Well, here I am

First post on my new blog. Gonna see how I like this, been on Xanga for awhile, Blogger seems to have a little cleaner format.
School's just been weird, a kind of stressful weird. This should be a time of happiness, getting done with school and less work, but it's just a time of disappointment. People don't like how my board is doing it's job, failed a class, doing a pretty mediocre job at everything. Seems like I have to try so hard nowadays just to stay afloat, the minute I slow down everything grinds to a halt like a motor with no oil, and then blows up like... well, a motor with no oil for a very long time. I suspected it'd be to much when I started this year, well it was. Ha, the only thing I've really learned this year is that I can't be trusted to run my own life. Unfortunately, I can't afford someone more qualified, so here I go again. I know I'm through with housing, I was so close to quitting last year, but we decided to give it another chance. Way to much effort with no reward. I do want to be around next year when no-one wants to be on any of the boards. I'm pretty sure everyone else on my board is done for good too. It sucks, we all did housing a favor stepping up to the plate, and all we get is insulted and punished. Good riddance when it's over, my only regret is that we have another whole semester where we have to be tight-lipped and diplomatic, not telling off who needs to hear it. This sucks worse because it's the second time in my college career that I've been through all this yelling and unnecessary hatred, I just want it all to stop. It's not hard to imagine how an engineer could be content working in a very small, tall walled cubicle in the farthest corner, where he doesn't have to talk to anyone. There are a few people who make it worth it, you know, talking to other people. It just really depends, if your lucky enough to work with happy, productive, and mild-mannered people, or if you get stuck with all the self-centered assholes who seem to enjoy making everyone miserable.
Been working on Baja brake designs all day, and making progress. I'm stuck though:
P = F/A, but does that mean that for a given pressure, in say a 1/4" line, you could increase the output force indefinitely with a large enough surface? A pressure of 1000 psi and an area of 10 in^2 means an output force of 10,000 lb. For an area of 1000 in^2, that becomes a million pounds. It seems to indicate that we need more caliper pistons, and larger ones to get a larger force, but that doesn't make sense. A very small area SHOULD make the largest force, and all the numbers makes more sense that way. On my Baja car calculations, the first method yields a per-tire braking force of 10,000 lb, and the other method just 500 lb. But the more sensible, second method screws up all the units. I've been at it all day, when I hit it later I'm sure the anwser will be obvious and I'll feel stupid.
I've been going through www.tv.com and making a list of all my favorite/memorable TV shows. It seems like just another little OCD activity of mine, but it's been bringing back some interesting old memories. For starters, it's reminding me how much I loved 90's science shows on PBS, like NOVA, Square One, and ESPECIALLY Newton's Apple. I remember my dad and brothers would always just lie around the TV on a lazy Saturday afternoon and go through shows like "The New Yankee Workshop," "Motorweek," "Super Dave Osborne," and "Newton's Apple" Those lazy, warm Saturday Afternoons were some of my favorite memories. Episodes of Newton's Apple and Bill Nye: The Science Guy really introduced me to and sparked my interest in topics I saw years later in high school, some topics which I received no further formal education in. Bringing back all the old memories reminds me how great those old shows, but its kind of a rude awakening how we don't have any of those shows anymore. Sure, we have Junkyard Wars and Robot Wars and Mythbusters, where you can still get your televised science fix, but it's just not like it used to be. You can look at your parents and grandparents and tell the difference between some who are "hip" and readily buy into new trends like cell phones and computers, and others who are the "Back-in-my-day" crotchedy type who still don't know what e-mail does. I think in 30+ years I'm going to be very much the "back-in-my-day" type, always belly-aching about how much better the old days were, with my Super Nintendo and my TI-83. See, I'm already starting!
But what I've really been getting to this whole time is, well, girls. Or just one, in my case, as is usually the case. I'm always stuck on just one, with the exception of an occasional few-week overlap between crushes. But this time it's really just one. And it always seems like "this is the one!" every time, it was very much so last time even though I didn't know her well at all and didn't have much to go off of except that she's always been really friendly to me. But this time, oh yea, this has to be the one. Just like the last 30. There's a few more things going for this one than usual, she's Catholic like me (unlike every other girl I've ever dated), shy (which is a turn on), and I've already dated her once. I started "formally" dating just as soon as my Senior year of high school ended. It all ended pretty abruptly after a few months, for reasons I'm still not sure I understand, but we found each other again and after seeing a movie together and 30+ e-mails back and forth, we are still in what I see as an ambiguous zone between friends and dating. Certainly not dating, because no-one has said that yet, but not just friends either, because no-one's said that either. It's been going well, it seems like I'm making "progress." This isn't like with the last two girls I've dated where they've just completly come on to me, and I've gone along with it thinking "well, this is nice." Ever since I first started really getting to know her, she's always been the one I couldn't get. Not "Completly-out-of-your-league-you-moron" hard to get, but always just on the verge of getting a little closer to. I'm really terrible at reading signals, and she always seemed so cold, not really saying anything, not giving me anything to work with. I've heard through the grapevine what I did wrong the first time around, things I completely failed to read from her. This time, I'm trying to be a little smarter about it and realize that when I'm with her, she says hours worth of information if only talking for a few miutes an entire night. I'm trying to think everything through and analyze it all. Like the title of the movie she took me to deserved a little attention: "Just Friends". Is that her saying "back the hell off" or her hinting that she want to see the happy ending of the movie in our own lives, where the guy and the girl finally hook up. The only thing I'm sure of is that I'm still not sure about anything, and unless her friends explicitly told me, I'm not sure about anything that happened when we dated the first time. She is definitely worth it though, she's the kind of person who I think would be good for me. Well, I could go on indefinitley, but 8:00 AM, time to get the day started.