spring begins, as do corrections

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It’s sunny, warm, pleasant.  Yesterday I met TB & RH (my bamboo research group) to talk about our submission to the ASET Capstone project.  We all wrote blurbs about ourselves, and TB will organize it all and submit it.  I trust Ty to catch all the goofinesses such as font sizes, placement of images, etc.

I worked on the Architectural class group project.  CE, a teammate in the Stan’s Stuff – Auto Parts and More, said he could meet up and work on it with me.  It’d be a good portfolio item.  It turns out he was too busy with flooding in his house and preparing to travel.  Se, the other teammate, rarely shows up for any length of time to help.  Very helpful when he does, but it’s rather seldom.  So I’ll continue to work until it’s absolutely time to wipe the drives on the computer.  Work on what?  Corrections to assignments.  All those red marks on assigments – I’ve paid for them.  I paid money to have the instructor put red all over my paper.  I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let that go to waste.

All students’ computer drives need to be wiped at the end of this course.  They have software on them that’s only licensed to the college.  We get a deposit back when we allow this.  I forget how much – like a hundred dollars or so.  No wipe, no deposit back.  So, we’re all told repeatedly to back up our stuff and save anything we want to save on another drive.  I’ve got my server (the one you’re reading this on) to store my stuff.

In case you’re wondering, I rarely use real names here on the ongoing letter.  I don’t imagine people would want their names, faces, etc. online.  So, rather than names, I use initials.  Are they real?  Who knows!  Ha!

Live

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I found a few new shows on Netflix now that I figured out how to change the settings on it.

Funny how four out of five are sci-fi.

I contacted Netflix a few weeks ago and told them I resented having to see people standing in their front yard with blood gushing out of their faces after having eaten another person, all the way smiling.  Gross.  I told them I didn’t want that in my house, in my living room.  No, Netflix doesn’t actually do a good job selecting for me what it thinks I might like – obviously a terrible job.  Fix it!  A couple of weeks later, the menus change, and now there’s thumbs up or thumbs down without having to actually view it or intentionally search for it just to have a thumbs-up or -down button.  Finally some control to get that crap off my screen.

I’m not into zombies, or blood, or walking dead, or whatever they can pull out of the dark turd pots of their minds.  When will this finally disappear?  Zombies???  What, are you five?  I’ve seen enough in real life, thank you.  Not interested.

I also subscribe to Curiosity Stream, a documentary website.  Now that’s leisure time well spent.

snow melt flooding

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There’s a lot of water around these days.  This winter has had the heaviest snowfall that I can remember.  Now it’s all turning into runoff.

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another windshield bites the dust

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I’ve got a crack in my windshield again.  This is my second windshield, and now it’s cracked.  So … let’s see … that’s two broken windshields and two broken back windows.  I’m not having very good luck with autoglass.

perspective

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As I’m finishing my education and getting ready to search for jobs, I know there is so much for me to learn still.  We all come out of our course thinking that we’re qualified, have got the knowledge, will run out and do great things.

I saw a video tour of New York City from 1911 on YouTube.  They had traffic management with electric, petroleum, and horse powered vehicles intermingling.  They had trains being driven several storeys over the street, buildings so high that an engineer these days would take seemingly forever to design and build.  They had so much already back then.  We think we’re doing something new – and we probably are – but we may be forgetting that these things have all been done without the technological help that we have today.  Damn amazing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aohXOpKtns0   Keeps it all in perspective.

EDDT is done (pretty much)

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Yesterday was my last class in the Engineering Design and Drafting Technology program.  I handed in my last project at 10pm yesterday evening and went home.  (I made this a bigger font ’cause it’s been a pretty major thing in my life for the past few years.)

I’m sitting at 75.63% (unofficial) in my weakest subject, Process Design, but the Final Project is not marked yet.  We designed oil & gas vessels and pipelines and studied how these systems work.

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50 first dates OR Sublinox

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You know that movie, 50 First Dates?  If not, look it up.

You’re reading this for the first time, right?  Yes.  Well, me too, or at least I will be.  Telling friends & family this is pretty weird.  Here how it works.

I take sleep meds called Sublinox.  It’s an hypnotic made to help fall asleep.  But it has a side effect of inhibiting memory (storage of, for example, writing in this ongoing letter blog) until sleep is underway.  It takes about 15 minutes to work, and, during that time, I cannot study, talk on the phone, visit with family, nothing.  I can make coffee ’cause I know that’s something I do every night.  I wake up in the morning and thank the person who made the coffee for me.  All I have to do is turn it on.  Well, really, it was me.  But I just don’t remember doing it.

So when I read this blog sometime – don’t know when – I’ll go, “Oh, somebody has broken into my server, left a blog entry in my writing style, and posted it.  That was … let’s see … right about the same time I was getting ready for bed.  I wonder who that was?”

I can’t do homework because I won’t retain it.  I can’t have important conversations, like with classmates to get things done, for the same reason.  I can’t change passwords!  That would be bad.  About the only thing I can do is go to bed.

So that’s what I’ll do.  Good night, y’all.

winter is back

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I was wrong.  Winter is back.  It’s April 7, and winter still hasn’t left.

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warmer weather

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Wow.  I think winter has finally kicked the bucket.  We’ve had four major dumps of snow this winter with more snow than I’ve seen in recent years.  Spring officially happened a few days ago.  Today walking home was really nice.  I’ve been really looking forward to warm weather, and now I think it’s come.