In Review

End of semester.

I should have seen it coming. Granted, I did see it coming. I saw it and survived. Doesn't change the fact it was painful.

This last semester was E102, E106, E158, E166, MUS080, MUS084. In order, that's Big Stems, Material, VLSI, High-Speed PCB, Music Theory I, and Jazz Improv, using the shortened nomenclature. I'm not going to say "Introduction to CMOS VLSI Design", more typing means you have to read more random babbling.

Overall, it doesn't look that bad. 16.5 credits. Recall that the maximum is 18 before you have to petition for an overload, and to graduate you need to average 16 credits per semester. Plus, the music theory shouldn't be bad, I've played piano and flute for many many years and Jazz Improv is a similar thing.

The kicker is the Engineering classes. Specifically, High-Speed PCB and VLSI are project based classes, which means the second half of the class is mostly devoted to doing something big and shiny. E4 is an entire semester of projects, some of which, I might add, were a really really tough this semester. I just built fences my year. Fences that had to stand up to people climbing over them and leaning on them and had to be freestanding. But I digress.

Also, turns out I'm not a super musician. I have what looks like a lot of hours, but in reality doesn't boil down to that much skill. Piano played second fiddle for most of High School and Flute was mostly employed in the Band. Granted I was one of the best flutes, Section Leader even, but that doesn't translate to being able to pick up Flight of the Bumblebee or something. But Theory. I should be able to handle that. Well, except the whole sight singing and dictation part. Plus, Jazz improv isn't like playing Bach's Invention No. 1.

I'm not saying it was a bad semester. It was pretty awesome. I helped build a chip. When I talk about crosstalk, the interviewers get confused as to why an undergrad knows these things. I have learned Masters level stuff about systems and control. And I can kinda jam on the piano, or write four part counterpoint. It's just there were definitely times when I felt at the end of my rope. Mostly due to time constraints.

The best part is, I now go off to an internship. So, I probably won't post anything for a while unless I feel bored or something really Mudd-y happens. And when I get back, I get to do Clinic, MicroPs, Rigid Dynamics, Intro to Philosophy, and Nationalism and Music. Plus some independent study testing the chip we built.

You'd think I'd learn.


In the meantime, enjoy:

Summertime

[insert Beach Boys song here]

As we wrap up the academic year, it's time to look towards our summer plans. If we were in High School, this might entail things from working at the local burger joint to summer school or, if you're like me, Summer Activities like Band Camp.

But, we're in College now.

What's to do around Mudd? First, there's summer math. It's about six weeks long, and covers all of your sophomore year of math. That's a lot of math, really fast. Typical day is lecture from 8 to noon, eat lunch, homework to about 10pm or midnight, depending on abilities and when you start (or later if you're insane), sleep, and repeat. The good thing is the homework is a bit lighter on weekends, i.e. same amount as during the week, so you've got 2 days to hash out to random stuff. Games, hang out, run a D&D campaign, hit the beach, etc. The advantage? No Core math classes sophomore year. There's also research. This year there's research in computer vision (army of friendly robots), software for seismographs, and the usual staff positions. Staff entails doing random jobs, such as fixing the printer or reviewing Clinic papers before they get published, hardbound, and locked away in a shiny cabinet somewhere. Past projects include cornea growth, burning buildings, testing dams, and shooting particles at materials and measuring the dipole moments.

What's to do outside Mudd? Jobs mostly. Internships are really cool. I happen to have accepted an internship at CornerTurn. Small offshoot of some bigger groups whose main goal is to just do Engineering, trying to stay as far away as possible from the bureaucracy and processes of larger companies. They like to build boards and special application stuff, such as this really cool system that can use multiple antennas as one internet connection, giving people on boats broadband without a giant dish on their ship. Had to turn down SpaceX, which would have been working on rockets. Oh well, there's next year. There's also even MORE research. Travel somewhere exotic like the East Coast and do research at some other university. And there's your usual jobs, such as bumming around the parents' house, flipping burgers, and doing community service. One friend helps out at a camp every summer. Insane awesome stories.

Last summer I worked on the Claremont Summer Sustainability Audit, financed by the Council of Presidents. Sounds impressive. Mostly it was an audit to find out how sustainable the Claremont College were in our consumption, utilization, and removal of resources. So, water use, electric use, waste management, the whole bit. A big chunk of the time was spent just getting the data from giant databases and archaic file formatting, but once we had it stuff got really interesting. We then made recommendations, such as switching to less water intensive landscaping and using smarter irrigation methods. Turns out Mudd, Scripps, and Pomona use this cool thing called RainBird which takes weather data and calculates how much water the plants have lost, then replenishes that amount during the next watering. Pretty cool. Also, switching to more efficient lighting like compact fluorescents saves globs of electricity, which is usually the most costly utility. Ironically, water is the least expensive, but it really should be the most expensive since we have to import it all from up north. All in all, some pretty neat things.

