Fifteenth Post

I noticed that alot of other students post like 3 sentences in their blog entries.  I thought they were generally supposed to be longer, but i can't really argue with the majority, or atleast I don't really want to.

blog=done

Last Final

Just finished my last final as an undergrad.

I have to finish writing a paper, and then I am done with my bachelors in Aerospace Engineering.  It was difficult and took a long time, but I think it was very worth it.

I don't particularly want to sit through a long graduation, but I think my parents would kill me if I decided not to go.

Home Stretch

I'm coming down to the home stretch here.  I'm almost done being an undergraduate student.

I have the portfolio for this class (and I'm probably going to have to present it), a ~10 page paper due next week for my STS 470 class, and one final on monday.  That is essentially all I have left to do to complete my degree.  That really doesn't total up to a lot of work.

The portfolio I have done, I just need to upload it.  The paper I've got about a page done so far and the topic is phenomenally boring (the assignment is 100% bullshit, god I hate gen eds).  The final is in my only really challenging class this semester aersp 430: space propulsion (which is an awesome class by the way).  

The teacher for my propulsion class has broken the class into three distinct sections and allows you to have multiple chances on a test grade on all but the last section of material.  The first test is only on the first sections material, the second test has half first section/half second section, and the final is equal parts all three.   Each section is graded separately on each test and he takes the highest score for each section (from any of the three tests) when calculating the final grade.  If you already banked a satisfactory grade on the prior material you can skip them and only do the new material.  

Which is what I am doing on this final.  I already have A's banked for the first two sections so therefore I only need to study the last sections material.  Also, when it comes to taking the actual test the third sections material will most likely be covered in only 2-3 questions for proper time fairness to those trying to complete all three sections material.  That means I will have the full 2 hours to complete 2-3 questions instead of the normal 10-11 ish.  I really like this method of scoring, it really allows you to demonstrate your grasp of the material fairly instead of just catching you with tiny technicalities.  

Portfolio Deal

I'm trying to figure out this whole portfolio deal, or whatever it's called.  I'm not exactly sure how to appropriately demonstrate what i've learned in this class.  I've had a few decent ideas, but nothing that seems both decent and is also not rediculously hard to do (I am pretty lazy and the end of the semester is sort of piling on).  

I was thinking of maybe use the flamethrower I built to set some stuff on fire in class, or maybe make something explode.  Although these are somewhat unsafe in a classroom setting.  

I contemplated making a flash animation, last semester I got reasonably good at flash.  That would be a a good way to show off multiple things I learned.  I don't really have a ton of time, and flash animation quality is directly proportional to the amount of time put into it.  Even a basic animation takes a fair amount of time.  

I think I might just make a webpage, or a video collage, or something that utilizes someone elses work rather than doing it all myself.  

Jobs

I verbally accepted a job with AAI corporation (they make UAVs among other things, and are a subsidiary of Textron) a few weeks ago.  Last week I signed all the contract paperwork, I stalled as much as I could for as long as I could, but eventually I had to sign the papers.  

This job pays great money, has great benefits, is in a pretty sweet area, and I found cheap apartments nearby with little trouble.  My specific role at this employer was explained in some detail, but as with any job you've never done before it's kind of hard to get a feel for how working that job everyday will be.  

On monday night at like (4:58pm) I got a call from a company I was applying to four months ago(GeoEye)  requesting I come down and interview with them.  This is the company that does the majority of the picture taking for google earth and pretty much any other service that provides satellite images that is not the military (although the military does contract them frequently).  This is also the same company that took those massive photos of the obama inauguration where you could make out a lot of detail (the pictures were taken by a satellite about 400 miles up and a few hundred miles south).   

I would normally just brush off the offer and ignore them, but this company was one of my top choices to work for.  The job description is one of the coolest I can even imagine (I plan and control the movements of their three imaging satellites to maximize the pictures in critical zones around the globe).  Plus from what I hear in general it is a very awesome company to work for.  

