Christmas Aftermath

Hello all. It's the post-Christmas fallout.

Well, I've been busy. Not with work, mostly with gatherings and special events and trying to grab a few hours of play time here and there. Mostly playing Blokus with my family, which is an AWESOME game by the way. Simple enough everyone can play, deep enough for some strategic skill (my specialty), but not so deep that I can always win (unlike chess).

Back on topic.

Christmas started a bit early with the family opening our family gifts on Christmas Eve. This is because we hosted the Christmas Day luncheon, so not much time to do all the other stuff and entertain guests. Then it was clean-up the house time for the afternoon. Then we performed in the Christmas Eve Candlelight Service for our church. My dad ran the sound system (he's the best of the church, and I swear that's not just family bias), my mom and older sister sang in the choir, my brother played the drums, and I played the flute. Turned out very well.

Christmas Day was the luncheon which lasted until nightfall. Not surprising. We tend to like to hang around, play games, talk about random stuff. My mom also made us sing carols, but being musical my brother and I played on the piano and my dad played the guitar. We're not all that great on the piano, so I had to take the left hand while my brother took the right. Plus, those old hymnals are not meant to be played on the piano, they're meant to be sung. Normal hands can't reach that wide and that dexterously.

Of course, we also had smaller Christmas meetups with family friends on Saturday, Monday, and Tuesday. Monday's was a funeral, though. However, we got to see all of my second cousins from Utah.

Friday was cleaning again. My mom is big on keeping the house clean. We still have the same carpet in our house from our remodeling, which was when I was really young. In case you don't know, that's apparently a really long time. Being Asian and taking off our shoes indoors probably helps. This time, it was putting the house back together and moving furniture. Then we sorted out what we needed to return (wrong sized clothing) and took a little trip to do it. Today it's a catch up and prepare for our trip to Sac/Davis day. That means last of the chores and start pulling out clothes. Apparently it's around 40 degrees up there, so I'm going to have to pack layers.

At least I've been getting over 10 hours of sleep each night.

Plans for Break

Man, I am failing at the prep blog early game.

Anyways, today it's time to detail plans for Break. This is akin to New Years Resolutions where you make a list, feel good about it, try to follow it for about 1-2 days, then lapse back to your old habits. Unless you're still young and in that malleable age where your parents can smack you around and make you shape up.

So, here goes. (in no particular order)

1) Relax. Probably the easiest to pull off. Make sure I'm not sleep deprived.

2) Work on Clinic. Mind you this is rare. Most people forget about Clinic and spend a week when they get back in the Spring remembering everything. Unfortunately, my Clinic, in my personal opinion, needs a jump start and some serious catch up. To make sure stuff goes smoothly next semester, I'm catching up on stuff I need to do. This mainly means getting my processing element completely built, fixing up the code to describe the entire chip (i.e. stable architecture good. See VLSI gripes from last semester about what unstable architecture does), and maybe even getting to know the layout tools early.

3) Games. I've been doing such a good job repressing my gamer side this semester. I still haven't gone through the massive number of games released this year, even the ones during the summer. So, I need to do a bit of catch up. I even have a copy of Fallout 3 sitting in my room, ready to be installed.

4) Family. In case you didn't know, Mudd kicks us out of the dorms for Winter Break. They are locked down and you have to turn in your key or be fined lots of money. So, we're all at home. Except for the crazies who find an apartment or something, but I don't know any of them. Thus, I find myself at home with family. And, my family is very hospitable. Thus, we will be having gatherings and parties pretty much every day until somewhere in the first week of January. We're also going to take a trip up North (i.e. Sacramento) to see some of the rest of the family. If I'm lucky, Michael and I might even be able to meet up with a professor at UC Davis for a little jaunt.

5) Grad School Apps. I've got many more to do. That means more 2500 word essays about my motivations to join their programs. Whee! Luckily I don't have to fill out pages of how awesome I am and my club activities, unlike my brother for undergrad applications. It's pure grades, Letters of Rec, and Statement of Purpose.

