Today is Jordan’s birthday. He’s still in St. Augustine Florida. Today is also his P-day so he was able to write. It sounds like he is beginning to see some great success. His letter from today is found here. Alison and I haven’t sent him anything for his birthday yet. We were planning on sending him some socks, but as was mentioned, life gets busy when school is in session.
Now onto school. For the most part things are going pretty well. I haven’t missed any homework yet or really come up against any brick walls. I’m not sure what my favorite class is yet (or what my worst class is either for that matter). I do know that the three classes that I chose to take (Micromachining, Analog IC Design, and Slavic Folklore) have been much more exciting than the two required courses (Engineering Probability and Statistics and Thermodynamics). This isn’t to say that the electives are easier, because that is definitely not true.
I have really enjoyed the Micromachining lab. We’ve only had one “real” lab so far (we had a safety session first) and it was really interesting. We were given a silicon wafer and had to measure the curvature of it with a special machine. After that we cleaned the wafer by rinsing it with methanol and another similar chemical and then rinsing it in de-ionized water and drying it in nitrogen gas. After that we soaked the wafers in a sulfuric acid/hydrogen peroxide solution and then in a hydrofluoric acid solution. After the wafers were clean and dry we put them into a furnace for 1 hour at 1000 o C. This was to grow a silicon dioxide layer. It may not sound too exciting to you, but this semester is exciting because I am finally doing things that can be applicable in real life. The first few years of EE were spent solving circuits. I still get plenty of that but we’ve branched out now.
My calling as the Elder’s Quorum President has kept me busy as well. It seems that I find out virtually daily things that I need to be doing, but haven’t been. It’s so far been a learning experience.
Alison and I got new phones a little while back. We showed them to Alison’s younger sister Abby who took the following pictures with the camera on my phone. I warned her not to take them – now they are accessible to anyone at anytime…
We are now signed up with Sprint. It’s so far been loads better than Verizon was. The biggest reason is because our phones now work in our apartment. Before, we couldn’t use our cell phones in our apartment because we couldn’t get service. The phones are really nice. They are LG pm-225. They are red, with 2 color screens and cameras. I’m excited to have a camera with me everywhere I go. I hope that I’ll be able to take a lot of interesting photos.
Well, life is good. Maybe I’ll tell you more about it sometime.
No comments:
Post a Comment