

For 750,000 points, What is the difference between a pier and a dock?

For 250,000 points, What is the difference between a harbor and a bay?

Bonus (pointage TBA) Who sings "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay"?

Brown Nose points for whoever listens to the song.

(Endorsed by Melissa)

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nA18g_PwG0)

Honey Moon Pictures

This is in Seattle.

This is a bad picture, but I thought

that checkered building was so cute.

Cute man in front of the Space Needle,

Experience Music Project, and Science Fiction Museum.

This is inside the space needle.

The picture above and below are

views from the Space Needle...SO pretty.

These are both inside the experience music museum.

We thought it was a little lame and were glad

some man gave us a two for one coupon.

We went on an Argosy Cruise...so fun.

I thought this picture was cool.

Eyes open would probably be better.

We saw neat stuff.

By the time we were done it was dark.

Tacoma. I know attractive picture of us both.

Port Angeles! Small, quaint, and beautiful.

View from the fourth story of the cool dock tower.

Mostly this picture is for Large.

(For fairly obvious reasons.)

Jelly fish! Welcome to Victoria!!!

Fisherman's Wharf...it's like a

very small floating store gathering place.

It's hard to tell, but in these pictures

this wood is covered with four things.

1) Water

2) Barnacles

3) Starfish

and

4) Shrimp

(For reals, look close.)

P.S. Some had crabs on them.

Pictures from the ferry while leaving Victoria.

Dear Mom,

This is a Hawaii license plate.

(Just wanted to rub in that I've seen more than you.)

Love,

Melissa

It was cold on the ferry and windy.

This is like an all women, all white gamelan.

Love gamelans. Awesome!

(Notice the lady in the back.)

The Rest of our Fabulous Adventure...

So...we were at McChord Air Force Base trying to make new plans when we found a pamphlet that said something to the effect of...take a cruise to Victoria and we thought to ourselves, "Okay".  Actually, it was really cute...we were trying to figure out what in the world to do and Ryan looked at me and smirked as if he was trying to be unbiased about what he was going to say and then said, "We could go to B.C."  That was enough for me to think that we should just go.  Wish I had a picture...it was really cute.

We checked out the pamphlet more and the cruise left from Port Angeles, so we tried to figure out how to get there.  We had no idea.  So we got on Greyhound and bought tickets to Port Angeles.  We later tried to buy tickets from Port Angeles back to Seattle and it wouldn't let us, we were very confused, but we still bought plane tickets home for the beginning of the next week.  When we went to get on the greyhound, we asked about the ticket thing and the guy (who seemed very unhappy to be there, I felt bad for him) told us that Greyhound didn't actually connect to Port Angeles, it was a different bus system.  We weren't quite sure what to do about that, but we just shrugged because, meh, what could we do then anyway.  Then busses...busses...then Port Angeles!

Port Angeles apparently had a population of about 30, 000 people, but it seemed even smaller than that because we never really saw that many people.  It was cool though.  They had this Tower thing on one of the docks that was about 4 stories high and we could see out over the ocean.  We spent one night in Port Angeles and then the next day we got on the Victoria Express, which was really just an hour Ferry.  It was a nice day, so we were on the top of the boat in the open part.  There was us and a man with his four sons, well, that's what it looked like at least.  About 20 minutes into the ride they all left and went down into the boat, so Ry and I had the entire top of a ferry boat to ourselves...it was FABULOUS!  And cold!!!!!  We kept trying to keep warm...Ryan had this great idea that we should run around all the seats in circles to warm ourselves up.  So...we did and it helped.  I thought it was really funny though.  :)  We kept trying to look for whales, but all we really saw was waves.  Waves are cool.

In Victoria we found that everything was expensive.  All the hotels were ridiculously priced, so the frugal part of my personality came out and I thought we should spend our time just walking around looking at things.  We still spent more than I would have liked, but it doesn't bother me anymore.  :)  I hope that didn't make me a little bit of a party pooper...you'll have to ask Ry if it did. 

Anyhow, Victoria is gorgious and we saw so many cool things even just walking around.  There were these wood poles by this dock village place and when you looked at the part of them in the water, you could see that they were covered with barnacles, shrimp, starfish, and crabs.  There were also some very little fishes.  One place was this concrete wall that went about a quarter mile into the ocean.  There were tons of purple looking jelly fish in the ocean there.  Very cool.  We like the ocean.  We also went to China town where we found White Rabbits.  Ryan said that Andy, his brother, really likes them, so we bought some and we really liked them, so before we left, we went back and bought more.  We also went to church in Victoria.  We thought we were lost, but really, it just took us longer to walk there than we had been expecting.  It was good. 

After Victoria, we took the farry back to Port Angeles and spent the night.  The next morning we took the bus (not the greyhound) back to Seattle.  In Seattle we spent a few hours walking though Pike's Place Market and then went to the airport to get on our flight.  Our flight was listed as operated by SkyWest, which made us nervous because SkyWest didn't exist in that airport.  Later we found out that was Delta (If you can help it, don't fly Delta...they now make you pay for your baggage!)  So, we waited forever for our flight, not really forever, but a lot longer than we wanted.  Eventually we made it back to Utah and Kate and Richard (Ryan's parents) picked  us up at the airport and we spent the night at their house.  

The next day was Ryan's birthday and he really wanted to play baseball...so we did!  Um...maybe he can tell you about that if he wants.  He really liked his birthday, even though I STILL haven't given him or told him anything about his present...eventually...he'll like it.  ;)

Um...yeah, that was not the best story of our honeymoon.  I think Ry tells it much better.  That is all.  :)

Our Fabulous Adventure!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So...for those of you who are not aware. For our "we just got married adventure" we WERE (and still hopefully are) hopping from airforce to airforce flights on fabulous adventures. We were planning on leaving from Hill Airforce Base in Utah on Monday, however, they didn't have any flights leaving before Thursday. We thought that was pretty lame, so we went to the SLC International Airport and bought the one way tickets on the next flight to Seattle. Yay! So we left about 5 hours later and found ourselves in Seattle. The airport has what is called courtesy vehicles, so we took a courtesy van to a hotel called the Clarion. We were quoted the wrong price, so we got back on the courtesy van and went back to the airport. We called a few places until the Econo Lodge gave us an offer we liked, so we spent last night and the night before here at the Econo Lodge where we are currently waiting to leave from. (Waiting for the courtesy van to take us back to the airport. ;) )

Okay, so the courtesy van came right then when I wrote that. So...we are currently at McChord Air Force Base where we found out we can't actually use flying and we are trying to make our next plans. Boo! Oh well.

So, in Seattle we went and saw the Space Needle, the EMP and SFM (Experience Music Project, okay, and Science Fiction Museum, I liked that one). Then we went on a 2 hour Argosy cruise during the sun-set. That was really fun.

I suppose we'll update again if we have the chance. Best of luck!