Greetings. I am Trevin Murakami.
Who am I? I'm an Engineering Major class of 2009, Male, Christian, Gamer, Eastie, Anime Watcher, Server Operator, Event Organizer, Ultimate Frisbee Player, Musician, Fun Friendly Dude, Observer, Martial Artist noob, Video Editor, the list goes on and on. And while I'm not doing homework, well, there's lots of options out there.
But I mostly do homework...
Some closing up stuff that has gone down. We had awesome performances for the end of the Shakespeare class. Unfortunately I didn't get to take pictures of the performance, but I did get a decent number of behind-the-scenes stuff. Hopefully the college professional photographer got good shots. Also, we got recorded, so maybe I'll get a copy and be able to watch it from not on the stage. Or behind the stage. I mean, I didn't have all that many lines anyways.
^This is indeed Matthew Lawson posing as the Old Lady over Kevin Oelze. In case you're new to this blog, Matthew was my roommate Frosh and Soph years and ended up as Proctor of East, President of Gonzo Unicycle, all-around cool guy, director of the LAC... basically became awesome. Oh, and he brought his trusty staff to graduation.
^Here's Prof. Dodds, who also was the prof for Robotics. We got 4 professors (including the one running Shakespeare) to play the madmen in the play. So awesome. They got the loudest applause besides the main actors.
^Liz Flannery did AWESOME costumes for us. She had help, especially from Glennis here on the right. That's Michael Braly. He was the scheming Cardinal.
Clinic is Done. We've turned in pretty much all our work and it's sealed up in a box. The only thing left was a lovely jaunt up to Oregon on Monday to present at Intel on Tuesday. I was a little nervous because we're showing our work to some of the best digital engineers in the nation. Luckily we got really far. Unfortunately we couldn't send the chip to fabrication due to complications. But, we have pretty pictures of a core of the chip. Also, a young up-and-coming frosh William Koven has volunteered to work over the summer to fix everything up and get it to fabrication. This means fixing up the research group's designs that they wanted to get on the chip as well. Oof. Overall I'm simply relieved it's over even if I am a little bugged out we didn't make it across the finish line. I don't like settling for "close enough."
Robotics went very well. We got the robot to run around and localize where it is in a map. Maybe not the craziest thing to ever come out of a lab, but pretty cool nonetheless. Other fun projects were things like an outfitted Barbie truck that followed directions using a webcam or Roombas using the Wiimotes to follow one another and be controlled. Overall, lots of cool stuff.
Graduation was... nice. Very cool message from the speaker, even if he does have public speaking problems. He did warn us at the beginning of the speech. It was a nice little "the world's a mess, but people are looking for solutions and you guys are now equipped to go out there and kick ass helping fix the world." Not in those exact words of course. Tahir was our student speaker and he had a nice little speech about the 3 tenants of success. Humility, Moderation, and Cooperation. We were actually all pleasantly surprised at his speech skills. In fact, no one noticed that those three tenets spell out HMC until the very end. Very suave. We also had an awesome rendition of the Star Spangled Banner featuring Elaine Shaver on the lead and Matthew, Marissa, Scott, Michael, and Sarah filling in as backups. It was in the style of a barbershop quartet, and was expertly done.
A whole bunch of people came out that I didn't expect for my graduation. Besides the obvious family members there were a few like my Great Uncle and Aunt or some Church friends who surprised us a bit. I'll be writing thank you cards very soon.
Now, I get to prep for the rest of the real world. For example, I have a nice internship in Austin, Texas with a company called Intrinsity. I'll be doing some work in preparation for a Clinic at HMC this next year. We'll be flying out on Sunday to get moved into the apartment. Gotta figure out a good way to pack my computer. After that I'm off to UC Davis for a Masters. I'll be working with Prof. Bevan Baas on some really cool expandable architectures. I'll be living with Michael Braly up there in a nice little house that his parents own. Michael's job this summer is to remodel the place from an office building to a two bedroom house. His dad will be watching out for him. His dad's pretty neat too; he watched one guy remodel their house once and then Mr. Braly did the next two remodelings himself. Sounds a lot like my dad who just picks stuff up so that he doesn't have to pay other people to do it.
Anyways, that's all for now. I'm not sure how much I'll post on this now that I'm out of HMC. But, there's plenty of fun archived stuff if you're interested. Peace out, and Have Fun.
So, sorry I haven't been updating. It's been very, very busy.
