On Track

American Guns

My brother is so awesome. I've been having a lot of fun biking, golfing, hanging out, and fighting with him.

I apologize.
That was an awful post to leave up for so long.
It is Sunday afternoon, I have nearly nothing better to do, thus I blog.

Since I left, I have graduated, partied, lived it up, started work, enjoyed life, so on and so forth.

Immediately after graduation, I sent off my best friends Andrew and Chelsea to hot, humid North Carolina. If they were snowpeople, they would be melted by now.

Kudos if you know where this is

To ease my sorrow of sending them away, I went to Hawaii. I just had to get my mind off of the sorrow. Party the sadness away.
My family romped all over Hawaii. Two islands worth. It was great fun.

We [family] started at Pearl Harbor; a sobering but really cool place. We crawled all through a submarine, saw the USS Arizona memorial, then finished up with the Big MO'.
There was waaay more. I saw the submarine museum, but not the museums that lead up to the Arizona or the air museum. We'll leave those open to make sure that I get back to Hawaii.

While on Oahu, I managed to sneak in some cups of $60.00 coffee. Talk about living it up. Some of the best stuff. Strong enough up front, but doesn't leave some nasty burned aftertaste.

From Oahu, we moved onto beautiful Kauai. Kauai is so nice. We stay near a small town that is a tropical Homer. It has it's love-able quirks.
Needless to say, I want a house on Kauai. There are so many hikes to do, so much adventure to be had. Tons of biking, potential for pouring rain, nice beaches, and it is relatively uncrowded in comparison to the other islands.

When I got back, I still had a week of vacation. Towards the end of the week, I was going nuts. No homework, no studying, no work. What does a normal person do under those circumstances? I'm still trying to figure that out. I've read a couple books. Learned to lounge around and enjoy coffee no matter the time of day. Golf. <I'll get back to that thought.
I started my job. I love it. I love my job. The people I work with are great. One of the other engineers is very boisterous. My supervising engineer is what every runner aspires to be. The director of engineering is quirky, but can be pretty awesome. He was angry at I.T. and suggested I just go buy the biggest, baddest computer I can find. I settled for larger monitors, which no one has ever thought about before because they are the most coveted item in the office.
Shortly after arriving, my supervisor took a week off and I've been trying to figure out how things work on my own. Sometimes, that is really frustrating, especially when projects are not moving as fast as I feel they need to be. But I see the wisdom: I am getting to know the system.

Pre Race

I completed my second marathon in here somewhere, too. I was feeling awesome, until the 15th-16th mile, then I just died. I still had fun. It never ceases to amaze me that I can do those things. The next one will hopefully be somewhere out of state so that it is more of an adventure. I'll run it off the cuff so that I know none of the course, make it a real challenge.

Post marathon, I've been golfing a lot. For some reason, I find it really fun. It is super challenging not to get frustrated, but the number of good shots that I have is increasing. That makes you just keep coming back to the game.
I was in the company tournament, and I'm not sure how, but I won a natural gas BBQ grill. I guess I'm blessed. And it means that my family can't get rid of grills. Every time one gets sold or taken, we get a new one.

My current music kick: I guess it's blues. Little Axe. Jon Shain. Jo Bonamassa. (thank you Pandora)
My current goal: lets just recover from the marathon. I feel spent and running is really hard.

So! In future chapters of Nathan's life, I want to explore the hole in the wall restaurants around Anchorage. Take golf lessons. Learn to rock climb. Find every other possible means to enjoy life. I am a free man. This is going to be great.
Check back periodically for updates.

Think About It

I am so close to finishing, I can almost taste it. I cannot wait until 11:15 Thursday when my final normal class lets out.

And, because I'm playing with my new computer and I ran across this...

How many unnamed faces do you know?

All Heart

Ice. (ice baby...)

It's actually pretty interesting. So! This will be fun facts of water and ice. More small talk conversational material.

www.benbest.com

Why do lakes smell worse in the fall? Because water is most dense at 4C. (39F for you english people) When the temperature of the ambient air approaches that temperature, the water from the bottom rises to the top since it has been storing all of the summer heat and is above 4C. This is known as lake turnover. And the smell is everything being brought up from the anaerobic conditions at the base of the lake.

This is also why lakes freeze from the top down. The water at the bottom is warmer than 0C.

When water freezes, it forms a hexagonal close packed structure. See the image at the right. All of those black dots are water molecules, and the whole hexagon is an ice crystal. Ice likes to grow out of the vertical faces of that molecule. They don't have to be oriented vertically, but in the image, they are. When it forms off of one face, its a grain of ice. A ton of grains put together is called columnar ice.

