Facebook? Me?? No Way!
I have always been opposed to the social networking sites. If I want to talk to my friends I can email or IM them. I have never needed a prefab website because I’ve had my own since the late ’90s. Not to mention all the problems with myspace. I remember when facebook first came out. It was limited to specific groups of people, university students, if I recall correctly. It was designed to only allow your friends in real life to see your profile, yada, yada, yada. It was better than myspace I thought, but if only your friends can see your profile then why can’t you just tell your friends what you’re up to? Why would anyone need a social networking site?
About a year ago I started having the feeling that I needed to get in touch with some old friends. See how they were doing, and reconnect. These weren’t just run of the mill friends. These were my best friends who I had lost contact with. Time and semi-frequent relocations tends to do that. There are two in particular who I have felt I needed to get into contact with. I started scouring the internet. Nothing. After a while I found one of them in a local newspaper, perhaps a BYU Idaho paper. His name was in the caption of a photo of a local band. He was playing the drums. That was the only thing I could find. I couldn’t even find his email address from BYU’s directory. The other friend has all but dissappeared.
A couple weeks ago a friend invited me to join facebook, it was one of those form letters, you know where everyone in that persons address book is invited; personal spam. I haven’t ever accepted any of her invitations before, why would I now? I ignored it for a few days, even deleted the email. It kept pestering me. I kept getting the feeling that I should do it. I even ran across an old journal entry of mine where I talked about how I wished I would always follow that little voice. Talk about prodding. I pretty much had to do it. So I found the email in the trash, and accepted the invitation.
During the application process that ensued I was asked about my entire life, the high schools I went to, where I went to college, where I work, where I live, where I go to church, the whole nine yards. Little did I know that it would use all this information to find my real life friends. It is a little scary how accurate it is. After I filled out the application it popped up a list of names and said you might know these people. The first person on the list was James Speirs, one of my best friends. One of the few people I’ve kept in touch with through a mission, college, and marriage. That’s cool I thought. The remainder of the entire first page was people I knew. Some of them are friends, some I wouldn’t be caught dead with, I guess facebook can’t know everything.
After choosing some friends I sent them a friendship invitation, where they accept that they know me and are my friends. After a few days I had a couple people ask to be my friends. A couple I didn’t know, it must be popular to have tons of ‘friends’, whether you know the people or not.
Anyway after a day or so it asked if I knew Nathan Hope, since we both are LDS and went to Temecula Valley High. Nate was one of my best friends when I lived there, in fact Nate was the one playing the drums in that band in Idaho. I’m glad I followed that nagging feeling. We’ve sent a few emails back and forth, and it’s nice to re-connect with someone you were good friends with and haven’t seen for 15 years.
As for Josh Corrington, I still haven’t found him. I drove by his dad’s house when I was working in the area, but it’s gone, and a subdivision now sits where their orchard was. Hopefully he’ll have that nagging feeling to join facebook.
In the mean time I’ll be wating for a message that says “you may be friends with Joshua Corrington”…
and for James to acknowledge that we’re friends.
Gas Prices
I can’t believe how high gas is. Here we are paying about $4.15 for a gallon. Ridiculous! Anyway, if history is any indication of the future there may be some respite. Laurie and I always keep track of our fuel economy, a habit I started about 4 years ago. So over the past 4 years the fuel prices seem to peak around June and then drop off. Sometimes they have come back up, but that is because of some local supply problems, i.e. in 2005 the second jump in prices was due to a fuel pipeline being shut down. Anyway I thought I’d share our price graph, it might not be as ‘accurate’ as professional statisticians like, but it is very accurate in that this is the price we have paid for fuel. The areas with a lot of squiggles in one place are times we have gone on vacation and paid different prices during a short period of time.
Research
I decided to post updates every now and then discussing the research I am doing for my masters degree. My topic relates to pavement design in arid regions. The specific topic is the design of highway pavements on expansive subgrade.
Texas department of transportation uses a very different model to account for subgrade expansion than Arizona does. My goal is to compare the two models using soils in Arizona. If I can obtain actual pavement performance data and link it to the properties of the subgrade I will be able to determine which model provides a more accurate prediction of how the roadway will respond, and therefore recommend a design method suitable for the soil in Arizona.
At the moment it seems like a very daunting task. First I have to figure out exactly how the Texas method works, and either obtain the computer code used in Texas, or write some myself to provide pavement designs for specific soil characteristics. Since I am familiar with the design methods used by the Arizona Department of Transportation it won’t be so difficult to write computer code for this.
Once this is done it will be a bit easier. I will feed the programs the same soil data and see what the recommended pavement design is. I will then compare the results and see how the two are related, if there is any relation. If I can get my hands on pavement performance data I will feed the programs the soil information and see which, if any, of the design methods is able to predict the actual pavement performance.
Then comes the time to write.
Hopefully I will be able to have all of this done by mid November. It is still dark, but there is a little light at the end of the tunnel.
Background Photos
For some reason I am always wanting to take good photos for my background on my computer. I have taken quite a few of these pictures, and thought I’d post a few.
Slope Stability Paper
All,
So apparently I don’t publish posts often enough, so here is a new post. I have been quite busy lately. Here a link to the paper I’ve spent 16 of the last 24 hours working on. If you feel inclined to read it do, and if you proof read it, I would appreciate the help (it is due on Tuesday; any corrections after that will just make me frustrated). After 16 hours I’m not to into reading it again. I’d just hand it in as is at this point, spelling mistakes, grammar errors and all. I have two more homework assignments to finish by Tuesday and a take-home final to do by Thurday. So it will probably be a while before I check in again, except to read comments about the errors on my paper.
-Brian