First of all, looking ahead. I have accepted a position at Intrinsity, a chip company in Austin, Texas. This means I am currently in serious crunch time as I try to find a place to live in and a car so I can get around. Intrinsity is actually sponsoring a Clinic at Mudd next year, so my job is to set up the stuff for the Clinic. They were hoping that the person they hired would also stick around and actually do the Clinic, but I guess they decided I was good enough. Or they think I'm just that stellar so I overpower that fault. I don't really know.
After the summer I will be attending UC Davis for my Masters. I will be working with Professor Bevan Baas and working on some really cool stuff in chip design. He's been working on a really interesting architecture where the chip is composed of several miniature cores that each do a specific thing. Then, you can string these together to create a processing pipeline. It makes it really fast and low power, especially for pipelined processes like digital signal processing.
Currently, I'm trying to save Clinic. We found out that there's this tool we MUST use to lay the chip out and connect it to the pads. MOSIS, the fabrication group we're working with, claims no one every gets it right by hand routing. So, I get to learn the new tool. I'm getting pretty close, but it's been really hard and I'm still unsure if I can pull this off. Plus, we have to get our Final Report all sorted out and approved, prepare for presentations, and finish wiring up everything for the chip. We don't have a few critical parts, so I'm getting very nervous about this.
We're also really deep into the Shakespeare production. Ironically, this year the class is putting on a play by John Webster, someone who was in Shakespeare's troupe, but isn't Shakespeare. It's a lovely tragedy where every major character dies by the end. Except for the male protagonist's friend. I'm a minor character, so I don't die. I forgot to bring my camera to the coffin building session AND the dress rehearsal. Gr.... Oh, in case you missed it, I helped build a coffin. It's a bit large, but very coffin shaped. It's 1.5 feet high, 6 feet long, and 2.2 feet wide at the widest point. We joke that we could store the Duchess, the kids, and Antonio all in the same coffin.
Robotics has been going... oddly. Due to time issues I haven't logged as many hours as I'd like into the project, and unfortunately have forced one of my team members to pick up my slack. We're trying to get the robot to know where it is using Monte Carlo Localization. I'm implementing the motion and sensor models into the system. We'll be using the IR Range finders to do estimations of how close it is to a wall. Should be really cool once we get it working.
Other than that, it's been fairly OK. I managed to score a 1TB external harddrive for $100 off of Newegg, so I now have somewhere to store stuff before I leave campus. I've been filling it with Anime mostly.
Anyways, that's it for now. I'll leave you with a video that pretty much sums up the stupidity of the Internet comments.
Greetings denizens who may or may not really care about what I write.
Apologies for the late(r) post.
In case you haven't been reading the other blogs, Kyle Marsh noted that we have about 4 weeks left in our existence here at Mudd. Which is barely meager enough to elk out the rest of Clinic and all those other fun happy times. Also, Kyle decided to be awesome and make a senior page for the yearbook. I am lame and didn't make one. I was thinking I should send in a semi-joke page due to my limited number of pictures of me, but as usual was too lazy to do even that.
Life is currently slowing down. Or, perhaps it's speeding up. Clinic has finally, at least in my mind, come under a semblance of control. We might actually pull this off. Granted, we're still behind our original schedule, but hopefully the last few risk areas will work out gracefully. I'd explain what they are, but I'd probably bore you since they're a little technical and weird.
On the other hand, I have a deadline on Monday to respond to a summer internship offer at Intrinsity, a chip company in Austin, Texas. The major reason I haven't jumped at this chance is to figure out all the other issues that come with it. Namely thinking about housing and food and transportation. I don't think they'd look kindly on me bringing a sleeping bag and camping out in the office. I also would lack proper nutrition. Plus, it's in Austin Texas which means dry and hot in the summer, at least relative to our temperate SoCal weather. I've been advised an air conditioned car would be appropriate, if not a necessity. And, at the end of the day I'd rather not go into debt due to this internship. In fact, it would be nice if I made a bit on the side so I can pay for grad school.
Speaking of which, I still haven't decided where to go. If you have any cool insights, please let me know.
I've picked back up some of my musical hobbies. I'm prepping for a performance during my church's Good Friday service, except there's no sheet music so I transcribed all the solos and will improv the rest probably. Also, Matthew Lawson, my former room mate, has press ganged me into helping to do music for the Shakespeare play, so I'm still learning to master the recorder in a few weeks. I'm actually not too bad now, but not good enough in my opinion.
Other than that, there's not too much happening. Cya around.
