A Game of Firsts

My first presentation of my first paper at my first conference.

I certainly helped that the CSCE (Canadian Society of Civil Engineers) 2013 conference was held in Montreal, QC. After a bit of a shaky practice the day before in front of Sriram and Scott's research teams, I fixed things up majorly on Tuesday ready to present on Wednesday afternoon. There were a few other people from the civil department going, but Scott and I didn't happen to coordinate transportation with them, so we rented a car and drove down early on Wednesday. Plans for this trip also included doing the same type of field work that I did at the bridge in Brossard but at the bridge that lead to the spa Bota Bota (also built by MAADI Group), see Turlough, and go dancing at Cat's Corner.

After some really great and enlightening talks along the way, in the last few hours of the drive I finally pulled out my laptop and went over the changes in my presentation with Scott. Arriving within good time for my 3:30 session, I had to change and get ready (after a 6-7 hour drive) in the hotel bathroom since I couldn't check in. We weren't in the conference hotel, but we got bumped to each our own executive suite, which was ok with me!

A familiar view

Due to some mix ups, Scott was not able to attend my talk, and it turned out to be a very empty room. The one person I did know that was in the room was Jacques from the Aluminium Association, so I had a good presentation, but not too many witnesses, but that's ok. From then on, I could enjoy the conference!

The first night at the young professionals social, I met Kevin and Matt, two recently graduated UW civils that were in the dynamics class I TAed. There was apparently a new competition at the CSCE conference to present capstone projects and UW sent them. Hanging out with and a few others from University of Saskatchewan at dinner, the evening ended relatively early because everyone was very tired. But now that I had found to UW students I knew, Scott's conflict the next morning with chairing a session with the time slot we arranged with Bota Bota do to accelerometer instrumentation on their aluminium bridge would no longer be an issue.

The next morning I woke up, I meandered to the conference for breakfast, gathered the guys and took the car to the Vieux-Port with a heavy bag of big accelerometers (the kind we had before), accelerometers the size of sugarcubes, my laptop, the DAQ, and the mounting blocks we built for the last field test.

Portfolio picture from MAADI Group's site

Having a few extra hands around was a huge help, and it would also would have taken a much longer time had I also had to jump on the bridge and collect the data. After a few hours of us collecting tests and moving the accelerometers, Scott came by after his session to check out our installation. Scott and I later met with Alex at the office for a bit and got to hear about some really neat things he has in the works. When I responded yes to whether I brought my swim suit with me, Alex gave me a pass for the Bota Bota spa. Already planning a run the next day, I now knew how I was going to do my cool down.

Returning the equipment back to the hotel, I returned to the conference to listen to more talks and meet some pretty interesting people. Dinner was at the 3 amigos for the young professionals group, and I found out that many of the organizers or older people of the group were GNCTR captains or on the committee when it was at their university in recent years. Needless to say, that was a really awesome dinner table for me because I'm still very interested in being in the loop (UW Alumni team!).

I made a slightly early exit from dinner to go visit Turlough who originally invited me to the Rialto, but did not feel well enough to go in the end. So I went out on the metro to see him at his new place by Jean-Talon. We drank tea, chatted, and watched classic Doctor Who. It was a very comfortable evening!

Saturday morning I woke up early (like every other day during this conference) and went for a run down Peel to the Lachine Canal, along the water past Bota Bota, into Old Montreal, and back. Still catching breakfast at the conference, I went to the morning presentations and at an early lunch I scooted out to the spa. It was my first time at a spa and it was very tranquil. The sauna was peaceful and I just lay there for a while trying to let go a bunch of stress that had built up in the past few weeks, the driving, and presenting. I had to say, looking out over the edge of the jacuzzi and seeing all of downtown Montreal was pretty unique and awesome.

I eventually left and made my way back to the conference (I felt I should at least make a token appearance that afternoon?). Scott had his second and final presentation, which was nice that we didn't have to stick around on Saturday when people would be leaving the conference throughout the day.

Attempts to meet up with my cousin fell through sadly, but I made it out to Dunn's to have a victory smoked meat sandwich, walked up and around Mount Royal, had a small nap, then walked over to Cat's Corner. So ensued a really awesome (as expected) 4 hours of dancing, along with meeting new and old faces. After the run, lots of walking around Montreal, and dancing, my legs were getting pretty tired. On my way home, I came across a café that was still open and had some tasty looking macarons, which made a nice treat on the way back. Second super late night of the conference, I crashed and woke up 3 hours later!

