Slashdot | Exoskeletons in IEEE Spectrum

Slashdot | Exoskeletons in IEEE Spectrum

I want my own powered exoskeleton! I guess I'll have to start saving up...

So, what has been going on the past week, since my last post? Work, that's what's been going on.
On last friday we had our first thermo exam (absolute joke; he gave us 2 hrs and I finished it in 45 minutes. Then I rode around in a Mustang convertible through Schenley, but that's besides the point) so my prof was 'nice' and delayed the HW a week, essentially, but then he still had HW for that next week, so we had a "double" assignment due 1 week after the test. No biggie, right? WRONG! The first problem on the assignment was literally 8/3 of the test. IE the test was three problems, each of those problems being as involved as 1/8 of the first HW problem, and then there were 7 more! Granted, none of the others was as tedious as the first, but still. I wonder if my prof even looks at the problems before assigning them, or if he thinks we can linearally interpolate in our heads or if he just told one of the (relatively incompetent-seeming) TA's to assign us 7 ch3 problems and a ch 4 problem. So that managed to consume over 8 hours of my life, plugging through thermo. Luckily I started on like, tues, so I wasn't finishing the problem set at like 8am the day it was due. What was sucky for a lot of my friends was that there was a PhysII problem set due the same day, and a lot of people put the thermo off to the evening before it was due.
Other stuff has gone on...I'm just temporarily blanking...I did have two exams this past week: Calc (I think it went extremely well) and Programming (I also feel good about it).
I've done some serious upgrading of the 'ole lappy, I've bumped his RAM up to a full 2GB and I bought a new HDD. I also bought an external USB/Firewire enclosure so I have my old HDD in that so I can still pull my old stuff out of it, and now I have the uber-spiffy one in the lappy, partitioned into a 20GB system partition and a 80ish GB data partition. This is very exciting, I can re-install bunches of stuff. I also had something of a treasure hunt going through program settings on the old drive, getting them transferred over to the new one. I think I've got everything mostly working; I've yet to wrestle with the BT drivers...they're still the Windows default ones that only really let me network actual computers and use my BT mouse. No wireless PDA syncing for me...yet. I still seem to be having some firewire issues with the lappy...the cardbus IEEE1394 (firewire/iLink), I'll have to try the MS hotfix again and see if it works now...it still doesnt work, but unlike before, windows seems to actually recognize the drive now; if I knew where my 6-4 pin firewire cable was, I could test to see if it was just an issue with my PCMCIA card, as I have a 4-pin IEEE1394 port on my laptop. If I get my 4-pin port working, it'll be wicked sexy because I can daisy-chain my two external drives through firewire and get rediculous (at least compared to the 12Mbit/sec I get through the lappy's USB 1.1 ports) transfer rates.
So, yea, other stuff has happened...whatever...mebbe I'll post about it later, prolly not though.

I would like to mention an excellent comment Gerrit made at the board meeting today "I'd like to point out that the Dungeon master [me] is wearing a +1 shirt" cuz I was, and I hadn't really even put together the fact that'd I'd be acting as Dungeon Master for SnS (talking at the Board meeting) when I put that shirt on today. I chose it more for its 'not dirty' status than for the text on it.

Oh, the 'rents called today and it looks like I've set my winter-break travel arrangements; flying home early afternoon of the 20th and flying back evening of the 14th, in case anyone cares.

And now to fight with my IEEE1394 drivers before people get back to me with stuff to finish up my Matsci lab report