I got to visit USC on Friday as a potential Masters student. It was kinda cool, a lot different than when I visited as a potential applying undergrad.
As readers of the backlog may know, I have no car. In case you're interested, I'd estimate about 1/3 of the students on campus have a car. So, I had to take the train. Luckily, we have a Metrolink station a few blocks away. And by a few blocks, 20 minute walking distance 5 minute bike ride (downhill). What's really neat is that it only took about 1 hour to get to LA Union station, and the round trip cost me $14. That's cheaper than the gas it would have taken. Plus, I didn't have to worry about traffic or driving myself, I just read my Philosophy of Science book instead. A pretty sweet deal if you ask me. USC also provides a nice tram to get to and from Union station, an extra perk.
The ride itself was also very interesting. In a row behind me a black gentleman was trying to figure out when he would arrive at one of the train stops so that a friend could pick him up. Suddenly, everyone around him was giving him maps and advice and even specific instructions on how his friend will have to drive to get to the stop. As he said, "I'm feelin' the love here." Turns out he's visiting LA to follow up on some job leads. He grew up in Chicago and lives in Florida now. What's interesting is he then started to ask how it's like to live in LA. One of the ladies spoke up and described that there's still quite a big of the gang issues and all that. In fact, she used to take drugs and had been cut up quite a few times. However, she eventually decided to quit and now has kids that have grown up and are starting their own families. There were also talk about the nasty traffic and the smog problem too.
It was weird in a way. I've lived in the suburbs near LA for all my life, yet I know so little about downtown LA. Sure I've heard about the gangs and all that, but it was an eye opener to have someone who had survived through that life talk about it as a personal experience instead of some statistic. Claremont has even less of these gang problems, although we often get all the smog that blows out of LA hanging in our air.
As far as the USC trip itself, it was interesting. I met a person from Boston (MIT) and another who was deciding between USC and Carnegie Mellon. I got to talk with the advisers and the staff there. I even managed to grab a student who gave me some advice. Unfortunately I didn't catch any professors since it was Friday and they were all off-campus.
The campus is the same as you would expect from USC. Really pretty outside, inside is kinda drab for the older buildings (especially where they stick their professors' offices) and there's some really olde stuff. I'm going to do a little more research on the kind of work they're doing and seeing if it's stuff I'd want to do. Apparently about 98% of the Masters students there just do their classes, get their Masters, and head out to a job. It's a 1.5 year, or 3 semester, path.
The other college I'm considering is UC Davis. Professor Bevan Baas is doing some really cool stuff up there. Hopefully I can get into his research group, and he seems willing to let me in. Plus, I can probably rent a room from Michael Braly.
That's all for now. I'm currently trying to slay Clinic as fast as I can, but it's gonna be tough. Not to mention this team is riddled with bad traits. For starters, I'm a lazy bum, tend to over think the problem too much, and yet miss the important detail. Yay! \o/
I've received word that I might be getting more traffic soon. Something about acceptance letters or something like that. Weird.
Anyways, this is once again late because I am a lazy jerk who doesn't remember to write these things on Friday like I'm supposed to.
Spring Break was... interesting. I managed to cram in 24 Hours of gaming. Well, I actually didn't game all that much since I was organizing and keeping the gaming session going, but I had fun nonetheless. I blame my mom for indoctrinating me to be a good host and deriving pleasure out of making sure others are having a good time. But, that's another story. I then commenced to cram in as much Clinic as I possibly could for the next few days. Thursday evening I went home so that I could wake up at 4 in the morning on Friday and drive to Goleta, CA for an interview with Raytheon. The drive up was actually pretty nice. Two hours of basically empty freeway in the dark of night. The interview itself was pretty fun. I think I impressed them with my awesome Mudd knowledge and ability to problem solve on the spot. I might have to review how I answer questions like "How do you like being the technical lead of your team." To be honest, it's sometimes a very thankless job and I'd rather I only had my own work instead of being the go to guy in the team for help. But, sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do to make the project work, and I'm more than willing to shoulder the job. Then I had traffic on the way back. So, it took me four hours to get home. Then Saturday I got to watch my brother at his Drumline competition (yeah, he's just that cool). Sunday was church and a nice lunch at my grandmother's for my mom's birthday. Then back to school. And now, more Clinic. Yay!
