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