Abiding by the Rules

2006-05-02T22:06:00.000-07:00

Graduation's right around the corner now, 4 days to be exact. Assuming I don't fail any of my classes, I should be just fine. I think professors try their best to pass a senior, and frankly I'll take some C's cause that's all I need and at this point it won't dent my GPA. So I walk on Saturday, drive 8 hours to St. Louis on Sunday, and get on a 15 hour plane flight to China on Monday, sounds like the suck. I'm gonna have to work out the time change so I can start adjusting for it on the plane. The trip's either gonna be a major pain in the ass with tension with my dad, or it's going to be a minor pain in the ass. I'm not forcasting a pain-free trip, unless I find some chick, but probably not going there. The fun starts when I get back. It's be confirmed that I will be going to Hanscom Air Force Base to do research this summer. That's just damn awesome. The military's always been kind of cool to me, but I know I'm idealizing it and I wouldn't really want to join. Something that's scary though I have to to fill out a 14 page long security questionair that includes things like where have I live for the last 7 years and name 3 people who together can vouch for my whereabouts for the late 7 years. I'm not applying for an security clearence, though I hear that process gets even more intense as they're send agents to interview your parents, friend, high school teachers, basicly everyone you know.

On a different note, the AF is more of a career move as I'm getting my foot in the door with the AF, which is a big employee of people in my field. I think I may take this chance to have a little fun in Boston, since I'm only there for 2 months, anything stupid I do will be forgotten.

2006-04-23T22:44:00.000-07:00

Graduation is 2 weeks away. It's odd how this is just hitting me now. I guess I'm finally grasping the signifigance of it since my work load has dropped as projects are getting finished and over with. Before I was busy doing this and finishing that, so I didn't really thing about graduation. It may also be due to the meeting I had with the other grad students this weekend. I guess you can call it our first research group meeting. We meet on saturday and the professor bought lunch. We went over what our projects were and shared our knowledge on the tools we were using. The scary thing is, while the other guys were talking about their projects, I was actually interested and understood the theory behind it. Plus I actually had questions about the projects. This suprised me as up till now I haven't really cared about anything I've studied except in relation to getting an A. Guess I'm starting to get into the Ph.D frame of mind or actually caring and wanting to know more...scary.

After graduation I'm going to China for a month. I'm not really looking forward to this since I don't really have a good connection or close relationship with my relatives. The last time I was back was about 10 years ago before 6th grade. Alot has changed since then, but I still feel like an outsides, not quite a tourist, and not quite a native. I'm not even sure what I'll spend a month doing. We'll probably go see some sites like the great wall or the forbidden city and such. I guess I'll spend the other days watching TV, on my laptop w/o internet :(, or maybe I'll bring my gameboy. I'll probably get time to work on drawing and hopefully be good enough by the time I return to start on the webcomic. Although now that Patrick is leaving to go home and tend to some family issues, we've lost a driving factor behind the webcomic. I also dread having to explain why I didn't go to MIT when I had the chance. In foreign countries, the big name schools are MIT and Harvard. It's even worse that in the US because in China they don't have any sort of knowledge about other schools, they just know MIT. I could actually care less about what my relatives think of me not going to MIT just for the prestige, but I'm not looking forward to the annoying questions. No matter where you go, the Chinese mentality is the same, make your parents proud.

2006-04-06T20:04:00.000-07:00

Well the dust has settled, and I think the folks have finnaly accepted that I won't be going to MIT. Well, mom's accepted, I think dad hasn't accepted but he can't do anything about it. I love my parents and respect them, but they don't respect my knowledge, they still think they know better than me on engineering. Guess I just strained my relationship with my parents, but life goes on.

Lets see, this summer I'm trying to go do research for the Air Force up in Massachusets. This should be pretty cool since the research topic is interesting, it's using and oxygen beam to probe nanostructures, or something like that. Plus, this will also give me some contacts with in the Air Force, which will be a big help cause they fund alot of research in EP. I'm still working it out with the director there at the Hanscom AFB, but it looks good. My other option is to go back to Boeing and work in hydraulics for the 787. I don't really want to go back there. It would be a much easier job and probably pays better, but it was just so mind numbing and boring. I would much rather get research experience and research contacts.

