Review #2

This morning is my second thesis review.  Which is why you haven't heard anything from me recently.  I've been working hard to get some things done for the review today, and to catch up from not having the CAD models when I wanted to.  I was really kind of stressing out about where I was a few days ago, but have made some good progress.  It also helped yesterday that I went and sat through a couple of other students presentations, and realized that I was probably never as far behind as I thought I was.  The weather has been pretty good recently, between 55 and 65 for the most part, occasional rain, and I'm definitely not missing the heat wave and 100 degrees from back home!

Same Old...Kind of...

Yet again, I'm still just working away.  Makes it harder to write these blogs, as it's kind of hard to share exactly what I'm doing, and a little too detailed as well.  Think I see the light at the end of the tunnel for this part of my project, but we will see!  The weather has been colder the last couple days, and it rained pretty good last night too.  It's sunny today, but still colder (says 55 F).  There is a music and art festival going on in the gardens here in Newport.  I went out for some live music last night, and will go check it out again for a while this afternoon and maybe this evening, depending on how motivated and productive I feel.  Looks like it should at least stay sunny which will make that fun.

Yesterday I decided I was tired of sandwiches for lunch and went to The Bull down the street for a classic ham egg and chips lunch.  It hit the spot and it was nice to sit outside - the rain came at night.  I did buy some minted lamb and a venison burger this week.  I cooked the lamb last night and it was really tasty, I managed to cook it just about right I think, maybe could've gone a little more rare.  I think I'll do the venison burger tonight for dinner, should be fun!  Tomorrow I'm going to finally give into my craving for Indian food, still debating exactly which place I'm going though.  Probably the one that is BYO alcohol, and a 5 course meal for 8.99 I think.  It's that or there are three buffet options for about the same price.  The 5 course is just as much food as I'd eat on the buffet, it's just a matter of choices.

At least there is F1 to watch this weekend, and the ALMS race is live on MotorsTV at 745 tonight, and of course enough day baseball on the weekend to keep me happy too!  It really helps having things in the background when I'm working on my project - a lot of the commands take a while to execute.

Being Productive

Finally I feel like I'm getting somewhere on this project, almost have the initial assembly built so I can start doing some analysis.  Hopefully that should start tomorrow, maybe tonight if I make good progress today.  Other than that I don't have much to add really.  I've been working more from home recently, and just going to campus in the afternoon for a few hours if I have to.  Yesterday I did take the bus to Olney to work from a cafe for a couple hours, and had some tea and cheesecake.  I felt way too British with the afternoon "tea and cake"!

Trying to Make Progress

I think I've finally made a small breakthrough on my project, getting some CAD files to actually work now.  Though a few are still being uncooperative.  Hopefully this means I can really start being productive today and all this week, we will see.

Yesterday morning and early afternoon was really miserable here, pretty constant and relatively hard rain.  So I stayed in and spent too much time trying to make my files work and watching golf - which they were playing in absolutely miserable weather.  The weather did clear up later in the afternoon, so I went into Milton Keynes to return some camping stuff we had bought for last weekend. I also picked up a few things to fix some issues I'd had with my shower.  When we were in Bordeaux, we tried Benedicte and Claude's favorite Normandy Camembert.  They explained that among other things, the difference in the good stuff was that it was unpasteurized.  Sainsbury's did have an unpasteurized Normandy Camembert, so I picked it up to try.  It's definitely nowhere near as flavorful as what we had in France though...

This morning I'm catching up on the last 2 episodes of Top Gear and doing more CAD work.  It's slightly rainy, not sure what the forecast is for the rest of the day.  I'll try to get a workout in after lunch I think.  I suppose I should be interested enough to watch the Women's World Cup Final tonight too.

Whew, Those 2 Weeks Went Fast

I really can't believe how quick Jess' trip over here felt.  At least it was all very fun. Had a good afternoon in London after she finally got through the long line at Customs.  Maybe it was due to the strike the day before, but Jeremy had the same issue in the same terminal (4) when he came over.  We had planned to check out the Greenwich area, but diverted after we'd been on the Tube for about an hour, and realized it would probably be another hour before arriving.  So we stopped off near Covent Garden for some lunch - a pork and black pudding pie, a few drinks, and then walked about 2 miles to Regents Park, which was very nice and relaxing.  A couple beer stops finished off our night before the train back to Milton Keynes.

Saturday we let Jess catch up on sleep as much as possible before repacking a bag to head to Bordeaux.  The trip to Luton was a bit stressful, due to, yes you guessed it - the bus.  It was 40 minutes late showing up in Milton Keynes, and we were right on the edge of taking a 40 GBP taxi instead.  Then we were slightly worried about being late for check-in, but in the end it all worked out, security and bag check went super quick and we were on the plane.  Not as easy as security and baggage at Bordeaux though, we were out of there meeting Benedicte and Claude in no time flat!  I think we'll get another post up about France specifically, maybe with Jess as a guest blogger!

We returned to the island on Tuesday afternoon, on a slight delay, but the bus was on time and we made it back to Newport Pagnell easily enough.  Wednesday we spent recovering from the food and wine coma from Bordeaux and a quick trip to campus in the afternoon for a briefing about the British Grand Prix.  We also walked around and explored my town a little more.