Saturday was just a pack stuff up, get a little breakfast and head out, where we made it back to Waterloo around 1pm. Oh! and the one day I only had a coffee as a lunch, but I won another free coffee, so there were lots of happy things that happened on this trip. Oh yes, and I bought a pillow from HMV that looks like a TARDIS, I would have kicked myself if I assumed the small HMV in Waterloo had it and then didn't.

I miss Montreal. Is there a way I can live in multiple cities at once?

To Montreal and back again

From November 20th to 21st, I returned to Montreal to do more testing on the bridge in Brossard (now called the Daigneault Creek bridge in literature). Ayan's wireless sensors were ready for testing and I was to go with him because I knew the bridge, knew the testing procedure, and I could drive.

It was a really crazy schedule on the Tuesday since I had class until about noon and then I raced to the car rental place at Weber and Columbia, picked up the car, tossed our equipment in the back (which was nothing compared to the last trip), and picked up Ayan. The only equipment we essentially had was a laptop, two wireless sensors that had 2 axes of measurement, a receiver plugged into the laptop, and double-sided tape. As a side note, this was the first time I got to rent a car since my being under 25 normally makes this a more costly venture.

We made it out of Waterloo by 1pm and made it into Montreal just before 7:30pm, we were lucky with traffic. I had booked the same hotel as last time, and this time I brought my swim suit just in case. As background, Richard the lab tech gave me a hard time that I neglected to tell him that the hotel had a pool before we left. After a yummy meal across the road (Boulevard Taschereau is convenient like that), and taking home a piece of tarte au sucre, I went to sleep quite quickly after a long day.

The next morning we both got up at a good hour, got breakfast, and headed out, not needing to be crazy early for a long setup. We got to the site and started to check the equipment and go a few tests. Being very scientific, I used small rocks to delineate the location of the sensors (since I remembered their location with respect to the trusses from last time).

November 21, 2012 at Daigneault Creek Bridge (rocks on right side to mark location of sensors)

The accelerometers were a prototype design from a subsidiary company of PCB piezotronics, so it was simply a board on a battery pack. There was apparently a casing available, but it did not fit well. The sensors measured acceleration in the long direction of the board and out of plane. Since we were measuring the vertical and lateral accelerations, I picked up little aluminum angles from the UW machine shop to attach to the sides of the battery pack with double-sided tape. Double sided tape was also being used to attach the angles to the top of the bridge girders.

Wireless accelerometer setup. Double sided tape held the aluminum angles to the battery pack and to the bridge

Me with the installation of the wireless sensor on the bridge girder

 Since we only had two accelerometers, but three sets of locations to acquire data (1/4, 1/2 and 3/4 lengths of the bridge), we had to repeat all tests three times over. We ran all the tests that we were capable of replicating (which excluded the crowd, bicycle, and car loading). This time I was the test subject while Ayan stopped and started the data acquisition from his laptop setup from the truck of the rental hatchback (which turned out to be handy).

No cart, no filters, no DAQ, no signal conditioners, just a laptop and a receiver this time around

The last test was really funny to do because Ayan wanted to try a forced loading for a minute by jumping and then wait a minute to measure free vibration, doing this at all 6 sensor locations). After the first few tests though, he cut the jumping time to 30 sec because it was a lot of jumping!

This time around we didn't have any visitors, and Sriram was willing to come down from Ottawa if we had any issues, but everything went smoothly. The only thing we found was that the sensors on occasion would just stop talking to the receiver, which might have been attributed to the cold (around 7ºC). We were done by 1pm, so we hopped back in the car and headed back to Waterloo. We hit a bit of traffic west of Kingston due to construction and got caught in the tail end of commuter Toronto traffic, but overall not too bad.

It was a very brief trip, we didn't get to go to Montreal proper this time around, but I still enjoyed the trip (and got work done). Oh, and as a plus, I got to learn more about Ayan and had some really interesting conversations with him along the way. :)

Research field work in Montreal

I've noticed that since I started grad school, the next question is often 'So...what do you do?' Well, in short, I do this:

A well-thought out setup. I'm serious, it worked out really well :D

Reusing covies, thanks GNCTR!

Promotional picture worthy, couldn't have done it without Richard

It can hold a car!

