Name:Kieran Country:United States State:Illinois Metro:Wheaton Birthday:3/17/1986 Gender:Male
Interests:Everything... Music, video, computers, women, art, sleeping, dancing, and playing jokes on my coworkers. Expertise:I am the executive grand president of the galaxy.
In my spare time I work full time in the summer, and study electrical engineering for the rest of the year at UIUC. Occupation:Manufacturing/production Industry:Manufacturing
Well I haven't posted for a long while,
This semester has been pretty busy. I started the semester with 4
engineering courses, a world religions course, and a math course. I
dropped the math course when I found out that I don't need it. It was
the first time i have ever dropped a course. School is going really
well and I think the U of I is probably the best school I could have
chosen.
Last weekend we had EOH -Engineering
Open house- During this time we competed in a robot design
competition which happens every year. Our team IEEE-UIUC smoked
pretty much everyone else. We won first place. I took a bunch of
pics, and video. I mounted a camera on the front of the robot. So
check out the video!
Right now I am back at home on spring
break for a week. My niece is here from New Zealand for about 6 weeks
which is a lot of fun. Its the first time I have seen her in about 14
years. We should have some fun being tourists, exploring Chicago a
little bit next week.
Ive Done it! I have created a smoothie that changes colors as you drink it! I am not exactly sure how it works, but let me explain what happens... When you add the ingredients to the blender and blend, it looks like a deep purple. Pour, and wait a minute. The foam that forms on top is green, but the smoothie still looks purple. Magical green foam is pretty cool. Then as it is consumed it stays purple, until you decide to clean out the cup. By adding water to the cup, whatever is left in the bottom changes from purple to green! Amazing! Its drinkable magic! Oh and its all natural. My theory is it works similarly to color changing paint. In other news. Only 2 more weeks of school till christmas and break! Can't wait to be over with finals.
Well I haven't posted in a while, so
its time for an update. I wont go into things past because most of it
is boring or kind of weird (girls here can be pretty messed
up) But this week its Halloween! not that exciting but theres
always lots of drunken people on campus, which is kind of fun to
watch. So this last weekend I started building a blinking Mohawk (my
hair is a few inches long now, more specifically its a row of LED's
going into a f2013 micro controller which blinks them on and off in
all kinds of cool patterns, and if you bob back and forth fast enough
it displays subliminal messages, (like HEY!). But I didn't get that
done for the weekend. The other thing that I
have been building is the electronics subsystem for a pneumatic
shifter for the formula SAE race cars here. So far it works, but my
prototype system uses the same hardware as my mow hawk, so switching
between the two is interesting. The race car
project is pretty cool, they are basically really expensive go karts
with full electronics systems and a 650cc motor on the back = really
fun to drive.. So far I have driven once, and it is a blast, (you go
really fast) This weekend I worked on getting one of the older
cars working, it has some electrical problems, mainly to do with the
ignition, and tonight me and this girl Stephani got it running pretty
smoothly. It went from backfiring half the time and shooting flames
out of the exhaust to idling with no help at all from us! Never the
less flames out the exhaust is a lot more fun! (we tried to get a
picture, but it was hard to time the randomly occurring flames with
the camera...) When I got home tonight I reeked of gas... glad no one
was smoking around me. The one thing i wish i had this weekend was
a camera, some of the costumes were pretty crazy, and flames always
make great pictures, especially when theres people standing right
next to them. One other thing, thank the weather for being nice,
it was a really great change from the late trend of cloudy coldness.
and for those of you on campus some tips. 1. don't go to
Bromley hall after midnight, especially on the weekends. 2. never,
ever, ever, EVER, assume the obvious. 3. Grainger is open till 3
am, work that into your sleep schedule! (mine varies greatly,
sometimes i sleep in the afternoon and do homework all night and then
go to class the next morning. There's something about being around
when no one else is.
And yeah, hope everyone else's lives are
going great.... mine is. K
Its saturday afternoon, and I had some free time so I decided to take some pictures of where I am living, its small but good. I basically have my own personal bathroom because no one is living next door.
I love the windows, they go from one wall to the other, and all the way up to the ceiling.
Under the bed is heaps of storage as well as in the closet. Still plenty of room to put giant foam hands and the like :D.
My Desk area, with a pretty nice chair that came with the room, suprise!
I heard the food here is terrible for vegeterians, so I did not get a meal plan, but I have heaps of food, and stores are not far away on my bike. Lunch, is a monstor sandwich with cheese, hummus, lettuce, tomato, peanut butter and fake deli slices. Yummy!
Finally, I have to gripe about the internet access, its bandwidth limited. and really stinks! basically if you download more than 750mb in 24 hours, they will start limiting your speed, if you download more than 1.2 gig in 24 hours, it becomes unusable.
There is a way around this, I found that if i change my mac address, I get a new 24 hour period that is not used (and a new IP). lets just say yesterday, I had to switch my mac 3 times... :P. under their policy, they say they will ban you if you switch your mac, but since I have 3 net cards, I can just say I plugged in a new computer, and started using a different mac. hopefully I will not get any problems... :P. So if your also at uiuc, and have this problem, just change your mac, when they try and mess with your computer! but only uses a few different macs so they dont catch on. (bandwidth limiting expires after 24 hours of little use so you can switch back to your origional mac.)
Well I made it, 2 years of COD and now i am finally at one of the best engineering schools in the country. I moved in to scherman hall, and started my first day of classes. I must say the most striking differences in the environment between here and at home are. -wow there are a lot of young people. -the smell of stale beer on the street. not present everywhere. -the muffled songs of sorority girls singing from inside their houses. -soooo many people.
So far, its been fun, the first half of my circuits class I already covered at COD, so I am set for a month or so!!! yay! My digital computing class seems like it might be tough, but luckly it is not graded on a curve. I have not gone to any other classes yet, but when I do, im sure they will be interesting. Taking: ece 210, 290, stats 200, and philosophy 105. I want to take one more credit hour (I only have 14 so far) so I am thinking about signing up with a design project for a racecar.
The dorm I'm in should be renamed hermit hall, so far I have not met anyone on my floor, partly because I am at the end of the hall, and the 2 rooms next to mine are empty, which means I have 3 rooms all to myself (I can get to them through my bathroom!) extra places in case anyone wants to crash! Also its a grad hall, which so far is really nice, no one playing soccer at 2 am etc. The RA is cool, low key, and 4 floors away :D
There are lots of frats and sororities around my dorm, I think UIUC is the greek capital of the world. At quad day, there was a huge chunk just for greekdom. There was some really nice stuff at quad day too: I got a rubix cube (Kyle I need you to solve it), planner, and a bunch of Tshirts. There are a lot of places to get free T shirts around here. So far I think I have gotten 5 shirts, and I have been here for 3 days. pretty good! (if only someone was giving away pants...)