In other news, I'm in the Shakespeare class. It's a pretty cool class. We get to read several Shakespeare plays, discuss them, and get cool lectures about Elizabethan drama and social issues at the time. For the second half of the semester we prepare and then perform a Shakespeare play. Well, except this year we chose a play by some other dude, but it's very nice olde English. It turns out Matthew Lawson, East Dorm Proctor, my roommate Freshman and Sophomore year, unicycler, LAC supervisor, and in general insanely awesome person extraordinaire is in charge of music. He happens to know I play the flute. So, now I'm learning the recorder. If you have any tips, let me know. I currently sound really stupid. Like, those really bad 5th graders who are being forced to play the recorder and they don't want to stupid. I've been told there is a way to sound really good, and I'd really really like to figure it out.
In yet other news Room Draw is now in effect. Since I'm a graduating senior, I don't have to deal with it. =] Unfortunately, it will consume most people's conversations for the forseeable future. And, being the social guy I am, I'd like to be having conversations with people. I guess I'll have to have topics that are more interesting that the drama of Room Draw. See this post if you're interested.
Anyways, that's all that mattered to me for this post. This is Trevin Murakami, and you've just been filled in.
Sorry I've been neglecting all one of my readers. OK, maybe the admissions department is watching as well.
First some current events. I got to see Watchmen last Friday. I was fairly impressed. Then again, that might be the sleep dep talking and my extremely short list of qualifications to be a movie critic.
It's actually been a really weird phenomenon concerning the Watchmen movie. It is very obvious they were trying to cater to both the Watchmen fanboys who know everything about everything in it, as well as the general populace who have no idea what is going on and the most "human" hero they have is Spiderman going emo. Ironically, every time I see a review people have to preface it with which category they belong to.
I happen to be neither. That is to say, I read the graphic novel, wasn't super impressed, but still thought it was a very high quality piece and understood it all. So, if there were plot holes or anything like that, I merely filled in the gaps. I was however extremely impressed by how much they managed to pack into the movie. They got all the major plotlines and subplots and character development in there. Not to mention the director has finally matured in his use of slow-mo during battle scenes. If you saw 300, you know sometimes the battles just start to take too long due to the slow-mo every time a bad guy gets hit. This time, it was much more tastefully done.
Overall, I'd say it was a pretty good movie and recommend people watch it. Just make sure you don't go in expecting Spiderman. This is a story of a messed up world. This is a look at the people behind the masks and not people with masks rising to fight the giant evil. In fact, a major point of the movie is questioning what is good or bad, or is it all just shades of gray in the end?
Oh, and the soundtrack was awesome. Some of the best music choices I've heard in a long time. The Sound of Silence for the funeral. The Times, They are a Changin' for the intro sequence. So awesome. Not much to rave about on the new music composed for the movie itself. =[
I'm prepping up for the 24Hr Crack party this weekend. For my newer readers, it's a gaming session I started my Sophomore year where a bunch of us try to play games for 24 Hours straight. Of course, we get to break for food and such. I've also been pushing a board game component so that we don't sit in front of computers fragging all day. I'm also in charge of providing beverages, so here's a lovely picture of my room, taken over by the 2 and 3-Liter bottles.
In Robotics we finally got our Chiara robots moving. W00t! Here's a picture of it going towards a landmark. We now have vision implemented and a basic finite state machine.
There are actually robots we got from Carnegie Mellon, the home of several robots. Unfortunately, this robot is still in development so we've been having fun poking around at low level C++ code to get things working.
Two weekends ago was Family Weekend. I gave a tour of the Engineering department. There were five tours and we wanted to partner up, but we had an odd number of tourguides and I'm an experienced one so I went solo. Pictures at the link here.
Well, that's it for now. Back to working on Clinic.
Call me slightly romantic, but I feel that leaving a mark tends to be a good thing. Assuming it's the good kind of mark and not the emotionally scarring mark.
Back in High School, I did quite a bit. I was active in band, did well in academics, and messed around in very very fun circles. I of course am barely a memory now, mostly in the teachers' minds. I don't expect people to remember the kid who did stuff in band four years ago. When I joined, I didn't know any stories about some long graduated person.
Oddly, in college, there seem to be more insane people, or just better story telling. So, I heard stories about Cal and how he managed to break one of the walls in the basement. I tell people about the crazy antics of Camilo. People still talk about the epic pranks that happened on HMC such as making a piece of public art rust.
It's not surprising then that we try to be remembered somehow, or at least hope that our accomplishments can continue to help others. For example, if you founded this awesome club, you'd hope it continued to thrive and let others experience its awesome. I recently gave over control of Crack in the AC to a sophomore Ben. Not only did I give him a crash course on how to do things, but I'm also making sure he doesn't do anything crazy. I'm also setting up the GameSHMC to get passed on if David ever gets around to calling the elections.