The subject for our running tests

Those are the 'yay for good weather and successful experiment' smiles

So, a bit of backstory, I had just returned from New Orleans 9:30 pm on October 1st. I was to meet Sriram at 8:00 am on October 2nd to get the last of things to pack in the CPATT Sprinter van before we departed for Montreal at 9:00am. Needless to say, all of my planning had to happen before I left for NOLA Thursday, so I was super prepared, and yet I still forgot my pajamas (don't worry I packed spare clothes and I didn't embarrass myself).

Sriram and Scott left in the rental car to take care of some errands and they would be meeting us at the ONroute stop past Toronto. They were also in charge of picking up the a 12th cable to run from an accelerometer to the signal conditioner. I couldn't find the last one in the lab so we unfortunately had to order one. Upon calling the supplier than morning, I had a bit of a panic when the receptionist said 'Oh ya, we shipped it'. Luckily they also had one at their office which we had to get before 5 pm.

Richard, Pampa, and I tossed the rest of the equipment that Richard had not yet packed on Monday into the tall van (as wide as a pick up truck but tall enough to stand in). We knew what we were generally getting ourselves into thanks to some pictures and dimensions courtesy of Alex's people at MAADI doing some surveying for us in the summer. We knew we needed long ladders to reach the midspan of the bridge from the underneath complete with fall arrest equipment for Richard (the only one trained). We had our non-destructive accelerometer mounting brackets all machined and ready to go. Toss in our personal luggage, about 4 laptops, Sriram's bicycle and all the cabling we'd need and away we went. Driving to Montreal was so uninterrupted, we forgot to point out the CN Tower to Pampa (this also happened on the way back!). Even just driving on the 401, Pampa was impressed by the colours of the leaves, which reminded me that she's only been from Pearson to Waterloo since she moved here on September 1. Well, she was going to drive through/visit Canada's two largest cities, a great outing for her!

Arriving to Brossard, we park the van up on the path and we have our first look around. The first impression while walking along the bridge was that 'wow, this is bouncy, yay we'll have data!'. We all got excited because we have known about the bridge for almost a year but we finally got to see it in person. Due to the embankments, 3 of the 6 locations (1/4, 1/2 and 3/4 bridge lengths on the north and south side) were easily accessible from the ground without a ladder. The centre north location required the long ladder off of the embankment and the centre south location was over the water. For this one, Richard put the base of the ladder in the creek and used the step ladder horizontally from the channel side to walk out to the ladder. I trust he knew what he was doing because he worked extensively as a rigger on telecommunication towers.We decide that since they're easily accessible, they could easily be taken/vandalized during the night, so we waited until the morning. Sriram and Scott met up with us with the crucial cable. Apparently there was a giant traffic jam and Sriram walked the last 1/2km to the supplier to get it before they closed (and it was still after 5pm but we got lucky). We had a nice relaxing dinner, talking about the future of the structures lab, planning and such (not that I could really contribute but it was informative none the less). Oh yes, and Richard (and Scott somewhat) gave me grief for not letting them know that the hotel had a pool and a sauna. :P

Wednesday morning we wake up nice and early, get breakfast at the hotel, and head out to site. Unloading stuff bit by bit, we all have our own tasks to do, and it worked out really great. Richard got the mounts on the bridge, Sriram installed the accelerometers on the mounts, I laid out the cabling with Pampa's help, while Scott fielded questions from Jaques from the Aluminum Association and Alex from MAADI. Alex was a really interesting person to talk to because he's the owner of the company that made the aluminum pedestrian bridge that we were working on, and that would also be providing UW with our own 70' aluminum pedestrian bridge. He's clearly excited about his work and puts all his effort into his company. It only took a couple of hours to set up, checking the working condition of the accelerometers, signal conditioners, low-pass Butterworth filters, and data acquisition software. I didn't want something to bugger up and not know where it was coming from.

Tests we did were; heel drop for free vibration, single person walking, two people walking synchronously or asynchronously, a runner, a cyclist, jumping off the railing, a walking crowd, a running crowd, ambient vibration, and (our favourite by Alex's request) driving a car. What I found funny was that I was left on the bridge for an extended amount of time to wait for random pedestrians and run the data acquisition for them. Meanwhile, everyone else went for lunch, though they also picked something up for me, I felt funny being exiled to the middle of the bridge. Then when Sriram saw someone coming he'd yell and point saying 'Ann! Random person!'. Now, being Montreal, not everyone would speak English, so I thought that it was rather funny for pedestrians.