Its not that the job I have already accepted is bad, its just the job with GeoEye seems cooler.  The downsides of trying to drop the other job and snag this new one would be: lower salary, contract problems ditching the first job, the new job is in a much more expensive area to live (Dulles, VA), might have to work odd hours at GeoEye (they operate 24/7), and I might burn bridges with Textron.  

I don't think I'm going to take the job with GeoEye, but if they contacted me earlier I think I would be considering it a lot more seriously.  Seriously who waits 4 months before even so much as emailing back about an application, every decently intelligent person I know who would be qualified for this job has already taken a position elsewhere by this point.  

Twitter

I don't get it, I just don't understand.

I thought blogging in general was an incredibly over hyped and pointless phenomenon supported primarily by angsty teen agers.  It just doesn't really make sense to me why other people would want to read the majority of text that gets posted to blogs.  If you want to present information, or maybe tell a funny anecdote that's fine, but that's not what most personal blogs consist of.  Most non-technical or general purpose blogs I have seen have basically been pointless stream of consciousness regurgitations about how someones friend didn't say hello to them while walking by.

Twitter takes the pointlessness of a full blown blog and removes any of the actual useful information from it.  You take the lack of any useful application that you find in a blog and further restrict it to 140 characters.  Here's a sample "tweet" that is 140 characters in length: "I just saw a car drive by that was the coolest shade of pink ever, like omg it was so amazing I totally want one, I wonder what kind it was"  How is this website popular?!   Who is interested in reading something that pointless?!

The website opened in 2006 and already has 6 million users, it is already ahead of myspace and only trailing facebook for number of members.  Part of the success can be attributed to the race between Ashton Kutcher and CNN to see who can get to one million subscribers (http://www.examiner.com/x-7995-New-Media-Examiner~y2009m4d19-Much-aTwitter-about-nothing).  

It may seem somewhat hypocritical to be making fun of a form of blogging in a blog, but I'm just doing this for the assignment, chances are no one will ever actually read these.  I know I wouldn't read them.  

robot vacuum cleaners

I really like the idea of getting a robot vacuum cleaner to clean my apartment for me.  I mean it sounds pretty sweet just having this thing clean my floors while i'm not there, and I don't even have to lift a finger, sounds like my kind of appliance.  

So I was looking around online because I know very little about these robot vacuum cleaners.  I had only heard of the roomba before.  I don't know anyone that has one, so i can't go look at it or ask them how well it works.  So I asked the internet.

I found plenty of information on them, but mostly what I found pointed to the ones that were good were pretty expensive (~$500 ish).  There were several types as cheap as ~$100 ish but I'm not too sure they are entirely useful.  

I also found this: http://housewares.about.com/od/roboticvacuums/qt/robotskins.htm

which I find fairly entertaining.  

Movies on Youtube

YouTube has secured a contract with MGM to display some of their movies in their full uncut format, and is working on a deal with Sony to do the same.  I wonder how this will effect the DVD sales overall.  Once this diffuses throughout the market will people still want to buy DVDs?

I think google/YouTube really missed the technological wave here (for once).  Hulu.com (owned by NBC) has been putting up full length movies for a while.  YouTube is just now getting into the game with Sony and MGM 7-8 months after hulu beat them to it.  YouTube still has a far greater market share, but a lead is a lead, and on the internet that big of a lead can make a huge difference.  

Another surprising fact I found was YouTube cost approximately 750 million dollars to maintain and improve last year, but only made 240 million.  A loss of more than 500 million dollars for arguably the most popular site on the web?  I was under the impression that google had turned YouTube into a profitable business.  I suppose I was mistaken.  

Crazy Robots

Check out this guy's work:

http://gizmodo.com/tag/shigeo-hirose/

I'd seen clips of some of these neat robots before, however I had no idea that one man was behind all of this.  Apparently all the robots featured in this montage were all projects run directly by Shigeo Hirose.  Some of theses videos are almost 30 years old, and yet all of them seem very modern, even futuristic.  

