041608: A Photo Blog

Sorry this is late. You'll understand why in a moment.

I had this insane idea to take pictures of my day, and randomly chose Wednesday since it's my most active and busy day. Little did I know it would be this insane.

8:45am - Time to wake up. After basic grooming and stuff, it's time to head out for my 9am class. Emotion: tired. Going to sleep at 2am last night doesn't help.


9:30am - Engaged.
Professor King is teaching Materials. Today we are learning about electric properties. You know, random stuff that happens when you apply a voltage to something. The best thing about King is his immense knowledge and passion for the material, but he can also help share that knowledge with you, the student. Also, when I say passionate I don't mean over the top off the walls, I mean he's engaged and so you're engaged. It's really kinda awesome. Plus he has a bunch of case studies that he shares with us, many from research or he's actually done.

10:01am - meh.
Return to my room. I have a small window of time to work on stuff before my next class. Once again the extraordinarily overpowered flash would make this look stupid, so I had to try and hold the camera steady for the 0.5s shutter time. It's a little messy right now due to the busy nature of the semester. Thank goodness for large desk space and the largest shelf ever: the floor. The floor's actually not that bad. Just 3 piles, one for work, one for storage, one for recent stuff like resumes.

11:15am - Engaged.
Music Theory at Pomona. Today we're continuing playing the pieces written by our classmates to a particular poem excerpt. The fun part was we had to use chordal notation, and then we got two guys to play them on the guitar. Lots of weird and crazy renditions, and Prof. Flaherty is quite crazy. He's the guy pointing on the right side of the pic. He loves music, and loves to talk about it and teach it and just knows so much history and theory it's incredible.

12:10am - Hungry
Lunch time. I typically shell out almost a whole hour to lunch. This is the East table. Well, one of them. Typically it's a giant table where Easties of all types gather and talk about random things. Games. Life. Classes. Memes. Politics. Linux vs Macs vs Windows. etc. I use it as a steady period of social interaction in case I don't have time to hang around the lounge, which has become increasingly more and more true recently.


1:20pm - Working.
This is a picture of the Engineering Computing Facility, or ECF. Recently outfitted with shiny new computers, it's where you go to run your software and modeling programs as an Engineer. Today, it's High-Speed PCB Design time. Figuring out modeling and then setting up our signaling and accounting for noise in the signal. Basically, making sure the digital signal gets form one place to the other OK.

4:20pm - Merp.
It's time for Seminar. Today it's Professor Little talking about Engineering being about politics. Not Democrat versus Republican, but codifying rules and ethics, ensuring what you make is used responsibly, etc. Pretty interesting overall. Seminar is usually used to bring in outside speakers who then give a talk about what they're doing in the real world or any other random topic. Last week was one on leadership and a look at a life in review.

5:40pm - A little hungry.
Today's High Speed class got moved to 5:30pm so that we could have a guest speaker, a Mr. Happy Holden from Mentor Graphics, and he gave a really cool talk about the history, current issues, and future considerations/ideas in printed circuit board (PCB) design. Stuff like optical signaling or 3D boards where you place the chip inside the board. Crazy awesome stuff, as well as practical stuff like material considerations as we have to remove lead from solder. Bloody pseudo science, it's been shown lead in solder is extremely inert and doesn't leech out. Oh well.

9:00pm - Working.
Right after the guest talk, it's to the VLSI lab. Actually, I haven't been back to my room since lunch time. Anyways, tonight we happened to get the Schematic team (of which I'm part of), the Microarchitecture Team, and several other teams all together. The key, though, was Microarchitecture and Schematic, because Micro built the tests, and Sch use them, but things break, so the Micro team can tell us what went wrong, then we can fix it. We churned though a lot of bugs from wiring to artifacts from recent changes that didn't get done properly. One giant work session. And Prof. Harris was around to help supervise and help out.
12:30am - Really Really Happy!
The schematics passes all of the tests. Professor D. Money treated us to ice cream at Jay's Place. W00t! I skipped Jazz Improv since we were smashing bugs left and right, and this is so worth it. Also, everyone helped out a lot, so major kudos to Braly (white shirt), Heather (purple), and Kyle (green) for helping me out the most on all these bugs. Although I can blame Braly for 3 out of the 4 major bugs. Bloody unstable ALU. Note how powerful the flash on the camera is. This is why I almost never use the flash. Professor Harris is sitting next to the non-functional pinball machine.

4:00am - Tired.
Went back to my room (finally) and started work on homework due tomorrow. Well, I guess now it's today. And now the homework's done. Busy day. I've got a 9:30am class tomorrow. Wish me luck.