By mid-afternoon we were done collecting data, cleanup was fast and we were all done. I'd say it was a super successful day, especially since even the evening before, it was calling for rain. It was dry and fair all day. It looked a little cloudy towards the end but we got lucky. We headed back to the hotel where we regrouped and went downtown to join Alex at a pub. We first dropped in on the MAADI office, which was in a tech incubator-type centre like the Accelerator Centre in the Research and Technology Park at UW. Since Alex was crazy busy, we decided to meet him downtown later, and went for a walk. This is when Pampa got really excited about being in Montreal (which made me proud of my hometown). Walking along Peel and then St. Catherines, we stopped for a few pictures.

Meeting up with Alex, he talked about some of the interesting projects he has been a part of, including floating barges in Florida and pedestrian bridges around Quebec. We were able to stop by his one project, which were bridges leading from an old boat renovated into a floating spa docked at the Montreal harbour. Needless to say, the pictures show that it is a very high-end trendy place now.

Bridge to Bota Bota, a floating spa in Montreal, actually I didn't realize this picture has me (left), Pampa (center), and Sriram (right)

This also meant that we walked through the old part of Montreal, cobblestone, European buildings, and all. It was great, I hadn't personally been there in...ages really. It was great for Pampa and a bunch of the others either hadn't been before or hadn't been in a while. I love Montreal <3 p="p">
The next morning we took at a leisurely pace where Scott took us to see his family house. The Walbridge family had a large plot of land near Bedford, QC, about an hour south of Montreal in the townships. On the land is Quebec's only 12-sided barn, still standing from around the 1880's. It was really neat to see because inside the barn, the centre platform rotated to allow easy entrance/exit of horse and wagon, but also easy loading of hay bales into the stalls. The roof work on the barn was complex and quite remarkable. Richard was very interested in the history and was gushing over how things were built. We went for a bit of a walk in the forested area, passing an old sugar shack where they made maple syrup. Since the trees were changing colours it was really something special. While Scott had to meeting at the family house, the rest of us ventured to the café in Mystic (the hamlet). They had an extensive set of chocolates, preserves and everything made form scratch. This is where Richard found maple syrup pie that was closer to my mom's tarte au sucre than the one we had the first night. I was all excited, yay French Canadian dessert that's pure sugar.

Oh yes, and to Bedford and almost all the way home, I drove the Sprinter van. That's right, on the 20 I drove the van, and confidently at that! :D I was proud, though I did have a bit of guidance from Richard to start since I had never driven anything bigger than my family's Chevy Malibu. Getting home at 9:30pm, I was tired from having travelled over 4000km by plane and 1200km by car, but I had a lot of fun, and the research trip seems successful (from what I can tell so far). Of course, here's hoping that the data looks nice, then it'll all be worthwhile!

Beginning of grad studies!

So this post is a little delayed, which would correctly indicate that I have been super busy (not just school but yes school's taken a big chunk of time). I'm still working for Walterfedy partime when I don't have classes, lab work or meetings. I enjoy the two types of pace, academic and industrial, I feel it keeps me grounded.

I'm taking the only civil structural grad course being offered this term called Risk and Reliability, as well as an ECE stochastic processes course in relation to signal processing. It's something different but I'm trying to get a feel for where I could take my master's thesis afterwards. So far both courses are good, had the same first 2 weeks if lectures since they have to review statistics. The ECE course will definitely be higher math, should be interesting.

So the big news is that We were finally able to nail down a date to go to Montreal to instrument MAADI's aluminum pedestrian bridge spanning 44m across a ditch in Brossard. I'm super excited because we've been planning this since June but the date would get pushed back. We're hooking up up to 12 accelerometers on mounts that will be clamped on the underside of the bridge, hook them up to a data acquisitions system, and collect data on the laptop. An added challenge is 1) we needed to bring our own power and 2) we're leaving the day I get back drom New Orleans. :P

I'm also excited because some of the coolest people from my graduation year stuck around for MASc too :)

My office has been frequently frequented by my friends/people hungry for baked goods. :P

So yes, things have been going exceptionally well, busy, but very well.

I have two offices!

