Happy Halloween

I don't really have anything special to say today, but how can there not be a Grant's Pad post on a holiday?

We recently had a crisis involving tin-whisker growth on tin plated components at work, and so I decided not to wear a costume today, in attempts to be serious. However, there were free cookies all day, and some people at the company did come in costume - one of my coworkers came as George W. Bush, and some of the older ladies came in disturbingly raunchy outfits... Yipe!

For those of you who didn't know (and it should be all of you, since Grant's Pad wasn't around in Halloween of last year), I did come to work in costume last year. I brought back the Goku costume from my college days, seen in the picture to the left. That year, we actually went back to Boca for the actual holiday and Cherry, Melinda, and I went trick or treating in the neighborhood! It had been ages since I'd been trick or treating, and I must say it's quite different from going to the clubs on Halloween night to check out all the sexy costumes the fine young things come out in.

This year, since we are staying here in Melbourne and don't have the excuse of taking the little sister out to trick or treat, we went ahead and bought some candy to hand out. The only problem is, I don't know how many kids I should expect. I only bought a few bags of candy, but I still fear it might have been too much. No harm done though, I am a sweet tooth myself, and will gladly eat any left over!

Now for some Gator Football News, as you've all come to expect on posts following weekends! The Gators survived a scare in Jacksonville at the game-formerly-known-as-the-World's-Largest-Outdoor-Cocktail-Party against Georgia. We came out smoking, scoring on our first drive for the fourth time this year, going into halftime with a 14-0 lead, with Andre "Bubba" Caldwell scoring both TDs - one on a reverse, and the other on a 40-yard pass from Chris Leak. After the first kickoff after halftime, our incredible defense forced a Georgia fumble and recovered it for a touchdown to make it 21-0. That was all the scoring that we would do, and fortunately, it was all we would need, as Georgia stormed back strong to score 14 unanswered points. The game should have been a blowout, but we had a 66-yd punt return by the little guy Brandon James (who is officially listed at 5'7 but they say he is closer to 5'5) negated by one of 10 penalties by the Gators. The penalties really are ridiculous - UF is the most penalized of all 119 teams in Division 1-A football! In addition, Chris Hetlund missed two field goals, making him 1 of 7 for the year. It's really incredible that we haven't lost any more games than we have...

The big news for the Gators was actually the result of another game - the University of Southern California, or USC West, lost their first regular season game after winning 27 or something like that straight. Their loss busted open the race for number 2 in the country, since one of number 1 Ohio State and number 2 Michigan will lose when they play each other at the end of the season. More importantly, the USC loss bumped UF up to number 4, which puts us in prime position to take the number 2 spot if we can manage to win out the rest of the season! Go Gators!

Geniuses At Work

It seems my theory from yesterday's post is a bit flawed. Grant's Pad got very little visitation yesterday, despite my stat padding. My only explanation is that visits are also related to the quality of the posts, meaning I can't just post for the sake of posting and hope to get a mass influx of visitors.

In hopes of rectifying the problem, today's post will have some higher quality material. My dad, who is an electrical engineer like myself, only with a Ph. D degree from a top 10 engineering school (as opposed to my own M.S. degree from a top... 30 or so engineering school), sent me the images below. Nerds like us will enjoy them thoroughly, while people who don't "get" them are probably the same people who actually worked the problems as shown in the pictures...

Enjoy!







 

New Software from Microsoft

Wow.

It's become amazingly evident that the visitation of Grant's Pad is directly proportional to how often I actually write. On days when I write long, entertaining posts, such as last Wednesday and this past Monday, experience droves of visitors, and more importantly, page views, which indicates that those visitors actually hung around and, you know, read the blog. As you can see from the chart at the right, the spikes suspiciously correspond to days that I write new posts, while typically fewer than five visitors show up on days that don't show off fresh, new posts.