Thursday we picked up the rental car in the morning, and started the journey to Silverstone with a few stops along the way.  We parked in Buckingham and walked around a bit.  Lunch was a little picnic that we had packed, along with some cherries that we'd bought from a stand on the side of the road that were really good.  The trip to Silverstone was for our official briefing, and to pick up the ticket for Jess.  The briefing took too long, as it was scheduled when everyone else was in a different meeting.  So we spent a ton of time just hanging out waiting for the people in charge to come back to finish our instructions.  Finally we got out though.  After Clive scared us enough about the traffic issues on Saturday and Sunday we did decide to camp at the track though, so we had to stop by a store in Milton Keynes on the way back to buy a tent and a sleeping bag for Jess (I'll return them both, and we wound up not needing the tent anyway).  Our first meal out, not counting London (we'd done a good job using the food I had around to save money) was at 8 in Emberton, at the Bell and Bear.  We really enjoyed everything, smoked pigeon and goat cheese pannacotta apps, pan fried haddock and lamb for entrees, and a cherry clafoutis for dessert.

The weekend turned out to be really fun, yes it was long, early and sometimes tiring work driving the golf carts around, but it was really a unique way to be part of a Grand Prix.  It also allowed us access to a part of the track without the general public, which made it much easier to watch the cars when we had time off.  I will say that hearing and seeing the F1 cars run for the first time was absolutely stunning.  I'd almost expected to be disappointed by them, but that was not the case.  You can visually tell they are so much faster than anything I'd ever seen before.  And the noise is just something that you have to hear to explain.  TV doesn't even come close to reproducing the sounds of the weekend.  The atmosphere was really good too, tons of fans everywhere, way too many McLaren fans, and the weather was really only a minor annoyance, even though it was pretty bad on Friday and Saturday.  It was really annoying on Friday, our first session off was for Free Practice 2, which was seriously wet, and no one really ran until I think 45 minutes into the session!

On Monday we had to return the car - so back to the good old bus for Chuck - and headed down to the Chiswick area in London.  We walked along the Thames, down to Kew Gardens and Kew Green.  It was good weather, and a nice relaxing walk.  The permanent looking house boats along the river were quite interesting.  Dinner was a meat platter with fabulous chorizo, chicken, steak, pate, and salami, served with gherkins and some fresh bread.  A final stop for even better dessert put a great ending on the night.  I got a sort of chocolate Lava cake, but served with salt caramel, tonkabean ice cream and an amazing sesame cracker.  Jess had a praline nougat, with brandy soaked chocolate cookies and a chocolate whipped cream kind of thing too.  We definitely kind of lucked into finding the place, which made it even better!

Tuesday morning we skipped the continental breakfast for French toast and eggs florentine at a spot close to the hotel before heading to Heathrow.  The tube was delayed just a little, but we were still there in plenty of time, even with our tearful, never-ending goodbyes.    




  

The Week...

Seems to be going well.  Time at least isn't too slow, and I've found ways to be productive, even though I'm waiting on some CAD models still to progress on my thesis.  So not that much different than Lighthouse in that respect.  I've been filling the time working on job application stuff, so hopefully that will pay off in the end.  I think my eyes are starting to protest all the looking at the screen time though.  I tried to avoid printing off papers, but I did a few today so I can get away from the screen periodically.  I don't really feel busy, but I think it's because my idea of busy was really different back home.  Productive right now can simply mean I read some papers during the day and came up with x,y, or z conclusions.  Just really different.  Easy to be frustrated with the whole process though.  At least from talking to some other guys everyone seems to be in the same kind of boat.  I'm trying to just not stress about it and do what I can and it will work itself out.  I was trying to avoid having a last week or two scramble of late nights, but I think that is just going to happen.  Jess put it best - "it wouldn't be grad school without at least a few late nights of work".  I did find an awesome paper that should help out a lot in my project yesterday that is 58 pages long, think I'm gonna save that one for the train ride into London to pick up Jess on Friday.  And it will probably spill over into the flights to and from Bordeaux too.  Gonna get back to watching baseball and maybe a little job/website searching on the side.

Hot!

The weather has turned hot here, it was 81 yesterday afternoon, and its supposed to approach 90 this afternoon.  Not really sure how I'll stay cool.  Luckily some rain is coming tomorrow that should cool things back down.  The weekend was good if a bit slow.  Saturday we were going to the Donington Park Museum, but the only people interested did not have cars, so that didn't happen!  The weather was pretty nice that afternoon, so I rode my bike over to a pub by the canal that was having a beer and live music festival.  A nice afternoon.  On Sunday I rode my bike again, this time to campus, to watch the European Grand Prix with some classmates.  It was a slightly boring race, but still fun to watch of course.  The rest of the afternoon was slow, I did some laundry, cleaned up a little around my room, and made a black bean stirfry for dinner. 

I'm on campus today working with some software.  I might be wasting my time, but I've got to get started on my design otherwise I'm going to go crazy.  My dimensions and size might be completely wrong, I'm waiting on some CAD models.  So I'm trying to set it up and see if the program will allow me to change dimensions easily.  We'll see. 

Really looking forward to Jess' arrival on Friday morning, and then our trip to Bordeaux - we fly out Saturday night, and return Tuesday afternoon.