Last week I started working part time at WalterFedy, a consulting engineering firm in Kitchener that I had the pleasure of working with for two of my co-op terms, once in the mechanical department and the other in the civil department. Had I not been able to get NSERC funding for the USRA in the fall, I could have gone back to them for a co-op job since I liked their scope of work, the quality of work, and the office environment. When I had figured out that I'd have some time to spare before and after my travels this summer, I contacted them to some work, provided it would would around travels plans, finishing up my research work with the viscous damper and the new research work concerning the aluminum bridge as my masters' project.

It felt comfortable coming back, so much so that Brian taped a note to my monitor with the projects with work to be done, some of them were the same jobs as I had worked on 2 summers ago, though instead of the prelim design, they are now in the construction addenda stage. I got paraded around with the co-ops so that made me feel a little funny. Civil definitely has a busy summer ahead, I definitely won't be lacking in work despite there being one CAD student and one field/engineering student. The department is about 30% bigger than I remember it 2 years ago and the work is just increasing because they brought in some people with some pretty interesting niche talents.

At the same time, I have been looking to get the lab tests done on the viscous damper at UW. Apparently the department may already have some of the gear so I may be able to just patch the pieces they have rather than ordering all new stuff. Chances are it'd be a shorter wait time, ha.

I had made a quick stop at my office after my physio appointment, and sitting there made me sad that the shelving above my head was so dusty and disorganized. That is no longer a problem :) I like have a clean and organized work space. Taking care of both offices is kinda fun, I'm building up my emergency food reserves, the way I arrange stuff for super maximum efficientcy.

On the topic of arranging stuff, I should start thinking of how to pack smart for my trip... :D I'm so excited it's so soon!

Success at last, at cost of health

I have triumphed over OpenSees, my model renders, the natural frequency is within predicted/reasonable numbers (around 2-3 seconds). This obviously makes me very happy considering this is 2-3 months in the making. It took a month to really get a feel for OpenSees and Abaqus in order to really get into it. Even though there wasn't much in-program help for OpenSees, there is a fantastic wiki page and a forum that are a million times more helpful when you do have that handle on what you are trying to achieve. Using MatLab for the laying out of nodes, loads, masses, and elements was way easier than using the tcl built-in commands of OpenSees, had I known sooner! I have pictures of my bridge, but I will wait to post them until I render them better (lines instead of dots).

Even Abaqus is going not too shabby, I reduced it to a 2D problem because all of the literature I was finding from papers and grad courses here at UW only did 2D. That's going way better! Doing some literature review to see if people have thought about what kind of foam they'd put in the ground to absorb the vibrations before they reach a structure.

In other research news, I've bounced around the idea of staying on these projects part time next term. I know I promised everyone I wouldn't take a sixth course or a URA, but this makes sense, right? Right? I'm at least not taking a sixth course, though my schedule is pretty awesome: 4th year design course, FEM, Dynamics, Structural Systems, and Applied Math: Modelling of Cellular Systems. I battled to get that last course as it's a third year AMATH course, but I heard it's good and useful cause it introduces dynamics but from the proof/math perspective. Like...nothing like that happens in engineering, so sad. Plus, it's biology, huge win, because I miss it so.

~*~*~

This week marked my first grad school application officially sent in. UBC only notifies the referees once you pay, so I figured I should just stop sitting on my application. Next is Berkeley on December 14th, UofMichigan at Ann Arbor in February, and UW in March. It starts... eep!

~*~*~

I've had the same persistent cough for over three weeks now, and it has also accumulated congestion, joy! Funny how I get the most work done when I'm sick. Definitely seems like there's something going around, but no one in my immediate vicinity is sick, good for them :). John's been super busy with his paper so it's allowed me some space to try and recover and feel better when we have time to hang out.

In other news, someone's going to ULHS next year and has a ticket already! Early bird sales were just recently and I got mine for $120. Huge savings, AND on the off chance I can't go, it will be super easy to sell without losing any money. I'm already excited. This actually threw a few things to the front of my mind, including what the heck I'm doing with myself in the summer. I had thought of Herrang, but meh, it's too lindy hopper for me. Iceland/northern Europe's still on the table, Anna's offering that I go to Scotland with her, a road trip around the US isn't bad, North American competitions/workshops are definitely an idea too (or combining the last two).

