Yoink!

Well, it's now the end of the year.

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.

Oh, one last video.

BIG Update

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.

Fading into the Background

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.

Refresh

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.

Late as Usual

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.

Re-Entry

Um, I'm back in school. Just FYI.

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. =]

Here's to an exciting semester! Cheers!

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.

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.

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.

Welcome to the 50th Percentile

or below.

Perhaps one of the most surprising and yet most obvious things about Mudd is that there's smart students here. The obvious factor is, well, quite obvious. It's bragged about, stories are written about it, and the statistics support it. The surprising part is what students do when they get here.

They think it's gonna be like High School.

You know. The place where you're the best of the best. Maybe valedictorian, top 10, National Honors, smartest person around, impressive and gawked over by teachers by your natural insight and talent. Plus, you've probably got some other talent, such as being involved in Band like I was, or art, or a sport, or taking over the student government. You were on top of the class. Maybe a little socially ostracized, but you were excelling nonetheless.

The problem is that everyone at Mudd was the same as you. They all were near the top of their class, they took advanced courses, they have special talents, and they're also here to prove their mettle before stepping out into the real world and dazzling it with their brilliance and awesomeness.

This presents you with some interesting circumstances. Best case, you're still the brightest in the class and breeze through your homework. Lucky you. For the rest, you're not on top of the grades, you're dreaming of As while you shoot for that B and sometimes settle for the C or even the D. You're not admonished with proposals to do extra work or to be on the team for the big project. Next best case is you've still got that special talent. You wow people with your guitar skills at parties or your ability to frag anyone on the net. You dazzle the halls with art or show the competition who's boss on the court.

But then again, maybe you're not. For perhaps the first time in your life, you have to be the average person. Or, even worse, you're the baseline, the minimum passing grade, the straggler.

The question is what to do?

I've mentioned before that you don't want to become the attention seeking jerk who annoys everyone, so here's some alternatives. Be content that you're the 50th percentile of the top 10% of the nation, and perhaps even the world. Improve yourself so you still shine in the areas you want, even if you're not the best. Diversify and pick up new things that interest you. Reach out to others. Do something. Do not sulk about not being the best around.

Personally, I'm somewhere just below the 50th percentile. The thing is I've never quite been on top. I was in low end of the top 10 of my class, but couldn't move up no matter how hard I tried. I never made first chair Flute in Band. In some ways, I always knew I wasn't gonna be on the top. Coming to Mudd solidified that idea. Now I live with Cs on my report card, and I'm OK with them. I've chosen some areas and hobbies that I enjoy, and have diversified my resume. For those who know me, they know I'm quite interested in games. I enjoy games for their novelty, the competition, the balancing, the strategy, and even the critique of games. Even though I almost never top the scoreboard. Perhaps more surprising is that I didn't play many video games before arriving at Mudd. I've also worked on my musicianship. I am still a far cry from my musical peers who can tear up the room with amazing ingenuity and skill. I've decided that I won't give in to failure, and will enjoy myself and do my best while I'm at Mudd.

It all boils down to this: don't sweat it. Yes, coming to Mudd is difficult. It will most likely challenge you. People have been scared away by this. Most people will break down and cry eventually during the course of their education at Mudd. There have been stories of people who had to be forced to come back to Mudd.

However, you are also coming to one of the most accepting community imaginable. You don't have to go out of your way to prove yourself the best. Just do your best and make sure to have some fun along the way. I'm sure you can find yourself a niche if you really wanted. Even if it's just being the person who hangs around the lounge too much.

Oh, and on a brighter note, the two people that I know of who were forced back to Mudd eventually found their place and graduated from Mudd, content and glad they came back.

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:

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?

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.

We Get Signal

Oh man, I'm such a nerd.

Anyways, the blogs have now been linked to the HMC Admissions website. Wheee!

As if anyone read this thing before.

So, onto the topic of the day: signals.

Now, this could go plenty of different ways. I could talk about signaling each other. Which would in turn be about communication. Or, I can ramble about my High-Speed PCB Design class and all the lovely troubles I'm having.