The physical technology used in any of these videos does not appear to be ground breaking in any sense, its just servos/motors/actuators/etc but yet each of these robots is striking in its own right.  I think what is made obvious in all of these videos is a facet of technology that is readily dismissed to obtain better results, namely the art that goes into a piece of inspired technology.  

Many of the robots move fluidly, even organically in some cases, which for those familiar with coding actuators/servos/motions in general takes a great deal of care and precision.   Now the videos by no means show a full test of any of these systems, the vids could very well be just one case where the robot happened to perform beautifully.  Its much more difficult to program a motion control system to respond gracefully to various situations than one preplanned case, however I doubt that the majority are programmed in such a manner.  I tried to do more research as to who was doing the control systems and coding for these projects, but the majority of the information is in japanese.  If it was primarily done by one man, he must be one hell of a programmer.  

The exploration rover w/ detachable wheel robot and the roller skating robot both blew my mind, they are easily some of the coolest displays of robotics I've seen in quite some time, and they aren't even brand new.  Look at these other videos to understand how marvelous that rollerskating robot is.

http://www-robot.mes.titech.ac.jp/robot/walking/rollerwalker/Rollerwalker_w_2.mpg

http://www-robot.mes.titech.ac.jp/robot/walking/rollerwalker/Rollerwalker_w_1.mpg

Also check out this lumbering monstrosity built out of the same lab.

http://www-robot.mes.titech.ac.jp/robot/walking/titan11/titan11_e.html

PimpThisBum.com

This CNN article caught my attention

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/03/26/pimp.this.bum/index.html?iref=mpstoryview#cnnSTCVideo

I find some of the stuff in the video very interesting, specifically the homeless man's testimony.  If I were an enterprising marketing person I would probably have lead the man being interviewed to be more positive about the website and what it was doing for him.  In his reasoning for allowing the website to utilize him as a marketing tool he basically said "My friends out here die all the time, so its better than dying."  I don't think this sends a positive message about the website at all, it could be that CNN specifically chose that clip from a larger amount of interview footage to highlight some specific, but I have no idea what that would be.  I'd think the marketing people would want to highlight the morally right aspects of helping out someone less fortunate rather than "it's better than death".  

The website has steered away from their original goal of making money, and have moved to a non-profit stance (most likely to avoid the exploitation backlash).  This website however has gained an incredible amount of visibility and as marketing professionals this will give the founders a calling card they can use to build a new business.  

www.pimpthisbum.com seems to link to a page on the two founders advertizing website  http://www.ascendgence.com which makes sense to drive curious visitors towards their money making business without seeming to directly link the two too heavily.  

Onlive

Heard about this yesterday, it was announced.... yesterday at the Game Developer's Conference, god I love the internet.  There's a new service/platform in the works called Onlive, and I think it is going to drastically change video games as a whole.  

Basically in this service you hook up a box to your computer or your TV as well as a high speed internet connection.  This box facilitates communication to web connected servers that run video games for you.  Instead of doing processing for graphics or physics or any of the real leg work a computer normally does during game play this processing load is outsourced to computer clusters specifically designed to handle said tasks and send the appropriate responses as fast as possible.  

This is the same concept used during the initial stages of computer development (big iron type monsters) where immensely powerful servers/clusters ran all the processing and data handling for numerous virtual PCs (aka terminals).  These terminals had no hardware of their own aside from the basic interface devices needed (monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc) and only existed separately within the main frames virtually with usually no physical boundaries.  This setup stopped being feasible as the technology became smaller and smaller companies wanted to spread computing power out geographically instead of having only people working a building with a main frame have a computer.  

