Go Team!

OU currently has a delegation of students at the IEEE Region V Conference in Denver, CO. I couldn't make it thanks to work I have piling up, unfortunately.

I've just learned that the OU IEEE Chapter won Second Place in the undergraduate student design competition, and First Place in the student paper contest! Props to Shamim Nematifar and Melissa Walker for their paper, "Using Neural Networks to Identify Tornados." With First Place, they won $800! Of course, their trip to and from Colorado was paid for as well. Our design team, Andrew Snyder and Jacob Henderson, placed Second in a mixed analog and digital design and won $200! Great job, folks! I think this is the most cash we've won at a an IEEE conference in a long, long time! I'm proud to have you guys in our section!

By the way, to the recruiters that may be reading this: I can put you in touch with some excellent Electrical and Computer Engineering graduates. Hint. Hint. Not so subtle hint. Email me for information.

The IEEE OU ECE Awards Banquet we have coming up will be a fun one! If you're interested in purchasing tickets, for students the price will be $5.00. Professionals will pay $15.00 if you purchase a ticket in advance, $16.00 if you reserve a ticket via email (just email me) or $17.00 at the door. We need you to please reserve seats so that we can accurately gauge meal and seating requirements. By the way, if you're reading you also know we're a student organization. By definition we're poor, so if you pre-pay I'd really appreciate it. At the very least please reserve tickets via email.

Congrats again to you guys for representing OU so well!

"A Fluorescent Blue Geyser..."

Salon.com has an excellent series of articles called Ask the Pilot by a (now out of work) airline pilot . He answers questions, pontificates, and is generally amusing, especially if you like flying or are fascinated by airplanes (like me). This article though, takes the cake. Have a look if you dare.

By popular demand: The full, unexpurgated story of what happens when dry ice is mixed with blue toilet acid at 33,000 feet. - The first vehicle in history to crash because of a flooded toilet? - Patrick Smith, "Ask The Pilot"

You should click here to get a free site pass and skip any ads first.

Found an apartment!

This is the exact floorplan I've rented, except for the vaulted ceilings that mine has.

I spent the past twenty-four hours in Austin, starting with a total of about twelve complexes, trying to figure out where I'll be living as of June. Brian O'Halloran, my relocation consultant, did a great job of working with a huge list of stuff I wanted to find me the perfect apartment! I'd highly recommend him; he showed me places I never would have found on my own. By the way, that isn't my actual apartment; its a model.

Riverlodge is great, from what I saw! The floorplan's very open, especially with the high ceilings. I didn't manage to take any good pictures showing this (battery ran down on the digicam), but from certain points of view, you can see straight from one corner of the apartment to the other which makes it seem very, very large. I like it a lot! I get my own garage in the building, vaulted ceilings, and we think an awesome view, possibly of Lake Travis. The building's up near the top of the hill country, and I have a 3rd floor apartment that looks out over the countryside.

Oh, and I have a gas log see-through fireplace, complete with on-off switch. :-) Its one of those neat random touches that I like, so I can click it on, and enjoy the heat from the living room OR the study. They also have free WiFi scattered around the main office / club house, the pool areas, and I forget where else, so I can just open up my laptop and hop on the web. They've even run data ports throughout the apartment, so its prewired for a private computer network. I guess that's what they get for being built just after the .Com bust.

Cool!