And the answer is...

..."some guy."

No, really. I at least knew N and Ch, but I swear I'd never seen this guy before.

Ah well, it was surprisingly fun anyway. R and T made me dance. With glowsticks. No, seriously. And I did so with near-mediocrity, at least after they'd taken away the ones on long cords that I kept hitting myself in the head with.

Of course, we had to bring in outsiders who actually knew what they were doing. Said outsiders invited me to the local dance club (TH has a dance club?) for Drag Night on Monday. I'm not sure why they invited me to this particular event. I hope it wasn't their gentle way of telling me that I looked like a guy in drag. <;-)>

These guys and girls and guys-as-girls were surprisingly nice. It made me a bit sad to think of the fit my mother would throw if she knew I'd been to an event where there were people dressed as members of the opposite sex. The horror!

C'est la vie.

Speaking of my mother, she's recovering quite nicely, but she's still nervous about the idea of travelling. This means we probably won't be going to NC for a while, probably not before I leave for Seattle. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I feel bad not being able to visit my grandmother when she's so frightened (possibly with cause). On the other hand, flying or driving out the day I drove back from TH would have been painful at best.

And this way I get more free time with E. In theory.

The last time I really talked with E, he was in a hell of a bind. The family business has been run into the ground, and he is now trying to decide whether to bail now (by throwing in all the assets he has and leaving) or hang on in the hope of correcting matters. I didn't venture my opinion to him - it's really not my place to do so, since the choice is so personally charged - but I want to see him get out. His family isn't responsible enough that he can trust them with his good faith, or with his future. Nor do they care for him in the way he cares for them.

Quite apart from my desire not to lose him, it bothers me to see someone give when their generosity is received thus. Too much sympathy? Maybe. I was generous in that way once, I think.

Maybe.

Teknikalmeltdown II

I'm over at Teknikalmeltdown II (pardon my leaving off the "two" the first time around), and rediscovering an inescapable truth of life at Rose-Hulman:

Engineers... can't... dance. (Unless there are arrows.)

The freshmen seem amused by this situation, because many of them (R and T, apparently, as well as E and potentially J) can. So they're in there moving it up, and everyone else is waving glowsticks in a haphazard manner that has nothing to do with any perceptible beat.

Makes me think about whitenoise, and how much he would scoff at the nightlife of RHIT/TH.

I realize now that I should have looked up info on the AVS before I selected the generic physics society option. Actually, I realized it at the time, but I *didn't* - I didn't want to make everyone sit around for 10-15 minutes while I booted up my laptop and made a Google run.

I'm seriously considering joining on my own dime. It sounds closer to my own heart than the others I've encountered - it's a professional society revolving around technology first and foremost. For those of you with interests and/or attitudes similar to my own, I highly recommend you check out their website here. Some interesting stuff. In practicality, most of their membership seems to revolve around materials science, but a heavy portion of that science pertains to microelectronics and other forms of electronics engineering - and, as I'm discovering in my own personal life, it's more the attitude than the particulars that count.

Speaking of microelectronics, I really wish I could start building an ECE library. Some of the books I'm running across on Amazon are awe-inspiring, and I haven't even gotten the chance to crack them open [yet]. I have the ARRL handbook almost memorized by now, and it left me wanting more.

But more is nowhere to be found, at least not while I'm this short on cash and space in which to store books. Now next [academic] year, when I'm $15k+ richer, my education's almost fully subsidized, and I'm living in my own apartment...

Speaking of my own apartment... <*grin*>

I need to send in the application form for SFE, at least if I want to have a place to live next year. It'll be interesting going, but I will enjoy it there. And I won't have to show the actual responsibility required to take care of my own house, such as E had. (But then, there are other reasons that the house would be a bad idea for me - see satellite post on living memory, when I figure out how/if I can make such a thing on this blog.)

R is out here now, looking reasonably exhausted. Tomorrow's her birthday. I never knew that. What can you find someone as a birthday present in under 10 minutes?

Now R and T are out too. They're having fun, and both look rather tired. They look related when they're seen in the same scene again, and I'm not sure whether that means they're back together or just "appropriate" in some ill-defined sense.

I wonder who DJ Mayop is...

You know you're an obscurite if...

...you create a new blog and spend the rest of the day humming "My blog/My blog/It's from my head..."

But it's done, and I don't really know the tune to the original, so I'm bound to give up eventually.

In other news, N (my EDM lab partner) left his stuff (notebook, breadboard & parts) for me to use during the lab practical. I had actually brought all my own stuff, but this was very nice of him.

Of course, I still need to return said stuff. That'll teach him to be nice...

I did well on the lab practical. I had a scary moment there the next day (just now, actually) when I confused myself into thinking I'd measured the wrong voltage (forward-bias voltage drop instead of Zener breakdown), but I was wrong. I'm just glad my little screw-up didn't occur yesterday, when it would affect my grade.

Come to think of it, I always seem to do decently well on lab practicals, despite my misgivings about labs. I only got a 99% on the Signals practical, but what are you going to do? I did get a highly implausible value for the power of that higher harmonic. I just hope J did well. She's been such an angel as a lab partner, and she does learn so much; I'd like to see that rewarded.

On a completely selfish note, I'd love to have her as a lab partner next quarter, and I think she'd be disinclined to work with me if I was associated with something that made her fail this class.

TeknikalMeltdown±{a few deliberate misspellings} is tonight. I'd like to go, but I suspect they won't allow me to take my breadboard and continue constructing circuits there. Such a shame, too - they shouldn't call it techno music if they aren't going to be more tech-friendly about it.

But on the other hand, I'm not constructing circuits right now, am I? Hmm...

It lives! (part the second)

Remember when I said I was going to move my blog off-site?

It's been done. The old one is in hibernation. The new one is here. For those of you interested in looking at the old one... tough luck. There was a REASON it was moved. But for those interested in reading the old posts, I may have something - I plan to retroactively ship them over here at the beginning of each 'whenever-I-feel-like-doing-so' period.

For those who are visiting from the old blogspace, you get comments now! Congratulations!