Not only that, I graduated first in my class…

Well, perhaps only temporally (president of the class walks first so that they can shake the hands of each of their classmates) but I’ll take my victories where I can get them.

My folks flew down with my Megan. Chris and his Megan even drove over from North Hollywood to see me. :) All in all I felt all kinds of special and that was great fun. Well that and I was completely high on graduating. I’m sorry to see it all come to an end, but it was one hell of a great ride while it lasted.

A couple pictures of just after the whole graduation thing. Click on the images for slightly better looking versions or go to the full album.

Then it was time to pack up, finish my yearbook page with Badier (WARNING: LARGE FILE) and leave Mudd.

So directly after graduation I drove the birdling north to my ancestral home and left her with meggie and then flew back down to California to start working at Medtronic Diabetes I’m in the Advanced Systems department of the research & development branch. It’s actually pretty cool work and if all goes according to plan in 24 months 12,000 people will be using pumps with a drive system I designed (and an additional 12K every year!) so that’s pretty cool that I can be a part of that. The unfortunate thing is that I’m doing work primarily in one of my weaker subjects in engineering. Well it was one of my weaker subjects. You live, eat, and breathe something for a few weeks and academic survival instincts kick in and you start learning very quickly….

Anyways, now that I’ve said all that I SHOULD be doing, I’m actually not even in the country. I’m in the UK this week and next at Emerson college to see my sister end her Orientation year and pick her up to go back to the states. It should be very fun with one glaring exception. Annie has a boyfriend who’s bed I’m going to be using because he “never uses it” He knows very little of how close that sentence came to being his last.

In all fairness he seems like a perfectly nice guy. Sort of like if Ron Weasley had a hairier and slightly nerdier Aussie twin… Still. Damn near killed him within 30 seconds of meeting him for that bed remark…

Oh well, it’s 12:30 and I’m supposed to go sing with my sister’s class (hooray! I’m useful!) at 8:30 tomorrow morning so I’ll sign off.

Peace

To put it in colloquial terms: Clinic has pwned me hardcorz.

I’ve put over a hundred hours in in the last 6 days. Let’s do the math shall we?

6 days * 24 hours/day = 144 hours
144 hours – 100 hours on clinic = 44 hours of “Free Time ®”
44 hours of “Free Time ®” / 6 days = 7.3 hours of “Free Time ®” per day.

That’s five and a half hours average to do everything from shower to eat to sleep to keep up with the rest of my work from Mudd.
Here’s the kicker: a couple days ago I crashed out and slept for 14 hours. Workin’ them numbers again that leaves me with an average of 6 hours a day to get everything done.

Bottom line: I slept on a lab bench because it was not as comfortable as my bed and I knew I’d get up to work in the morning.

I have been pwned and pwned hard.

</RANT>

So in that aforementioned “Free Time ®” (I’m not sure who registered this as a trademark. All I know is that every time I use some of it I have to pay out the nose later on…) I did manage to watch two very well done videos which I will now share with ya’ll in an attempt to make this post less of a “Jacques whines about his life” and more something you’ll be glad you read…

These are visually clean but they drop the F-bomb a couple of times so unless you have headphones I wouldn’t suggest blasting this on your office computer…
That said, just click the image to play the video.

First off… a very well done “Drunk college Jedi” movie…

Second up: A great stage production number about those yellow stickers on SUVs. The beginning is kinda slow, but it’s a great video…

This last few days my life has been COMPLETELY taken over by clinic (thank goodness VLSI got through the work-heavy part JUST in time) At some point I’ll throw some pictures up here of the whole machine, but for tonight I have a quick story before bed. A lesson perhaps…

When testing things at high speed… Stand back.

That’s it. That’s my pearl of wisdom. “Sure sure” I hear you say. “Anybody knows that” Well, I’m here to tell you I know it better than most.

Tonight I was testing out my shrimpy-spin-dryer and its new motor.(Think:giant salad spinner for shrimp. But sideways. And continuous. And powered. And with a taste for human blood.) Very exciting stuff. (You’re going to have to trust me on that.) Anyways, the thing spins up nicely the first time (mind you, I haven’t actually mounted the motor, I’m holding it in tension on the belt drive so I can see how the system works before going on) So I thinks to myself, thinks I: “Let’s open this thing up and really see what she can do…”

Upon reflection, when holding a 28lb motor in your hands with your head next to a giant role of mesh rotating at high velocity, this is not a wise thing to think.

Sooooo I change out some drive pulleys, forget to do some multiplication, and damn near decapitate myself. In the space of… oh I don’t know, maybe half a second my beautiful contraption goes from looking something like this:

(note: this isn’t actually my spinner, I took these pics AFTER the fact so this one is the wet separator version that was still intact)

To this :(

(note: the twisted mess of mesh on the top there was wrapped neatly around and pinned down. Also all of the hoops, such as the one in the foreground, used to be concentric around the drive shaft.)

All while I’m a good safe twelve inches away with both hands occupied holding this motor.

It was at this point that I decided mechanical engineering needs to be done between the hours of 7:30 am and 4:am. After 4am it is no longer a good idea. So knowing that, I’m off to bed. It has been… educational.

Before passing out I wanted to toss a few pictures up here ( as proof I’m really still alive. Castro reads the newspaper, I put pictures of mudder-ridden insanity on the web. We all have our ways.)

Teh Hugzorz!

So there I am: minding my own business in this refrigerator you see…

The quintessential “happy wedding guests” picture…

That’s all I’ve got. I’ll put more up if I wake up. I may just Van Winkle this time…