Other types of ice:
Granular ice forms from freezing slush, creating porous ice.
Frazil ice forms in rivers that have supercooled below freezing. Ice crystals form erratically in the water, float to the top, then clump together to form sheets of ice.
The supercooled condition creates an environment for ice to form on the riverbed. Yes, freeze at the bottom of the river. This has been known to cause rocks to float when a large amount of ice is formed on the rock face.

Why all the ice?
For starters, its being taught in Arctic Engineering. And theres a bunch ice floating down the Chena. I went and stood by the river to watch. Its rather relaxing just watching it all go by. You can hear all the ice absorbing water as it goes by. It sounds like thousands of those wooden wind chimes. Pretty cool.
The picture above had a cool phenomena going on. That black line is a tree stuck on shore and the river is flowing from left to right. The ice behind the tree is being drawn/trapped there by the eddy that the tree is creating, causing the ice to flow up river behind it.
Also see the columnar ice.

What has become of my computer dilema?
Well, my computer has been reduced to the hard drive. It's all heart now. Though, it will be much cheaper than expected to fix it, so it might be resurrected after all.
My saving grace in this troubling time was family in Anchorage and ENSTAR! My mom went and bought me a macbook air. It's slick, small, light as a feather, and super quiet. Plus one battery charge lasts me about two and a half days. Thats sporadic usage, but still impressive.
ENSTAR gave me a computer in the fall, and without it, I wouldn't be able to continue my reports because that machine has Word and Excel.

Pressure. Pushing down on me...

I can hear the champion whirring.

Til Death Do Us Part

Google is aggravating me. They changed their look officially. Now navigating gmail for me is a pain. And this blog. I fail to see how the new set up is optimized. I liked the way it was.
Put it back.

I think it's strange how someone who puts minimal effort into something can be recognized with those who did everything. Case: Student Advocacy - Point: 2 guys went to Juneau, those two and many others wrote letters to legislature and testified in a public hearing about the need for a new engineering building and I get credit for it.
I got all of the original details and disseminated them and asked for volunteers to go on the trip. I showed up to three meetings, unaware and unprepared. They wrote all of the letters. They went on the trip. We got the certificates of appreciation at the awards banquet.
(at this point, I am searching for the preview button. Stupid google... Ooo just in: Google is a word. google has the squiggly red spell check line under it.)
Case 2: My Tau Beta Pi presidency
I delegated nearly everything because I was busy. My officers were probably more busy but picked up the pieces. I got a lot of face time due to the presidency. I got to travel. I got to know the Dean's office assistant who is always happy to see me and went out of her way to make sure that the 3 guys and I on the advocacy team made it to the banquet.
Life isn't fair, I guess. It's about showing up at the right place at the right time.

Sunburn itches. It's on the front of my shoulders where all of your shirts sit and rub. Luckily it's not all that bad of sunburn. But I've been out in the sun.
Again, life isn't fair. This last week was sunny and beautiful. Today, when I try to bike, a sport that should be pretty fast paced, it is cloudy, windy, and cold. I fought head winds for 35 minutes to have a 20 minute return trip.

Milestone: I ran 12 miles yesterday at 1 second faster than I want my marathon pace to be. I really think that I would've matched the pace if I had ran one more mile.

Wondering what the title means?
My computer died. The first. The original. The champ. The beast. (The beautiful keyboard)
I was using it this morning and and I put it to sleep and went to do something else. I came back, flipped open the screen, and it never woke up. It died in its sleep with a fully charged battery gearing up to go. Moment of silence.








I tried turning off and on. Tried plugging it in. Took it to the MacHaus and they did a quick test and nothing happened. It only had 3 weeks left to last... After almost 5 years of heavy use, they think the logic board is fried. It powered through all of my work almost as fast as the newest computers throughout its life. It ripped dvds at the speed of those new computers up to the end. Ate batteries as if they were candy. Outlasted its own charger.
I shall miss it; I always wanted to stay classic.

But! "Hollywood, we're never going down."
The next one is on its way. Hopefully its as good.

R.I.P.

Tis the Season to be Jolly

I live 2.65mi round trip from the store

It's an entire 59 F here! Well it was at 6:53pm at the airport.
Now is the season that everyone should be rejoicing! The sun is up, cabin fever cases are high, and the roads are dry! Mostly. Enough to bike.
Today was the first day that I got to bike to school. It was also the first day that I got to bike to the grocery store. Did you know that you can go to the customer service desk at Fred Meyer and they'll hold your giant backpack while you shop? Pretty handy. Then you go retrieve it after you're done and bike home!
And I got to use my nifty new watch.

