Grand Update

This is partly for Sarah (who requested my take on how the printing press trip went), F.B., who I'm sure would have liked to know about that as well, and of course, the M.O.M. because I've been a bad boy lately and not kept up with all the nooze as I should have :(

This all probably /seems/ rather scattered. Don't worry, it is!

I think the last post that was lost had something to do with the trip over to Enid to give Austin a send-off and then a description of the trip to the printing press.

By the way, I had decided to discontinue the reading of Pilgrim's Progress in the 19th Century because the 18th chapter was in need of being almost completely edited out. Despite the very good points that the author would bring up from time to time and his putting the Revivalism of his day in a true light (and thereby showing it to be dishonouring to God), there were parts having to do with the atonement of Christ that I believe to be unbiblical and fallacious. So rather than trying to edit it all out and possibly missing something, I'd prefer to read someone whom I do trust and would be willing to recommend. Unfortunately I can't say that for Mr Weeks, as much as I've read of him. Hopefully these are things that were added posthumously and he is not to blame, but in any event, no more chapters. Sorry, I should have looked through it more carefully before I had begun.

Anyway.....

Austin's party was fun, Jonathan was taking myself and Jon over for the ride (and we'd pick up Ben and Greg). We took his car and frankly, I don't think he has ever ridden in the back of his own car, he claims that it's just as roomy as my own, which I contest vigourously. Jon had a late time at ROTC so we didn't leave until after 6:00 and then headed on to Enid. There was still plenty of things left to eat so we sampled a few things and continued on. Jon and Jonathan had planned a skit to show and had given me the quick rundown because I was to be the narrator/sound man. I gave a brief introduction and then started the music. Christy recorded it so I won't spoil anything, but it was a big hit and pretty much made fun of Austin, Mr Wagner, and the Air Force in general.

Then Missy said "L-, you HAVE to do your Gollum imitation!" When I showed signs of declining she appealed to the crowd with "Hey who wants to hear L- do his Gollum imitation?!" Talk about pressure. I did do the entire scene where Smeagol/Gollum has a conversation with himself, to the best of my memory (much longer than at the Talent Show) and Christy recorded that too, though you couldn't hear very well over all the laughter. Apparently it was well-received but I don't want to be perpetually known as the Gollum-man. Both times I was forced into it from crowd appeals.

Austin opened some gifts, which were very funny. There were a lot of gummy worms (apparently he's always opening up some can of worms or another at the study, figuratively) and a Napoleon Dynamite air freshener. We then spent some time playing Telephone Pictionary, which was quite amusing! I had never played before and almost didn't this time but was glad I did.

Basically you start off with a stack of small sheets of paper, you write something down on it, and then pass the entire stack to the next person down. That person sees what you wrote, places the top sheet on the bottom and then tries to draw it. Then that person passes it down, and the next person places the top sheet on the bottom and describes what was drawn. And so on. Example: Jonathan started out with "Obadiah" (which is his and Jon's inside joke having to do with Beer). So the next person drew a picture of someone getting a glass of beer from a keg. The next person wrote "Obadiah needs a refill on his beer" which was passed to me, I drew a picture of a person getting a glass of beer from a keg, looking sad (because the mug was empty) and then on the side drew a Bible with a cross on the front, a man with a mining cap and shovel, and two dollar signs. That was probably a bad move but I thought it was clever, it was supposed to signify a minor prophet ("miner profit") from the Bible. Well, it got passed down and around and I think it ended up with someone saying "a man inside a box", so someone drew a picture of a man's shadow on the ground with a box on top of him and the next person wrote "human pancake" and finally Jonathan drew a waffle iron with a man inside of it. That was probably the most hilarious one. I am SURE that Jonathan, Missy, and Anna were all purposely trying to mess things up though, you just couldn't get that far off on accident! :)

Mine, which was 'Babe Ruth' ended up being a robot standing inside a circle with a laptop computer and a picture of a Christmas tree. How that happened, I have no idea.