As a recap, the Naomi Uyama workshop and night with music by her and Gordon Webster was really great. I'm listening to the music from his CDs as I write this :D. Lots of life at the Button Factory, people from  Waterloo (even those who haven't been out in ages), Hamilton, Toronto, and Windsor. I have great hopes for the future of Waterloo's event potential!

Upcoming stuff:

Waterloo Holiday Dance - December 2nd

Hamilton Christmas Dance 

Toronto Christmas Dance

Tayler's coming to Waterloo

Christmas :D
New term

TUX V - January 20th ish

Followlogie - January 27th ish

GNCTR - February 8th ish

Swing-a-dance? Quebec City February

Troitsky in Montreal - March 2nd

Pirate Swing in Ann Arbor - March 9th

busy!

Settling in, modelling, and frosh week

And thus concludes this year's frosh week, folks! For once I was actually involved in it since my sparse attendence of my own frosh week four years ago. I was going to take a picture of the engineering frosh teams that I could see through a window down the hall from my office, but then I realized it was not entirely impressive. I definitely heard the chants, cheering, and praise of Ed Com, I saw the strings of yarn taped along every walkway and lots of hard hats, pink ties, and lanyards.

This past Tuesday I co-taught swing dancing lessons for the frosh Variety Night. Since this event is so free form, there's just a whole bunch of student everywhere overloaded with activities. Even a basic lesson of jig walks in 30 minutes is super speedy. Though it seemed like people enjoyed themselves, tried something new, which for frosh week is what counts.

On Thursday was the student team lunch where the engineering frosh got fed after their morning of junkyard wars. The whole week I was trying to work out how to get the concrete toboggan out to the V1 green, but I didn't know how the display case was locked and who was in charge. After much running around and the people seemingly in charge being away on vacation, I threw in the towel because I didn't want to take off the whole morning from work just to figure it out. When I got to the GNCTR table though, Richard the lab tech pulls up in the CivE truck with the toboggan. It seems the 2013 team got enough people to lift the display case - yes, lift, it's bolted together to slide the panels out but it's not secured to the floor - and loaded the 300 lb sled into the truck. The luncheon turned out great, I conveniently had my laptop so I had the GNCTR 2011 highlights and the RMR segment on loop for people to watch. It was overcast but the weather held out which made it more pleasant, windy as heck though. It's definitely fall now and I'm enjoying it tremendously. Heading out to a forested area for a hike in a few weeks will be very pretty.

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As for work, I successfully got keys for my office on Tuesday. It's quite silly how the whole process to acquire keys involves civil eng. deparment, student accounts, civil eng. department again, then key distribution. It was a lot of biking around campus for something so simple. Though I had fun parting the crowds of froshlings with my speedy bike while ringing the bell. They have to learn and there's no time like the present!

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Work-wise, I'm beginning to get somewhere in my work. I understand the basic of Open Sees and I've been using their well-laid out wiki page and examples as a framework for that I need. Turns out that all that the MTO would require is a stick model of the bridge, which avoids me trying to get the 3D slab models to work for the bridge deck. Like any program, you can go into more detail, but at this point, only a theory-level model is required. Due to Open Sees having its own commands, the error messages are complex and hard to decipher, so I've spent a lot of time trying to understand where and what goes wrong.

Since I mastered the 2D framing system, I moved onto a 3D frame and I will be sculpting it to the shape I need. Rather than a simple, equal dimensioned bay 2D frame to use as a basis, the 3D frame example incorporates complex cross sections, being the actual concrete column dimensions with geometrical accurate rebar. This adds a few text files to the program, which I feel some information that I would still require would be buried in there. Another issue is that while I'm currently just augmenting my 2D frame model with 3 dof to a 3D model with 6 dof, I feel that some commands may not operate in the same way or work at all. It's hard to tell with the cryptic error messages. The only way that Asim said you can find the error is just to return a line to the command prompt so that you know if the error happens before or after that ouput.

The end of this week also boasted the installation of and tinkering with Abaqus, the FEM software. The pretty convoluted setup included a static IP to my machine and transferring of an unused license. Now that I think about it, the process was simple enough, it's just that no one who takes care of this type of thing was around for the past two weeks. My first impression is that it's like AutoCAD and Photoshop in the sense that its GUI is complex, technical, and insightful once you know what on earth is going on. I look forward to it :P

Diary of a grad wannabe: Day 3...