The dorms are still open, but only to people who need to live on campus for the summer. So, we all cram together in Sontag, South, Linde, and Case for the summer. This leads to some really cool things, like for our Summer Math we had an awesome suite. Last summer, we had around 12 people on average pooling together for meals. This meant each person cooked or helped cook about once a week for dinner, then we split the costs. Some really cool, and some not so cool, dishes came out of that. Infamous events were when I overfilled the rice cooker, so the rice was all dry. I can cook rice in a pot, but apparently not in a rice cooker. Or the chicken dish with lemon and garlic, except there was way too much lemon. I was pretty bummed since I had to peel and mash all that garlic, five full cloves, and you didn't even taste the garlic. And of course, if the food run didn't make it in time, we defaulted to spaghetti, which was also widely varied. Oh, and that one time some of the guys found out they had never made omelets, so decided to try their hand at it. They got OK at it by the end. They were also the ones who cooked BLT sandwiches for one meal.

Oh, and by the way, apparently Mudd is the only College without a pool. Mudd used to have one, but it got replaced by the new dinning hall. Scripps has a pool, CMC has a pool, Pitzer has a pool, Pomona has a pool. Not Mudd. Word on the street is that they're going to build a new one.

It's the End of the World...

as we know it.



So, the year is coming to a close. That means registering for next year's classes, projects, and of course finals. I've currently knocked off 6 out of my 16.5 units semester. Wheee! Big Stems and High-Speed PCB Design to be exact.

So, I find it interesting that I'm probably a pessimist. It's not that I'm depressed or anything, it's just that for some reason I always think of what's the worst possible thing that could happen within reason. So, I don't worry about meteors hitting me. However, I do imagine myself clipping something with my handlebars on my bike, causing it to spin out and throw me onto the street. Of course, it hasn't happened yet, I imagine it every time I transition to the sidewalk (thus a strong bump) and then have to maneuver a moderately small space.

Anyways, this means I expect the worst. Works for strategy, basically expecting the best possible move your opponent could do. Works for dangerous situations, I'll be ready. Works for a lot of things.

Doesn't work so well in school.

Expecting to get low grades is one thing. Bombing a test is another. Getting a zero, that's a little out there. However, there's a serious problem. If I did the worst case, to prevent it I would have to work hard. Really really really hard. Attend all office hours, converse with at least two other people on answers, study at least 3 hours before a test. That's a lot of time, and to try and do that for all of my classes would be suicide. Then there's the moderate case. I've been getting about average with moderate work, I bet this will be average as well. Then there's that little voice in my head that knows I'm a pessimist, and tries to convince me that I'm just being pessimistic and that actually I'm doing better than I think I am. Which I promptly shut up, and get back to work.

The key is to set priorities. For example, this blog is NOT a super high priority. It's why I haven't posted in over a week. I've been busy. VLSI is pretty high priority. High-Speed PCB was a HUGE priority as the deadline for our final project rolled in and I wanted our stuff to get better, more accurate, more comprehensive. It's worth almost 40% of my grade after all, and I could use the points.

There's actually a saying that at Mudd, there are three things. There is good sleep, good grades, and a good social life. Pick two. While this is mostly true, the trick is to realize you get to pick two on a daily, or even maybe over five times a day. Tomorrow is a test, sacrifice social life to get more sleep and better grades. It's a giant party tonight, sack some sleep and maybe a little on your grades to get a boost in social life. It's this balancing act that is key at Mudd.

I mean, let's face it. You can't do everything. Especially at the Claremont Colleges in general, since each College is doing things every day. Plus, there just aren't enough hours in the day to hang out for 3 of them, eat for 1-2 of them, sleep for 8 of them, spend at least 1 of them on personal time, especially hygiene, while getting work done and attending classes. Granted, some people need more than 8 hours of sleep, and some can survive on less, and perhaps you feel a good healthy social life is more like 5 hours of social hanging out. Or you're a girl and washing your hair takes an hour all by itself.

The point being, if you don't have time management skills, you won't do well here or you'll get some fast.

But, what's the worst that could happen? You ITR (Inability to Re-register) and transfer somewhere else. If you got into Mudd, I'm pretty sure there's plenty of other colleges that will have you.

The question is, after coming to Mudd and seeing the awesomeness that is Mudd, will you have them?

Things I've Learned from Anime

First, I guess I should start off with an apology. The last couple of posts have been kinda haphazard. I tried my hardest not to make them rants, and yet the main point was kinda to rant, so it all was in pieces. I'll try to get things a bit more coherent.