Now, in no particular order, the trip to the Printing press, or Quebecore I think it was called. Apparently it's the largest four colour printing press in North America, at least, and it's located here in Stillwater.

As a side note, the four colours are of course, black, yellow, cyan, and magenta. Many people (including myself until last year) thought that the three primary colours were red, blue, and yellow, but they are not, they are really yellow, cyan and magenta, at least in inks. You can make any colour from these three.

Now the three primary colours of light however, are red, blue, and green, which is why HTML codes are in sets of Hexadecimal, with Red being the first two, Green being the second two, and Blue being the last two.

As a further side note, Hexadecimal goes like this:
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
A
B
C
D
E
F
And then starts over
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
1A
1B
1C
1D
1E
1F
20
21
And so on, up to 256 (in decimal) or FF (in Hexadecimal)

If you wanted to make a blue color in HTML code then, you'd write
#00000FF (meaning that Blue is at the highest and red and green are both zero)
Red would be
#FF0000 (red is highest and green and blue are both zero)
and pure green would be
#00FF00
Make sense? So just mix up a bunch of colours and you can make just about any colour, well, 256^3 or 16,777,216 of them.

#FFFFFF is a mixture of all the three colours at their highest value, which is white, and #000000 is absence of any colour, so that's black. If anyone happened to be interested in how these codes worked....... there ya go.

So back to the printing press. It was quite impressive. And noisy. There were ear plug dispensers all over the place though so we picked up some of those. Much of the plant is robotically controlled, they control the amounts of colour that go into the printing and even change rolls of paper when it runs out. The paper came in rolls that were about 4 feet in diameter and six feet long and weighed something like 5000 pounds! We were able to look back into a warehouse and they had several acres of these things stacked probably six high or so, tons, and tons (literally) of paper! Forklifts would go and get these and bring them to the printing press, which would automatically load them on and change the rolls. The paper was sent through at probably 30-50 feet per second, large rollers (which were dipped in water so that the ink would only stick to certain spots and not smudge the image) would make their impressions as the paper whipped by through the various colours.

The paper traveled back and forth at this breakneck speed down the length of at least a hundred feet, going up to the ceiling forty feet above and on diagonal rollers to change directions, it was really quite amazing. The final products would come out as little pamphlets and be taken away on a conveyor belt far above us, probably at fifty per second, easily. A man stood next to the conveyor belt and periodically took one off and examined it, adjusting the various levels of yellow, blue, and cyan to make the perfect image I believe. I couldn't see any change over the period he did it but obviously his eye was better trained.

A machine would stack the papers rapidly and send them along another conveyor belt where a robot would take the papers, pick them up and place them on a pallet, all in a certain order so that it would line up with the ones beneath oppositely (so they didn't all fall over).

That was the most impressive part of the entire factory I thought, though there was also a place where we were able to see the designing end and how they transfer the images to the sheets of aluminum to place on the rollers (and I was pleased to note that they used G4 and G5 Power PCs by the way.... those are Macs in case you happened to not know :D). They showed an "older" assembly line, where the papers went by and were labeled with mailing addresses and stapled at probably three or four per second. Then they were creased and folded and stacked, wrapped in plastic, and sent through a hot oven to shrink wrap them. A man would take the packaged stacks and put them on a pallet.

It was a most impressive factory and I was very glad for the opportunity to go there!

Now let's see....
Last Tuesday I had the opportunity to go to Tulsa. Alan had to go in early to meet with F.B. and some people on campus about something so I drove Philip out there to see the RUF that evening (since is a prospective student, had already seen the campus, and yet wanted to see RUF). I wanted to see all those "RUFfians" too, and was excited for the opportunity to visit. I almost felt bad though, as though I was cheating on good ol' OSU. I guess University Loyalty does reside in me somewhere.....