As for what's next, today was the Spring Career Fair. It was actually very disappointing. Not only did it start at 12 noon and I have a 1:15pm class but there were so few people attending. The economic decline is hitting everyone pretty hard and so there's still quite a few internships floating around but not that many entry-level jobs. I guess it's my turn to be much more proactive.
In case you didn't know, I'm focusing on digital engineering. Think of it as a subset of Electrical Engineering that deals with the digital components. This usually translates in the real world to programming FPGA chips to do data processing from communications. Communication is a big industry, and everyone want to be wireless. However, there's a few people who would use my extra training in actual chip design, but Intel and the likes are mostly interested in Masters level or higher for full-time jobs.
So, I'm still waiting on the graduate schools. It's weird, most of the other people I know in the other majors have been accepted into at least one school already. The physicists are extra thrilled because they all want to get PhDs and do the awesome crazy physics work that won't be commercially feasible or useful for several decades. You know, like quantum computing. They've got these really cool algorithms that speed things up a lot, but the problem is they don't have any hardware that can actually do the computation. Ah how that real world clashes with the theory.
BTW, there's some interesting plans in the works. I won't spoil it, but it should be sufficiently awesome.
This of course is in no way designed to be the end-all, just a humorous romp through some very.... nerdy... things.
First, the background.
You see, to be geeky, you have to know geeky things. I'm not necessarily talking about quarks and quantum physics. I'm also talking about the sub-culture of internet memes and crazy things that are fun and get referenced quite a bit. That way, you can pull from the same database of weird and wonky things and know what we mean by them. So, if someone fakes an accent saying "H'OK, so. Here's the Eaaarth" you know it's from The End of the World.
Next, you gotta play the part.
This is doing stuff like making awkward gestures, being unsettled in non-nerd social groups, and wearing coke bottle glasses. No, wait, that's the stereotype. Actually it's more about what you do when you find out the person you're talking to is a nerd. The vast majority of nerds can in fact blend in very well with their environment. The trick is to find other nerds and then nerd out together. For example, talking about games is OK since even jocks play games (otherwise EA wouldn't exist). The trick is if the other person says stuff like that they play World of WarCraft (or WoW, get with the lingo dude), then you might be on to something. Except for me, I don't play WoW. The real trick is if they play other stuff or are known to be extremely awesome on their server. Even better if they are into game design, as in have ideas about how to make games better, but aren't actually in the field. OK, they can be in the game industry, but that just makes them professional geeks that make money.
Then, now that you have revealed their geekiness, reveal yours. Often, geeks get extremely emotional about stuff they like. Thus, the whole Star Wars versus Star Trek feud we make fun of so much. So, get into it, start throwing around more geeky language (LOL pronounced 'lawl' is a quality and popular one), even if you don't know anything about what they're talking about. Just appear interested. Sometimes you can trick us if you just probe us and keep us talking. I'm serious. I've goaded many people into 30 minute rants while I sat and ate dinner.
And Finally, get street cred.
The thing about the nerd community is it can be very tightly networked. So, as your nerdiness spreads, other nerds will pop out and recognize you as a nerd. Unless you're one of those sneaky people who never post pictures of themselves that can be traced back to their forum screen names and so will only reveal themselves by telling you their screen name and then you realize you've been talking with that forum moderator that you keep having flame wars with on that one forum. That was a joke in case you were wondering.
Something to help you along is to surf YouTube. It is incredibly geeky. I'm not talking about those emo kids talking into their webcams, I'm talking about viral videos of crazy. Like this one:
See? They can also be AWESOME.
Well, have fun. Geeks can be fun to be. Just don't go too far, I'd rather not know you as that person I have to have a ban hammer ready for every time people start to talk about Mac versus PC and you complain that everything isn't Linux. Not that I have anything against Linux, it's just that there are some very, very whiny Linux people. =]
Just this last weekend, I was bashing my head against a certain bug. It's called an iteration loop error. In Verilog, parts of the chip don't have any delay in them. Since this is a rough simulation, that's usually OK and in the real world (or better simulations) we'll see delays and all is well. Iteration loops occur when there is a signal loop (i.e. a signal is dependent on itself) and keeps changing indefinitely. In the real world, this never happens. But, due to the zero delay in Verilog, it can in simulation.
