Denton County Police

Last night, two of my girlfriend's best friends celebrated their 22nd birthdays, so we all went out to a local bar near campus and said cheers to a spectacular 22nd year. The night was full of chatting, and everyone had a gay ol' time. That is until they decided they wanted to switch bars. I had not had anything to drink, mind you, besides a White Russian. But that was early in the night and I was being a responsible little engineering student and offered to drive to our next destination. This is when things got interesting.

I pull out from our parking spot and we hear a funny noise coming from the rear end of our car. As I pick up speed, the noise gets worse, and there's a slight turbulence in our drive. It turns out, we blew out a tire somehow. To make matters worse, neither me or the significant other knew how to change a tire. Yeah hush - I know I don't know anything about cars, don't rub it in. So here we are sitting on McKinney St. stranded and confused. A random guy pulls up to us and offers to help. He was equally as clueless about the whole matter, but some help was better than none.

Then, out of nowhere, a police officer drives by. For once I'm happy to see those flashing lights. He pulls up to us and I expect he'll lecture us for stopping up traffic in the middle of the road or perhaps ask me how much I've been drinking (I was well under the limit FYI). But no, the gentlemen walks up to us and asks us what happened, introduces himself, asks if we need help. He even helps us change our blown tire. By now a friend of ours shows up as the officer began loosening the tire lug nuts, and the other random dude that pulled up to help us excused himself. We all worked together in jacking up the car, shining the flash light, holding lug nuts, chatting about what it's like to be a cop, etc. This is the most pleasant experience I've ever had with a police officer. And I've had my run-ins with Denton County Police before.. I even blogged about a different experience here. Another time, I was pulled over for going 10 meters in the wrong direction on a one way and despite my squeaky clean record, they wrote me 2 citations - the other for an expired inspection. Thanks a lot for the warning....

Anyway, it turns out the girlfriend's Sequoia was in no mood to be jacked, and broke our first Jack and refused to work with our second jack. The officer called us a Tow Truck, and stuck with us the entire time we were having trouble. He was a likable guy with a wife, 4 month old daughter, and a fun sense of humor. Apparently, Denton officers get paid a little better than Corpus Christi officers ;)

In the end the Tow Truck helped lift the car, we swapped tires, and we were on our merry way. I took a picture of the whole ordeal but somehow it didn't save, and my phone died.. I'm more pissed about that than having the blown tire.

Thank you, Officer King. You are a gentleman and a scholar.

Sumo Bot Competition

If you're a regular viewer of my blog, you may know that I'm a member of UNT's robotics society out of Discovery Park! It's a rag tag group of fellows that just like to mess with robots and play with toys. Recently, we had a little Sumo Bot competition!

The bots are written in BASIC Stamp, and as the name implies, are very basic. Despite this, they are very powerful. They've got infrared sensors on the front, color sensors on the bottom, LED emitters, and a speaker on them. They are all sorts of fun to play with. These are also what we use at Robocamp.

All of the robotics society students are engineering majors of some sort. Some Electrical Engineering, some Computer science, etc. Regardless, robotics is a great example of how different types of engineering disciplines can co-mingle. This is just one of the many student societies at Discovery Park!

Blogger App

So today I found google's blogger app. Since I'm always glued to my phone, I figured it'd be easier to write up my posts if I could at least START writing them while on my phone. It's also pretty fast since I've got the whole swype keyboard thing. Since my laptop is up and running now, here's a video of me typing with
Swype!

Ok I give up on debut video capture.I've switched to Snagit. Anyway, it's just a video of me writing with swype. It's pretty fast and I have minimal complaints about the keyboard. It's nice to have the voice to speech while driving as well. I don't really know what else to say so I guess I'll stop now. I guess it is worth mentioning that typing on swype requires all your attention, so it's annoying while walking or driving, but that's why my phone has a physical keyboard as well. I love physical keyboards. Wow the whole video turned sideways that's interesting.

Also, here's a picture of my laptop:

Notice the neat custom made sticker my friend made for me!
Speaking of apps, NPR had a segment recently about the unemployment rate. They said the united states has dropped to 8.5 unemployment, and that the numbers fluctuate for certain fields. Interestingly enough, job postings with the word "android" in it have doubled since this time last year, and that the unemployment for computer science is a mere 5%. 5% by the way, is considered full employment!

The e-learning curve

Nowadays people disseminate information primarily over the internet. When I'm talking to a co-worker, or a teacher, or a friend and I ask them for something, gone are the days where they write it down and they do that task later. If I want my grade in a given class, I have to e-mail the teacher. If I want to remind someone of a party going on, they say "oh just text me". If I hear an ad on the radio, they say "google such-n-such to find out more info about us because we're just that awesome!!!" Web sites or email addresses are given out as another way to communicate with people. In fact, communication is such a vital part of our lives, that tyrannical governments first turn to communication methods to shut down the peoples' movements and communication. The "Twitter revolution" in Iran, whether that actually happened to the scale we've been told or not, at least played some roll in Iran's recent post-presidential election protests.

