Sheesh, Where Have I been?

Hooray! School's Out! (It's acutally been out for 2 weeks now, but I can still get excited about that right?) Things here are going very well. This last semester was a busy one (as you can probably deduce from the lack of posts), but it also turned out to be a good one. I got the best grades that I've ever gotten while here at the U. I should take a full load with a pregnant wife, time-consuming church calling and change jobs in the middle of every semester. It seems to work out well... I will give a rundown of my grades below:

(MEEN 2300) Thermodynamics - B+
(ECE 3530) Engineering Probability and Statistics - A
(ECE 5720) Analog IC Design - A
(ECE 5221) Micromachining - A-
(RUSS 4900) Slavic Folklore - A-

GPA = 3.77

I'm pretty proud of myself. This will definitely boost my cumulative GPA.

After school had finished for the semester, I could finally buy what I had been looking forward to buying for a long time. For almost a year, Alison and I had been saving up for a new computer. I toyed with the idea of building one myself but, for various reasons (mainly I couldn't find a tower/case that I liked and had all of the ports that I wanted accessible on the front). We shopped around a bit before settling on an HP Pavilion model m7470n. It is a Media Center PC - so we don't have to buy a Tivo or a DVR now and it has pretty good specs.

Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual-core processor 4200+
Memory: 2GB PC3200 DDR SDRAM
Drives: Multiformat DVD+RW/CD-RW drive, double layer support, lightscribe capabilities
Hard Drive: 300 GB SATA
Also: TV Tuner, 9-in-1 media reader, ATI Radeon Xpress 200 graphics, and all of the usual stuff.

We also bought a 19" Samsung LCD moniter to go with the computer. We are set now to be able to do just about anything that we want. I would definitely like to upgrade the videocard to one with a TV output, to be able to watch recorded TV on the TV. I'll probably do this in a few months.

Alison is looking good. More and more pregnant every day. Look for some pictures to soon follow. Less than two months now until the baby's due date. How exciting is that? She has had a couple of showers already and we have gotten some good stuff. There's a ton of stuff you need though.

I've got a new job since I last posted. I now work for Pacificorp (Utah Power). I got an internship there and started on March 13. It's a really good job. During the school year I worked 20 hours a week and once summer started I upped my hours to 40 a week. I have been working 4 10-hour days in order to have a day off each week. I work 6:30 AM - 5:00 PM. I have been taking the bus in order to save money on gas and have a chance to read. The main thing that I have been doing at work is FeederAll updates. This basically consists of taking the Autocad maps of the circuits for a substation and using these maps to update another program (FeederAll) with the correct circuit. The updated circuits in FeederAll can then be used for various studies. It sounds exciting doesn't it? You won't find me complaining though because I'm getting paid for it!