Food Glorious Food

I’ll be trying to update about once every other week. At least until school starts. Or I run out of ideas. Whichever comes first. You can also use the RSS feed feature to check up for when I update.

One of the biggest concerns for most people is what you’re going to eat when you go away. First, let’s get something straight. Your mom and dad are no longer around. So, you’re not going to get your favorite lasagna dish or fresh soup or favorite sweet and sour pork chops. If you’re a regular on-the-town kind of junkie, well, feel free to run rampant in The Village or a quick trip down to any of the other food joints around.

As for the rest of us who prefer food that doesn’t come off a menu or waiting in a giant line for reservations, we have the dinning halls. You might still have to wait in line to get your food, but at least you’re not paying gas to drive out. Convenience is nice and sometime people shy away from going down to Pomona to eat because it’s too far. See how lazy you become when you get to college? OK, to be fair, it might also be because you don’t have time to spare due to that giant project that is due tomorrow, but usually it’s because we’re lazy.

The meal plan is a required part of your life at Harvey Mudd College with the exception being if you live in Sontag or a special Atwood suite, and are not a freshman. Basically you choose a number: 8, 12, or 16. Bigger number means you pay more. It also corresponds to how many meals you get per week and how many Flex dollars you get. Please note there is NO rollover, so on midnight between Saturday and Sunday your amount gets refilled. This leads to a phenomenon knows as “Flexing out” where you go down on Saturday night somewhere and check how much Flex you have left. Then you try to spend as much as you can. Be sure to get there at least before 11:30pm, or else the line might be long enough for you to not Flex out in time. Flex dollars are usable for a variety of things, including snacks, drinks, more meals at dining halls, muffins at the breakfast cart, chocolate on Scripps, etc.

Meals are used one per meal, and only up to one per meal. Since all meals in their eyes are created equal, breakfast costs less Flex than dinner but both are worth a single meal. So, if you plan on using Flex to supplement your meals, use it on earlier meals. The meals themselves are actually pretty good. They do have a tendency to be a little greasy or over flavored, like how their idea of Asian food is throw as much soy or teriyaki sauce at it as you possibly can, but it’s better than a lot of colleges. It’s also buffet style, which is a blessing and a curse. Be very wary of the Freshman 15 here. They also have a decent rotation of foods and a few staples that you can fall back on if nothing appeals to you. I have seen some people eat cereal for dinner. One of my friends eats nothing but white bread, chocolate chip cookies, bananas, milk, and vitamin supplements. I’m not sure why, but the guy isn’t diabetic yet. They have served stuff like hamburgers, pot roast, curry chicken, soup bread bowls, lasagna, gyros, Swedish meatballs and noodles, and turkey cutlet to name a few. Don’t worry if you miss a dish, it’ll be rotated back in eventually.

One of the coolest things is that the chefs have been given plenty of freedom. It’s become a familiar event when one of the chefs concocts something new, like a Mexican pizza or something, and offer it up alongside the usual fare. I strongly advise you try them at least once. Not only is it nice variety, but usually they make good stuff. Just goes to show they can cook and not just mass produce a recipe.

Now, Harvey Mudd has its dinning hall called Hoch-Shanahan, or the Hoch (pronounced like “hawk” in Mudd slang). However, we’re right across the street from Scripps College, which has its own dinning hall, and a few blocks from CMC with their own. And lucky us our meal plans work on all the Claremont College Campuses. So, if you’re tired of the hamburgers from the Hoch for lunch, enjoy a nice trip down to CMC and their giant sandwich bar. Pitzer is known for organic options. Pomona is more of what you’d expect in an older back East College. Mudd tends to be a bit more fast-food in nature. Plus, you can use your Flex at their shops as well. So, you can head down to Pomona and the Coop and buy stuff there as well as the stuff on Mudd at Jay’s Place. This actually creates something interesting, since they get money based on attendance. By spending your meals or Flex on another College, Mudd has to send part of your meal plan payment to them, and the same thing if an off-campus student spends their meals on Mudd. Thus, it’s an incentive to make good food that the students like to attract more students, thus earning them more money. Pretty cool, huh.

If you get off the meal plan or have access to a kitchen, there’s also your own cooking, which is very much subject to the chef’s abilities. Or you can get yourself a microwave and lots of Ramen, but I wouldn’t advise that. At least bring a rice cooker and some furikake, although that’s not too healthy either.

In short, you won’t starve here. Or if you start looking starved, we’ll track you down and force feed you.

Being a Real Engineer

Double feature today.

Now that I’ve been in a real job for a while, I can make a few statements about a job and how well Harvey Mudd prepares you for it. OK, it’s not a real job, it’s an internship, but I’m getting paid to do it.

