Get ready for the nice shiny stream of consciousness, spelling
errors and typing mistakes and all, because I'm typing with my eyes
closed again, and I'm can't find the backspace key like that. So, Here
we go. Ok, So it's been just about forever since I'm written
anything, but I guess that's ok. Sometimes the inspiration just
doesn't come, and it's not something that comes naturally. Fun to do
sometimes though,, and strange though it may be, I actually
communicate much better with the written word than with my voice. See,
I have kind of deep voice, and I'll be inspired and make a witty
comment, but the person I'm talking to will inevitably say "What?" and
that sucks, because it's never as much fun or as relevant the second
time. But oh well. Maybe I should just learn to speak louder, but
that's not the only problem. There's also this tendency to get excited
and trip over my words, or if I'm' being careful, I speak very slowly,
and bore people. Then when I get excited, I talk very fast and jump
from topic to topic and people are like wtf are you saying.
It's important to always close your html tags. I'm not sure why I
just wrote that.
So, people may be wondering, but probably not, why I've been
writing about failure in spacecraft and related systems. Well, I'm an
engineering student. Failure is near and dear to my heart (I've done
it a few times), at least in terms of making things work correctly and
having to proper processes in place to make sure the design process
itself doesn't fail, but also so that the end product doesn't fail
(much). You can never have a perfect design. Engineering is an art of
compromise. Your employer will never say "here is an infinite supply
of cash and time. Do what you will." You can't be a perfectionist and
an engineer; they are mutually exclusive, though we all try to be
perfect of course. I actually once knew a person who claimed to be
perfect (this was in high school). He was a very religious person; he
might have believed himself to be full of virtue and general
goodness. Anyway, I'm interested in how things fail because failures
revel not only flaws in a single product, but flaws in a process that
led to that product's design and production. Of course the law of
diminishing returns comes into play; you can only design so far, at
some point the amount of energy you put into solving a possible
problem will be so great that the problem is better left unsolved. So
I might be nitpicking a bit when I examine the NEAR burn
anomaly, which has never been fully explained, but ultimately the
incident could have been avoided by more rigorous
procedure. Organization. Yeah.
Ok, I got a bit off track there. But then again there isn't really
supposed to be a track to stream of consciousness. It just goes and goes
and goes. This has been edited for content. That just popped into my
head; I don't know where it came from.
The semicolon is my favorite piece of punctuation. I love it even
more than the humble period. Not the period that girls have, which I
liken more to an exclamation mark, but I guess it makes sense if you
think of it in terms of signal processing, in that it occurs on a
fairly regular interval; thus it is periodic. So I wonder if when a
girl is late if the whole cycle is phase shifted... after giving
birth, does the cycle return in phase as it was before pregnancy
occurred? Or is it out of phase by some degree? Hmmm, a study must be
commissioned! Perhaps there is something to be learned by studying the
phase shift of such periodic cycles.
Anyway, yes, the semicolon. I loves it. It is a wonderful
invention; it pause is greater than the humble comma, its effect
greater! It separates a sentence into distinct parts more effectively
than a comma, but it joins sentences that would be lonely without the
companion joined to it by the loving and tender semicolon. There's
nothing worse than a lonely sentence, left to float in a formless void
of thought, alone and haunted by it lost love. But salvation is in the
semi-colon, for in it we have Cupid to our lovers, those that were
lost soles are now joined in harmony.
Our hero Cupid can make for bad matches; the author must be careful
when exercising his or her god like power over the prose, for a slip of the
finger leader unmatched lovers to their doom.
Ok, I'm done with the whole semicolon thing. I swear. It's just a
phase I'm going through. I hope it's not periodic. My laptop is making
my legs sweat. Damn hot laptop.
I can't believe you've read this far. I mean who actually reads
drivel like this. God. Well, he probably doesn't care to read it
either.
Lord of the Rings is cool .I have now read the first book a grand
total of three times. I have not yet made it through the second book
in its entirety once. Not once. I've just started it again though, so
we shall see how it goes. I always get bogged down somewhere after the
return of Gandalf. I can't remember where exactly, its been so long
since I attempted to read it. But I really wanted to read the first
book at least before the movie comes out, and it seems I am well ahead
of schedual for the seconds. If I manage to get it done before
Christmas of 2002. It might be a feat. A mighty, majestic feat,
undertaken by only the most brave souls.... no, it's not like its Ayn
Rand or something. I haven't read any of her stuff either, although I
would like to, just so that I know how much I disagree with her.
Wow. Still going. Hmmm, this much doesn't come out very often. I'm
more often given to one word utterances or simple grunts. *grunt
grunt*. Food. Good. Yum. Sex. Sleep. It's hard to expressed more that the
most base of your desires with simple words and grunts. My neighbors
probably think there's a caveman living in this apartment by
now. Although a caveman that dresses in snappy ThinkGeek shirts!
Christmas is coming! Not that I'm into it or anything, but it's
sort of nice when it snows and all the family (what do you mean I'm not smart
enough to be an engineer?) comes around and all that. Yeah. But before
that, I have a birthday. I'll be 22 (ack!) on the 20th of July. Which
is a bit off I guess. Still lots to do before then. But I don't think
I'll be able to make my first million by the time I'm finished being
21. Oh well.
Sooo, anybody see any good movies lately?