Gone

Well i'm gone for 60 days. Wish me luck!

Hello New York

Well I finally landed a job. It's only a temporary one, but it definitely sounds interesting. I'll be sailing aboard the T.S. EMPIRE STATE, the training ship of the State University of New York (SUNY), as a licensed watch officer. Yep, a training cruise...on the OTHER side of the grades!!!

Only this time, I'll be sailing in the Atlantic instead of the Pacific Ocean!
Ports they will be visiting:
Fort Schuyler, NY (home port)
Antwerp, Belgium
Istanbul, Turkey
Cesme, Turkey
Palma, Mallorca
Lisbon, Portugal
Fort Schuyler, NY (home port)

trippy eh?

Angels & Demons

Well I just finished both of Brown's famous controversial books:
The Da Vinci Code
Angels & Demons
This guy is a novelist, not an historian. I especially ran across it in certain elements on Angels & Demons. This guy, maybe doing a little research, didn't do enough. On page 5, I discovered discrepancies! I have a slight bit of knowledge that, when used, easily refutes what he used about hypersonic (above Mach 5) jets. The X-33 was a research vehicle that was supposed to be a RLV, or Reusible-Launch-Vehicle. Not like the shuttles of today, but more like an airliner, a space-liner, if you will. There were numerous problems with the X-33 R&D, and the project was cancelled in 2001. There even is a conspiracy theory surrounding the whole project. As of now, fastest air-breathing manned vehicle is the SR-71 Blackbird, traveling at speeds of up to Mach 3.3. The fastest air-breathing unmanned vehicle was the X-43a, reaching speeds of Mach 9.8, so speeds of Mach 15 (as mentioned in the book) by any manned vehicle are a definite problem.

I'm still reading the "Secrets of" series for both books, and its interesting, they pretty much call Brown's bluff and obliterate his "this is entirely factual" references.

you should check them out yourself.

Pictures are in!

go here to see pictures of my graduation from The California Maritime Academy.

I guess I should rewrite my title sometime soon, eh?

job apps

well currently I'm waitin on msc, I just filled out an application for open third's positions for NOAA in Seattle, so who knows where i'll sail out of. The worst part is the timing of everything. I have to wait 2 weeks up to a month before anyone can actually decide ANYTHING.

oh well. back to filling out thank you notes for all my checks and gifts!

I dun gradiated

A few things I am now:

-Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering
-3rd assistant engineer available to sail on any steam, motor, or gas turbine vessels of any horsepower
-Engineer-in-Training #121595
-Certified Plant Engineer-in-Training

I walked on Saturday...I will post pictures as soon as I get them from my dad.

Update1:
Thanks to Jihad Jimmy from the SHoP, welcoming me into the ranks of Engineer-in-Trainings. Thanks to all of you who have wished me congratuations (especially you, amy, I miss you!)

Update 2:
Don't worry, the pictures WILL come, and yes I'll be wearing "choker whites" the common name of the dress whites.

Getting there

Now that the project is completed, the report is done, and the presentation went well...just winding down. All I have left is to finish up a take-home final for Automatic Feedback Controls, and finish up a last homework assignment for Energy Systems Design.

Then I'll be college grad.


sounds weird doesn't it?

Testing

Pictures from when we test-fired our water balloon launcher, and were recording firing pressures and distances. For those who can't figure it out, we are protecting the balloon from bursting by using a cradle that slides down our barrel, and then is prevented from going down-range with a parachute. In the shots below, the yellow object is the waterballoon, and the big blue thing behind it is our parachute deploying, stopping our cradle.

One of the launches, ours is the black one to the left, a competing launcher is sitting next to ours (ours is more compact)


Another test shot (no, I'm not in any of these pictures yet)


There I am! I'm on the right. So far we've been able to shoot a water balloon up to 180 yards. We know we can go farter because the other group (with their barrel painted gray) was able to shoot up to 255 yards (about 1/7th of a mile!)

Stupid people piss me off

*looks at the current world's population* You must have a lot of frustration then.

What pisses you off?

Created by ptocheia

IT FREAKING WORKS

For those who don't know my senior design team has designed and is building a waterballoon launcher. We finally constructed it to a point that we pressure-tested our receiver for leaks, and we dry-fired our cannon today (about 8 shots). We put it on its frame and rolled it outside, aimed it down the waterfront road, and fired a few empty barrel shots. Man it's awesome making something that SOUNDS SO COOL (and works). Then just to be ornery, we stuck a lil plastic ball (about the size of a tennis ball- our barrel is 6 inches in diameter...so the air might have just rushed past it...), and it launched the ball almost 200 feet!


We're going to take pictures tomorrow and start test-launching actual waterballoons.


Update 1:
Well, today we painted everything black then we test-fired a waterballoon with our protective/sealing cradle and it worked! We first tested it at 40 psi and our gate valve 1.5 turns open, the line that prevents our cradle from going downrange held but the waterballoon only went about 30-40 feet. We then tested 60 psi with the gate valve 3 turns open, and the waterballoon went about 100-130 feet...but the line that held our cradle snapped :(
Back to the drawing board for that!

Update 2:
Well we got the cable to hold, but then the cradle was destroyed by the jerk at the end of the line. We ended up using a parachute idea. We made a parachute out of tarp and attached it to the back of our slider/cradle, and just sending it freely down the barrel. Today we tested a number of different firing pressures, keeping our gate valve fully open, and recorded distances, then we held our pressure constant at 40 psi, then throttled down on our gate valve to get the accuracy shots of 25, 50, and 75 yards.

GMAIL

Just recently got a Gmail account. 2 gigabytes now.

For those who are about to ask, no I don't have any invites yet.

For those paying attention, Yahoo is about to offer 1GB email storage space to their free service members now.

Coming soon! 1GB of storage, free to all users
There's more in store with Yahoo! Mail. By early May, all free Yahoo! Mail users will receive an email storage increase to a whopping 1GB. That's enough space to keep thousands and thousands of emails -- so you'll never have to delete those important messages again!

And to those who wish to update their address books, hscharf@csum.edu will soon be no longer my email address. I'll have two accounts I'll check regularly now:

henry4@scharfcpa.net
hscharf@gmail.com

Still busy

Still busy building our senior design project and finishing up school.

I'll post pictures when we're done (maybe even post a video of our senior design project working...it's a water balloon launcher for those who don't know).

weirdness

nerdy

Found via SHoP

Passed!

I passed Electricity on Monday with a 77%, and General Subjects on Thursday with an 87%!

Now I really am an inch away from graduating...!