With that very interesting fact in mind, it shouldn't come as any surprise that I sometimes try to pad my stats, as any competitor would, by writing fresh new posts even if there isn't much to say! My argument is that there is never (or very rarely anyway, "never" might be too strong a word) not much to say. True, nothing might have happened, but you can still talk as much as you want about it. Or write, in this case. Trust me, the technique is probably even more applicable to writing. Just ask anyone who's written a research paper for a class!

Truth be told though, today's post isn't entirely about nothing, although I can assure you that I most certainly can write a whole post about nothing. But no, today's post was inspired by a series of events caused by a condition with my computer at work that caused me to not be able to see Grant's Pad from my own work computer! The audacity! Some sort of real-time error from my Internet Explorer kept on preventing me from opening up the page for more than around two seconds before the dreaded error window popped up and forced me to close the web page.

After thinking about it for a little bit, I decided that perhaps the condition was a byproduct of spyware, since my copy of Windows Defender hadn't updated since around April (also a victim of my unusual computer here at work - it refused to allow me to update Windows Defender!). My Google Desktop news ticker thing showed me that there was now a new complete release of Windows Defender available (as opposed to the beta release that everyone has been using to date). I quickly grabbed that, and to my sweet surprise, I discovered that it could update itself! Hoorah!

However, this still didn't solve my original problem of not being able to see my own blog from my own computer. Back to pondering, and maybe a little work as well. Eventually, I decided that, hey, maybe it says "Internet Explorer" in the error message because there was something wrong with my Internet Explorer! So I promptly went back to Microsoft.com to see if there were any fixes or updates to Internet Explorer 6.x. I didn't find anything Internet Explorer 6.x related, but what I did find was the complete, non-beta version of Internet Explorer 7.0! I decided to grab it, since it boasted the cool tab-browsing features of Firefox and the cool "cleartype" font. Those features lived up to my expectations, and I have to say I really like the "quicktabs" function, but most importantly, I could now see Grant's Pad from my own computer at work! Double Hoorah!

But with all good news, there's still a little bit of bad news. After I was able to look at my blog again, I surfed back in the archives to posts made in April and before. I found out that most of the photos I had linked to my photo albums in April and earlier didn't work now in those archived posts. I guess Facebook, who hosts my photo albums, must have changed the addresses of my photos, so since the links no longer work, the photos don't show up. I considered going through and fixing each link, but I don't remember which photos were featured on Grant's Pad. However, all of the missing the photos are still viewable in the photo album, so if you want to see the photos, head over to the album! Until next time!

NBAA 2006 Convention

I had a pretty good weekend - Cherry and I went roller skating and we cleaned the house for the first time in a few months. But today's post is about something way cooler than cleaning the house - though it might take a little persuasion to convince me that it's cooler than roller skating!

Last Tuesday, I went to my first trade show as a working professional! I went to the National Business Aviation Association Convention, which was held in Orlando this year. The location rotates from year to year, and this year's was actually supposed to be in New Orleans, but due to the hurricanes last year, the facilities couldn't handle the event, and so the event moved to Orlando, which made it only a hop and a skip away from us here in Melbourne!

Our group bought only five tickets, so I had to go to the show as my mentor guy, Mark, which was sometimes awkward when I was introducing myself or when other people at the show called me Mark. The show itself was huge - it took place at the new building of the Orlando Convention Center, and there were full planes and helicopters inside the building, in addition to all the models and displays. Some of the models were really awesome - they showed planes that had complete living rooms and bedrooms inside - literally they were two bedroom apartments inside a business jet! Must be nice to travel like that!

In addition to the plane displays, vendors were selling just about anything imaginable - from plumbing systems to carpets to noise and vibration damping material. Of course, most of othem do have applications in the aircraft industry, but some of them, like the Ferrari in the picture, were there just to see if some of the rich folks who own their own private planes would like a car to go with their jet!

Of course, no trade show is complete without booth babes, and NBAA 2006 had its fair share of them! Many of them were in mock-up flight attendant uniforms - you know, the ones they always wear in the movies. Of course, in the US, real flight attendants usually aren't the fine young things they used to be (what's up with that? Asian airlines still use fine young flight attendants!), but the booth babes sure were!