Now that data transfer rates over the internet have increased dramatically with the widespread inception of high speed internet connections (DSL, cable, FIOS, etc) this terminal type of organization can again be beneficial.  It has always been far more cost effective to have one centralized cluster divided up into virtual terminals for any significant amount of computer processing (a video game for example) just because of the way computer technologies scale.  This type of organization was dropped because of its inability to spread geographically, now that problem has been solved by the wide spread availability of high speed internet.  

The Onlive service offers some interesting features and capabilities that I think will cause alot of changes in the gaming industry.  First it gives you the ability to play games from any platform (xbox 360, PC, PS3, wii, etc) on a TV or pretty much any computer with just a simple box which is pretty crazy.  You no longer need to invest in several gaming platforms costing hundreds of dollars apiece just to play all the games you want.  Second, it allows for spectating of games like never before.  You can go see game play from games without even purchasing them, you no longer have to trust videos posted online that may or may not be fake, you can see how the game works with your own eyes before you even spend a penny.  You can watch others play (if they have turned spectating on) to get pointers on how to beat things, or how to be better.  You can go watch your friends play, even help them if they are having difficulty with something, or want to show you something.  I think this may result in some games based more on collaboration instead of individualism, it brings new exciting elements to coop type games.  

There's plenty of other cool stuff the system can do, but what really sold me is the work the creators put in before they even announced the system (they kept it fairly heavily under wraps until yesterday).  The creators have gotten 7-8 MAJOR game publishers (Atari, EA, Codemasters, and Ubisoft to name a few) to put their best selling games on this system.  I am but a humble observer, but these creators have convinced major publishers that their new and untested system has enough potential that huge companies can put their name on it without fear of reputation loss.  That speaks worlds of the system if entrenched studios like EA would support it.  

Here are the two interviews given at the GDC announcing the system.  

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/47080.html

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/47082.html

just by the way Percepturally, not really a word...

Rocket Racing League

So a friend mentioned something when he was talking to me about his recent trip to look at a grad school for astronautics.  He said that they had the wing from a Rocket Racing League plane there and were using it to test wing loading.  This kind of surprised me because I had never even heard of a Rocket Racing League.  So when I got home I looked it up online, and here's some of the stuff I found.  

The promo video on the official RRL website seems overly optimistic, but awesome none the less.

http://www.rocketracingleague.com/

I would LOVE to watch a sport like that, however my practical side keeps nagging at me that this sport is highly unlikely to be successful.  

Further investigation lead me inevitably towards the wikipedia page for the league (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Racing_League ) which gave a few more details such as the types of planes being used.  The planes the league intends to use are a heavily modified descendant of the Rutan VariEze that are being assembled by XCOR with a LOX/Kero rocket built by Armadillo Aerospace.  I love looking into small aerospace companies because I frequently come across really really cool projects like this.  Both Armadillo Aerospace and XCOR have numerous other cool projects either already completed or in the works. 

I broadened my search out and dragged up some YouTube vids that demonstrate proof the XCOR plane and Armadillo rocket can and have flown, which is encouraging.  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEPr3DRUS7Y

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJJT8639Weo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8ouSwCn8so

The third video is using a color additive to the fuel, because that red color in the rocket plume is not normal for buring a LOX/Kero or LOX/Ethanol mixture.  

All in all I would love to see this sport become popular, however conventional aircraft races are still fairly unpopular and that is a much safer/easier sport all around.  Maybe the extra danger and the buzz word rocket will draw additional people to the sport, but it seems like a monumental infrastructure that will be needed to support entertainment of this magnitude.  

To put it in perspective a little, could you even see someone shooting a movie like this with 8 rocket powered planes racing through courses they see on their HUDs?  I think it would cost way way to much to actually do this even for an action movie with an enormous budget, they would inevitably animate it on a computer. Unless this sport builds a huge grass roots following or has major sports sized sponsors (like Nextel NASCAR money) before it even begins I don't see the league having more than a major action movie's budget to start out with.  