The point is, technology has become an integrated part in everyone's lives -- not just the nerds like me that sit on it day and night, or who carry it around in our pockets. It's touching grandmothers and parents, kids, and rural communities, even rebelling communities. It takes a small learning curve and a way-of-life change to move your entire calendar away from you pen and paper written agenda and onto sync'd online calendars. My girlfriend still uses pen and paper, but of course there's nothing wrong with her methods. I'm just different is all. Like my preference for Wendy's french fries over Food Poisoning Whataburger french fries.

That being said I still have a hard time tracking random things such as Blackboard. If you're not familiar with blackboard, it's a teaching system that UNT uses. Thankfully, some of the Discovery Park classes use a different, more accessible system called Moodle. Nonetheless, some of those deadlines really sneak up on me in those Blackboard classes....

Lasers

I recently chauffeured several high school students around UNT's Discovery Park campus. This was a group of Lake Dallas High School students that were interested in engineering. By the way, if you're a high school teacher or parent of a high school student and you want to take a tour of the campus, let this lady know.

Anyway long story short they got to see our Engineering Technology department, Materials Science department, and a demo of robotics from students in Electrical Engineering. This demo in particular was quite interesting - it demonstrated different applications of fairly common devices and how robotics can be used in - say - a Mars roving environment. This ties into a grant that UNT's electrical engineering students take advantage of. These students are tasked with thinking of and creating feasible Mars rovers or perhaps even asteroid rovers that need to be able to navigate, think, and maneuver a foreign surface. You may be aware of robots that NASA recently sent to Mars to explore the martian surface. As I am told, these robots are controlled manually by humans in Houston. Do you know how long it takes for a transmission to go from Earth to Mars? 10 seconds. A lot can happen in 10 seconds. Try driving a remote control car with a 10 second delay. Not easy. These students are in a bid to develop totally autonomous Mars roving bots.

Try guessing what this bot is made of!

As my title promises, here's a video of a laser. This thing requires ~3000 watts of power!



The laser starts at about :50 seconds

What it's doing is etching someone's name into the casing of their phone. Mind you, they did not stick their whole phone in there, they simply removed the back case. One kid had an iphone and really wanted his name etched into it, but he couldn't ;)

In all fairness, plastic melts pretty well at those temperatures, so it didn't turn out as great as he would have liked. In fact, the plastic casing looks more like it has been shot or something, or a grenade went off next to it. Metallic materials are best for etching. This is not what Material Science is all about mind you, this is just 1 of a million uses and applications of this type of science.

Recently at Discovery Park

Despite how my blog is an excellent source of info about UNT's Discovery Park, there's actually a lot of things that happen here that I don't cover on my blog. Occasionally, we get newsletters through the school e-mail system. The most recent one being this one. It just so happens there are several students I know that appear in this issue. The Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers at UNT pictured a couple kids I knew, as well as the UNT Robotics Society pictured yours truly, along with fellow blogger and ambassador Jordan Simleness! Although I don't know if we made a good enough impression on her...

The letter also gives you a nice feel of what PhD students accomplish. If you ever read my "random criticisms", one of them mentioned how our traffic system is very inefficient, and we desperately need an engineer. Well Yiwen Wan heard my call, and he is on the case:

Yiwen Wan and colleagues assembling traffic surveillance equipment on Loop 288

As pictured in the student newsletter, Wan is pictured here fiddling with traffic surveillance equipment.

"Ms. Wan submitted a video-based traffic surveillance system for which she leads the development. Specifically designed for remote locations, the system communicates via wireless to the base station. The camera autonomously calibrates and, in addition to collecting traffic statistics, watches for incidents." -Source

Also mentioned in the article is her receiving of the Wanda J. Shafer Graduate Scholarship. There are many scholarships available for those dedicated (and lucky) enough to receive one. Deadline is March 1st!! So start applying!

Ice Day Consequences

In the short run of things, ice days are great. They allow you to put off that assignment til' tomorrow, sleep in, and have snow ball fights. I mean, everyone loves snow right? And this is Texas, we never get snow. Want to know what happens when we do get snow?
Here's us at the back of the walmart parking lot. Fellow UNT Engineering blogger Jordan also shared her experience with the apocalyptic snow storm as she had a dickens of a time simply filling a prescription. It just so happens I was there for medicine too for quite the case of cabin fever (and a nasty cold).

In the long run, ice days stink. We missed 6 days of class because of it. I live in Texas for the 110 degree days, not the 10 degree days. We will receive no make up days, and I missed a Physics lab because of it. Not to mention I almost got steam rolled by an 18 wheeler that was barreling down a frozen over highway too fast.

On a positive note, it was so refreshing to see other people hating on the cold. I saw plenty of people falling on their arses, and people actually shivered. You know how annoying it was being the only one shivering in New York? I'm surrounded by a bunch of eskimos up there. Here, I'm with my own kind...