So, I spend most of Friday, Saturday and Sunday chasing around this bug not only in simulation but in my mind. It appeared to come from the flip flops, a certain digital structure that can capture a value on its input on the rising edge of a clock signal, and hold it as its output until it samples another. Very handy. To hold these values, there's certain loops that, in theory, should open and close and not create a feedback loop. However, I finally gave up and worked on other parts of Clinic and asked Prof. Harris to help me. He suggested adding in delays everywhere, setup the wave, and then bring him over to check them out.
So, on Wednesday, I setup the simulation with delays everywhere, and it appears to have fixed the problem. While this is all well and good, we want to isolate what caused the problem in the first place. Magic fixes don't actually fix the problem. So, with Prof. Harris watching, I start to remove the delays in the Verilog code. Eventually, we get back to code with no delay. Puzzled, I then try to re-create the iteration loop bug. It doesn't show up. I then turn to Julien Massas and ask him to try to re-create the bug, since his code was the first to show the error. It also doesn't exist in his code.
Now, I know we didn't change all that much from Sunday to Wednesday, and I'm very very sure it was still broken on Sunday. So, my only explanation is that the presence of Prof. Harris fixed it. Or, it somehow managed to hide itself in fear of his awesome l337 skillz and will resurface sometime next week, right before our deadlines.
In other news, I'm still searching for what I'll be doing after graduation. Grad apps are in (well, 3 out of 5, the other 2 are due next month) and under review, my resume is floating in databases around the globe, and JPL has declined to offer me a position. One of my physics friends already got into one of his Grad schools, so he's very very happy and much more relaxed. I blame it on his Indian heritage (Asiatic India mind you). Plus, as an engineer I can find work without a grad degree. He can't. So, extra kudos for him being so awesome and way smarter than me.
To close, I'll drop a screenshot of my resume. Just in case you were curious.
As it turns out, it hasn't been altogether a bad week. Robotics is gonna be awesome and Shakespeare is gonna be awesome. Clinic has carried over from last semester (still on the critical path of you screw up the project fails).
So, the real question is what to do about my 3 Hums. One hasn't met yet since the professor is at a conference for this week. However, I know the professor, and it's gonna be on the Philosophy of Science. The second one is about Asian history, specifically the recent modernization and post-colonialism. After all, that's all we Westerners really know since most of the ancient stuff is still being translated/dug up/hidden by the government. Decisions decisions.
Now, the bad stuff. Mostly clinic. I'm currently figuring out a few new tricks to make testing easier in the future. Unfortunately this is a pain to learn and puts me behind on other stuff. Basically, I've managed to overwork myself again. I stayed up very late Friday morning (sun didn't come up while I was awake, so it's not an all-nighter!) finishing some tests. As par for course, I was the only one to get those tests done, mostly because it's the easiest piece to test and I've been ahead of the rest of the team for some time now. I also have to debug a nasty problem that was mucking up everyone's simulations, so that didn't help everyone else progress either. As I said, I'm on critical path, and just barely making my deadlines means the whole team falls behind.
Also, I can't just mess around anyone. That means stuff like Mass Effect and Fallout3 and learning Japanese are back on hold. =[
In other random news, apparently Nvidia has managed to give us 3D vision from our monitors. Basically it uses the same technology that is used in 3D movies today, but created on the fly from your graphics card. The downside is it requires 1) a 120Hz monitor, 2) a GeForce 8 series or better graphics card, and 3) that you wear glasses. Now, the glasses are apparently not the yellow abominations you return after watching other 3D cinema and are apparently pretty stylish. Plus, the Nvidia team apparently to be doing a good job of letting you know what does and doesn't work. Plus there's the disorientation that you're in 3D now. Especially in First-Person-Shooters where we've been trained to think we're looking at a 3D world already with perspective and enemies behind cover 20 yards away. But, it's supposed a pretty sweet gig. Not gonna change your world or make or break new games, but a nice feature that if you have disposable income to spend on, is kinda cool. I don't have that disposable income handy. =]
This is quick snapshot of the lovely little doohicky I have on this Blog called Google Analytics. It shows that every day this blog sees about 5-10 viewers. Most don't stay for long, and the majority (over 50%) come from a referring site. I surprisingly am also getting quite a bit of traffic now from search engines. This blog is in fact NOT the top result from searching my name, Trevin Murakami. So, obviously people aren't searching for me. BTW, the HMC page that details and links to this blog are the top hit, just in case you were wondering and didn't want to Google me.