What I learned today: The repeat lesson that moms are awesome.
Mine texted me today, it went a little something like this:
"What doing?"
"Sitting in class getting my last project." (Last project of my degree!)
"Really? What on earth do they think you'll learn? Nobodies paying attention." (jaw dropping amazement happens here)
She nailed that on the head. After our FE exam, all of my classmates and I are just along for the ride. If I wasn't such a driven individual to get good grades, I would probably stop doing hw and going to class. I've rocked my classes up to this point, that I'm confident that I could get a C in all of them by doing nothing from now until the end. (And since I can't graduate Summa Cum Laude because of having a B+, does anything really matter anymore?)
Plus, mine provided great roots for me. I read her "about me" section on google friend connect (that's how you follow my blog, by the way) for the first time. "We love the outdoors and the city life as well." Ohhh... Now I see where I get it.

What makes a Nathan:  Happy is a yuppie word...
I was given the biggest compliment today. I got home from my bike/grocery shopping escapade and Steven says, "Dude, you're such a yuppie."  (Cha-ching. Score one for me) His reasoning: I've got on plaid shorts, a polo, and I am riding around a beautiful 1984 Raleigh Alyeska. The only thing missing on that bike is leather wrapped handlebars.  ...Such a nice bike... (daydream off into the distance)
The situation that he complimented is a perfect example of who I would like to be: someone without a care in the world. (my definition of yuppie)
Someone who has those obscure trinkets (and uses them) that you thought were cool, but didn't buy. Someone with that leg up on life.
I'll take any hints on how to get to that point that I can. Offer away.

Summer Time!

I survived an 8 hour exam! (Everybody can celebrate now)
The best part is that I feel confident that I passed. The premise of the exam is a little ridiculous: instantly know which formulas to use to solve the test question. For 8 hours. We're engineers, we are taught to think objectively to solve problems: Google!
"Gaze into my crystal search engine to see the solution!"

In celebration of my semester rapidly coming to an end, Sean and I decided to hold a beach party. Or more appropriately, back deck party.
Is there anything better to do on a sunny Sunday than barbeque with friends? The only thing missing was the kiddie pool filled with warm water.

The great American past time

You could tell that it was a man-sponsored event because the meal was mostly meat. Peppered bison steak, chicken kabobs, chicken breasts, and salmon. And chips and dip. Oh! And Kevin made amazing hand squeezed lemonade. Poor fellow didn't realize that we had a juicer. His labors were greatly appreciated, though.
We just got to sit around in the sun, munch all afternoon, and ignore homework.
To make it more of a beach party, Sean moved the truck into the back yard, we opened the doors and windows, then blasted music. Pretty sweet boombox, eh?

What makes a Nathan: Toys!
So I still suffer the urges of a boy when it comes to shiny things and other toys. I must have it. The trick is to resist the urge for meaningless things. (Hot Wheels and Legos are not meaningless and are great purchases at any time)

My new toy: a Garmin Forerunner 610

It's freaking sweet. It tracks total time, pace, distance, heart rate, percentage of maximum, time behind a virtual partner, where you're going, how you can get back to a certain place, where on a course you are... and so on. For both running and biking.
The best part: It's touchscreen.
It has too many features for mere watch buttons.

When your finished with your run, it links wirelessly to my computer and then uploads it to the Garmin website where it displays all this awesome information.

Definitely one of the coolest toys ever.

The 2nd mile here was one of my fastest recorded.

Life is Good

Nothing to be learned tonight.

I'm running low on "care".
How do you... I don't care.
Hey! There's homework due... I don't care. (a lie, my homework always gets finished)
School this, school that... Eh. Whatever.

I'm not sure if I'm swamped beyond belief and stressed, or if I see the light.
On the graph here, I'm either cresting the last peak, or I'm far below the x-axis.

With the FE looming, I'm not sure how anything is getting done. I feel like a zombie who's eaten too many brains and gained too much knowledge. Not a sponge. A zombie. (I don't care; also a lie but slightly true since it will be a huge load off when I finish it)

But! Hey! Life is good!
What makes a Nathan: I got myself a new fan dangled GPS watch thing with waaaaay too many features. It's amazing. I've been mapping my runs before I embark on them; I've blindly done one run so far. I like to know that where I'm going to be running is going to get me the necessary distance and not just run in circles until I hit the mileage.
As a sort of update on my running: I ran 7mi yesterday in under an hour for the second time ever. The run made me feel like I only have one speed since I didn't really slow down, despite going up a large hill.
Today I ran one of my fastest recorded mile times, in the middle of a run. Oh yeah.
Basically, my mileage is up and my pace is down. And my heart rate, according to the watch, is peaking at 102% of my maximum. Hmm... Something needs adjusted. They said it will "learn" me.

Also, its nice and warm here in the day. 45-55 may not sound warm, but 3 months ago it was near 100 degrees colder. Its so nice in fact, that I get back from running and lay on the back deck to cool off. I spent 2~3 hours outside today grilling and such and...
I wouldn't say that I'm sunburned completely, but I have pinkish skin, sensitive to the touch. On April 11th. Life... is so good.

*Update: In the last 5 days I've ran 27.4 miles in 4:08:34.  (Did I say how cool this watch is?)