Thursday 25 March 2010

k-epsilon is the industry standard two-equation turbulence model


There has been drinking and Tapas.

There have been heroically manly exploits in the field of car poking.

There has been an oddly confessional road trip with a manager from the Big Gay Department Store, delivering what later transpires to be completely the wrong thing to a customer.

There has been brightness.

But mostly, there has been a bastarding fuck of a computational fluid dynamics assignment, which up until the hand-in date (today) has utterly consumed me somewhat. Even sleep offered no respite; each morning my alarm would go off and awaken me from a dream in which I was resolving the pressure drop of a continuous fully turbulent flow through a rough walled pipe of known dimensions... and I would hit the snooze button, so I could fall back to sleep and carry on writing the report.

Thankfully, this CFD beast has now been slain - after days of wrestling with incomprehensible theory and even more incomprehensible software, I resolved to just blag the rest of it and hand the fucker in. So I am now free to dedicate myself to working on the other two neglected projects, and preparing for three exams on subjects that make no sense.


Wednesday 17 March 2010

work rant


If you are one of these people;
  • Instead of treating escalators like the moving staircases they are, you like to just stand in the middle of the damn thing. And then, when you eventually reach the top/bottom, you just stop and look around gormlessly trying to work out where you are whilst a colossal human pile-up forms behind your dithering fat arse.
  • You talk on your mobile phone the entire time that I am serving you.
  • You just stare at the message on the screen of the PIN terminal that says "PLEASE ENTER PIN" until the system times out; then tell me that it's telling you to remove your card.
  • When it's time to pay, you look a bit surprised; and then have to rummage through your bag to find your purse, and then have to rummage through your purse to find your card, and then have to rummage through your bag again to find your diary, and then have to flick through your diary to find your PIN... You must have known that this would happen? You surely realised that at some point you would have to pay for your shopping? WHAT IS THE FUCKING PROBLEM HERE?!
  • You can't understand why none of the 10,000 or so customers we serve in a day are allowed to just leave their shopping behind the till whilst they do something else.
  • When I ask "would you like your receipt in the bag, or with you?" you respond with "yes."
  • When the till cannot read the barcode of a particular item, you say "well, it must be free then!" And you think that's really fucking funny.
  • You expect me to know where you parked your car.
...I hate you.


Monday 8 March 2010

engineers have minds made of cold hard metal logic. that's why we make such informed and sensible decisions


Y'know how you always have the best ideas when you're drunk?


I am now part owner of the above BMW E36 328Ci.

Telling my mother that I had become a BMW driver was a little bit like revealing that I had been caught looking at child pornography at work. I would imagine.

I have entered into this very dark period of my life as part of a joint venture with a very Welsh girl that likes orangutans but hates toasters, and her chap Matt "why are you melting my toaster, is it because I am so superior?" Smith, after we spent an enjoyable morning trying to find out what it would take to break a Honda Prelude. Despite our best efforts, we never found out; but since the 'lude in question was mine, we decided that the next time we embarked on such a venture, it should be in something more expendable. And so we spent a booze fuelled evening scouring autotrader.co.uk for cheap yet fruity motors, and came up with a fairly decent shortlist of Toyota Celicas, a Honda Civic VTi and the BMW. Naturally, all of the mighty Japanese cars had been sold by the time that Matt and Laura got to see any of them (I was busy perfecting my fake smile at the Big Gay Department Store at the time), and so we plumped for the hideous triumph of form and function that is the BMW. It pains me to admit it, but apart from a startling amount of surface rust and a moderately disturbing coolant leak, it is a pretty fucking good car.

We have our first trackday booked for a few weeks from now, and speculation as to how we will kill our Bavarian track slag is rife. The current list of doomy predictions, helpfully compiled by a lovely Pixie, looks like this:
  • Head gasket failure
  • Clutch and/or gearbox failure
  • Chassis damage
  • Rear axle damage
  • Death by Armco (driver failure)
  • Death by Armco (brake failure)
  • Fireball
  • Crash on the way to/from track
  • Rust
  • Brake failure (sabotage)
PLACE BETS NOW!!!


Personally, I think it's highly optimistic to suggest that the car might rot into a festering pile of orange dust before we annihilate it ourselves; but thanks anyway for the vote of confidence, Sam.

And as for the possibility of brake failure... we're watching you, you sneaky RoboJew...