Anyways. If you don't know what Anime is, it's a broad classification of romance, comedy, action, horror, philosophical, visionary, melodramatic, stupid, ridiculous, and insane things. In short, it's Japanese cartoons. Several have made their way to the US, including stuff like Pokemon, Naruto, and Spirited Away, but who could forget the stupidity that is Dragon Ball Z. Suffice to say that if you think all Anime is like that, you're sorely mistaken. It would be like trying to collect all American movies and categorize them as "American". The style varies from studio to studio, and since it's animated the content is a varied and limitless as the animation. Everything from realistic drama to giant battling mobile suits with beam swords, Anime's got you covered.

The key thing about Anime is often its themes and/or style. It is extremely distinctive form the American style, although The Avatar on Nickelodeon has done a very good job at imitating it. Also, a common trademark in more comical ones is the expressions are distilled into very specific things, like a single sweat drop to illustrate nervousness. Also, a common feature in many Anime is large eyes, since the Japanese culture has a fascination with eyes and their ability to convey emotion and character.

Enough with the background.

So, some fun things I've learned form Anime.
1) The protagonist will always have a secret past. This isn't completely true, but it's something people like to use as a plot device. Something about the history of the person will define something about the current period of their life that we're watching. Whether this is a latent superpower or an explanation of whey they react the way they do to certain situations, the past makes a difference. Of course, to counter this, a common theme is also being able to break away from the past and destiny in general and to be yourself.

2) Your body can take it. For example, Bleach seems to think the human body has about 3+ Liters of blood that you can lose, and still get up and use your super powered move to finish off the bad guy. Or, how about several instances where people undergo intensive training and eventually become super powered over the period of about 1 year or less. Note they never break a bone or anything during all of this. Weird.

3) When the going gets tough, be sure to have friends. Now here's a theme I can get behind. The support of friends is awesome. Period. Mudd takes advantage of this by often times forcing to rely on your peers for homework and projects. And usually people do a good job of helping each other. Anime sometimes takes this to a whole new level. Basically, if you beat up the protagonist's friend, suddenly they get all pumped up to defend their buddies. So, if you're a bad guy, remember to kill the main character first, then gloat, then kill the friends. Hurting friends will mean the main character will suddenly get a power boost as if they ate a Mentos or something and then commence to beat you down.

4) Family is important. Sometimes people get confused when Anime makes such a big deal about family. This applies to not only relationships, but also to family history. Often they have to deal with something that their father or predecessor has done. However, to the Japanese, family is extremely important. There's often even a sense of debt to your parents for raising you and caring for you. The extreme case is the family is more important than the self, a theme that crosses with honor of the family name. Relationships, especially broken ones, are often a key and central theme in many series. Finding a family is also important, whether it be comrades or blood relatives, the idea of a family unit being together is important.

5) Only teenagers can pilot giant mech suits. OK, make that angsty teenagers that are maladjusted. See Evangelion. On second thought, don't. You might not be prepared for the insanity of the series. This is more of a LOL point. Most likely this theme appears in certain genres since they are geared towards middle school to high school aged kids. And let's face it, the time of change during High School is perfect emotional fodder in general.

and finally 6) Serialization is a bad idea. Trying to continue a series for to long usually ends in fail as the makers try to keep topping themselves with more outrageous characters or abilities and situations. First season they stop a nuke? Well, next season let's have them stop an entire insurrection. Then the national army. Then... ALIENS! You get the idea. The good ideas may still pop up every now and then, but usually they become so sparse it's not worth it anymore. I guess the same rule applies to this blog. Eventually, I'm gonna run out of good ideas to talk about. Then I'll have to try and write some random gibberish, or only talk about current events. Merp. That would be sad. I'd become a reporter. And it's not like I live an exciting life with robots and ninjas and cute girls everywhere... wait... I do live a life with robots and ninjas around. Now I just gotta get myself a cute girlfriend. A girlfriend with a mysterious past that will unlock my latent superpowers.

Heh, that would be hilarious.

Christian on Campus

Again, a disclaimer. I don't claim to speak for Christians nor any other sect of religious affiliation. This is a personal opinion.

So, I happen to classify myself as a Christian. The way I look at this is not that I attend a Christian church, or that I believe in the Bible, or any of that. I mean, the above statements are true, it's just I personally feel that doesn't make you a Christian. Being a Christian is a way of life, not filling your head with a bunch of facts or simply being at a certain place at a certain time, as great as those things may be. Nope. Being a Christian involves realizing your own shortcomings, how utterly lousy you are, and putting your faith in something greater than you who cares and is willing to help you. Of course, there's more to it than that, but I don't want to plunge into a giant rant about being a Christian and all that. This is just to let you know where I'm coming from.

In a prior post I talked a little about differing opinions and such. This is extremely applicable and so I suggest you read it if you get confused, because I'm going to assume you've at least skimmed it.