Now lets wrap up with my ski trip. It all went well, no one got seriously hurt, though I was sore for a week in my shoulders and knees after we got back. It was a blast, and I think I'm hooked. We're already talking about going skiing again before Christmas. This was my first time skiing, but I picked it up pretty quick. I still don't have the side to side movement down right, and I am so not good at hockey stops. Next time I may try snowboarding, atleast for a day.

2006-03-26T15:05:00.000-08:00

And another coversation with the folks ended with me hanging up. So the question is what is the role and duty of a parent? I think parents are to support their children, guide them, provide them with a moral structure, and help them if needed. They are not suppose to treat their children as an investment that should provide some sort of return eventually. It is the duty of parents to raise their children without except of reward. They are suppose to sacrifice so their children can find happiness and grow up.

Know what my folk's view is, or apparent view from what they've said? Apparently my dad has sacrificed his life (dream to get a Ph.D. in history) so that I can make him proud. When I said choosing grad school was my decision because it was my life, he said what did he sacrifice for then? Boy was I stunned and kind of pissed off. I think they fully expected to get some kind of profit off me in pride or bragging right or something. While I understand wanting to be proud of your child and be able to brag about them, that should not override wanting to see your child happy and doing what he desires. I swear I'll never do that to my kids.

2006-03-24T17:16:00.000-08:00

So I was going to talk about my ski trip for spring break, but first I need to rant a bit about my parents and fucking MIT. I had gotten the acceptance from MIT about 2 weeks ago but I waited to hear about finacial aid from Georgia Tech so I could have some support when I told the folks I was going to stay. So as of today, Tech will cover my tuition and pay me a good $30,000 a year to go to grad school here. MIT hasn't said anything, and I know for a fact the professor there is broke or close to it in funding. So added to that the fact that Tech has the type of research I want to do, all logical signs point to Tech.

Now I call my mom after I get back to Atlanta to let her know I'm safe, and I let her know that I got into MIT but haven't heard about funding while Tech is giving me some pretty generous funding. The first thing she says is to call MIT and see what my finacial aid status is. Next she says to wait to see if I get any of my external fellowships. She completely glosses over the fact that Tech is giving me lots of money and had the decency to let me know about their funding decision a week ago while MIT has said dick. Then I tell her it doesn't matter what the MIT funding is since they don't have the type of research I want to do, and she asks "how do you know they don't have what I want to do." At that point I had to end the call or I was going to flip out and use some very bad words with my mother. She is questioning my knowledge of what specific type of research I want to and what the school does when I've spent the last year working on the research and talking to professors and grad students in the field. How the fuck does she have the right to question my decision of what research I want to spend the next 4 years doing when she knows jack shit about it. She and my dad are so in love with fucking MIT that they would probably empty their bank account if it means I would go there. That is just wrong. I swear to all that is holy that if I get the power one day, the world will witness MIT burning to the ground and me peeing on its ashes.

2006-03-15T14:36:00.000-08:00

Score one for me, I'm gonna get paid to go to school! HELL YEAH!!! I got the e-mail today from Tech's graduate finacial aid department. I'll be getting a research assistantship which will pay for my tuition and I think some money for a stipend, not sure cause the wording in the e-mail was unclear. Plus, I'm also getting the Georgia Tech Insitute Fellowship, which will pay for any extra tuition costs and give me $12,000 a year as stipend. That's not a lot of money compared to working, but I'm getting paid to learn, that's awesome. I'm still waiting to hear from my two external fellowships that I applied to, though I don't know if they can all stack. If they can though, I'll make out like a bandit and have more money to spend than I ever had. I think I hear a fancy new computer and x-box calling my name in the future. :)

2006-03-10T15:06:00.000-08:00

EVE Online is awesome. I'm recently stopped playing World of Warcraft, since my friends stopped playing and I was getting bored of level grinding. After I quit, I played Guild Wars for a week or so since it's free, then together with my roommates relogged into EVE Online. We played EVE a couple months ago but school was kind of busy and we didn't really do much. Now though we're doing mission together, going to blow up stuff with our ships. We're going to join Goonfleet, a huge corporation (guild), who are all members of Somethingawful, a forum. I've watched one of their PvP videos and it was pretty awesome. They use teamspeak to give commands by the commander of the fleet and such. It lets you feel like you're in a space battle. I think I'm going to stick with this for a while.