As you all should know, I'm an electrical engineer. To be honest, electrical engineering isn't a really cool profession for exhibits - looking at a bunch of components on an FR4 PC board isn't that much fun. Mechanical engineers, on the other hand, get to show off cool stuff like the jet engine to the left. Now, that looks really cool. Much better than an RC filter circuit on an RF amplifier card, anyway!

There were also some bizarre exhibits too, like a rope-the-mechanical calf exhibit demonstrated here by Marlene. I guess her ride must have left an impression on us, because after the convention part of the show, we went out for some Tex-Mex (I think - it might have been just regular Mexican food). There was only one chef and one waitress, but the food was pretty good. I had a burrito that could put Moe's to shame, and the company paid for it, so that made it even better!

After lunch, we headed over to Orlando Executive Airport, where a boatload of business jet companies had static displays (read: real airplanes on the ground) for convention visitors to see. This was actually pretty awesome, because you could see for yourself how posh some of those business jets really are. Polished wood cabinets, leather seats, fancy dashboard and HUD displays (much nicer than the ones on commercial airliners) - I would love to have that kind of stuff in a car! There were also a number of incredibly futuristic looking private jets, which would also be awesome to have. I'm told you can get them for between $200,000 to many, many millions... Any takers?

I'm pretty sure the little photo flipper I added a few weeks ago to the top of Grant's Pad is flipping through photos from the show, but make sure you check out all of the pics in full size in the NBAA 2006 Convention Photo Album!

More College Nostalgia

Quite a bit has happened in the past few days, but it's going to take me a while to gather all the fancy photos and stuff for the upcoming posts about them. However, Grant's Pad has been seeing some great visitation in October, so I have to reward my regulars with fresh, new posts. To fill the time, I thought I'd go ahead and reminisce once again back to the ol' college days.

As you regulars know by now, I'm a big Nintendo fan. I am pretty passionate about things, or people, that I'm a fan of. Take Chris Leak for example. He had easily the worst game of the season last Saturday in the 27-17 loss against the Auburn Plaintigles (for those of you who aren't familiar with the term, Auburn effectively has three mascots - their "official" mascot, the Tiger, and two "historical" mascots: the Plainsmen, named probably for the militia who patrolled the plains of Alabama where Auburn University is located today, and the War Eagles, a patriotic tribute to the American forces during World War II. Because they can't make up their mind as to which mascot they want, non-Auburn fans lovingly refer to them as a large number of mixed up names, with a common one being the Plaintigles). Even so, I still support Chris Leak 100% and hope that the Gators win big for the rest of the year. Anyway, today's real story occurred, oh I don't know, probably around 2000 or so, and it is a story about how a great Super Nintendo game almost caused a great friendship to fall apart...

One late late night, I was either trying to study or trying to sleep, when the usual crew was hanging out in the living room. I think it was George and Pablo, and possibly Jorge, who were playing Street Fighter II on George's Super Nintendo, which he brought up for our enjoyment that year. Now, as I said, I love Nintendo, and I love Street Fighter II as much as the next guy, but they were playing it loud. All I could hear was the theme music from Ryu's dojo and the kiais of Ryu and Ken. I was getting quite fed up, so I stepped out of my room and told them to turn that crap down. Pablo took great offense to my remark. He wasn't so much upset at the fact that I wanted them to be quiet - he was more offended by the fact that I called Street Fighter II's music crap! So, one thing led to another, and after arguing for a bit, I attacked Pablo, grabbing his head and giving him a knee to the side of the head. To this day, Pablo insists that he had a Bruce Lee moment and he kicked my ass in our fight, but the truth is, he didn't talk to me for almost a month after I attacked him. I have to admit, I felt pretty bad after what I did, so I guess, in a sense, it was a moral victory for Pablo.

Since then, Pablo and I have gone on and I really think that he is one of my best friends from College. He was, after all, the first person I talked to when I first arrived in Gainesville, though, at the time, I kind of brushed him off (I'm pretty sure I wrote about that in my earlier reminscing posts...). I guess great friendships need a few bumps to really stand out!

