So much has been happening this month.

My niece came down to visit for about three weeks. We did stuff almost non-stop while she was here. We really wanted to show her a good time so that if she ever needed to make a decision about where to live, she would want to come here. We also packed some of our own summer fun into that time. We went canoeing, and I got lovely foot sunburn. We went to a county fair and the state fair, and I got to ride my favorite ride. (It twirls around three axes of rotation and is about enough to make you toss your cookies. I love it.) We had my brother up here for a while, and we went to a water park with him. It was fun, but it was also somewhat of an interruption to our normal lives.

After she left I really had to kick it into high gear at work, as we are finishing up our "funding year," which means we have to do some killer presentations so that we get funding for this same project next year. I'm pretty much the primary student who has been working on this stuff this year, so it was all on me to get all the figures done, and Dr. Neal to write stuff. It was a lot of work, but we got them done well. Dr. Neal took me with him to Honeywell to do the presentations with him, which was actually a really neat experience. It's always fun to do a lot of really good work and then show it off, and while Dr. Neal was the one actually doing the presentations, I'm still proud of the work I've done and glad to see it shown off. It was an esteem builder and I was happy to see the results of the things I've been doing.

It was also really interesting to meet some of the people I've been hearing about and experience the dynamics and politics of industry. I learned a lot of non-technical things. I also got a chance on the drive to talk to Dr. Neal about his experiences being a professor in the engineering field. All in all, it was a big learning experience.

But the most exciting thing lately is that I've started school as a graduate student! Classes just started yesterday, and I'm really excited. I'm glad that I took a year off, but I'm also glad to be back. I'm taking two classes this semester. One is on robotics and is mostly involved with stationary (i.e., they are bolted to a table or something) robots and the things you can do with them. There is a lab with this class, and we'll get to do some fun things, I'm sure. The other class is on controls, and this really excites the nerd in me.

I took a class called Feedback Theory a few years ago, and I absolutely loved it. An example would be the cruise control in your car. If you designed one without feedback, you might just have the input be the desired speed and the system would multiply the desired speed by a predetermined constant and set the angle of the accelerator pedal based on that. Well, if you choose the constant based on tests with the car on a flat surface, the cruise control would no longer be accurate if the car started going down a hill. So you have to feed back the output of the system, which is the car's actual speed, into the input of the system so that you can set the acceleration based on the difference between the desired speed and the actual speed. When you're designing the system, you also want to control how fast the car reaches the desired speed and how much error is allowable and you can change all these things with lots of nifty equations and graphs and stuff.

Turns out that all the theory that class was based on was developed in the 40's and 50's by people mainly working on instrumentation for things like airplanes during WWII. During the cold war, even more nifty methods were developed to control things like missiles. These methods took advantage of computers more than graphs and use very different sorts of mathematics. That's what we'll be learning about in this class. I hope it will be as fun as the first class was.

Okay, so I'm sure many people would think that I am a big dork to be so very excited about this, but I love learning and I love math and I love applying it. At least I know I'm in the right field, right?

I'm sure the newness will wear off after a while, but I still think that I'm really going to enjoy being in graduate school.