PROVO-ALONE

INTRODUCTION:
I've decided to start writing more to this blog. Eventually the entries will be moved to a site that is more user-friendly to myself and something I have more control over. I don't really care for the bar at the top of the page.

Additionally, while gazing out the window of the CRJ50 en-route to SLC from SFO, I realized that I might have a lot more to share about places I travel to for work than I originally thought. This trip is no exception and I've only been in the state for 3 hours.

PROVO:
Provo is Salt Lake City's smaller and more religious sister to the South. It's the home of BYU, a school known for its 'honor code' where college girls are forced to tear down the poster of Usher and tack up a life-sized LDS artist interpretation of Jesus in campus housing. It's a place where you can be kicked out of college for such a minor incident such as talking to a member of the opposite sex in your church-funded dormitory room. It's also a place where a very large number of the entering student body are already in their mid-20s and married with children. You'd think that in a city built as a religious college utopia that it would be void of problems. I admit, this place is very clean. A bit too clean. But driving the 1-mile from the freeway to my Marriott (did you know they were Mormon too?) I saw homelessness. Being homeless in the cold-desert that is Utah has got to be brutal. Granted, it's a difficult life any way you look at it.

CRJ50:
I've mentioned to friends/people in-person many times about the planes I fly on, their quirks, pros/cons, favorites, etc. Today I was on a suprisingly small CDJ50 - Canadair Regional Jet. In the past the SFO<->SLC route has been dominated by the 737/A319 class, and it still may be. Since SLC is a Delta hub, I'm sure that they as a company still use larger transporters. A CDJ50 only holds 50 passengers. It's a sleek, fast, thin and quiet jet aircraft. It's the kind of aircraft I would imagine a rich business executive owning and using several times per week. Did I mention it's quiet? Yes I did. Almost too quiet. I don't even need to don my Bose ANC Headphones. And I love them headphones.

DOSIMETER:
I wear a Landauer Luxel Film Dosimeter to measure whole-body radiation I recieve while on-the-job. In the past the most dose I had been measured to recieve was nil to very little. The "very little" was always due to my dosimeter being exposed to the airport security x-ray screening. A trend was noticed recently when the dose was analyzed across all employees in my company. There's an upward trend of dose and it is most likely caused by the x-ray detection equipment in airports. They have now told us to carry these film badges on our person instead of leaving them in our bags. Note: Do not take repeated trips through the airport x-ray detector conveyor. It is not a toy. It will not find your cavities or broken bones very well. I have another story on radiation exposure which I may or may not mention here in the future. My what a teaser.

CARL HAYDEN H.S. ROV TEAM:
Reading a Wired magazine I picked up at the airport was a great story about a group of 4 immigrant students living in West Phoenix and how they triumphed over a team of MIT students in an underwater remote operational vehicle contest at UCSB. It's a triumphant story about the Carl Hayden H.S. Falcon Robotics ROV Team, but it has a bittersweet ending. Due to economic standing and citizenship status, these students cannot afford and cannot attain scholarships in order to attend college. Each of them came to the US by illegal means when their families crossed the Mexico-US border when they were very young. I am hoping that some kind of scholarship fund gets set up to assist these students in their future. I'm going to look that up and see if anything is being done. One student specifically has a genius quality to him and deserves much more than what the article expects.

I guess I get a little bit sentimental concerning this specific story because I always took pride in extracurricular activities. Especially those that required engineering. I remember staying afterschool once trying to reproduce sonoluminescence. We thought we were successful, but there was no physical evidence. Geeky, but I think being industrious can be more important than grades or what school you came from.