Hey guys,

Been doing the grad-school thing.  That means all work and pretending I never play (I make time for sanity keeping).  Lots of homework and my classes have been rough, but I think I'll pull through.

I'm taking only 9 hours (3 classes).  One is Linear Algebra, which I took to be an easy class for my first semester.  So far, it's been eating into my time, but the only "hard" thing about it is an anal-retentive professor who wants more information than I give him.  I said to myself "I'm an engineer, and if it's completely obvious exactly what I did then I'm not going to worry about it".  I'll lose a few points, but not stress over minor details that are irrelevant to my major.

My second class is Acoustics.  Everyone thinks I'm learning guitar when they hear that, and I'm left wondering what guitar has to do with rocket science.  Acoustics is a class that focuses on the mathematical description of sound.  We talk a little bit about music and stuff, but we stick to the math.  We did have a pretty cool YouTube video of a Reubens tube that I'll share:

<iframe title="YouTube video player" width="480" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/HpovwbPGEoo" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

My last class is "Design of Electro-Mechanical Systems".  We had our first mid-term exam recently, and I told the professor when it was over "If you're going to give tests like that, you should do it before the drop date".  The class had been doing basic run-of-the-mill examples that used a single fundamental principle to work, so I thought I might be ready for the test.  I got to the test, and there were six devices that we'd never seen or discussed before on there where the question was "Figure out how this works, describe it mathematically, and then calculate the value of something using it".  The last two questions were real beasts -- one involved the use of Faraday's law (which I was a little fuzzy on regarding alternating current, since we didn't really talk about it in class much), and the other was a magnetic braking system that I was only really familiar with because I was looking at applying that technology to a drop tower (in other words, ouch, because I ).  I think I did terrible, even compared to the other students in the class, but in consolation nobody finished the test at all before time was called and I did answer a handful of questions.  I need to go back and study super-hard.

Overall, the experience has been pretty good, but I spend all my time vacillating between "OMG SO HARD I'M GOING TO DIE" and "What was so bad about this grad school thing again?"

For gaming, I've only been playing a few quick cheap games I find on sale on Steam.  I was accepted into the closed Darkspore Beta, but can't tell you much more than that.  I picked up Greed Corp., and it's been kinda fun.  I only paid something like $2.50 or $5, so I feel like I got my money out of it (I still load it up once every few weeks).  Played the Dragon Age 2 demo, and I liked it, but I'll have to put off buying it until I have the money for it.  I was surprised my computer could run the game at all, because it's getting a wee bit old.  My money mostly goes entirely toward grad-school related expenses, which is mostly rent and food.

Heard about a few internship opportunities which I need to follow up on "soon".  I had the flu recently and have been playing "Don't fail" in my classes.