2006-03-10T14:59:00.000-08:00

8 Days till we leave for Vermont. Party!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Anyhow, me and 3 of my friends are driving up to Vermont to go skiing for 3 days. It's like a 20 hour drive, so we'll probably end up doing it in 2 days, cause even with four of us switching off driving, it's a long trip. Now I've never been skiing before, so this ought to be interesting, I'm fully planning on breaking something. Here's the problem though, the week after I return, I have to give a presentation on my research for my Honor's program, and I am so no ready yet. I finally got over a stump in the research and got the computer model to work right, now I just have to run a bunch of different cases with different configurations so I can improve on the design NASA has right now. Sound cool huh...well back to trying to make a name for myself in science.

2006-03-03T22:59:00.000-08:00

Huh, it's been quite a while, what 2 months. My laziness caught up to me and I stopped writing. Lets see, what's happened in the last 2 months. Guess the only major thing would be grad school admissions. I'm going for a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering with my research on electric propulsion. I applied for 3 schools, Princeton, MIT, and Georgia Tech. My top choice would have been Michigan at Ann Arbor, but the professor there wasn't taking anymore students, so I didn't bother to apply. Between the 3 I did apply for, I think they were pretty much balanced in worth, with Princeton leading by a little and MIT in 3rd. You see, Princeton is one of the best schools for EP, or rather it has the most well known professor in EP. That was mostly my incentive for going there, to piggyback on his reputation. On the downside, the professor is more theoretical while I'm experimental, so I wouldn't have gotten good assistance from him.

At Tech, the EP program is only about a year old and the professor is really young for a professor (30 I think). But I have a good working relationship with him as I currently do research for him as an undergrad and he would love to keep me as a grad student. Also we're getting some nice stuff in our lab, including the largest vacuum chamber in any US university rated for testing pressures. Since he's a new professor, he'll be around to help and he'll push me to get things done cause his reputation also depends on what his students put out. He's also an experimenter, so he'll know how to help me with my projects. The down side of staying here is he's a new professor so he doesn't have the high reputation to throw around, and he'll be constantly trying to get funding, which can be a pain. He'll also constantly be looking for results cause he needs them to show he can be a competent researcher. (Btw, there's a really good book called "A Ph.D. is not enough" that talks about all the steps in going through a science/research career, and I'd recommend anyone considering a Ph.D to pick it up.)

Now MIT, I wasn't ever looking to go to MIT, but applied because my parents really wanted me to. It's part of their age long dream of being able to say "my son goes to MI-fucking-T." Ok, maybe without the cursing. The school is a good school, I'll give them that, but the EP department is small. The professor is pretty much strictly theoretical and from what his grad students have told me, he'd really have to like your project to let you do an experimental one. Plus, he currently has little to no funding, so I would have to pay for my own tuition, which would suck cause it's about $40k a year. So it's not really good for me.

Now lets get to what happened when the letters came it. Princeton being the bastards they are said no (I'm not bitter or anything), MIT and Tech both said yes. So for me it's a no brainer to stay at Tech, and I have a good chance of getting the aerospace department's graduate fellowship which would pay for all my costs, otherwise my professor has already said he would fund me. Now the trick is, how do I tell my parents I want to stay here with the new professor who doesn't have alot of name weight. I got the MIT letter today actually, and I was debating with myself whether to lie and tell the folks MIT said no and thus resolve any possible discussion, or tell them the truth and go thru the probably hour long discussion trying to convince them I'm not fucking myself over by staying here. Well, I'll do it on monday and we'll see what happens.

