Bombs and Cars

So there we all are, us Year 3 Mechanical Engineering students, in the computer labs for our Design tutorial, learning how to create a machining path (used to tell a machine what parts of the material to cut out and stuff) so that we can manufacture our structural brackets that we are currently designing for our Design project (worth 50%), when at 11:56am, this guy comes in and announces something like "Attention everyone, could you evacuate the building, we have been informed there will be an explosion at 12 o'clock. This is not a drill!"

So after a couple of seconds of pause while the implication of what he has said sinks in, along with the realisation that 12 o'clock is in fact only a couple of minutes away, everyone suddenly grabs all the stuff of theirs that they can and we all head for the door, much faster than we ever have for a fire alarm! (Fire alarms are treated pretty lightly in the Engineering building.)

By 11:58am we were all outside and heading across the road and through the underpass to a safe distance. As 12pm came I was in the underpass, but there was no explosion. That was ok, maybe my watch was faster than the one controlling the bomb. We walked along past Level 0, sheltered by a concrete wall, to the Alfred St/Symonds St intersection where we settled down with a good view of the Engineering building.

But the explosion never happened. The cops arrived, and the fire brigade came and went (because someone set off the fire alarm - maybe to make sure everyone was out). Then at about 12:20 a lady came by and was announcing to everyone that the Engineering building was closed for the day.

So we all went home.

What an anticlimax.

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I want a car. Not the Diahatsu Charade that my mum owns and my sister and I (and now my dad) drive, but a car of my own.

The car I want must:

- Have more power than the 3 cylinder, 1 litre Charade

- Be a manual

- Have four doors (I really don't like 2 door cars anymore)

- Have power steering!

- Look good - cool, somewhat sporty, without looking like a boy-racer car

- Be somewhat cheap (less than $6000 if possible)

- Be either a Toyota, a Diahatsu, a Honda, a Nissan, or maybe a Mazda

- Not be red

HelLO Nissan Primera TE 1995!

4 Cylinders, 2 litres, 5-speed manual gearbox.

Roughly $6000.

Another car that looks really good is the Honda Torneo.

So I'm probably going to get a student loan next semester just so I can keep saving up for it.

Here's something different: A 3D representation of a tesseract rotating about 2 planes simultaneously:

You can't actually see it rotating because Blogger doesn't support .gif images even though they say they do, so you need to go here to see it work.