Physics 161 Lab Practical

I haven’t blogged for a week, as my dad reminded me. I blame it on sickness. I’ve been sick for a whole week now. Just thinking about it makes me want to cough.

Yesterday was Wednesday. I had my honors physics lab practical. The lab constitutes 20% of our grade, and 40% of the lab grade is based on this practical. My lab section is 8am. I set my mobile alarm for 7am and the atomic for 7:05am. The “atomic clock” has a pretty good alarm. Anyway, I got up on time, and was ready to go. I think I did reasonably well.

I finished about an hour early. I could have went back and redid the problems and experiments, but I didn’t feel that was necessary since I worked carefully. I did six measurements (“trials”) for the density problem. I hope that’s enough. My uncertaintly calculation was weird though. It was almost 400% of the actual value. I hope they don’t grade it too harshly. The lab grades are going to curved at the end, with a 10% standard devation (or something like that).

Since I finished early, I wasted the time back in my dorm room and then went to tennis. He told us about next week’s midterm (Wednesday), and then we had free play. I’m prety good at tennis, I think, but I’m not getting any better. The once-a-week tennis class is the only way that I exercise significantly, however. I’ll try going to the Lyon Center tomorrow.

I then had my Computer Science lecure, and didn’t fall asleep this time. I think my goal from now on is to never fall asleep in class ever again. I feel terrible whenever I do it. Surely professors don’t like it, I don’t like it, and I don’t learn more by doing it. So there’s no point. I’ve decided to sleep more at night and stay awake all day.

But that didn’t happen today. After my economics lecture, I wasn’t feeling tired. But when I came back to Marks Hall and started reading the news online (Google has released a Page Creator!), I suddenly got very tired. So I jumped on bed and slept for an hour. Luckily, I didn’t sleep any more than that. Still, it was too late to go to Prof. Crowley’s office hours as I had wanted to do, so I decided to dash him an email, and just do something else until my Physics lecture at 2pm.

Prof. Bickers talked about rotational motion, rotational momentum, and second moment of mass… or something like that. I still need to start on the physics quiz. They’re take-home. Our second quiz is due Tuesday. I didn’t do very well on the first one… maybe I’ll go talk with him about it. Still, the most important thing is finishing this second one. I also need to finish my computer science lab for tomorrow. One of our lab assistants (or TAs) has been sick (Runfang), but we have two. I hope she’s better tomorrow… she’s more helpful in the lab. On the other hand, there’s less pressure when she’s not there: they’re likely to be more forgiving.

The engineering date auction with SWE was today, 5pm. I went and bid on J.Lo (wifey!) $15 and $17. He was almost going to be sold for $16 until I (Michael S., actually) put a stop to it. The final price was $18, sold to some other guy (Jason S.?). The price corresponds to his age… and maybe it will correlate, too. The date is for the Viterbi ball tomorrow… which I of course am not going to. Nor do I want to. It was a fun auction though. And I got a free rose and t-shirt (“Everyone loves a Trojan Engineer”).

Earlier today was the Engineering Career Fair. The two Internet companies I spotted there were Shopzilla and Oversee.net. It might be interesting to work for them. I’m good at web stuff, and they’re real companies. But would I really learn more? They need to have a very well-designed internship program for me to benefit from it. I don’t want to join a company and not know what to do there. Unless it’s Google. Speaking of which, I can now talk to people from Google whenever I like. It’s quite nice… and they do an excellent job at what they do!

I need a new and unique name for this blog. Something like “Ted Leung on the air,” but original, of course. Any suggestions?