After a good Tuesday where I got a desk, got briefed on what I'll be doing for the term and starting to find out what to do with my computer situation. Abaqus needs a static IP for the license to work, it's also a Windows only software. The available towers are old and controlled by the univsersity, not so desirable. Still working this out, but it might work on my Mac on boot camp, here's hoping!

Day 3 was nice. Started off at home with more readin on OpenSees and doing practice work. I headed into my office where we I got a bunch of papers to read over and get acquainted with the soil-structure interaction project. There was one paper in particular that will be very helpful because it studies the surface vibrations of trains on structures using Abaqus.

What was particularly great today was my discussion today wit Sriram about grad school. He knows that I'm interested in continuing education, but that I don't know where yet. Asking where I'm interested in going (I mentioned Berkley, Cornell and Austin for the US, and Waterloo, UBC, and UofT for Canada), he give his open opinion which resonated with what Rob had told me a while ago. Apparently one of his colleagues from Cornell is due to arrive in Waterloo at the end of October who does stochastic structural analysis. Apparently he's super nice and I'd get to see if I'm interested in his work. I'm told I should also check Michigan, Standford, and Illinois, this is a corner of the states that has so many colleges that it just confused me a bunch and I gave up (so this helps). Like Rob, Sriram made an indication that he'd like me to stay here but that it's my choice. What was really great of Sriram was his attitude that he'd help me with my application even if in the end I chose not to stay at Waterloo working for him. I guess that's the kind of nuturing behaviour that would attract people to stay.

[Thursday's update]: I got boot camp to work on the Mac so I have Windows 7 and Lion on one omnipotent machine. Also I got locked out of my office again and I locked my bike but failed to lock it to the bike rack. It was still there though. I supposed I was distracted today.

Sorry and I need to point out the shoes I found. I don't wear heels unless it's a special occasion, and even then! But when I was in Uptown Waterloo once I saw those and I had liked the style but hadn't found a pair I liked. I waited until they brought in my size and I'm so glad I did! They're lovely and they smell great! (and look pretty darn awesome too!)

4A, 4B, fall RA, grad studies, blogs, and more dancing

Having my last final on the 9th, it was a while until I started getting the marks back, and all is well! The only one to have not updated yet is law (typical :P). What I proved is that I could totally overload my schedule and still keep on top of everything. By no means am I doing this ever again. Managing six courses, part-time research, swing club, concrete toboggan, and travelling to Miami and Chicago were more than enough, but it was a really fun summer. If I am tempted to make a third term with a sixth course, for my sanity and yours, please stop me :).

The next academic term is shaping up to be

• CIVE 401 - Project course 2
• CIVE 405 - Structural dynamics
• CIVE 415 - Structural systems
• CIVE 422 - Finite element analysis
• CIVE 460 - Engineering biomechanics

The last one is the most iffy, it will be either biomechanics or geotech III, both of which are nice but I'm not overly thrown one way or the other. The term will be very structural based (more than enough courses for the structural certificate), and very math heavy. Due to the high level of interest in the topic though, it should be an interesting and perhaps even fun term. Seeing as this will be the standard course load, it might be a nice break (plus once the Iron Ring Ceremony comes in February, the tone will totally change).

I met with Dr. Narasimhan today to figure out what I'll be doing this upcoming term, and it looks interesting. The two projects lined up are:

1. FEM modelling in Open-Sees of existing MTO highway bridge (either steel or reinforced concrete in Ottawa or Toronto). Later in the term, the team will collect dynamical data and compare it to the models.
2. Modelling of soil-structure interaction using ABACUS from dynamic vibrations of subways or light rail in the sonic frequencies.

The first month will be starting to dig into the software, the topics, and find reading material to get my foot in the door.

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One thing I noticed recently is the explosion of blogs in my close circle of friends. Chantelle made a blog to recount her experiences in St. John's, Nfld for her masters. Mike has had and is currently improving his site. John is also totally revamping his blog site by hand without templates. Turlough is interested in a blog as well. I guess we've all hit points in our lives where experiences are worth noting, be it school, work, or hobbies.

