Cooking

So I've been doing some cooking now that I'm on my own with no Center Court to go to. I started simple - Mac 'N' Cheese with hot dogs - then worked my way up through Red Baron pizzas, spaghetti, and am currently at brownies. (You actually have to mix eggs and milk for those! Intense, huh?)

Of course, I had to know when my spaghetti was done:

Freaking awesome, really. Has the military considered making gecko robots that climb walls using spaghetti? What makes spaghetti stick? I seriously think this should be studied. I just spent 10 minutes on google, and found nothing! Although I did find a really cool study about why spaghetti doesn't break in half when you hold the ends and bend it. I want to know if it's van der Waals forces, or bubbles, or what. I'm betting the surface structure of spaghetti would be a lot easier to mimic than that of gecko feet, and if the clinging ability is scalable, it might be a significantly cheaper gecko-tape strategy.

Next on the menu is taco casserole! My mom mailed me a box with the recipe, as well as some ingredients and other goodies. Isn't she great?

Los Angeles & Shopping

It has been WAY too long without an update, and I apologize. That happens sometimes I guess.

The weekend of the 17-18th S drove me and all the San Diego co-ops to LA to visit ATA's two co-ops in the LA branch. They're both girls. (Woohoo!) And they both already have boyfriends. (Aww!) But I had a great time hanging out with them. We spent a gazillion hours at the beach Saturday, and everybody but me and S got burned to a crisp. S is naturally dark and used sunscreen; I used sunscreen and adopted a fun technique for hiding from the sun:

That worked great until some drunk girl who was playing volleyball with us decided it would be fun to step on my stomach, but misjudged and hit a little lower instead. There is nothing like being woken from a warm nap at the beach by someone stepping on your balls! It would have been funny if I hadn't been so furious.

Afterwards, we hung out at the pool in front of the LA apartment, and in the evening went shopping to get N a pair of dress pants for a presentation he was giving Tuesday. The only outcome of that was I got Cinnabon (woo!) and finally found some glasses cleaner! Both the stores within walking distance of my apartment, Ralph's and Von's, sell about two dozen contacts cleaning products, but no products for glasses. Are glasses that out of vogue?

The following weekend, the LA coops came to San Diego and spent the weekend with us, where they went shopping (they are girls after all) in the Pacific Beach area. The gals went to Pink Zone and who knows elsewhere, and the guys and I just walked through all the thrift stores looking for T-shirts. I need some white T-shirts for wearing on Ulimate Frisbee days (white shirts versus colored shirts), but didn't find any I liked. I did find this though:

Now I just need to find a pair of pants AWESOME enough to wear with that.

The Allergy Shot

Some of my better friends know that I have allergies, and get allergy shots regularly every two weeks. I figured it prudent to continue the shots here in CA, just in case. (Secretly, I was hoping my allergy symptoms would disappear in California, but that hasn't happened.) Luckily, there is a medical clinic just a five minute walk from ATA, so I scheduled an appointment during my lunch hour. That way I wouldn't have to do make up time, I figured. Besides, how long could an allergy shot take?

Quite a while, as it turned out! I'd forgotten to consider the tremendous paperwork required the first time you go to a new doctor. I filled out form after form, signing this and that, and spent quite a while chatting with the lady behind the front desk while I was at it.

"Responsible Person... is that me or my dad?"
"Either one really, it doesn't matter there."
"Patient Address. Um... I forget the apartment's address exactly."
"Oh put Ohio for that one, honey! It's used for billing."
"Responsible Person [different form]. Doesn't matter again I guess?"
"No, it matters this time. Better put your dad there."

At that point I was called in to the allergist, and told I could finish the paperwork before I left. The allergist was a really nice guy, and when I told him I was working at ATA, he smiled. "Good! So you do you know George?" he asked.
Thrown off-guard, I replied, "Um, not yet, I guess."
"Ah, well George works there I think. He's a good friend of mine. Here, I'll write his name down so you don't forget. Tell him I said to take good care of ya!"
Hmm, that'll be an interesting conversation starter, I thought. "Hey! You and I have the same allergist, you know that?" It'll be hard to pull that one off without seeming creepy.

Back in the waiting room, I struggled to finish the paperwork for the lady behind the desk:

"Employer Address. Dang, I don't have that one either on me. Can I call them really quick?"
"Oh just skip that, it doesn't matter."
"Wait, so which ones of these matter?"
"Just the first two."
"So how much of this do I really have to fill out?"
"Oh, I think it's good now, you can just hand it to me."

