weak end

so i finally got some sightseeing done this weekend. i went to the british museum on friday, saw some of the stuff there. lots of neat stuff from desecrated tombs in egypt, the rosetta stone, and a lot of stuff from the parthenon.

i slept in the next day, but somehow managed to get a full day's worth of london in spite of my laziness. my flatmates and i wandered around the tower of london for the better part of the afternoon, and later in the evening we took a flight on the london eye. the london eye was pretty sweet. i'm now messing around with slave hack, waiting for laundry, and doing just about everything to avoid doing lab reports.

the past week

so i've been a little busy this week. on thursday night, i flew out of cleveland direct to london. i sat next to two nice english businessmen. they were engineers, in the field of metallurgy. they were also pleased that a young person like me would be interested in engineering, and implored me not to go in to something boring like banking. the airplane food was terrible. not that it tasted particularly terrible, it was pretty bland and inoffensive. it's just my gastrointestinal tract spent the next day and a half recovering.

after disembarking, i got through immigration and customs without a hitch, got majorly ripped off at the currency exchange, and found my way through the trains to my apartment flat. i did nothing too interesting for the next couple of days, just recovered from the time difference, and finished my book.

i didn't get internet access until monday, when classes started. classes generally fall between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., which is nice. unfortunately, i'll need to spend some of extra time doing lab write-ups, but i'll manage. yesterday we had a lecture on the history of london, combined with a bus tour of the area, both narrated by a professor of history at the university. in addition to the topic at hand, he went on at length about the differences between the american and british dialects, as well as slipping in snide comments about princess di and her worshippers. note to self: shadenfreude compels me to go see the princess di shrine at harrad's.

bad jokes

world cup games watched: 2.5 . i'm on my way to becoming a bona fide soccer football fan. didn't do much else today. went to go see "a prairie home companion"; my brother and i were the youngest in attendance. listened to "a prairie home companion" on the way to dinner. after dinner, we drove out to river styx, ohio and back, listening to the first four chapters of garrison keillor's book, homegrown democrat. i am now putting that very audio book onto a computer so that i might listen to the rest of it at a later date on my ipod. and that's the news from lake wobegon.

the one for you and me

i've done a good many things since i last wrote. i got into the daily grind of being up at 7:00 in the morning, and it made me feel under the weather. i celebrated tuesday by listening to iron maiden. i bought my lollapalooza ticket, and "bitter films, vol 1". i leave for england in less than a week.

i spent most of this week and last in the lab with k. disassembling and reassembling the apparatus in hopes of finding out what component was causing the apparatus to malfunction. yesterday she cleaned out the entire system and today we changed the oil. turns out that may have been our problem. the oil we were using was old and contaminated. science is fun.

i still need to figure out how i'm getting home from ohio after i get back from england. i still need to start paying attention to the world cup so i can feign not being an ignorant american. here's a list that has nothing to do with any of the above.

• national disgrace
• mtv makes me wanna smoke crack
• kill the music industry
• california songs
• laughing with lucifer at satan's sideshow
• last time i tried to rock your world
• we are not going to make it
• hooker with a penis
• pop1
• css descramble
• dinosaurs will die
• radio friendly unit shifter

stormy petrel

today my brother and my grandfather went down to columbus with the electro-spinning apparatus. didn't see them in the morning; 5:00 is far too early unless one has yet to fall asleep. i went to the university and did my thing. i helped the graduate student i am working with (we'll call her k.) make improvements to the apparatus we're working on. we got it running with a minmum of leakage, but we could not make it behave in a steady state fashion in any reasonable amount of time. science is fun!

i feel compelled to recount a conversation i had with my brother as we went to lunch a couple days ago. amidst a discussion about how best to mispronounce "chipotle" (it's kai-pawt-l), we also decided upon the best vanity license plates. some of the ones that i recall:

• OMG1111
• LOLOLOL
• 1337H4X
• ROFL111
• N0 CL1P
• W4LLH4X
• 5P3DH4X
• 41M B07

well, you get the general idea. the sad thing is, we don't even play that much counter-strike; furthermore, we don't even have a computer capable of playing counter-strike out here. i suppose we're too nerdy for our own good.

rescue me is the best show on television right now. i'm watching too much televison.

getting settled in

my parents left my brother and i on monday, and we've been set to work at the university of akron in my grandfather's employ. along with some of the his graduate students, all of whom are very nice, we've gotten to know his mildly sociopathic lab handyman. apparently he dropped out of electrical engineering and stuck around to become a jack-of-all-things-technical. my brother has been helping him construct a new apparatus for demonstration that will travel down to columbus tomorrow as part of some convention.

i was introduced to a professor in the chemical engineering department, and am now working with one of his graduate students to reconstruct an apparatus left by a former student. it involves working with an oil similar to diesel fuel, so if something fails, i will end up smelling like a gas station. this project looks to be a lot of fun.

that's pretty much it for news from ohio. the eastern time zone sucks, especially when you need to get up at 7:00 and the daily show doesn't start until 11:00. you can see where my priorities lie.

postcount++

greetings, interweb. i have decided to keep a record of my experiences as i run amok this summer. maybe this journal will continue on. maybe i'll stop after two entries. it's an experiment. we'll see where it goes.

i am staying with my grandparents in akron, ohio for the time being. today i went with my mother and brother to the rock and roll hall of fame in cleveland. i'd been there once before, when fleetwood mac was the big inductee of the year. this year had black sabbath and the sex pistols. the latter sent a positively charming hand-written letter declining acceptance, and that was all they showed of the sex pistols in their video presentation of the inductees.

there were a lot of neat artifacts, a large-ish exhibit on jimi hendrix, a too-large exhibit on bob dylan, and listening stations of rock music that don't go a month past 1992 (because nothing has happened in rock music since then). the food there is overpriced and microwave heated, but somehow it wasn't that bad.

i'm now back at my grandparent's watching the black and white stray cat that has taken to their back yard. they don't mind, in fact, the number of rodents living in the yard has been drastically reduce. grandma has christened her 'gipsy'. gipsy currently lives somwhere behind the greenhouse, but grandpa is trying to get her to make home on the deck. she is unbelievably skittish, although undeniably social. she will walk right up to the back sliding doors and watch us eat dinner, but if we open the door, she back up. if we step outside, she runs away. it's really amusing. more on gipsy later, if nothing interesting happens.