The ride over was nice and pretty, despite the brown grass. We got to a place where there was some road construction though and there was a truck with a small enclosed trailer (about the size of a two horse trailer) in front of me. I WAS paying attention but all of a sudden it looked like it had come to a stop and I made it to my brakes quickly and came to a halt, it looked like we had inches to spare. I was sitting there thinking how in the world I could have been so unobservant when I noticed that the tail lights did not function on the trailer. So I had no idea when he was slowing down or stopping, besides the rate of change of the distance between us (there is probably some derivative function available in that last sentence). That was quite dangerous so I left plenty of distance between us after that. It's amazing how much harder it is to see whether someone is slowing down or not when their tail lights do not work.

That reminds me of a story told by the associate pastor of Grace Community Church a while back, and one which I like to think I emulate. He said he was riding with a friend when suddenly an accident happened ahead of them. His friend was one of those few gifted people who when such an emergency happens, make it to the brake faster, but don't panic and slam on the brakes, thereby losing their static friction with the pavement (and everybody knows that kinetic friction is less than static friction) and sliding and losing control. Well, I was pleased that I had the sense enough not to slam on the brakes but apply them enough to come to a halt. Philip said he didn't see any clearance :D I'm grateful that God spared us from getting into a little bumper-bender like that, even though it probably would have been the other driver's fault for driving without tail lights, I don't know.

We first went to the boy's dorm and met Bob and Kevin, the former who is a Mechanical Engineer and the latter who is a Petroleum Engineer. He was telling Philip all the great things about TU, including that if you were a Sophmore or beyond, you didn't have to have any classes before 8:30! :D

F.B. showed up shortly and we took a quick walk to her room to see if Rachel was there, then went to the cafeteria for supper. I'd been told that the cafeteria food was bad but I'm having a hard time believing that, I thought it was pretty good actually! Bread bowls with beef stew. Admittedly I was also told that this wasn't the ordinary fare, in fact, a possible first!

A large table of RUF folks gathered and I enjoyed listening to the conversation and friendly banter that went back and forth, though it was difficult for me to hear things at the other end of the table sometimes. Crystal tried some fried Okra with her frozen yogurt, David took some and said it tasted oddly like funnel cake. A group of girls went around inviting people to lazer tag and handing out glowsticks. Mine (a blue one) died Thursday :(

Afterwards, we headed to the boys dorms again and stood in the hallway for a while while the boys tussled. I nearly jumped in I admit :), I was feeling a tad frisky. Asher ended up locking himself and David in their room and I was getting hot in the hallway (they must keep the thermostat high) and said I wanted to go outside for a bit, so F.B. offered to show myself and Philip around, to see the library and such. Philip already had of course but I was glad for the opportunity. We went in and up some stairs, past where there was a lecture in progress and into a large study room. I had trouble shutting the huge doors quietly. There were many books in the cases along the wall having to do with dissertations from the former students at TU. I opened one from the fifties and was amused to see a comparison of methods used in Engineering schools to the ones used in the industry. There were lots of funny things such as that Engineering students use a T-square much more than someone in the industry, they use a different type of lettering system, etc. I'm not sure how much of a help it really was, but at least it was fun to read!

We went around campus to some various spot until it was time for RUF to begin. I ran out to the car to get Philip's and my Bibles, then jogged back in time for it to begin. I was able to meet a few more of the people F.B. has mentioned and then the service started. There were couches lined out in the basement of the boy's dormatory so it was quite comfortable, and there were probably forty people present at least. John, the campus minister, gave a lesson on the last part of Ephesians 1 and I very much appreciated his sermon. By the time it ended however, it was past nine o'clock and I needed to get going home, so I said goodbye and Philip went out with me to get his bag from the car.

The ride home was uneventful and quiet. I spent some time praying and some time listening to a lecture from Dave on Contentment, made it home, and tumbled into bed. And that's about it. I've had a great week, see you all next update!