If anyone has been reading this, you may have noticed that I stopped updating early last semester (I'm a grad student, I think in terms of academic years).
This is not by accident. Semesters eat my life, just in general. It is difficult to justify doing "frivolous" things that my advisor or professors will never see. Heck, I'm still shocked /you/ are reading this.
However, that is no excuse for my failure to update during winter break, or even before classes in January. So, the way I see it, you are owed at least two more entries to this thing before summer begins.
Before I officially begin either of those entries, however, I wanted to explain the real reason I have not been keeping up with this blog, especially during the winter. Last semester, a lot of things changed for me. I stayed in roughly the same geographic location, but I became a new kind of student with different responsibilities and a wildly different living situation.
My world basically flipped upside down without my approval. Adjusting takes time, and doing good work while adjusting is completely possible (especially if you are as stubborn as I am), but takes a nontrivial amount of effort. Occasionally this means ignoring things. Occasionally it means sacrificing things. But it had to happen, and I am hopefully close to righting my world (or reorienting what I consider to be "up"...metaphorical gravity is a funny thing).
Additionally, I realized that I did not feel like chronicaling old projects in detail on this thing. It is a good exercise, sure, but that's why I have a lab notebook. I find it dull, and I can only imagine how a reader feels about it.
Therefore, I plan to revive this blog during the spring semester in a tentatively new direction. Excrutiatingly detailed projects, written like a science paper, just won't cut it anymore. Instead, I have a couple of new topics I hope to get in written form in the near future--/concise/ written form, mind you.
The candidates are:
- welded chain steel bridge (chain as a compressive element! The one project my senior year I felt proud of)
- how to choose an advisor (part II! With nuts!)
- waxing eloquently about the oceans (I gave two talks last semester about this, and only further realized my passion for keeping our world in some semblance of working order)
- Teaching (fluid mechanics, what else? I have ducklings now!)
- Grad projects (?? Let us be honest, I have no idea how much of what I currently do can be published casually in a blog. Name of the game in science).
So. Hold me to at least two of the above topics and I will consider myself to have made up for December and January.
In the meantime. Things change. Hence the title of this blog ("fluid" archive. Get it? Get it? Poke.) I'll try to keep this at least moderately active depsite all of the craziness of real life.
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