So, anyways, it just goes to prove people (besides you) actually read this thing. And by read I mean not really since only on a few days does the average time on the page creep above 30 seconds.
Um, I head back to school this weekend. Back to more deadlines and such. I think the Verilog I built for the chip is solid, but I haven't gotten a full-on test going yet so I wouldn't want to publish it. I'm now in the midst of building a bunch of supporting schematics so I can start wiring pieces together. The toughest part is getting things straight in my head. There's certain subtitles about the design and some things like ordering can actually matter. For example, a schematic that places objects to the right or left of each other will more likely than not produce a layout design in the same shape. This can be a good thing (good schematics make layout easy) or a bad thing (bad schematics make layouts a living hell). Plus, I have to make decisions about how we're actually building everything, and there's stuff like fixing mistakes others have made.
Overall, though, I haven't been doing that much work. Every night I play games. I still haven't finished off my giant pile of games to play, although I did beat Portal: Prelude which was sufficiently awesome. Also, around 10pm a lot of people regularly are showing up to play DotA online, which has been fun. It's good to learn from peers instead of just playing a random set of players and feeling very angry about stuff. If you play with and without friends, you'll understand what I mean. So, with any random housework excluded, I typically am getting around 5 hours of work done each day. Which isn't too bad, considering technically I'm still on break and stuff is about on the schedule I set. There's always the chance something goes horribly wrong next week and I have to suffer, but oh well. I don't think anyone else is doing work over break, except for grad applications and thank you cards.
Speaking of grad apps, people have been asking me what ever am I going to do once I graduate. First of all, yes I will graduate this semester (unless Prof. Harris holds me over to fix stuff on Clinic). As for what I'm going to do, it kinda depends. I eventually will need a Masters. How I get it is a good question. There's the straight to more school. Short, sweet, about 1 year to do. Then there's work and school, much more economical (work typically pays) but there goes your evenings and it'll take more like 4 years. Or work, then school. Except then you run into the situation 1) will your employers let you go (and pay if you're extra lucky) for a year and 2) you go from positive income to negative income (the usual route, employers typically don't like you leaving for a year). With other responsibilities (family if you're at that point) that can be hard to swallow.
As for where, I don't know. I am applying to USC, UCD, UCSD, UCLA, and University of Texas at Arlington. For jobs, I've been 2nd round interviewed at JPL, but that's about it. A few groups called to make sure I was still in the market, but we haven't had any formal chats yet. And then there's the economy so hires are gonna be slim and late in the year. However, some companies are still hiring fresh grads since it gives them new blood, especially the aerospace industry since all their guys are gonna retire soon and they haven't been hiring new grads for a while.
So, that's where I am right now. As if the anonymous internet cared.
Still on break. HMC returns on Jan 19th. So that means one more week to fix all that Clinic stuff I still have to do. Gr....
Anyways, on to the topic of the day: communities. While a loose term, I'm going to reference it in regards to the supportive (or lack thereof) nature of people doing similar things.
Let's start with the DotA community. If you're unfamiliar, DotA stand for 'Defense of the Ancients' and is a WarCraft 3 Frozen Throne custom map. It is also perhaps the single most played WarCraft 3 map, with a huge community, patches, it shows up in competitive leagues, and basically tends to be a big deal. It is based around teams of players each controlling a hero. The goal is to push into the enemy base and kill their super structure, a tree or a throne. As the game progresses, the heroes level up, gain cool powers, and you can buy items to further augment your heroes. The core gameplay though is very micro dependent (fine control of your hero and its actions) as well as team coordination (acting as a team when fighting, allocating who does what, etc.). Team coordination in some ways trumps the micro aspect since 4 heroes attacking 1 hero should win, unless that 1 hero is ridiculously overpowered due to levels or items.
So, here's the crux of the matter. The DotA community is not very supportive of new players. In fact, there are times when people have actually told other players to leave because they were so bad at the game. There's also what are known as griefers, or people who intentionally do things to annoy others. Some of these actions might be intentionally dying to the other team to give them an advantage, or leaving a game in progress (no one new can join and now the team is down a hero). Why? Because people want to win, and DotA is very team dependent, so if you have a bad team people get frustrated. However, in the long run, there seems to be a problem. If you chastise all the new players and get rid of them, what happens? There is no influx of new players, old better players might eventually leave, and now you're stuck with no players. Of course, there's a few really stubborn players who keep playing, and there's definitely some helpful players out there, but in general the community is pretty hostile. Most new players only get better because they are trained by experienced players, usually friends who introduce them to the game. I actually started playing because we have a DotA game night each week at Mudd. I'm still pretty bad.