Busy October Weekend

I didn't expect this past weekend to be as busy as it was since we didn't have any days off or anything like that. Cherry has most of this week off, so I would have expected this weekend to be busy, and it might still be, but that doesn't take anything away from the one that we just went through!

Friday night was Cherry's Phi Theta Kappa induction ceremony. Phi Theta Kappa is some sort of honor society for two year colleges. She was invited into the society after posting straight A's for Spring, Summer A, and Summer B semesters. The ceremony was rather long and boring, but it did have an unusual candle-lighting ordeal that probably represents some virtue. Plus, there were some pretty good snacks and some great cake!

During my group meeting on Friday, Theresa mentioned that she wasn't going to make it to the company's Open House on Sunday because she was planning to go to Kennedy Space Center. It turns out that Kennedy Space Center was holding a food drive, and all Brevard County residents could get free admission to the Visitor's Complex over the entire weekend! Upon hearing that, I immediately made plans to go to KSC the next day.

The last time I was at Kennedy Space Center was probably during my senior year of high school, and it is going through some changes. However, those changes obviously weren't in place by the time we visited, with the exception of the new International Space Station Exhibit, since work on the International Space Station didn't really start until the 21st century. Most of the day was taken up by the three-hour tour, which consisted of three stops. The first stop was the cool observation tower where you can look at all of the launch pads with binoculars. The second stop was the Saturn V center - a large building which houses a Saturn V rocket. For those of you unfamiliar with the Saturn V, it's the rocket that made all of the Apollo missions to the surface of the moon. The last stop of the tour was the International Space Station center, which holds actual modules of the space station, built by different countries, waiting to be sent into orbit to be assembled to the floating station. In addition, we also checked out the Rocket Garden, but we weren't able to see any of the 3D IMAX films. Still, make sure you check all the photos from Kennedy Space Center in the Photo Album!

Sunday was the date of the company's Open House, where employees could bring friends and family into the Melbourne facility to show them what we do here. I brought Cherry in for about an hour, showing her around the TCAS/TPR lab as well as the Weather Radar lab and the factory before grabbing some refreshments and some stress balls with the company logo on it. Cherry enjoyed the tour a lot - in fact, she said that this tour was her favorite activity of the weekend. Unfortunately, we already had an appointment to look at houses in the afternoon, so we couldn't spend any more time at the Open House.

So, that concluded our busy weekend, but don't worry, there'll be more classic Grant's Pad material coming up very soon!

UF 17 - Auburn 27

So, the Gators were finally brought back down to Earth this past Saturday, in a heartbreaking but incredibly frustrating loss to Auburn. Ed created expressed his feelings below by creating the image below of the Hero from his (somewhat poorly updated) webcomic, TWFC, and posting it on his blog.


I think this says volumes for fans all through Gator Nation...

My Car Nightmare Saga Continues...

Ever since Football Season has started, Grant's Pad has somewhat degenerated into a casual Gator Sports blog, and has reported very little on my real life. I guess that's probably a good thing - I obviously haven't been doing anything exciting over this period of time, which means that any exciting news on my life would probably be a bad thing. Case in point, today's post...

So, I have driven my 1994 Corolla since I got secondhand in 2001. I'm proud to announce that I am approaching 120,000 miles on it. The first three or so years that I drove it was fairly eventless, save from a few dents and other cosmetic things I picked up from being an unexperienced driver at age 19. The last two years, however, have been a bit of a headache. Prior to yesterday, I had replaced my tires (five tires, since one of the new tires was damaged beyond repair earlier this year), replaced my hoses, all of the belts, all of the inside door handles (an infamous problem with many Toyota vehicles from that period), a windshield, two regulator cap/wire/spark plug sets, two automatic window regulator sets, my starter, my bumper, and a stabilizer for my engine block.