2006-01-12T18:55:00.000-08:00

I'm not a big fan of reality TV generally, but there's one show I really like, Beauty and the Geek. I think Aston Krutcher has really stumbled upon something here. It's a really good idea and funny as hell. They type of question they ask in the game aren't too intellectual or pop cultural, but apparently way out of the knowledge of the players. The girls are especially funny. The geeks are at the extreme end of geeks. I use to think that I was a geek, and I may be, but damn this show puts a new spin on it. I atleast know some of pop culture and can answer 80% of the pop culture questions. I saw last season's show also and it was quite suprising the difference between the first and last episode. The funny thing is, without the show though, these same people would never have gotten to know each other. Oh, there's also a Georgia Tech grad on the show, have to root for him!

2006-01-11T17:43:00.000-08:00

If sleep is for the weak, then damn it I'm weak. After spending winter break getting up at 11 am and going to bed at 3 am, I have completely screwed my sleep schedule. Now that I'm back in school, my 8 am class is killing me. I haven't had a class that early since freshman year. It's only 8 pm here, and I really want to hit the sack, but if I do I'll end up waking up at 4 am or something ridiculous. From experience, if I take a nap in the afternoon, then I won't be tired at bed time. That would be an issue if I had time for an afternoon nap. With research and the design project, it looks like Tech is taking it's revenge on my last semester.

2006-01-10T15:39:00.000-08:00

You'd think I'd be use to it by now, but every semester, the total cost of textbooks makes my wallet cry. Atleast this is my last semester as an undergrad, and I won't have to buy books for 5 classes anymore. This time the bill only came to about $250 and that was cause I already had one of the books and not all the classes needed books. The worst semester I believe was over $500. I was real sad that year. But if I think about it in context, that money is being well spent right? Actually by the end of a semester, I'd look at my textbooks and think, "damn, I think I opened that one once the entire time, what a waste." Maybe it's just me, but I hate reading textbooks and avoid it as much as possible, cause it usually results with me falling asleep in my chair with the book in the lap. But I can never guess which books will be useful and which won't, so it's one expensive crap shoot, oh well.

2006-01-08T15:48:00.000-08:00

Well, it's sunday evening and school finally starts again tomorrow. I'm having mixed feelings about going to classes again. On the one hand, I had a great time this break and I'd hate for it to end. But then again I don't think I can sit around and not do anything for much longer. This will be my last semester here at Tech, thus another chapter of my life is about to close, and honestly I'm kind of apprehensive. It seems to have passed really fast, time that is. I can still remember my freshman year at Tech and when I think about it, I wonder where has all that time gone and what have I gotten from it. Sure, I have an education, and soon a degree. I've done research, work, and probably paved a career path for myself. But with everything that I've done and achieved, I have failed in the department of the heart. Very rarely do I think about girlfriends and such, but when I do, it makes me kind of sad. Maybe if I actually tried these 4 years to get a girlfriend, I could have, but my priorities were different. The cruise showed that this was missing from my life. I think I now regret not trying in college, but the path I have choosen is there, I have played my hand, now it is time for Fate to play hers.

2006-01-07T17:36:00.000-08:00

Mission accomplished, we've got the guns. We went to Target at Lenox Mall and got the Nerf N-Strike Maverick for $8 a pop, pretty cheap. It's a revolver style gun where the cylinder leans out to reload. But the cylinder only comes out partially and only allows you to reload one at a time, so we took the thing apart and cut off two pieces to allow the cylinder to come out fully. Now we can play russian roulette where you put in one bullet and spin the cylinder. These Nerf guns are pretty cool and we've been having some fun with them in shoot outs, but Patrick probably said it best, "This is either a great idea, or a really bad one." Here's a link for ya: http://www.hasbro.com/pl/page.viewproduct/product_id.15953/dn/nerf/default.cfm

2006-01-07T13:04:00.000-08:00

A normal student, when returning from winter break, would first get settled back into their home at school, unpack, and do some cleaning. What do I do when I get back, I go shopping with my housemates for Nerf pistols. Apparently Hassan was reading a forum at work and they had a long thread about these Nerf pistols that were really cheap. So he comes back and shows us the pistol and we drive out to the Walmart to look for them. The bad things is Walmart looked like it was looted or something cause the shelves were half empty. So today we set out to look for them again.