First, a quick overview of my job. I’m an intern at CornerTurn. They’re a small company that broke off from a larger firm so that they could do engineering without all the bureaucratic methodology. They specialize in special application boards, although they’ll do a variety of tasks. One of their claims to fame is a special internet router designed for boats. People on their yachts want high speed broad band internet, but that requires a giant satellite dish. So, they designed a special router that can use multiple antennas and combine their signals into a single internet connection. This means that they can use a couple of small antenna, and treat it as a single Ethernet connection to your computer. Pretty neat, or at least I think so.

My particular job is to do whatever they want. This so far means that I’m working on three separate projects in parallel. First, I am building a printed circuit board for monitoring liquid levels in a storage tank. Second, building scripts for hashing data from a remote sensor that’s been acting up. And lastly, trying to understand and apply energy harvesting for another remote sensor.

The cool thing is I’ve actually been helpful. Not in the thanks for doing the grunt work helpful, but some of my ideas have actually found important results. Looking at the second project, I’ve been building MATLAB scripts to parse data that we get from a sensor. It’s supposed to find itself using GPS, and then report. The problem is that for some reason we’ve been having periods where there’s no GPS data in the database. So, I’ve been parsing NMEA protocol and console dumps trying to help track down the problem.

One of the things I did was to use what I’ve termed gap analysis, or plotting the duration of the time gap in the signals. I’ve recently learned that gap analysis is a term for something else, so probably delta analysis would have been better. This creates an interesting graph where these peaks show up, indicating a giant gap in the data stream. I’ve also created ways to compare these gaps in the NMEA packets the database makes with the attempts of the sensor to try and transmit a GPS fix, and to track throughput of packets. One key element we found was the sensor would try to transmit, but either it’s getting lost or the database drops them. It’s still unsolved, but hopefully we’re moving forward.

As far as Mudd getting us ready, I think the answer is they’re doing a good job. I have had to put my knowledge of energy and computer science into practice already. I’ve done some physics and mechanical applications. As a bonus, the theory has given me a really strong base. Sure I don’t know everything, but they can start explaining something and I’ve figured out what’s going on and what they want by the end of their explanation. Plus it’s not all spoon feeding, I’ve been working mostly on my own to figure out the energy harvesting, and that’s been quite the experience. It turns out that there are lots of options, not just solar cells. There happens to be vibration and heat as well, but those only seem to work well if there are strong driving forces. Not so great in the middle of nowhere, which just so happens to be where we want this sensor to be.

All in all, it’s been pretty good. I even get my own desk that’s getting filled with lots and lots of datasheets. That’s right, better get used to scouring datasheets people, they’ll be with you for many years to come.

Home Away From Home

No, this is not some philosophical insanity about where your home is or touchy feely piece about being far away from home.

I happen to live in Hacienda Heights, California. For the non-locals, that’s about 30 minutes drive southwest of Harvey Mudd. San Gabriel Valley region. As such, my perspective on the whole living in the dorms and away from my home and family is pretty lightweight. In fact I go back at least once a month since I have duties running Powerpoint for my church.

Since the school year has ended, the dorms shut down for everyone except the summer researchers and Summer Math kids. Summer Math is an opportunity to take your entire sophomore year of math in about six weeks. I personally thought it was intense, awesome, but not for everyone. Especially if you mess up your sleep schedule on Monday and have to wait until the weekend to reset it. Back to my topic, the dorms shut down. So, everyone has to move somewhere else. For me, that was back home to Hacienda Heights. For others, it was off to apartment for jobs or internships or summer camps.

It’s a weird transition moving back. One of the best things about college, at least for me, is the freedom; the ability to set your own timetable, your own rules, and reap what you sow. As I discussed in a previous post, you have to set priorities about how you spend your time. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), Harvey Mudd College is not a place where you can have it all; unless you’re some weird mutated genius protégée who can do all the homework for all the classes for the whole the week in one hour.

Coming back home to where you live by the rules of your parents, the bills, the chores, the siblings, and of course no more college high-speed internet, which I might add is very important for some of us, can be a little jarring. I can’t stay up until midnight anymore, although that’s from the requirement I wake up at around 6am for work. I can’t just walk down the hall and check out what the lounge is doing. I can’t take a bike ride down to the Motley or see a performance from an orchestra.

On the other hand, it’s back to the real world. Yes, there are such things as rising gas prices; and they’re rising like WHOA. There’s this thing called money which you’ve been hemorrhaging to pay for tuition that comes in handy for stuff like food and electricity bills. Oh right, and you will not live perpetually in a world where all your friends live about a five minute walk away. Sorry. And no more F&M means you have to vacuum the house regularly.

So, I’d have to say it’s a blessing and a curse. I get to do more real world stuff like make money for a change and learn to cook, but I can’t chill at 2am in the lounge watching people get drunk. Wait, that’s a plus as well.