deviationz .LOG

I really sometimes wish there was no snooze button on my alarm clock. Atleast that will prevent me from waking up at 7.00 a.m. inspite of the first bell going off at 5 a.m. Bad habits creep in easily, and this is one that refuses to go away. I am a snooze addict, and wish I had a patch that I could wear on my arm that would help me get over it

I have a menu that is functional, is XHTML 1.1 compliant, has a drop down menu and opens both in IE and Mozilla variants. It was not without its share of big problems, but they have finally been ironed out and the menu is in place. Now with the menu in place, along with its placeholders, there is enough incentive for me to complete the pages that are due for so long.

I will now bask in the glory of the working menu till someone shoots me an email asking me about what happened to the pages that I promised.

My previous Wordpress 1.2 is now updated to 1.5, and I have managed to get my old theme running in 1.5. I will work on the default kubrick theme, and spice it up just like my current theme.

while the same file opened on OpenOffice Impress®. Amazed ?? Read on…

My roomie had a big problem one night and he sought my help. The problem was rather simple. He had a .ppt file uploaded on his filebox on the VT server and he wanted to download the same and rip off a few slides to complete the presentation that he was currently working on. But poor old Microsoft Powerpoint would not open the file. It kept popping a “cannot read from file” error. I tried everything from trying to rename the file, rename the extension, opening in different versions of Powerpoint but to now avail. With all hopes lost, I decided to try one last thing before I hit the sack. Emailed the file to my address, rebooted my system into Fedora and tried the one last gasp attempt at opening it in OpenOffice. Voila ! It worked. I was able to read the file and view its contents. Then all I had to do was to save it again, and send it back to my roomie. Now he was able to open it in Powerpoint. I am no whiz when it comes to how these things work internally, but I can find ways out of situations. If someone ever has this problem with any other MS-Office suite applications, try opening them in OpenOffice. It might just work.

And if any of you geeks know why it opened in Impress while it failed in Powerpoint, enlighten me.

I live in a place that has by far the most variable climate. See the weather for today and the prediction for the week ahead and you will know what I mean.

I have personally had many experiences with the weather here right from when I was a newbie to this place until this day. Don’t ever be surprised if you see the sun shining brightly through your window blinds, and the temperature outside reads a shivering −10° C. And this I never knew when I first came in to Blacksburg. It was a fine morning (or so I assumed), and I started off for my Dynamics lecture at 9.50 a.m. hoping to reach there just before the class began. I was dressed in a jeans and a shirt, and wearing slippers ( yes, you read that right, slippers !!). I walk out of the house, and the cold hits me and hits me real hard. And there is not much time for me to get back home and change. Its about a 5 minute walk from the place where I get off the bus to my class. And believe it or not, about 2 minutes later, my feet were so numb that I was almost tripping every three or four steps. It was a nerve-wracking experience. It was then that I decided never to step out of house with out seeing this. People call Chicago the windy city, but Blacksburg is not very far away. For all those who don’t really know, take a look at the wind chill readings. Never be fooled by the temperature readings. The wind chill is a very major factor out here.

So much for a constant weather through the day. Now add some real wiggly variations in it, and its a whole new story. Sunny in the morning, mild showers in the noon and flurries in the night. It does happen, and happen quite often. You will come back home drenched if you thought you would never need an umbrella on a fine day when it is warm and sunny in the morning, and of course, you did not care to check the weather forecast for the day. I have done it more than once in the past. But everything said, Blacksburg is a nice little university town, with a very calm and serene environment for pursuit of graduate studies. The spring, summer and fall seasons are really amazing with so much of color and nice warm weather and skimpily clad sun-bathing babes ( my girlfriend is sure going to call me soon ;)).

And just as an aside, the weatherman’s job is a really cool one. No one is ever going to question him for a wrong prediction. Just like the weather column on this day in The Hindu said partly cloudy and rains expected in Chennai but it probably turned out to be a super hot and sunny day. Ah! well, the weather man is always wrong. This was so wonderfully portrayed in the movie Swades where the local weatherman looks at the sky and says, “No clouds for a long distance, no rain today”, while Shah Rukh spends billions of dollars of NASA money to predict the weather and other related parameters.

Some purposeful googling to search for a program to access my linux ext partitions, lead me to explore2fs. It is a very nifty tool that allows you to access your linux partition from within your windows environment, and it lets you drag and drop from Linux® to Windows®. It sure is a great tool for someone who actively uses both operating systems.

Now “it” has a name, and “it” here refers to the research that I am working on.

“Application of toroidal visc0-hyperelastic devices for structural seismic response control”

Structural/earthquake engineers may be able to comprehend it, but the *other* people can just gawk and say, “Pretty cool stuff he’s working on !”. I will however, try to define a few of the above terms.

Toroidal : A surface generated by a closed curve rotating about, but not intersecting or containing, an axis in its own plane. In simple non-math terms, something that looks like a donut.
Viscoelasticity : A time depend material behavior where the stress response of that material depends on both the strain applied and the strain rate at which it was applied.
Hyperelasticity : A behavior, which could be due to geometry or material property, that results in the material having a nonlinear elastic stress-strain relationship.

Curious, sad, happy and intense. These are pretty tough emotions to be reflected on someone’s face. And seasoned actors find it very difficult to portray various emotions. But here I am talking about the four emotions on someone’s face in a time span of just forty six seconds (yes, 46 seconds). And he is no seasoned actor, he is just 1 month shy of his first birthday. Click on the image for a bigger image.

I/we now have an official definition. The Structural Engineering Certification Board has developed a definition for “structural engineer” and “structural engineering”.

“A structural engineer is a professional engineer who is competent, due to specialized eduation, expertise and experience, to engage in the practice of structural engineering. Structural engineering is the application of mathematics, materials science, and the physical principles of statics and dynamics, to the design, analysis, construction and rehabilitation of buildings, bridges, towers and other structures, and parts thereof, to make them safe and serviceable while enduring the effects of various loads.”

There is a long list of other characteristics that define a structural engineer, which I will post soon.

I am almost set to complete my Master’s degree in structural engineering and now is the time I start worrying about investing money and stuff. Yes, I don’t have a job yet but that is not stopping me from thinking of how long it will be before I double the money I make by investing it somewhere.

I got a forward which had an interesting rule - the rule of 72. Well, it supposedly is a lightning quick way to find the number of years required to double your money at a given interest rate. All you have to do is to divide the interest rate into 72. For example, if you want to know how long it will take to double your money at eight percent interest, divide 8 into 72 and get 9 years. And this rule is quite accurate for any interest rate less than 20 percent. Interestingly, you can also run it backwards. If you want to double your money in six years, just divide 6 into 72 to find that it will require an interest rate of about 12 percent.

So much for money, investment and interest rates. Let me get back to FEA.