2006-01-06T18:58:00.000-08:00

I got back from the cruise to the Bahamas yesterday. Had to say it was pretty fun, even if I got shot down. Saw some pretty cool things. I got to go snorkling for the first time. I've been scuba diving before, but snorkling is something different entirely. I felt a quick panic attack when I first got into the water and looked down. When I was scuba diving, I atleast knew I had air on me so if I went underwater it was not a problem. But snorkling, man, having to worry about keeping the tube above the water was a bit worrying. Oddly enough, I actually lost weight on the cruise, probably the only person on the boat. Mainly it was due to me getting a bit nauseas when I saw food. I don't really know what it was, cause I wasn't sick any other time, just whenever I smelled lots of food like at the buffet. But it was still fun.

2005-12-27T12:44:00.000-08:00

Umm, well...New Years commitments don't start till after new years damn it. So I've been lazy on the blog. Now I'm on winter break from school and enjoying some lazy time without classes, though there's still some work I have left to do on applying for graduate fellowships. But right now I'm playing Worlds of Warcraft again since all my friends back here have picked up the game again. Hey, I'm a sucker for playing games with friends, it's so much more fun than playing alone.

But on to more serious matters. There's only one semester left till I graduate, and then move on to the next step of my life, grad school or work, and I really don't want to go to work. The time I spent at Boeing showed me that working life is boring, really boring. So I guess it's off the grad school. Now it's time to decided where to go. I'm probably not going to MIT, since the professor there only works on low power EP thrusters, and I'm more interested in the high powered ones. Only Princeton and Tech are accepting students and work on high power EP. So to me it's either Princeton or Tech. Of course my parents say it's Princeton or MIT, Tech's not even in their consideration. They're very hung up on the whole big name school thing, even when they don't know anything about the field. I hate that. Oh well, let's see in 3 months.

2005-12-09T20:38:00.000-08:00

New Commitment

Ok, so it's been what, 6 month since I've last look at this place. Never really been big on blogging, my life's too boring to share. But I kind of feel back about having this space and never using it. So as my new year's commitment, I will start using this thing...at least once a week. So lets start now.

It's now friday before final's week. I should be studying, I should be worried, but I'm not, know why? Cause I have 1 take home final and one actual final, and it's in Chinese. So this is going to be a very relaxing finals week for me. The first one in 3 and a half years. But I still can get away with not having finals on fridays, sheesh. The previous two weeks however, were a bear. I had a proposal for space design to finish and a final in my controls class to do. On top of that, I got sick and was out of commision for two days. I'm still coughing now and it's annoying the crap out of me. At least I can take it easier this next week before going home.

2005-07-25T13:18:00.000-07:00

Funny picture.

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/20389566/

Got this link off a webcomic. I'm sure everyone's seen the Burger King commercials with the guy in the king mask giving away sandwiches. At one point my roommates and I thought of this exact situation, and it's just funny to see it on paper.

2005-07-22T14:58:00.000-07:00

Working at Boeing is coming to a close soon. I have 3 weeks left here before I head home to St. Louis, hang out with my friends for a week, then drive the 9 hours back to Tech. Yesterday I made a presentation to a group of people who scare me on a proffesional level. Last week I got a task from one of the engineers here to do a trade study on a part of the 787 airplane. It started out as a simple change of where tubes run, but it snowballed and I ended up running all over the place to get other people's inputs and impacts. So after I got the initial data gathered, I had to present it to get it officially chartered, and put on the books. So I make the presentation first to the Hydrauylics team (the group I'm a part of, which includes the two managers incharge of hydraulics), then I have to make one to the FCMH group (Flight Controls and Mechanical Hydraulics, the next level up with more managers, and finally I go to the System group (this group is all the managers in 787 system). Needless to say that final one got me a bit uneasy. The only level above systems group is the airplane group, which includes the president of Boeing Commerical Airplanes. So I was talking to a room of 40 managers. I actually got through it just fine, no stuttering, didn't speed talk, and managed to field the questions. It actually got approved, so I'm now calling meetings with people to get it done, cause I'm outa here in 3 weeks.

