Today, I checked out the site, wrote a little bit on Ascendancy, played a little on Ascendancy (when you write about a game it makes you want to play it!), and then watched some few videos on Giant Bomb.  

Checked my email a little bit, did some job hunting stuff.  Got email from the career center at my school; they recommended a few places to look for work, but I don't know how it'll pan out yet.  

I was mildly surprised at the reaction to wanting to work at NASA, so I think I'll go into greater depth.  My two primary interests are in propulsion (where I have some talent) and navigation and control (where I have interest), but my interests are broad and I'm flexible, and I'm not 100% sure exactly what I want to do.  My psychology interests are mainly in human factors and Industrial/Organizational Psychology -- the two branches of psychology most related to engineering.  

Human Factors focuses on making things easy and intuitive to use, the most familiar example being natural mapping.  It's the best thing since sliced bread, and about as exciting.  Most stoves have the dials across the front or the rear, in some arbitrary order.  Stovetops that use natural mapping have the dials arranged in the same pattern as the burners; this eliminates rare but unpleasant experiences like turning on the front burner when you meant to turn off the back burner.  Human factors fits in well with an Aerospace degree because planes are large and complicated vehicles that can be difficult to control, especially in a crisis.

IO Psychology focuses on workplace effectiveness, and the associated mental health of employees, to enhance worker productivity. Things like providing proper lighting for work are in the realm of IO psychology; I recall a story about some false-white lights that were more energy efficient being installed in an office.  When they asked the engineers there how the lighting worked, they opened a drawer and pulled out the resistors; all the bands were black because the false-white lighting didn't provide all the colors in the spectrum.

Trivia aside, my day was pretty dull.  My family went out of town, which was nice.  I feel like Pliny the younger, who often wrote about how he liked public activities that made other people go away, but I really like it when I get time to myself.  Been trying to pick out a good background for my profile page.