All work, (almost) no play

Jan 12, 2008

It's been a while since I wrote something here, mainly due to studying like a madwoman. My finals for my diploma in process engineering are just around the corner: 6 lectures in two exams within two weeks (first two weeks of February - they still need to tell me the exact dates).

The first 3 lectures belong to my first major Mechanical Process Engineering:

• Basics of Agglomeration: how to make things bigger, like for example how to make a powder into some sort of granulates or tablets and the like
• Solid-Liquid-Separation: how to filter solid particles out of a liquid - which kinds of filters can be used, what techniques are there, what do you need to keep in mind etc.
• Rheology: not everything flows in a simple way like water does: from honey to polymer solutions you can find some rather interesting phenomena, viskosity changes there over time or with sheer force.

The second part is about Food Process Engineering:

• Food Process Enginnering I: is about the machines most commonly used in Food processing - from separators in the milk industry to extruders for snacks and cereals
• Food Process Engineering II: is about the most common products - how does milk get from the cow into the tetra-pak and the shelf at the supermarket? What is done with coffee all the way to drinking it or dispensing it in vending machines?
• Sterile Techniques: it is about reducing micro organisms to make food storable - not everything can be heated up to kill germs, or would you like to eat cooked apples when you were buying fresh ones?

so it's going to be veeeery much to go through and that's why it's been so quiet here ^^;

At the moment, I'm going through solid liquid separation... oh my god - I had not remembered that the script was THAT damn big. But it is and no whining or procrastinating will help me. I just hope my mum's right. She said I'd always had a good memory and an ability to talk my way out of anything, so I would be fine...

As always I'm trying to balance studying with colourful images as seen to the right. It's nowhere near finished and it won't be for a while because an hour or even only half an hour at a time just doesn't get you far. Even though I'm only starting, the psd is already at over 500MB and it takes my slow (but trusty) pc at least 5 minutes to open *le sigh*

Everything else has pretty much come to a halt, including the darkroom tutorial. In addition to it being a time killer, I'm currently trying to figure out how to handle my Photoshop version switch. My pc crashed and I took it as an oportunity to finally upgrade from PS7 to CS3 Extended (finally discovering that there actually was a new driver for my Aiptek graphics tablet had no small part in it hehe). The thing is that I have no idea what CS and CS2 can or can't do, so I will have to find a way to make the tutorial concise and still account for different screenshots and what not. Come to think of it, I have no idea if that will work. But I don't have time to look into it atm anyway, so *shrug*

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