I actually enjoyed my time here, atleast the last couple weeks. I always had pictured in my mind that I would hate the cubical engineer job. I thought it would be boring and dull since all you're dealing with is paper data, and nothing physical. But as I got more involved, it became interesting, and I got to see more and more of the aspects of a job like this. I'm now not so sure what I want to end up doing after graduation. My old idea was to get a PhD and do reasearch for the government. I want to do something important. Yeah I know, it's a bit pretentious. But now I think working a normal engineering job in a company is not so bad. The pay's good, and you get to go home and not worry about stuff. I don't think I want to end up working for Boeing Commercial forever, but IDS (Boeing Military) has some very cool projects. I may end up getting a Masters degree and going to work instead of going to PhD. The problem with masters then work and stright to PhD is that I would end up doing completely different things on each path. In the masters to work path, I would probably get a masters in design methods and system integration. And in the PhD path, I would like to work on space propulsion (ion engines, MPDs etc). So one is analysis and the other is experimentation, two things that don't mix well.

2005-07-14T13:48:00.000-07:00

Unreal Tournament on an airplane.

I've been looking at Connexion by Boeing, a part of Boeing that's letting people on airplanes access the internet. I saw a presentation for it and a curious thought came to me. Imagine if you will, a college student is sitting on a plane with his laptop out. He connects to the internet, and after doing some mundane stuff, decides to bust out his unreal game (or some other shooter). He starts a game and is having great fun shooting guys. Then he accidentally bumps the mute button in the middle of a firefight, and the sound of simulated gun fire bleeds through the airplane. Sleeping people wake up and those already awake freak out. An undercover air marshal pulls his taser and runs to the source of the sound thinking it's an actual gun. The kid may get out of this safely, but damn he's going to have alot of pissed people looking at him.

2005-07-13T08:42:00.000-07:00

Airplane crosswind landing

http://www.flightlevel350.com/viewer.php?id=1568&rating=yes

The video is of a 747 landing in a crosswind. A crosswind is a wind that blows perpendicular to the flight direction. So if the plane were to flight straight, it would miss the runway. The rudder in the airplane is designed to accomodate for crosswind landing to keep the plane moving in a straight line.

All this I learned in class, but it's pretty cool to actually see it in action. Although seeing the plane land at a 20 degree angle is kind of freaky.

2005-07-07T14:38:00.000-07:00

The future of warfare is...

...Westfall's Command and Conquer. Or something damn close to it. I saw a video today from Boeing IDS (Integrated Defense Systems, the military branch of Boeing). The video was on the Future Combat System, a network centric system for cooridnation. Basicly FCS is linking the soldiers, tanks, airplanes, unmaned machines and whatnot on the field to commanders and generals in a room with bunch of computer monitors. I guess it's to make the military more efficient. This video had a armored division moving through a snow covered mountainous area while it was snowing. There were 3 guys in a command center of some sort, it looked like a military version of a news van. They looked at touch screens showing all the troops, tanks, UAV's as blips. They move their fingers across the screen and arrows pop up dictating where the troops should go. They zoom in and go to video feed from flying observers. The first tank starts crossing a bridge and half way through some guy pops up and fires two rockets at the tank. The tank fires counter measures and takes out the rockets then quickly moves across. The rest of the troops say they can't see the shooters, so the commander looks at his screen and orders them to drop a small robot vehicle. The robot moves across the bridge and get shot and destroyed. The survellence drone sees the shooter and spots for a tank which promptly blows the crap out of the place.

As I was watching this, I swear I could have been watching the opening cinematic for a strategy game. The whole thing was too close for comfort. I hate to think of people as numbers and pixels, but looks like that's the way of future warfare.

