The End is Nigh!

It's the home stretch. Last few weeks of school. For some, this would be heartwarming. Last few things to clean up, time to go out and start Christmas shopping (Amazon.com, you are one of my saviors), and all that.

Not true for me.

Let's recap.

In Clinic, Prof. David Harris commented last week we had about "6 weeks worth of work, and about 3 weeks to do it". This is also the same guy who casually looks at the problem I've been trying to fix for the last few days and solves it in a few minutes. So, yeah, we're in trouble. The key factor is to get what we call Rev1 done of the schematics. This first involves getting Rev0 done. Rev0 means your schematics simulate correctly (or at least as expected) in Verilog and SPICE. The SPICE simulations barely got up and running last week. And, as conventional wisdom says, these kinds of things are so simple that they'll work the first time. WRONG. Assume everything will fail, plan ahead, then double the time you expect that will take, and you're still probably missing something. Trust me. Something ALWAYS goes horribly wrong. Luckily, I have Schematics simulating in Verilog. Or, at least I did. Some weird bug has arisen and one of my schematics doesn't work anymore. See? Even when you think it's done, it isn't. Gr.... The scary part is I'm perhaps the closest to finished out of my team. As much as I'd like to pat myself on the back, it also scares me how behind we are as a team. I'm usually the person lagging behind. Then again, I crash if I don't get at least 6 hours of sleep, so I guess they get the chance to lap me by doing all-nighters. Not that I advocate all-nighters, just that it's not a viable option for me if you expect me to be cognizant the next day.

Next, MicroPs. I'm building with another student, Julien Dage, a MIDI synthesizer. It takes in MIDI signals from a keyboard and uses wave tables in the memory to synthesize music. Unfortunately, there's a few problems. First, it takes too long to process each individual note we want to play. I think, according to simulation, that I can get 3 notes. I want 8 notes. Options now include tweaking code at the assembly level, re-writing a part of the code to use a faster system, and slowing down how fast we output music. We also are having issues on the analog side of things. Curse that real world and all it's foolish inaccuracies. I demand more binary values!

Next, Hums. Philosophy final paper, Music final exam. Um. Yeah. Not quite as scary, but I still have a few loose ends I have to tie up. These are the only two classes that I'm either on schedule or ahead of schedule. Go figure.

Next, GameSHMC. I'd like to petition for more money for our budget. However, that means I have to prepare a presentation on why we deserve more money for the year.

Next, Family. Right now I'm at home. Thanksgiving was full of good food. Unfortunately, I can't access all the stuff I need to do the above mentioned work. Well, I can access the Clinic stuff, except it takes five times as long to get anything done. On the other hand, I can't snub my family. We've compromised and I'm heading back later today to do more work. Still gotta schedule moving back after this semester is over.

Next, everything else. I have a giant list of games on my door that I haven't played. Heck, I haven't even played stuff that came out over the summer, let alone the stuff people are raving about that just came out like Fallout 3 and Left 4 Dead. Oh, and that Red Alert thing. Sorry, I'm not quite as avid a RTS player, although I do love blowing up the computer with nuclear weaponry.

Anyhow, that's where I'm at. No time left and everyone wants me to cash in yesterday.

Back to work.

You are eaten by a gru

and by you I mean me and by gru I mean Clinic and MicroPs.

On a quick note, there's a few addendums to some prior posts.

1) Scripps is a woman's college. K-12 girls do not attend a school across the street. And if they did, saying this was a good thing might be misinterpreted as me promoting pedophilia, which I happen to not support.

2) On Nov 1, I made a few statements on diversity. To clarify, I was merely targeting diversity purely for diversity sake. Diversity is overall a very good thing. It's when groups put diversity as a priority over things like general well being or performance that it gets a little hazy. I for one am not an avid fan of affirmative action (AA) since it can actually hurt the people it tries to help. With AA, people tend to second guess if they made it in on merit or simply because there was a quota to fill. On the other hand, disadvantaged groups should get compensation. As I said, it gets hazy, and while I don't love AA, I don't hate it either.

3) 35% of the incoming class came from California. That's right, Cali people are the minority. I'm a minority by home town AND race! wooooo! Now if only that meant more financial aid....

That's all for now. Stay safe and have fun.

Sayings Around Mudd

There's a few sayings that are used around Mudd. They're pithy, get across an idea, and while perhaps exaggerated there's a bit of truth.

