Digging My Potato

I am in love...







Why yes I did just buy her cd based on the cover art.

Sorry to my future wife/girlfriend. She is hot and mainly I see her now yet you are no where to be found at this time. So I don't feel bad in saying this girl is hot!


UPDATE: 01-20-10
Ok the cd came in. Her voice is as amazing as her picture above. I guess I should actually tell who she is...From the best I can tell from Wikipedia...Her name is: Alison Sudol, she was born 27 days after I was....also from reading...and I am making an assumption here...I would guess she is a Christian (Woohoo!) as well just by looking at some of the authors (such as CS Lewis, and writing a Narnia style book series) she likes. All that given...why cant she live some where near me...then again maybe not...That might freak her out if I tried to meet her lol.

anyways here is the cd

The band is called "A Fine Frenzy"
Album is "One Cell In The Sea"

Houston, we have uh-oh

So... It has been a long stinkin time since I have wrote here. I really could care less who if anyone reads this. I have given up on looking at page counts to focus on content.

This will turn into a space for me to read later on. Therefore I will put my random thoughts and quotes about what is going on.

Let's get started shall we.

Currently reading: Blue Like Jazz

Great book so far. More thoughts about it tomorrow.

Also have started up reading the new testament again. I am in the middle of Luke. I have never made it this far in reading straight through. Of course I have read bits and pieces here and there in church and what not. I have read through Matthew probably 10 times but never could make it though Mark for some reason. Not that Mark was bad. I just became unfocused. Needless to say I am running into a few random things I have never read before. But nothing ground shaking. i.e. I read about the brothers of thunder wanting to call down fire from heaven for not accepting them into a town. Odd...

And I am listening to Dune Messiah on audio book now. So far I preferred the original Dune to this book. This one is too much political cloak and dagger stuff so far.

All for now.

Drive around the lake

just a little too fast...

The last breaths of this semester are occurring. And with this is generally a sign of projects needing to be completed, exams, homework, and late nights in the engineering building.

Some times you are granted a gift though...and in this case we went and visited Beaver Dam. It was an amazing experience. I took as many pictures as I was able to and will talk about the rest.

Beaver dam is apart of a lock and dam system that covers NW Arkansas and SW Missouri.

This particular dam was made back in the 60's. The design shows on the inside. The insides are painted in colors that I imagine the 60's coated in. The control room walls were a mix of soft browns and a light green. The kind of green you see on all old machines. I couldn't tell you what half the things do in there or how they are operated. Everything had lights and knobs as if it were from the Star Trek series of the same era.

We were able to see the, for lack of better words, giant axles that are connected to the turbines. They consist of a solid metal shaft that is some where in the neighborhood of three feet in diameter. When spinning they were only spinning at something around 90 rpm. I can only imagine the amount of force to get that much weight moving that quick.

Now for the Dam part of the operation. (And yes our group revisited every single "dam" joke from Vegas Vacation and then some) The dam itself as you can see from the pictures is pretty big. It is from top to bottom about 250' tall. Yeah like looking down the length of a football field. The width at the bottom if I remember correctly is in the neighborhood of 170'. And there are tunnels all through it. I had never realized it but most dams have tunnels through out their structure. One of the reasons is to help with drainage since concrete "leaks". Another is to have instruments. One of the main ones is the "Tilt-o-meter". This meter is a string that goes from the top to the bottom of the structure through a pipe. Basically this device shows how much the dam is tilting due to pressure of the water. There was a red line on a little beyond where the pendulum was and asked what that was for and what they would do if it got that far. The operator just looked at me and said, if it gets that far I am running. The red line was apparently the point break for tilt-age.
















This picture is looking out over the top of the dam. They had no restrictions in taking pictures in this area. To give some perspective...those blocks on the right are about the size of a VW Micro-Bus

















This is a picture showing the height of the structure.

















This is looking straight down. Notice how small the door way is in the center of the picture.















This top of the dam, but suprisingly isnt the main control center.















The Feds will be after me for this picture...I took a picture inside of the restricted area....ahhh....I think if I remember correctly it is just a bathroom in there and some stairs.

Needless to say I am staying vague on some details because I dont know what is acceptable to talk about. I am keeping to stuff that could be found on wikipedia and really dont want a goverment agent to come knocking on my door. Especially since they know who I am since I signed my name....although it didnt have a NDA on it...

The horizon has been defeated

by the pirates of the new age

Problems I have been thinking about....here are 2 statements that are true...according to my knowledge of physics and the universe.

The speed of light remains a constant speed regardless of the sources speed.(i.e. the speed of a beam of light being shined by a car going 60 mph is not going 60 mph faster then the speed of light...nor are the tail lights going 60 mph less then the speed of light...basically the speed of light is source independent.)

The second statement is that there is light from stars that will never ever ever reach our solar system.

This made no sense to me...even if the galaxies are moving at a magnitude of 1.5 the speed of light....light in theory would still make it here...Galaxy A going .75 the speed of light and Galaxy B going .75 the opposite direction = magnitude of 1.5 speed of light. Since light is not source dependent it would only have to over come the .75 SoL. This means yes it would make it to us right?

Turns out the answer is NO. Here is where my brain broke for about an hour. I totally forgot about the universe is expanding. Imagine the universe is a giant piece of nylon and galaxy A and B are on opposite corners....now have the nylon start to stretch...this is the same concept...now add the galaxies also moving on the nylon away from each other....this means the beam would never be able to beat the speed of the expansion of the universe and the speed of the other galaxy that it is chasing...

Mind blowing?

Naughty or Nice

Consider the Price, to an Elf...

So let me update what is going on.

Since the last post, I have had a birthday, dead day, finals starting, and a few crazy nights in between.

I have also laid down the money to purchase my new laptop. It is a HP 2730p. 1.86 ghz, 120 GB hard drive, 3 GB of ram and its a touch screen. I don't know how I feel about it right now. It is a lot of money but I feel that I made the best choice...just not sure if economically it was the best one. I haven't splurged in a while so I guess I am splurging now? Oh well, I'll give my review of it soon.

I also have recieved my certifcation to test concrete by the ACI. This makes me happy. Maybe it will get me a summer time job.


Below is a video of our compression tests on some concrete samples we made. The concrete we batched surpased 20'000 psi which in turn gave us a 10 percent bonus in my Structural Materials class. While watching the video you may want to turn the volume down as some one lets out an explitive when the concrete finally gives way. I am in the background as well. It honestly was a pretty scary site when the concrete cylinder exploded.




This is at a "yay school is about over" party where we watched about 5 minutes of revenge of the nerds...we were suppose to dress up as nerds...sadly this is the closest thing I had while I was in fayetteville.

The night got much better after we quit watching and moved into the garage.






This picture is from the National Missionary, where I was litterly locked out on the roof. What happen is I was exploring with the Tyler Twins when we decided to go out this door. Well the door opened just fine but had no door handle to get back into the building. So we were stuck outside on the roof looking in through the windows on the roof. Thankfully some one let us back in.

Yeah I realize I covered the NMC in the last post but I forgot this photo.


My new computer should be here with in the week, and I should be done with finals on Wednesday...therefore I should have plenty of time to do some comics...and get back to some more enjoyable stuff.