Damn it feels good to be a grad student

PAYDAY!! Whoop thaaa raaa (thats my slur of "whoop there it is"). Besides being stuck in 1992 as my post today has proven, I am also soooo happy to have made bank. This is my first pay check in awhile and crap, I just realized something. Like as I was typing I realized something that sucks. I was all stoked cause my pay was huge! But I realized that it includes my last month of pay from the Lupus Center so I won't be getting this much every month. Eh well, at least this month looks good.

I want to take this time to let you guys know what I do everyday that you don't see me. I am really proud of the work I have been doing and I'd like to share:

Class 1 - Mathematical Methods in Chemical Engineering
This class can be defined as the area under the hard as hell curve. But I'm still going, falling behind I promise you, but moving just the same. Fun fact about this class: Dr. Federspiel took us all out for an end of the month happy hour to Hem's where the beers were on him. Fun right? Oh yea and guess what else? Thanks to a Miller Light promotion, Dr. Fed's bottomless generosity, and Craig's skeezy way of including himself in the party - BOTH Craig and I were selected from a raffle, individually, and left the bar with $600 total to go on a spring break trip. Look out, JAMAICA!!!!

Class 2 - Cardiovascular System Dynamics and Modeling
This class is the definition of bioengineering and I absolutely love it. All of our assignments have been intense programming and modeling of the cardiovascular system as an electrical circuit (makes me wanna get a tattoo real bad). I want to show you my code but an anonymous reader has told me that was lame.... Oh well, EFF them:



OOOHHhh, check out that human input impedance spectra. Doesn't seeeeem impressive BUT I had to perform fourier transforms into the frequency domain and then convert back to time domain for analysis. If you don't know what I am saying, you're cool, stay that way ;-)

Now there's a sexy plot! The clinical curve is real human arterial pressure data... the dumber looking bottom curve is what I did! Haha, it's actually good though, since that curve was modeled after a circuit composed of only 2 resistors and a capacitor arranged in parallel. Who's laughing now?! Hmm, no one is, good point, let's change the subject...

Lastly, is my TA class. How I love people who are just learning MATLAB... so frustrated, so hateful, if only they knew MATLAB is the language of technical computing. No really, it is, look here. It's fun.

So I don't ride the 54C to school anymore since my lab has a parking lot. This means I don't get my daily fix of Pittsburgh's best characters. When a door closes, however, a window always opens -- my gym is a gold mine of weirdos! I won't elaborate now but trust me, sweaty, middle-aged nurses and business women make for great talking points ;-)