Now, to the main topic.

First, realize that there are differing definitions of being a Christian. I've presented one of them. Also, people tend to classify Christians in different ways. I use the word "people" to include Christians themselves in the prior sentence. I'm sure you know about Catholicism and Protestants and all that jazz, but even on a finer grain there's variety. Showing up for church is what some people think is a necessary pre-requisite for being a Christian. Perhaps being good enough or doing good deads. Others feel you have to believe the entire Bible literally, some think it's more of a guideline manual. There's huge variety, even down to people who claim to be Christian but don't believe in the divinity of Jesus nor the resurrection. Personally, those people kinda confuse me. I mean, you think someone stole the body or something? Bug me with your theory and I'm pretty sure I have a rebuttal, I won't list all the various crazy theories I've been presented here. Seriously, Jesus just went into a deep sleep? There was a spear stuck in his chest for crying out loud.

Moving on, there's plenty of different ways to express your faith on campus. We do have an Intervarsity (IV) group here on the Claremont Colleges, and they are awesome. I kinda wish I'm able to attend more often, but homework keeps kicking me in the face. Of course, there's also several churches locally, and people with cars who might be able to get you there. And of course there's everyday stuff. I mean, we don't have Bible burnings and being an awesome person in general is never frowned upon.

Conflict of course arises when the extremists start being, well, extreme. For example, going around being the stereotypical "you're all going to hell" kind of Christian is a Bad Idea. Not only are you being a jerk, you're also making people less likely to view Christians in a favorable light, and probably pissing off other Christians as a result. Also, there have been times that Christianity in general has butted head with other groups. The issues of abortion and homosexuality are the big current ones, evolution to a lesser degree. Maybe I'll do a random rant some other time on one of them and what both sides have been arguing so people will stop getting one-sided information. I hate that kind of stuff. Back to the point, while the general Christianity, or at least whoever the media report about, may set some kind of platform, even withing Mudd you'll find people who agree and disagree with the general platform. Kinda fun. Lovely little microcosm. Hey, there's another idea for another post.

This beings me to the final point. A weird thing occurs when you profess to be something. You are now an example of what that label might be. I profess to be a Christian, so I can be a representation of what a Christian is. Others claim to be jerks, and we all know the connotation of that based on people we know who are labeled or label themselves as jerks. Some people avoid labels because of the connotations and that their actions may reflect badly on that label. Sometimes I don't want to call myself a Christian since it would tarnish what other Christian I know have worked hard on to give it a good name. Then again, it's an accountability system. I need to live up to what I say I am. And, as I mentioned above, I know how lame and lousy of a Christian I am, which is probably a good thing. Being a self-righteous Christian is usually a bad idea.

I imagine that all of these things apply to other groups as well. Just wanted to share some stuff form my side.

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.

Mudd Lore: Nunchuck Frosh

Sorry this is a bit late. Been very busy.

Also, there were a lot of prefrosh running around campus. Geez. Sorry I didn't get back in time to hang out and chill as much as I'd liked.

Anyways, I'm going to share with you a little bit of Mudd lore. Now, this is fairly accurate, and recent enough that there are in fact people who know the person in question still at Mudd. In fact, the crazy guy comes back to visit every now and then.

So, without further ado, here's the legend of the Nunchuck Frosh:

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So NunchuckFrosh makes himself nunchucks, is happy. Nunchuck frosh makes himself a duct tape sword, is happy. Nunchuck frosh takes him a Frosh Chem Test, is happy. Nunchuck frosh gets really tired at the end of the day.

Nunchuck frosh doesn't want to sleep in his dorm room.

Nunchuck frosh wanders out.

Nunchuck frosh thinks he's on Pitzer campus. Nunchuck frosh has slept on Pitzer campus before, and knows it is safe to sleep there. Nunchuck frosh is very tired. Nunchuck frosh sits against a wall and goes to sleep.

Nunchuck frosh is on Scripps campus. Big oops. Very big oops. Numerous orders of magnitude oops.

Scrippsies call Campsec. Campsec comes for Nunchuck frosh. Campsec says Campsec gets a call that a man is passed out on Scripps campus armed with weapons. Nunchuck frosh very confused, then veeeeeeery not happy.

Campsec tells Nunchuck frosh that NUNCHUCKS ARE ILLEGAL IN THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA. Big oops.

Nunchuck frosh has his nunchucks confiscated. Nunchuck frosh has his duct tape katana confiscated for good measure. Nunchuck frosh wanders back to his own room.

Nunchuck frosh no longer sleeps anywhere near Scripps campus. Big time.
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The man in question has also made a full set of armor and several other weapons of varying degrees of awesome. If you come to ITR Games, he just might visit in full armor. He even has gauntlets.