2005-06-27T09:58:00.000-07:00

Man goes boom, VW gets pissed.

http://www.snopes.com/photos/advertisements/vwpolo.asp

Now this was one funny commercial. It shows a supposidly middle easter looking man enter a VW Polo and drive infront of a restaraunt. He presses a detonator to what looks like bombs strapped to his chest. He blows up, but the car contains the blast. And the tag line is "Polo, small but tough." Now if you remove the commercial from the context of current events, it's damn funny. But in light of the world as it is, alot of people are upset. VW denys that this is their commercial, and is going to sue somebody for it. I'd hate to see the uproar if this was anything but an internet video clip. Imagine the absurd amount of phone calles VW would get if this made its way to television.

2005-06-27T09:29:00.000-07:00

The amazing anime skirt.

Ok, first of all I watch anime, I admit it. But I wouldn't say I'm a fan. I watch it like others would watch the Sopranos, or the WB. I have no plans to dress up for conventions. I have seen quite a bit of anime though, with thanks to the incredible speed of college internet. One thing that never fails to amaze me is what I dub the "anime skirt." If you've seen any anime, you'd know what I meant. There seems to exist some rule that Japanese anime females have to wear revealing clothes, and in any modern setting, it has to be a miniskirt or some sort of pleated skirt. Now that's not the amazing thing, the amazing thing is that the skirt moves to make you wonder where the hell the legs end and hips begin. And this miracle is carried to the real world. Last weekend in Vancouver I saw one 1 out of 8 girls wearing some pleated skirt that by all the physics of the universe should not have been enough material to cover what it did. Now being a college guy, I wasn't about to complain at the time. But now that I'm home and had a decent nights sleep, I'm amazed.

It seems the fashion world has gotten a good understanding of the male mind, atleast when it comes to women. In designing these skirts, they entice the imagination with what is barely not shown.

2005-06-26T20:48:00.000-07:00

So I've known of blogs for a while, and never really took to it, mainly cause I don't have much to say and it would just be my rantings. But I'm going to be really bored this summer, so I figured why not. I'm interning for Boeing Commercial Airplanes this summer, and many the aerospace industry is alot more boring than I thought. You know how in the movies or on TV the engineer does all sorts of things, well let me tell ya, real engineering involves a cubical, a computer and lots powerpoint. I like the money, but it not exactly what I was looking for in my job, we'll see.

This weekend I went with about 40 other Boeing interns to Vancouver BC for the weekend. I rode and roomed with with my two roommates and another guy we met at work. There was some sightseeing involved, but we didn't get much in, seeing as how we all got up at like 1pm on saturday. I blame the alcohol. Friday night the four of us and a huge group of interns went looking for a bar/club, basicly somewhere to get drinks. We wandered for almost an hour before the group went into a bar. It was called Speakeasy and was a restaraunt/bar. Five minutes in the rest of the interns started leaving for no good reason, but the four of us decided that was enough walking and sat down at the bar. Now this was actually my first time in a bar. I was never a bar hopping person, but this was a nice place. The bartender, a 20 something girl named Tenille, named after the show The Captain & Tenille, was very good in humoring us. The rest of the intern came back later, no idea what that was about. I tried a French Martini, which involved pineapples and a Long Island Ice Tea. Both were suprising good. I'm not a big drinker, this would be my second time. Saturday night we went out to an Irish Pub, which had the bouncers in kilts. Not that's something you don't see normally. Bunch of buff six foot guys in tight shirts, a kilt and knee high socks. Our first thought was "whoa, what the hell. The Irish don't wear kilts." We only had a glass of Guiness, but I can say I'm not having that anymore. I just don't like the taste of beer. We left that place and spent the next two hours walking down the street. The street was the place for clubs and bar, and thus in extension, scantly clad women. Now I didn't really expect the scenery to be what the movies showed it as, but damn it was spot on. I'm was quite impressed. Afterwards we went back to the hotel and drove back Sunday. All in all, a good time and an eye opener.