So, let's look at a few:

There are 3 things you can pursue at Mudd. Good sleep, good grades, and good social life. Pick 2. I think we stole this one from Caltech. Not sure. There's also an addendum that states, "if you're in a sport, that's the 4th choice, but you still only get to choose two." Basically, the idea is that there's a lot to do at Mudd, and you're going to be out of time. In some respects, it's true. I know a few people who really do sacrifice sleep for social life and good grades. I can feel good grades chew out my social life as I prioritize sleep. Then again, most of the time it's more like 2.5 choices. Also, you can switch your priorities around and get a nice blend. Bonus points if good grades just come naturally to you, you crazy smart person, so you can get all three. Speaking of grades, that brings us to the next item.

Take your High School GPA. Subtract 2. That's you new Harvey Mudd GPA. OK, this is NOT true. While HMC is very good at battling grade inflation, we don't destroy everyone and put them into the low B range. I happen to be sitting around 3.0, and I believe a value came out before that we average around 3.3 out of 4.0. Now, you may be thinking to yourself, how ever will I compare with those 4.0 GPAs spewing out of some other college? On one hand, you can't. Some people don't realize HMC's rigor, and will promptly ignore you. On the other hand, it's an advantage. There have been testimony to the fact that many groups actually prefer the HMC GPAs because now they can accurately tell how you did. If you get a bazillion 4.0s, how do you know who's better or worse? Coming out of HMC, they know how strong a 3.0 or a 3.5 should be. Also, these people are not just small startups. We're talking about Sun Labs, UCB, Raytheon, Google. Big groups. Just to put things in perspective, less than 10 students in the 50 years have graduated with 4.0 GPAs.

The odds are good but the goods are odd. One of my favorites. This is mostly from the female side of things. We have about a 2:1 male to female ratio, so as a girl you have very good odds about hooking up if you want to. The problem is the applicant pool is not necessarily full of Tom Cruises. That isn't to say we're all crazy or acne pocketed bottle glasses nerds who get monitor tan. The vast majority of us can operate just fine in normal society, just don't ask us about Star Wars or quantum theory. On the flip side, the guys might seem like they're getting the short end of the stick. However, remember that not everyone you're competing against is that socially able. And, as a bonus, Scripps (an all girl school) is just across the street.

Still no date friday night. Ironically, this is on our HMC T-shirts sometimes. It's placed right after the delta-epsilon proof. This is perhaps the biggest lie ever. As far as social life goes, HMC is pretty vibrant. You should at least be acquainted with everyone in your class, and if you hang around cool places like East dorm, you'll meet plenty of people from other classes as well. On top of that, there are regular social events, parties, and yes people do date. There is actually this weird idea in the 5Cs that we are a party school. Seriously. Yet, we have a lower drinking rate than the other colleges, and a lower rate than the national average. The reason we're known for partying is because we throw awesome parties. One of East's is Funball. We rent a bouncy castle, play awesome dance music, and instead of buying booze we buy loads of candy. Oh, and a funball pit and a cotton candy machine. Other notables would be Wild Wild West, the Suds Party (formerly known as Foam Party), Tax Night, Trick or Drink, Trick or Cheese, and many others. There's this special one that North throws that I can't remember the name of. Club two-something-something. But yeah, we can rock it out all night long if we want.

So, now you know a couple of random sayings and the facts behind them. Cya around.

Searching in the Real World

There's this mythical place where you get paid to do homework and your problems sets actually determine the lives of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people. WHOA!

Turns out I need to get into this world soon. I'm a graduating senior (or, at least I hope I've graduating), so that means grad school and jobs. It also means I get to feel really weird about myself.

Allow me to put things in perspective. I have a 3.06 GPA. Cumulative. Floated with some As in humanities classes. Did I forget to mention Harvey Mudd battles grade inflation? Then again, I get to brag about helping build a chip. Twice. Except the first one doesn't work.

Turns out most graduate programs have a minimum requirement of their applicants. Even more interesting is that the cutoff is usually a 3.0 undergrad GPA.

As an extra bonus, I'm interested in chip design and robotics and nanotechnology. Bonus points if you mash all three together. This means I kinda need a graduate degree to progress in the field. I guess I could try being like my dad who worked his way up the ranks and is now the senior systems engineer at his company even though he only has a BS. But, the economy also decided to tank. So, hiding in grad school for a bit isn't such a bad thing.