I was thinking, "Wow, that's like, a lot of repairs. My little car should be pretty stout now!" But no. Yesterday, on the way to Cherry's school, we noticed that the car would "hop" when we were stopped at a light or just starting to accelerate. When we got to her school, she noticed that the car had a smoking smell, so Cherry convinced me to take it to get looked at. I took it over to the trusty Tire Kingdom, and Nick picked me up to go to work. Turns out that one of the spark plug wires (which you may have noticed in the above paragraph was something I've replaced twice prior to yesterday) had shorted. It would cost me almost four hundred dollars to get that fixed and get my fuel system fixed up to clear out the burn damage, and that was after a little bit of haggling (I'm convinced I could have gotten another 5% off if I wasn't busy at work during the negotiations).

I wasn't sure why this part kept on failing on me. However, after rummaging through my service receipts, I remembered that, the previous two times, I replaced the wires and plugs myself - perhaps I didn't make a clean connection or the leads were dirty? Anyhow, hopefully my car is finally in tip-top 120K shape!

On a side note, last weekend, I finally picked up New Super Mario Brothers for my Nintendo DS Lite! The Joy! I love my DS Lite! I now have four, count 'em, four DS games in my collection now! It took me like four years to amass my collection of eight Super Nintendo games back in the 90s! Which reminds me, I have a great Super Nintendo story to share with you all, but it'll have to be next time!

Florida vs. LSU Wallpaper

I swear, I was going to post a real post chock full of the high quality prose you expect from Grant's Pad today, but instead, I'm going to feature another one of those kick-ass wallpapers from GatorCountry.com. I've been waiting for this one since Sunday!

Leak and Tebow Interview on ESPN Gameday

As mentioned in the previous post, ESPN Gameday was in Gainesville for the LSU game this past Saturday. After the game, they caught up with the two Florida quarterbacks for this awesome interview. Enjoy!



You gotta love how classy these two guys are!

Gators 6-0!

Another weekend over! Time is just flying by. It didn't seem that long ago that the Gator football season started, and now, it's already almost half over! This weekend, the mighty formerly number 9 LSU Tigers visited the Swamp looking to repeat last year's heartbreaking defeat of the formerly number 5 Gators, despite giving up five turnovers. Well, they repeated the five turnovers, but this time, the Gators were able to turn them into points, winning the game 23-10! The win, combined with formerly number 2 Auburn's loss to previously unranked Arkansas, vaulted UF into second place, behind Ohio State, in the AP poll, for the first time since T-Rex's mighty 2001 campaign!

Before the game, some cats on the GatorCountry forums decided to put up a Heisman display to show off to ESPN Gameday, who was in Gainesville for the game (and will follow the Gators to Auburn this Saturday! Seems like Florida's getting some media love now!). The poster named UFWrestler had his body painted gold and Leak's Number 12 painted on his chest and held the Heisman pose for around fifteen minutes during the show in the morning. The screenshot below was linked on GatorCountry, so I had to take advantage!

Chris Leak didn't get any touchdowns and tossed one pick against LSU, but he played a fairly solid game, with the help of Tim Tebow again (who was responsible for each of UF's touchdowns). The first of Tebow's touchdowns came when he pushed through LSU's strongest linebacker (500+ pound bench press!) at the goal line to tie up the score at 7-7. His second touchdown was probably one of the strangest plays we have seen this year - or any year for that matter. Again, at the goal line, Tebow starts in the shotgun and rushes towards the goal line. The defense keys in and bunches up the middle, and at the last second, Tebow pulls back and jumps up, looking for tight end Tate Casey, who freed himself from LSU's All-American DB Landry, and double clutches a pop-up pass over the line to Casey, who, in Coach Meyer's words, "fell down, did six push-ups, does a cartwheel, and catches the ball"! Tebow's last touchdown was almost as spectacular. On another spread formation, Tebow fakes the QB draw, pulls back, and bombs it to a wide open Louis Murphy 35 yards away in the endzone.