I'm not sure whether she was serious of just wanted me gone, but I didn't mind because the appointment had already taken over an hour. The lady behind the front desk was from Cincinnati, by the way. Lived there for 20 years before moving back to San Diego where she was born.

Mission: Acquire Postcards

Part 1: The Burrito

So Thursday, I was walking on my way to buy lunch, because I was tired of PB&J and wanted to get a burrito from this place N took me my first week. Only I didn't remember where it was. Normally I'd eat with the other coops, but S and C were gone on a test, and B had taken the day off to be with his parents, so the only coops were N and me, and N decided to go to the gym during his lunch break. So I'm stuck having lunch on my own, with only N's vague directions "somewhere across the street right?" to help me find the burrito place. So I took off using muscle memory, and ended up at a mall where I'd had lunch the first week. Having failed to find my delicious burrito, I settled for Subway instead.

Part 2: Hallmark

But fortune favored my misled wandering! For as I started back I passed a Hallmark store: At last! I thought. Maybe THEY have postcards (unlike the grocery store)? I walked in, and immediately saw some beautiful cards with pictures of California - $5 a piece. My heart began to sink. But as I turned around, directly opposite were postcards, with a sign "35 cents each, 3 for $1". As my friends in Cinci say, "JACKP(H)OT!!"

I grabbed nine of them to get a multiple of 3 and went to the checkout counter. With few customers in the store, the manager was happy to see me. She started by asking if I was visiting, at which I explained my coop and how I was from Cincinnati working on my ME, and she got excited and declared her husband was an electrical engineer. The other lady who was working the cash register interrupted to say she'd forgotten about the 3 for $1 discount and started re-entering the purchase, at which point the manager said, "Oh give him all of them for one dollar!" I laughed and thanked her, and wondered at my good fortune. Before I left the manager told me to drop by if I ever need something to do or someone to talk to! Suffice it to say, I will drop by and say hi whenever I go past the Hallmark from now on.

Happy birthday ATA!

Today at work we celebrated ATA's 9th anniversary. I celebrated the chance to eat cake and ice cream! ;-)

That is what ATA looks like from the parking lot. We share part of the building with Siemens, which is slightly ironic because they are the company that now owns what is left of SDRC.

Work at ATA

Boy have I been busy! The nice new camera I ordered from eBay shows "Lens Error" when I turn it on, so y'all be stuck with camera-phone pics for a while. (I'm going to try to fix it rather than return it, because - well - I'm a mechanical engineer.)

I've forgotten to take any photos since the ones I took of my room. I've been so busy just trying to buy enough groceries to have lunch the next day and not run out of toilet paper. But fear not! here's a photo I forgot to post last time:

That's the view outside my window. How sweet is that? I have a swimming pool outside my apartment! It's still a tad too cool for that yet, but I've got six months.

At ATA I've been doing tutorials learning to use I-DEAS, which for my UC friends is kind of like CAD programs like SolidEdge, but once you build a model, you generate a finite element model from it and can do simulations like in ANSYS. Actually, it probably is a lot like ANSYS, but I haven't done anything in ANSYS, so I don't know. Interestingly, I-DEAS is at the end of its life, so everybody is kind of working their way towards migrating to NX. Some of the founders of ATA may have helped write the original I-DEAS though, which is pretty awesome. Brief company history: ATA was the Advanced Testing and Analysis branch of SDRC (Structural Dynamics Research Corporation) which had close ties with the University of Cincinnati. When SDRC was being bought by another company, the testing and analysis group at San Diego was told they'd be shut down, so rather than leave they broke off from SDRC to become their own entity. So believe it or not, many of my co-workers are UC grads or from the UC area! Which, obviously, I think is awesome.

Another awesome thing about ATA is there's a dozen or so employees that take off an hour at noon on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays to play ultimate frisbee. I missed it on Tuesday, but joined in on the fun today! I like it, because I need the exercise - Stadium View had gotten me out of shape for sure. We had even teams, and I was supposed to cover one of the guys, but despite his gry hair he was pretty good, and I could barely keep up with him. I did make a few good catches though.

This weekend, I NEED to find a place that sells postcards; I hear it was raining in Cincinnati today. :-P