But, I think I'm going to go with the VLSI project.

VLSI is an acronym for Very-Large Scale Integration. Yeah, kinda lame. It basically translates into chip design. Way back in the day, building a simple analog circuit was the coolest thing. Then people got creative and started doing logic. And later, memory. Jump forward a bunch of years and you've got millions and billions of tiny transistors on a 1 inch silicon chip doing everything from accessing external memory to doing a linear transformation, not to mention dealing with internal signals and cached memory and figuring out what it should do next with the instruction we just fed it. So, yeah, Very-Large Scale Integration.

This particular class is very interesting. In E85: Intro to Digital Design, we learned about digital systems and logic and all that. So, how to build something that works. Now, we're learning how to build something from idea to schematic to layout to fabrication, and make sure it doesn't guzzle giant amount of electricity nor takes forever to do anything (i.e. minimize delay). Also, if you follow the microprocessor wars, you'll know that every little bit counts. Basically, it's a class on how to make a good chip.

The bulk of the class is taken up by a project where the entire class builds a chip. That's 14 students trying to build something. This year it's a 6502 processor, the thing in the Apple II and the NES game system, with a fun research component called a Razor latch. The idea is we run the chip so fast that it break (i.e. gets the wrong answer) in the worst-case scenario. However, most of the time, it works. And when it breaks, we detect it and pay a penalty to fix this issue. So, we're running this right on the edge of failure, instead of padding a little margin of error. As I said, every little bit counts.

Now that you know the back story, here's the main event.

It's a 14 person team.

Our professor David Harris was talking with a friend and they talked a bit about how the VLSI project works. The other professor, after hearing what's going on, asks, "Is this one of those only at Harvey Mudd things? I mean, what if one of the students doesn't do the work?" I'm sure you're familiar with this, that chance that one person drops out or slacks off and everyone else has to pull the extra weight. However, David Harris has been doing this at Mudd for every year since he's gotten here (well, maybe not his first year, but you get the idea) and not once has anyone dropped out of the project. Usually they drop during the first few weeks of class, pre-project time.

But basically, it's weird. At least to me. I mean, at Mudd, when you think about it, there's this weird feeling of letting others down. Thus, even in a giant project with 14 people, students don't want to let their team down, so they all try their hardest to make the project work. That is just awesome. I mean, I've always held a strong conviction about my work and ownership of a product, probably why I did so well on projects back in High School, but it didn't click until recently that elsewhere, sometimes people don't care about the team or the project and essentially screw everyone else over. Kinda cool that at Mudd we don't worry about that.

However, it's not all fun and games. We're talking about trying to build a processor with 14 students in about 8 weeks. This has several components to the process, all divided amongst different teams, and huge dependencies everywhere. We really felt that last week. One team didn't realize how much several other teams needed certain tests. The problem was exasperated by the fact the RTL (basically code that outlines the idea of how things work) wasn't quite finished yet. In fact, it's still not quite finished yet. Thus, even if they built a comprehensive test, they couldn't check if the test even worked. I eventually got in contact with these guys (one of them lives down the hall, and is a girl) and we hammered out what I wanted for the test, and how we could move forward even with stuff in a state of flux on the RTL side. We eventually got a simple starter test, and have since been able to start slowly moving forward again.

So, here's the lesson. When you've got something this big and complex, make sure you talk to each other. Plan ahead, figure out what you need when and make sure others know you need it. One of the biggest problems has been not getting stuff because people didn't realize others were depending on it. With all of these dependencies, if one end gets stuck, it eventually can bring the whole project grinding to a halt. Not fun. So, it's a learning experience not only on how to make a good chip or team dynamics, but especially one about how to plan ahead and make sure you communicate in a group as large of this.

And you thought classes would only be lectures, homework, and tests, now didn't you?

Slang/Jargon you Might Hear

Here's some terms you might see pop up in the blogs or hear if you visit the campus. While not canonical definitions, they should help give you a good idea of the general meaning of the word/phrase.