Well, I'm pretty sure I'm stuck with 4 and 5 being necessary. I'm also pretty sure I can get 1 done. It's a question of 2 and 3. 2 should take precedence if I don't want to look at Prof. D. Money Harris and say, "sorry, I let down the team again."

Have a nice Holiday Season all 3 of my readers.

Level up to Freedom

Well, the worst is over. Or should I say yet to come.

First, fun YouTube stuff.



Now those look like really badass freeform maps. Too bad I still have to wait for the PC version.

Anyways, back to reality.

It's finals week. Ironically, I only have two finals left. MicroPs, 6502 Chip Research, and Clinic all ended last week. OK, so Clinic didn't really end, I still have a few items I need to get done over break so that the project can continue on smoothly, but I don't have deadlines of death hanging over me anymore.

The last two finals I have are a paper for Philosophy, and a 1.5 hour final for Great Works of Western Music. Definitely not in the same class as the Clinic Midyear.

I also have grad school apps to finish. =[ UCLA was Monday, the next is due Jan 2 but I want to get it in at least a week early. Just in case bad stuff happens. It's actually weird that the graduate school applications are so much shorter than the undergraduate applications. It's mostly biographical info, letters of recommendation, and your statement of purpose. No pages upon pages of filling out what activities you did or anything like that. It's not a question of you being a leader or an activist. It's a question of whether or not you're a good enough investment for their research.

Looking back, the Clinic didn't go quite as far as I'd hoped. We barely got Rev0 out for our processing elements. We wanted to get to Rev2, which requires two optimization look overs of the schematics. I blame the processes not getting done on time as well as some other fun dynamics. Here's a few rules for surviving:

Rule #1: Start early and expect to fail. This is big. Do NOT ever start the morning before. Ever. It will not work. And then you'll be crying and having panic attacks at 2 in the morning. Believe me, one team member practically broke down every Monday.

Rule #2: When the going gets tough, the tough call for backup. Chances are, other people know more than you. As a matter of fact, I can guarantee you that in a team, each will have special knowledge that is useful to the team. So, if you're stuck, ask someone else to help. Bonus if it takes that person one glace to know what went wrong. In our case, this is often Prof. Harris. We've actually likened him to an extra super mind that just intersects our plane of existence. Lolly is actually convinced one day he'll just phase out of our plane for a little while. Michael and myself designed two major processes, so chances are we know what the problem is. We had to do a lot of "shoulder camping" this semester to help get stuff going.

Rule #3: Take notes. Seriously. Forgetting what we said yesterday may be the sleep-dep talking, but you can avoid it by taking notes. Notes last way longer than your short-term memory.

Rule #4: Stay Alive. This means sleep and be healthy. This is directed at Lolly who was in a perpetual state of sleep-dep and sickness for the second half of the semester. I blame her uncanny ability to commit to way more than she can handle. She sometimes handles it all, but mostly she ends up overworked. Well, I consider it overworked. In theory, if you followed the above rules, this shouldn't be too big of an issue since you won't be spending 20 hours a week on Clinic. You'll just be spending more like 13 hours.

In the other front, MicroPs final project was a success. Julien Dage and I built a MIDI synthesizer. We take the MIDI signals from a keyboard and synthesize music out. Sounds easy, looks easy, isn't so easy. For one thing, the MIDI protocol has some weird special cases. It also is a current loop signal. We want a voltage signal. Oops. Then, we have the problem of how to make music. Huh. We used an interesting system where you can move through a hardcoded table at varying speeds to get different pitches. It saves you lots of memory, which means you can store higher resolution waves. Unfortunately, it wasn't as awesome as we'd hoped due to speed and variable size issues. But, we did make it work flawlessly for up to five notes. Later when they post our presentation videos I can link it. Not too interesting, but it demonstrates it works.

Well, that's all for now. I'll be on break after this week, so expect sporadic updates on my travels and holiday awesomeness.

...

There is no useful post today.

I'll see if I can put up something after my two giant deadlines for Monday are done with. Luckily, MicroPs has a light at the end of the tunnel. Clinic sorta does as well, except I'm not sure if it's the end or an incoming train.