Youtube

Youtube is really really frustrating me, they locked some of our early videos (for forging fame) view counts almost immediately after we posted them (within a day or two).  Apparently this is a very common problem as others have voiced similar concerns.  

heres some recent threads on the youtube forums that I scrounged up with a quick google

http://help.youtube.com/group/youtube-issues/browse_thread/thread/300a2c2bf0edb712/4895f9aa640a28c9?lnk=raot

http://help.youtube.com/group/youtube-issues/browse_thread/thread/9657f303539beef4/6335b90e95f88e08?hl=en-US&lnk=raot

http://help.youtube.com/group/youtube-issues/browse_thread/thread/d6a6c6983add2cb0/b4b1edd61b0d63e1?hl=en-US&lnk=raot

Heres a few videos talking about the problem 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t40J7zkAh0g

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDUDlKoNEqU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytv22-_M3fY

We still have not heard back from youtube but several general comments are now pointing to youtubes new defense mechanisms to view count hacking, which makes sense as youtube claimed they were implementing new security a day or two before people started complaining about this problem.  

The best solution to the problem I have seen is highlighted in this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4ifuUmHbKI

In response to this unfairness on youtubes part our group tried to branch out our submissions with posts to metacafe and flickr.  

Bleh

I apparently forgot to make any blog posts promptly after creating the blog.... Crap

Hopefully I can still get credit

Anyway, I spend way way way too much time working on this class.  During the Crash and Burn project my group and I spent massive amounts of time trying to make things and then sell them.  I suppose we could have spent less time if we had better ideas with more popularity.  

However none of those ideas seemed to be coming, we tried to brainstorm several times and nothing really came of it, we came up with a decent number of general ideas that had a decent profit margin but nothing that really sold itself.  There were even several ideas we started to pursue that did not seem to have any potential in them upon further review.  Stuff like beer bongs, yellow bandannas, black and gold beads, and a bunch of arts/crafts type stuff; we looked into prototypes for each but people did not seem interested, or we couldn't find them cheaply/easily, so we scrapped the ideas.  

Basically our sales plan slowly evolved into a "general store" we set up in the Leonhard building, we tried a bunch of locations and it took quite a bit of trial and error to determine what a good location was.  I personally figured in front of the Allen Street Gate would be a great location to sell stuff (primarily hot chocolate) because a HUGE number of people pass by there, but after trying it out we found out that people just buzz by there in a huge hurry for most of the day.  Everyone walking by just seemed to want to get somewhere and we did not have the time to establish ourselves as a reputable business, so we decided to try other locations.  Lydia tried inside Kunkle lounge one day, but that got even less of a response, then Katie suggested setting up a table in Leonhard, which I was initially very skeptical of because I never have any classes that far away from the center of campus.  We tried it out one day and the location worked out great, being that far away from everything in the center of campus actually helped our sales a great deal because people don't have time to get to any normal restaurants downtown in between classes, plus its a huge walk, so lots of people just came and bought stuff from us.  It also helped that Katie knew a ton of people that were walking by.  

We mostly focused on selling hot chocolate because it was fairly simple, not readily available, and had a great profit margin.  The weather changed in the last week of the project and we decided soda would probably sell better than hot chocolate when it was 65-70 degrees out.  We also sold other odds and ends from previous money making ventures (cell phone charms, candy, Steelers ribbons) as well as doughnuts (which we sorta used shady marketing to sell, Giant brand doughnuts in Dunkin Doughnuts boxes).  On one of the last selling days we had, we decided to try selling pizza.  I was not present for any of the selling of the pizza but Katie said she sold out of like 8 pizzas in a few hours, which was fantastic, if we had figured out that pizza would sell that well earlier we could have made way more money.  

While this stuff made us decent amounts of money it was all very very time consuming.  We basically had to man the stand all the time, which turned into straight begging for money.  I didn't even spend the most amount of time at the stand, Katie did.  I had classes elsewhere all the time, and Lydia had meetings or classes most days so Katie got stuck sitting there alot.  

Initial Post

This is the first post for my ENGR 407 class blog.