5^th year – a student who is taking a 9^th semester at Mudd due to scheduling

AC – pronounced “ack”, short for Academic Computing (computer lab) or Academics, usually referring to the academic end of campus as opposed to the dorm/residential end

Bio – Biology

Clinic – The act of the College outsourcing it undergrad students to a company who pays for the students to fix something for them. Often considered a timesuck due to high levels of involvement. Required to be done by CS and Engineering Majors in order to graduate.

Crack – anything addictive. Usually associated with a game, for example World of Warcraft or Civilization 4.

CS – Computer Science

DOS – Dean of Students, includes several students who help organize random events about once a week, things like a trip to Mt. Baldy or showings of movies on the giant inflatable screen with themed snack or bed races

Flame war – an argument often carried out on e-mail lists or a forum between two or more parties, often but no necessarily including personal attacks, ad hominems, and/or continuing longer than anyone not involved cares. Usually, but not required, it starts out as a civil argument.

Graduate – the goal of most Mudders to do. Afterwards they disappear into the Real World, sometimes reappearing with tales of how easy life out there is yet wishing they were still here to hang out with us.

Graduate Student – these don't exist at Mudd

Honor Code – Rule #1: Don't be a jackass. Created under the assumption that if given the choice, people will do what is right. Covers both academic and social responsibilities and fosters a strong mutual trust and sense of community between students, staff, and faculty.

Hygiene – Something many people maintain, but there are those who don't upkeep it as much as others would like. Degradation of this stat is usually from the Sleep dep status effect.

LAC – Linde Activity Center, contains lots of cool stuff including fitness center, computer lab, ping pong table, and a printer. Also the hub for intramural sports and Dean of Students (DOS)

Nerd – what everyone has at least a little bit of inside them

Northie, Eastie, Westie, Southie – Student who identifies with North, East, West or South Dorm respectively. These dorms are not positioned according to the cardinal directions, South is the north most dorm and north of West and west of North.

Mudder – a student who is currently or previously enrolled in Mudd and is associated with Harvey Mudd College.

Prank – a humorous setup organized and executed to be relatively harmless but humorous for both parties involved, the prankster(s) and the prankee(s). Must be reversible within 24Hrs and you must leave contact information. Can be on a No Prank List to pranks in general or specific pranks from being performed, but you can not do any such pranks to others.

Prefrosh – a prospective student who is not currently enrolled in Harvey Mudd but potentially wishes to in the future. Sometimes visiting from the Real World to observe or even stay the night.

Proctor – not be be confused with a Resident Assistant (RA) at other institutes, the Proctor(s) of each dorm are there to help keep the students safe, provide emotional counseling, and look out for the well being of the members of the community. They also have keys to let you into your room if you locked yourself out and are required to host a number of events for the dorm.

Prof – short for Professor, as in Prof Yong or Prof Ran. Teachers of classes, people with office hours so you can talk about homework, your best friends and worst enemies, especially when they give out tests.

Real World, the – a mythical land out there where people have jobs, earn money (usually), and are much less sleep depped.

Sleep dep – short for sleep deprived, often a result of homework, projects, all-nighters, waking up early for class, or messing around instead of sleeping.

Timesuck – A sophomore suite in East or anything that takes up a lot of time, such as Clinic.

Wank – An action. To complain.

Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tails

That's what some days are made of.

So, if you're a data mining insomniac (which one of my friends actually is) then you might have noticed a much lower density of posts this last week. The reason being I didn't want to post while sleep deprived (i.e. sleep dep-ed in HMC slang), grumpy, and generally not happy.

You see, life at Harvey Mudd is not all fun and games. Sure there's times when it's fun, and there's times when people play games (I happen to do this quite often if I get the chance), but it's not one continuous run giggling and holding hands with your fellow peers and professors through the daisy fields of academia. Sometimes you're holding hands with your peers as you drag each other along through the war-torn countryside of France in WW1, except it's not France it's Harvey Mudd and instead of Germans throwing mustard gas it's professors lobbing project due dates at you.

