I just noticed that it’s apparently been almost a week since I’ve posted here. My apologies if you’ve been trying to keep up with what I post here. Suffice it to say it’s been a busy week, and in addition I just haven’t run across a whole lot I’ve been dying to post. Here’s a quick survey of what’s been going on in my life.

Elisabeth and I have been pretty busy with planning for the wedding. Actually, she’s been doing most all of the planning for the wedding, while I’ve been working on after-wedding stuff, like the honeymoon, transportation, budgeting, finances, etc. Some of the hardest part lately is figuring out transportation and moving arrangements, since we’d like to move Elisabeth’s stuff from W.V. to Indiana sometime before the wedding. As some of you know, I’m driving my brother Jon’s truck for now since he’s deployed with the Marines right now, so at least I have the ability to haul some stuff when I need to. However, I’m not sure yet whether it will be practical for me to take a quick trip to Indiana sometime in the next 6 weeks (before I actually move back) since I’m pretty busy with stuff here at Clemson right now and probably will be well into July (more on that further on). I’m not sure if I can justify the expense of an extra trip either. On the other hand, if I take a detour to W.V. during the move back to Indiana it looks like it will cost at least and extra $150 for mileage charges, so I’m having trouble figuring out a way to do this relatively cheaply. If anyone has any ideas I’m all ears. 🙂

Last Saturday I helped my friend Tim Joiner move his Joomla installation from his development server to his personal site. I had already gone through that process myself, so I was able to give him a few pointers. It actually went pretty well once I was able to remember all the steps I took, except that our FTP connection was a bit of a pain. Anyway, it was fun and we got our main objective for the evening done along with a few tweaks to his website. Check it out sometime if you get a chance. You’ll notice it looks suspiciously similar to mine, which is due to the fact that he’s using the same publishing platform I am (Joomla) and a color variation of the same template. Needless to say, our next task is going to be to develop a unique custom-built Joomla template. I’ve never done that before though, so it might take a while.

My research has been going rather slowly lately, which is quite nerve wracking, since I have to be finished within another month. The biggest dilemma so far came about when we finally were able to test my apparatus design and found out it needed to be significantly modified. It ended up that the entire assembly I designed was slightly too long and needed to be modified. Unfortunately this is more complicated than simply making a single piece shorter, so we need to modify about 20 small pieces and manufacture several new ones. We had originally planned to be at the initial testing stage a couple of months ago, but various delays pushed that back, and now that we’ve reached it we’ve taken yet another step back so that now we’re effectively at the same place we were 6 months ago. I’ve been scrambling over the last several days to complete a redesign and finally got it over to the machine shop yesterday, so Dr. Sosolik and I have been pressuring them to expedite the machining process as much as possible. Due to the fact that we hadn’t actually tested my design it’s been difficult to include as much information as I would like about it in my thesis, which has held up the writing process significantly, but now that that’s done I’m going to be writing like mad for the next few weeks.

Several people (especially my fiance :)) have mentioned that I need more personal posts here, so hopefully this is a good start. I think that’s enough for now, but I’ll have more updates soon.