embracing my inner nerd

i hate to leave you guys hanging so long, it's been over a week, man! work is slow yet tedious right now. the drive is exhausting. by the time i get back to the hotel, go the the gym, clean up and grab some dinner, it's time for bed, not time for updating, but i'm going to make a concerted effort to update more often. i still have loads to talk about. for example:

i've been in a rut lately. i don't really know what i want to do career-wise. i'm good at my job, but it's not really challenging. i've talked to a few people about going into teaching, but i'm too much of a $$$-whore at this juncture, though everyone i mention it to believes i'd be a good teacher (i envision myself a la robin williams in "dead poet's society"). i miss math and engineering and free-body diagrams. i truly do. they are fun, they are quantitative, they make me feel comfortable, but my job doesn't really utilize any of the things i learned in college. about 3 days ago, i got to use some math, and it was fun. not very complicated math depending on one's mathemability, high-school level, but it was fun, and it made a difference. here's the word problem (sadly, i had to calculate this in millimeters for the crew):

you have a length of pipe with a right angle in it with sides of length A and B. your pipe is too long by G, so you have to run the pipe at an angle (the hypotenuse). the length of side A is set, so if A=5820mm, and G=4572mm, how long will side B be, and what is the angle the pipe must be run at?

since i had fun figuring it out, i'll give you a brief rundown of how i did it. first, we know that the pythagorean theorem (A²+B²=C²) will give us the length of the hypotenuse we need given the length of the sides. we know A, and we want to find B so that C=A+B-G; that is, our new pipe length, C, is 4572mm shorter than the current length, A+B. now we square C, and substitute that and the value of A in to the pythagorean theorem. we find that B needs to be 12.946m downstream, so we mark there, cut out the right angle pipe, and pipe up the hypotenuse at 65°. now seriously, wasn't that fun? that was ACTUAL field engineering. that felt so good, i need the proverbial cigarette. check out the pic for a larger view of my ground-breaking work

<ASIDE>as TheEJ and i determined on our cross-country road trip, this is why i'm still single.</ASIDE>