For example, last week we had due a Problem Set and a Project for VLSI. It's a chip design class where you learn how to build a good chip with low delay and power consumption by optimizing sizes and making a good layout. Well, the Problem Set was beastly, as in there were four of us working together 'til around 3am on it. Then two of us had to wrap up some other homework from another class. I was part of the two with more homework. Next day, up for a 9:30am class and more stuff to do, hitting sleep around maybe 2am. Up for 9am class and more work.

Now, the clincher is that the project due on Thursday was the optimization of a 20-bit adder. The optimization parameter was the product of the delay and the energy consumption for one clock cycle. If you don't know anything about electronics, then I'm sure you're completely lost. For those of you that do, you know this is some pretty serious stuff. For one thing, people have done really really fast 8, 16, and 32-bit adders with low power, but not much 20-bit work has been done. Add onto the fact there's about 5 ways just to do a basic adder without going into the many crazy combinations that make up tree adders, which is what people use nowadays to get the best delay possible for as little energy cost possible on 32-bit and 64-bit adders.

So, optimization is something that you can't quite just churn out from pencil and paper. You can do basic guesses, but it really comes down to simulation to find all the quirks. Plus, everyone's doing a slightly different adder, so it's harder to help each other out except on basic ideas of how to optimize. So, I spent about 1 hour just figuring out optimal supply voltage. Then another couple hours isolating and optimizing my critical path. Then some more optimizing a special component I was using called a Manchester Carry. Again, non-uber geek probably have no idea what I just said. Go Wikipedia it if you'd like.

So, details aside, I probably spent about 8+ hours optimizing that bugger. That's on top of other class times, meals, other homework, you get the idea. Not alot of sleep, to say the least. And of course the less sleep you have the less efficient you have, so it's a downward spiral. Thank goodness for weekends allowing you to reset the sleep counter.

I'm not completely bitter. That would have been last week. Now, I'm better, got some sleep, that project's finished, things are looking up. The best part of the project is that even though it took a lot of time, it's quite a feeling of accomplishment. Just suddenly finding the right balance and watching the goal parameter drop was amazing and kept me going through that process. Granted sometimes I was frustrated and tired and angry about certain things, but in the end it worked out. I guess that's similar to most of life. Things tend to work out.

Lesson of the day: don't expect it to be a free ride through college here. It's not all happiness and love and dancing around the lawn. There's tough times, tired times, angsty times, but then again, that's life. Plus, here we at least help each other out. E-mail your professor, bug someone down the hall, stay up late together cracking stories to keep each other going. Well, either that or sing a random song together. It was American Pie last time. And I really can't sing that high. At least not well.

I'ma Eng-in-neer

If you thought of a game sound file reading that, well, I think enough said.

So, I happen to be an engineer. Cool. Not a railroad engineer, I mean the kind that builds stuff and optimizes things and figures out new applications for the latest and greatest technology.

At Mudd, we don't have Electrical Engineering Major, nor Aerospace Engineering Major, but instead have a General Engineering Major. Why? It's because of the idea that becoming a super specialized Engineer could be a bad thing. What if that area suddenly isn't useful? How do you cope with changing demands? Will you be able to communicate effectively with others in other disciplines? At Harvey Mudd, we try very hard to give you the breadth of knowledge to be a nimble engineer in the professional world, but there's also a commitment to allow you to specialize in your passion.

And here's the problem. To do both, you've gotta learn alot. Which is why the Engineering Major at Mudd is notorious for being a giant time suck. In fact, according to oral lore, once upon a time Engineers were required to overload at least one semester just to graduate. The Accreditation Board decided that wasn't good, and so told HMC to fix it. They did, by reducing the number of credits of certain courses. However, the class load remains the same.

It's not all bad, though. I mean, you get to build a processor chip in the VLSI class. Our new E80: Engineering Field Experience now offers you the chance to shoot off rockets and take the data from the flight for analysis (assuming it didn't blow up). And best of all, we get really cool Clinic Projects which let us as undergrads essentially work as if outsourced to some professional company. For example, Raytheon, DirecTV, and CIMIT all have Clinics going on at Mudd. Cool, huh?