Now, the HMC community. I tend to cite this as the reason I decided on Harvey Mudd College, and it didn't disappoint. The very concept that it's a high performance school, but everyone lives on campus and the professors are there to teach make an uber combo. Plus there's other perks like the hands-on work and such. At the core, though, I'm a big fan of how supportive the community is. It's a place where if you have questions, someone is bound to know the answer and is willing to explain it to you. I managed to debug and learn about boot failures when my computer went bonkers right before finals week. I've had people explain crazy algorithms to me. I was just interviewing at JPL and explaining what I knew about a CS class that I hadn't taken, and the interviewer thought I had taken the class. I eventually told him that this was just from learning from the CS majors complaining about chunky string and that I didn't know how to fix the problem itself in detail. I've also spent many hours walking others through problems of their own, sometimes in sacrifice of meeting my own deadlines.
Now, it's not all flowers and rainbows. I've mentioned in others posts about the downsides of such a tight community such as if you do something stupid everyone finds out, or that if you're the jerk people end up not liking you can't be anonymous. But, overall, I enjoy the community of Harvey Mudd College. Plus, we have professors who participate in some of the randomest stuff, like dressing up as Santa so we can take pictures with him. Go Prof. Yong!
In Dungeons and Dragons, abbreviated D&D, there are six primary attributes. Strength, a measurement of physical power, Dexterity, a measurement of nimble actions and fingers, Constitution, a measure of endurance to pain and body, Intelligence, a measurement of knowledge, Wisdom, a measurement of perception and application, and Charisma, a measurement of physical beauty and nimbleness of the tongue.
D&D explains the difference between Intelligence (Int) and Wisdom (Wis) as the former being book smarts while the latter is street smarts. Also, having a lot of one doesn't necessarily include the other. The example would be an absent-minded professor for high Int and low Wis, or a perceptive idiot for low Int and high Wis. Intelligence is numbers, calculations, lore, and held knowledge in the character's mind. Wisdom is the application of faculties to perceive the world around you by hearing or sight or general insight. Of course, a synergy occurs if you have both since you can take in the situation and then apply your dazzling archives of knowledge to take advantage of it.
This brings us to a common folly about smart people. Being a student of Harvey Mudd would imply that one would have a high Int score. However, not all of them would have a high Wis score right? They should be bumbling morons that only have book smarts and no other smarts. That is where you'd be wrong. Harvey Mudd prides itself on trying to find and admitting "well-rounded" students. I know it's a trite buzz word, but bear with me. They look for smart students, but they need something else. For me, it was a mish mash of music (band), a bit of athletics (tennis and frisbee) and random other things. But in the end, the students aren't complete book junkies. Granted, I'm sure one of my friends being a data miner (especially about politics) doesn't strike people as being less geeky.
Now, for another folly. The folly that smart people have. It's the concept that you're smarter than others. While, this belief isn't necessarily bad, the implications aren't so nice. For one thing, this tends to make smart people think they're better than the not so smart people, which is not true. The biggest problem is that they think they can outsmart everyone. Some, if they were teased or slighted at younger ages for their intelligence, may even feel entitled to the ability to outsmart everyone else. Of course, this doesn't necessarily hold. For one thing, there is always someone smarter. Secondly, which smart are you measuring? Someone might simply be more clever, or accidentally come upon a better alternative.
I personally have had this folly, a kind of hubris that I should win. I recently bought two copies of Blokus, one for my family and one for the gaming club at HMC. It's a game where you try to place as many of your pieces on the board while preventing your opponents from placing their pieces. It's so simple that anyone can play, but a bit of strategy so there's depth. However, it's not so complex as say chess. Thus, there have been a few games where I think I have the winning solution, and if I played it right I would have won. Unfortunately, I screwed around, messed up, and ended up losing.
The Admissions Office decided they want some blogs. Blogs about life, about death, philosophy, art, games, horror, sleep dep, movies, classes, professors, food, stuff.
So, they asked for volunteers. I'm one of them. They said, "Please blog at least once a week about Mudd. Just don't make it your rant page, and don't do personal attacks. Oh, and we could give you a $150 digital camera to take pictures with of your life, keep it if you blog for more than 2 semesters. Other than that, do what you want. We'll even link your blog from the HMC main website."
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