Classes in Fall

The summer is marching forward, and will be over before we know it. My teaching schedule for next year is now finalized:

ENGS 115 - Intro to Engineering - I teach one of the modules in this "round-robin" course. I spend my alloted 5 hours covering the NYC water supply system. We do a 2 hour lab "competition" where teams compete against one another to build the best water filter. Did I mention there were prizes for the winning team?

ENGS 204 - Environmental Engineering Principles - This is an introductory class in environmental engineering for sophomore Civil and Civil/Environmental majors. I cover all of the basic "tools" that environmental engineers need to start solving real-world problems. Sort of like the "Statics" for structural engineering.

ENVG 706 - Water Chemistry - My graduate class in water chemistry is perhaps my favorite class to teach. Three hours a night of everything you ever wanted to know about the chemistry of water.

Don't hesitate to get in touch with me if you are interested in taking any of my courses and have questions.

Paper in Polyhedron

Congrats to Magda, Timm and Tias on our paper being published in the journal Polyhedron. The paper details some of Magda's work while a Masters student at Manhattan College. The link to the paper can be found here: link.

Home Theather PC

I've been wanting to build a Home Theater PC (HTPC) for some time now. The idea would be to use it in the family room to watch DVD's surf the internet, or play back movies or pictures over my home network. Computer components have really come down in price, so I gave myself a budget of $500 to come up with an HTPC that I can use over the network, hook up to my 5.1 channel surround sound system, and my rear projection HDTV.





Here is what I came up with:

Case: Shuttle SG31G2 Barebones (Buy.com $195 w/10% off coupon)
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E7200, 45 nm Wolfdale, 2.53 GHz, 1066 Mhz FSB (Amazon: $129)
Memory: Corsair XMS2 (2 x 1GB) DDR2 800 (Newegg, $18 after rebate)
Video Card: EVGA GeForce 8600 256 MB PCI-E x16 (Newegg, $35 after rebate)
Hard Drive: Western Digital 500 GB SATA 16MB cache OEM (Amazon: $65)

Total Cost: $442

It get's cramped in the case, but Shuttle has done a great job with making everything accessible.











Back/Front view:











And finally, the reason for building it... to be able to stream movies over my network onto the TV. The video card puts out an HD signal at 720p so DVDs and movies played on the HTPC look just as good as a DVD player. Not bad for $450.

Beakers

I love when you expect something from Google search and get the unexpected.



I didn't know Dr. Bunsen's last name was Honeydew.

Setting goals

Well, the new semester is about to start (how exciting). At the start of every semester, I set goals for what I want to accomplish before the semester ends. My goals for this semester are to submit a paper that I've been sitting on, and finish off a paper I'm currently in the process of writing. On top of that, I have two conferences to go to (SETAC and the UMass Sediments conference) where I am giving presentations. I also want to get down to Hopkins at some point, and we have an ABET visit to get through.

Oh, and let's not forget I'm teaching 4 classes too. It's time to get ready!