Special teams also played great, pinning LSU for -10 yards on punt returns and causing a fumble on a put return, as well as a fumble on a kick return which was recovered in the end zone by an LSU player who was tackled immediately for a safety at the start of the second half, which accounted for the two points not caused by Tebow.

This season started with the Gator's facing an impossible schedule, filled with potent opponents such as Tennessee, Alabama, LSU, Auburn, Georgia, and FSU, and of course Darth Visor's South Carolina. We've beaten the first three, and face an angry Auburn next week, but for now, we enjoy our first 6-0 start since 1996!

Primary Care My !@#%!$@#

So, yesterday, Cherry felt sick in the morning. She was experiencing symptoms that had occurred a little over a month ago. At the time, she toughed it out and the symptoms went away. However, since this was the second time, we decided to seek medical help.

So, what's the first thing to do? Let's see... how about calling the doctor? I called our primary care physician's office at around 9:00 in the morning, and the receptionist told me that the doctors hadn't come in yet, but would take a message and have them call me back. Okay, cool deal. An hour and a half later, I still hadn't received the call, so I called them back. They said they would contact me soon, before noon. Noon rolls around, and still, no contact from the doctor. I call them back, and wouldn't you know it, all the doctors are off for the rest of the day, and all the nurses are out for lunch, so I can't even consult with anyone! What's the point of even having your practice open if you don't have doctors on duty?

At this point, I decided to try and go directly to a specialist, but, as many of you may know, under the absurd standard practices, you can't go to see a specialist on your own - your primary care physician has to refer you, which means another appointment would have to be made, usually at least a week away. Not to be blunt, but bluntly, my wife is sick NOW, not next week!

That left us with no choice but to go to the Emergency Room. To be perfectly honest, I wasn't so sure about the emergency room. I've heard they're always crowded and it takes forever, and the ERs on TV look overly chaotic and not particularly safe. However, the ER we went to was quite nice - it far surpassed my expectations. The equipment was all state of the art and the rooms were private, doored, and walled - much nicer than the ones from my Primary Care Physician's office. We were taken in within twenty minutes of showing up (compared to the hour wait at my doctor's office for an appointment for a routine physical!), and also unlike my doctor, the practicioner and nurse made sure we had no questions once Cherry was diagnosed and the treatment was prescribed.

So, the ER experience was quite nice, but we were told that follow-up would still have to be done with our primary care physician, which I was disappointed to hear. It's really so much trouble. If primary care physicians are so critical to all of your medical care needs, they should be a tad more reliable. No, I take that back, they should be damn reliable! Primary care my !@$#%@^!!!

Gators 28, Tide 13 and Another Fantasy Football Victory

Continuing with the theme of extremely descriptive post titles...

First things first! After suffering an embarrassing 31-3 defeat at Alabama last year (the first loss of the Urban Meyer era of Gator Football), sweet revenge was taken as the Gators defeated the Elephants 28-13, allowing no offensive touchdowns and improving to 5-0 on the season. Go get your Free Wallpaper (previewed below) from GatorCountry here! Check out the cool 1966 throwback uniforms!


I had my second Fantasy Football victory this weekend! Unlike last week's close 77-71 (or whatever it was) game, the Shaolin Warrior Monks hushed all critics of the aforementioned Larry Johnson trade by dominating the Palm Coast Scamsters 118-66, thanks again to the solid performance of Gator hero Rex Grossman and newly acquired (from the infamous trade) Bernard Berrian. The two connected on three long (around 40 yard) passes and one touchdown, giving me more than 50 points! My other trade acquisitions, Lamont Jordan, and kicker Lawrence Tynes, also contributed big, pitching in 29 and 12 points, respectively. On the other hand, Larry Johnson picked up a solid 31 points, Greg Lewis, who I traded to Shawn as well (but he dropped him) scored 29 points. At least for this week, I definitely got the better end of our trades!

Believe it or not, I actually am pretty busy here at work today, so that'll be the end of this post. But I will have some good stuff coming up soon! The ol' brain's been cookin' up all kinds of good stories!