Then again, what if I don't get into grad school? Don't worry, I'm applying for full time jobs elsewhere! This means spamming my resume and brushing up on my interviewing skills. Oh, and deciding if I'm really interested in moving to Oregon or Texas to nab that job. No offers yet. Here's hoping.

In other fun news, I recently discovered I was building the wrong processing element for the chip for Clinic. Oops. Luckily, everyone else appears to have the correct PE, and it's the simplest of the PEs. Unfortunately the code I currently have doesn't pass the test vectors, so I'm also debugging it now. Oh, and I became head of the microarchitecture, which means I need a full chip in Verilog code by Tuesday. Oh, and I'm heading up the Verilog testing so I need to fix Cadence so it will output Verilog so we can test the schematics. Oh, and there's this MicroPs project I'm working on where we're going to make a MIDI transceiver for a keyboard and generate music. Oh, and there's the debugging of the chip we built last year. Oh, and there's these two other humanities classes I'm in. Oh, and I'm going home for a bit on the weekend.

It's gonna be a busy weekend.

It sounded good on paper....

Today's episode will be covering things you think at first are good ideas, but in reality may not be.

Let's start with a simple one. Pure democracy. Everyone has a single vote, majority wins. Yay power to the people and all that. The only problem is this relies on an informed governed/voter population. Unfortunately, the USA is really really bad at this. We rely too much on the echo chamber of the media for our 30 second sound bites to tell us how awesome this one idea is. So, maybe having smarter people in power would be nice. Problem is, this same population has to vote them in. Oops. Solution, inform your public. Yay mandatory schooling! Just make sure you make people learn. But, that's for another rant.

Here's one closer to Mudd. Clinic. Pretty awesome on paper. You're working with a liaison and as an undergrad you're getting real world experience. Awesome! However, you're trying to solve real world problems while in school. Oh, you mean you forgot you still had to do Hum papers or that lab for the other class? Oops. Bonus points if your liaisons don't actually know what the problem really is. One Clinic team (which will not be named here) has a really cool project. However, we're past the half-way mark and they still don't have a good grasp of the problem. It's a problem that relies heavily on sample data, but they don't seem to have any accurate data. Plus, many times they ask for information, the liaison says "figure it out," they come back and present their solution, and the liaison goes "yeah, that's what we were thinking." As much as I'm a fan for finding things out myself and giving people freedom for creativity, sometimes the optimal solution is already known. Please share. So, be warned that Clinic is a huge undertaking. Probably worth it, I'll let you know at the end of mine, but a giant time suck. Plus, you've got to do it in conjunction with other classes. Unless you were awesome, planned ahead, and don't have many classes during Clinic.

Now, another of my gripes. Diversity. Yay multiple views and experiences. The question then becomes, are we doing things for the sake of diversity? It's become a huge question in the College Application Process if a college is accepting and rejecting people based on nationality or gender. After all, we love having numbers with huge non-white and female incoming classes. Makes the news, good stuff for publicity. However, are you lowering the quality of the incoming class? Cheapening the brand of a degree? This also hurts the minority who have to second guess if they're there because they deserve it or because it was a "diversity" choice. Blargh. FYI, I'm a minority. Unfortunately, Asians have this weird idea that we aren't underprivileged, so we don't give out many Asian scholarships. Also, we're one of the largest minorities in the West Coast schools, so we typically don't get preferential treatment. As the saying goes, UCI is the University of Chinese Immigrants and UCLA is University of Caucasian Lost in Asia. =]

Back to recent events, Halloween was pretty awesome. I hope Kyle posts about his Dr. Horrible costume, because it was made of win. If you don't know what Dr. Horrible is yet, go here. But yeah, I didn't dress up. Thought about it, then decided to be a sleep deprived engineer. Turns out it worked well. =] Other favorites were a Music Pirate, a Hamlet/Westley/Random dude in black with a sword, the entire Evil League of Evil including Bad Horse (another Dr. Horrible reference), a random lady costume as an excuse to wear her corset, and Martin dressed up a Room Draw. Yeah, that thing we're not supposed to talk about. East had Trick or Cheese. Each suite buys Cheese, sometimes crackers too, and you go around sampling cheese. This is the counter to Trick or Drink in West. There was also a group who took tin foil, wrapped themselves up, and went to Chipotle. Chipotle gives free burritos to people who come dressed as a burrito, and since they wrap their burritos in tin foil, well...

Anyways, time to get back to my lab. I'm implementing processor interrupts today. yay!