Happiness

Yay. My term paper is handed in. I did not do my presentation today (class was split up in half; the rest of us are going next week), but I'm fine with that. All that's left for this term is the presentation, and a final exam.

Some of the presentations were excellent: one was a PhD candidate who did his presentation on ground penetrating radar (GPR) for bridge deck condition condition surveys--he has some experience working for a company that does that. He had a great set of pictures of their calibration procedure: on a truck-mounted GPR unit, they put a plate of metal on the ground under the sensor, then two guys get on the bumper and "bounce" the truck up and down to set up a sinusoidal movement in the unit. Pretty funny.

Some of the presentations, however, were downright painful. E.g., the painfully-quiet-almost-inaudible Asian woman, where you're straining to hear anything. In another presentation, there was a slide showing a graph that I could interpret with a three-second glance--Yes, adding silica fume increases abrasion resistance. But instead, the slowly presenter plodded through, line by line: And... ahh.. we see with sample A, with the, ahh... addition of silica foom, that...

The grand prize, however, goes to the presentation that had an introductory bullet point: Bridge - A structure spanning and providing a passage over a gap or barrier. Um. Dude. We're Civil Engineering graduate students at one of the top technical universities in this country. I think we might have figured that one out already. As one of my labmates noted, "Hey, thanks for that one. Now I can move on to the question that's really been bugging me--does water go uphill or downhill?"

Besides being done with my paper, other things that are making me happy right now:

• My former boss and mentor (Fearless Leader) is in town for a conference and to meet with my advisor. We'll all probably get to go out to a nice dinner, hang out, and catch up.
  
• My laptop power brick showed up yesterday, so BatBook II is back up and running again.
  
• Took out the trash yesterday; I think it might be a new record (78 days). If I keep it up at this rate, I'll use 5 trashbags a year.
  
• Made one of my favorite sandwiches--a "day after"--turkey with Thanksgiving trimmings (stuffing, and canned cranberry with the ring marks still obvious), with excellent sourdough bread from the local bakery.
  
• Bought a new toy! A hard drive enclosure, for my old (30 GB) laptop hard drive. It came with no instructions, but it seemed pretty obvious how it went together--assembled it, and it worked right out of the box. Wow. I love it when that happens. (in case you're wondering, I went for the FireWire option because my laptop is ancient enough it only has USB 1.0).

Not too bad, right now. Just need to finish up the term. Oh yeah, and do laundry, ASAP. I think I'm on my last pair of underwear, and that's after buying new ones on Friday to put off the laundry event. Otherwise, it's inside-out or backwards time...