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Recently, I decided that with my work keeping me in Waterloo, I will have time for my hobbies (even moreso than if I was in Toronto). This definitely includes curling and swing dancing. In particular, I decided to really step up the dancing. My aspirations are to gain the experience to teach and to maybe try competing someday. I suppose I miss part of that from figure skating where it was a reoccurring goal. So while maintaining the president position at the UW Swing Club, I'll hope to work more with John, Krister, and Dave/Amanda (through the Hep Cat Hoppers). I also got asked by Turlough if I'd work with him as my dance partner, which sounds like a great idea. I'm very excited! I've got some ideas for this term's upcoming UW Swing Club for fun lessons, cool moves (and maybe an event?). There'll also be beginner lessons for the UW frosh week Variety Night which should be fun and a whole bunch of socializing :).

Next dancing workshop in the wings (still deciding) is the Nick Williams and Sylvia Sykes balboa workshop in Montreal on the weekend of September 24th. Another one for sure is Followlogie in Montreal on the weekend of January 20th. I went last year with Martha, Dave, Amanda, Charlie, Kathleen, and Phil and it was tons of fun.

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As a side note, I really miss Anna and Chantelle, I got too used to them being around, in particular during the summer.

The end is nigh!

This morning marks my second-to-last set of finals for my undergrad. Steel design, concrete design, law, timber design, all in a week. Then it's done, well, onto more studying for the GRE and figuring out what the heck I'm doing with myself after April 2012.

It's a great feeling, provided I'm ready. I remember starting university and some of my friends telling me of their last year and how mentalities change, which I see it as partially true. I feel it's because the nature of the courses narrow in scope and become more practical. There were some people that I didn't see other than in law (if that) because we actually do have options for specialization. On the other hand, there are some people you see for 10 hours a day (luckily they're nice people).

This weekend I got my event and plane tickets to New Orleans for the Ultimately Lindy Hop Showdown which is September 29th to October 3rd. So far it's just Dean and I but we hope to accrue more people. 3+ days of entirely dancing to New Orleans jazz with some of the funnest people around? Count me in!

In other news, two University of Waterloo engineering teams are starting up. The first is the Great Northern Concrete Toboggan Race 2012 to be held in Calgary, Alberta. It's a weekend of meeting other university teams, games, themed teams, races, and general nonsense. For more info contact uw-gnctr-2012@googlegroups.com.

The second is the Troitsky Bridge Building Competition, held at Concordia University in Montreal. Check out our Facebook Group!

The real world of engineering

I happen to attend a friend's birthday picnic where a lot of my high school friends and acquaintances made the majority of the group. Through talking with a few of them, my friend Molly especially, I find I am really not alone when it comes to being disillusioned with the industry for which we are studying. In her case, she gets the concepts of honesty, fairness, accuracy, and integrity of journalism repeated to her, and she sees a lack of it when it comes to examples in real life.

Though I really enjoy learning the concepts of civil engineering (thus far), some of my co-op experiences have left a sour taste in my mouth regarding how the system works in practice. I've seen probably the more dishonest side of engineering consulting, where I've seen the engineers I work with make deals under the table with clients to win a bid, or to avert government fees, or even designing an aspect of a job in which the engineer has absolutely no experience. It just doesn't seem right, nothing stops these people, and their stamp seals the deal. The engineering stamp carries a lot of legal responsibility, meaning that they stake their job on the honest and integrity of the documents stamped. Through very strong objection, I've had major projects sent out to a city for permit where the engineer stamped and signed the drawings without review. Though this was a very unique and extreme situation with this engineer, I still can't believe there are such people practicing and designing infrastructure that society uses.

Another issue I find with engineering in the industry is how lazy everything is. We learn in school about new materials, new ways of approaching design and how they are more thorough than the tried and true methods. I get to my co-ops, and all the jobs involve a copy and paste of specifications, design ideas, or even parts drawn in AutoCAD from previous projects. What's even more interesting is that the projects they are being copied have been submitted, but they are not built yet, meaning that sure the idea passed the review on paper, but they could be perpetuating a bad idea or something the construction guys know from experience that cannot be done or that there's a better way. For example, pipes that would seem to fit in the ceiling together nicely may not jig nicely when it comes to the physical installation due to tolerances in error, which is very common.

This just all makes me want to return to university of grad school or more, because I'm not comfortable with the real world yet, I feel as an undergrad, I wouldn't have the expertise to be able to change it, because that is very much a goal of mine. I don't want the status quo, even if I make a very small bubble of influence around me, I want to know that engineers can be more hard-working than they are and put less emphasis the dollar values of their projects and their wallets at the end of the day.