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.

Transfer of Power

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.

My Professor Knows Magic

I kid you not.

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.

Speaking to the Void

 

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.

The Intelligent Person's Folly

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.

So, something to think about. What's your folly?

Christmas Aftermath

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

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

Back on topic.

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

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

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

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

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

Plans for Break

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

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

So, here goes. (in no particular order)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have a nice Holiday Season all 3 of my readers.

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.

It sounded good on paper....

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

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

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

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

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

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

Politicks

The video is a little dated, but still so true.



Let me be up front. I happen to classify myself as a Conservative. I tend towards conservative social policies and some economic ones as well. But, I hope to stay fairly balanced in this particular post. Apologies in advance.

Let's think back a bit. Back to before I left school for the summer. Back when the primaries were still going strong, and Obama and McCain just started to pull ahead. I was eating at the Hoch and we were discussing the candidates, and most of us agreed that a contest between Obama and McCain would be fairly solid. On one side you've got the fresh face of change, on the other a conservative who isn't off his rocker.

Fast forward to the summer. Obama has the majority, McCain is off campaigning, and we start seeing the weak points in each candidate.

Now, we're in convention mode.

I am a firm believer that the most important class you can take and must understand is a good Economics and Civics course. Why? It's so you can understand the basic workings of economy and government and don't get cheated by fast talking dealers or 30 second soundbites from the news. My economic policy would be to raise taxes and pull down spending. Essentially, let's get rid of that stupid federal debt, or at least stop increasing it. As it stands, simply paying off the interest (i.e. minimum payments) on the debt takes up the largest chunk of our federal budget. Not only is this stifling other programs, but this is just paying off minimum payments. Any smart economist knows that paying minimum payments means you're going to be paying a whole lot more from the interest than the original principle amount. There's the whole compound interest problem, and the fact that it takes forever to pay off the debt. This is why credit card debt is such a huge problem in the US. Interesting fact, we've actually managed to, on average, be in personal debt as a nation, even with crediting our retirement funds. That's negative personal savings. Aren't we such a gluttonous people. Plus, our debt is being bought through bonds by foreign organizations. Not good.

But enough about generalities, let's rip these candidates a new one.

First, Obama. The easiest target is that he's young. He hasn't experienced a whole lot, and probably hasn't solidified what he believes in. Then again, this might be a virtue since he's not stuck in his ways yet and can change his mind based on new data and ideas. My personal concern is his voting record and his speech abilities. He has voted on several issues, and his record shows him to be the most liberal voter ever. He was the singular person voting against the Born Alive Protection Act in Illinois. It wasn't named the same thing, but it was essentially the same bill. Furthermore, there are several instances where he voted as merely present, or even better, he voted present then changed his vote after everyone had voted. Sounds a little sketchy to me.

As far as his speeches, he is perhaps the best orator the nation has seen in modern times when on a teleprompter. He has a great delivery, huge ideals, and the ability to whip his followers up and make them believe that the waters of the ocean will begin to recede at his command. When he's off the teleprompter, he keeps pausing and stuttering and throwing in lots of "um"s and sometimes plain out lies. Recently was the panel with Rick Warren, and let's be honest, Rick Warren is probably gunning for McCain but as far as moderators go he was solid, let the candidates speak, and gave simple concise questions. Yet the big Obama mess ups were his "above my pay grade" comment on deciding when a child gets full human rights, and his claim that he worked with McCain on the finance and ethics reform bills. He may have worked briefly on the ethics reform bill, but the finance reform bill was done and in law before Obama even was elected to the federal Senate. Now, all of my friends can attest to me flubbing up my wording quite often, but Obama really needs to get a handle on this chronic problem. I don't want the messiah, I just want a good President who can candidly tell me what he thinks. None this of trying to have both sides of the issue.

Last thing is the company he keeps. Reverend Wright, his grandmother, Bill Ayers (now convicted), and others that have basically not made Obama look good. As an added bonus, Obama then commences to disown them, or as the conservative radio talk people like to call, "throw them under the bus." I will concede that we can't know everything about all the company we keep, and I'm sure it's a little extra publicity since he's on our newspapers every day searching out all his brief encounters. However, some of them had to have shown signs. Reverend Wright is a very good example. Led a church for many, many years, and I'm sure that's not the first time he made interesting remarks. If anything, I'd hope he turned them down knowing Obama was part of his congregation.

On to McCain. He's old. Very old. Plus, he's not necessarily in the peak of health with the skin cancer and the swollen left cheek. On the other hand, you hope this means he has more experience and knows his way around the government and foreign affairs better, but it also probably means he's more set in his ways. Beyond that, he's a bit of an odd cookie. The reason we liked him a year ago was he was a moderate conservative, but had a pleasant liberal streak sometimes, especially on environmental policy. The problem is recently he's tried shifting right. Really, really right. There was a period where he was agreeing with Bush almost word for word, even while major advisers were saying otherwise. For example, they made statements about not even talking with hostile leaders, while their advisers wanted to at least give diplomacy a shot.

McCain is also a bit hawkish. He's a big military buff, and in a way that's good. A strong military is a powerful show of ability as well as a defender of the populace, plus it's usually what applies all our academic research into something more practical. However, when he made the comment about staying in Iraq for another 100 years, plenty of people were up in arms and with good reason. McCain is big on the military. He fights to win. Unfortunately, as it stand right now, most people don't want our military spread around the world. Getting tangled in too many conflicts is generally a bad idea. Just look at all the major wars in the past. Two front wars end badly. Heck, you could learn that from a simple strategy game.

McCain is also subject to being called the second Bush. We've been giving Bush a bad record for a variety of things, some warranted and some not, but the fact is most of us just don't like our President all that much. Big selling point is Iraq and the perceived trumped up charges on WMD production. Looking back, it is true the evidence was a little shaky, but on the other hand many people in the field still suspected Hussein since he broke his promises before. We also did find a little evidence that the program were ready to start up again, but not enough to really validate the claims. Then there's the slumping economy, which I personally blame on the stupid banks and lenders but oh well. But let's face it, Iraq is widening our debt, he's not the best on economic nor environmental policy, and his "either with or against us" attitude right after 9/11 was probably a bad idea concerning foreign relations. While I don't think McCain is quite as bad, you will have to suffer some classic conservative ideas such as businesses lift up everyone in the economy and growing economy is a good thing, sometimes no matter what cost. Which unfortunately recently has merely squashed the middle class, and prompted a nice recession. Then again, us middle class people always get slighted. Not rich enough to pay for stuff outright, but never poor enough to get much government support. Guess I gotta make it big to get out of here, or go broke trying.

McCain is also the "maverick." On some cases, this is a good thing. He reformed public financing, has been butchering earmarks, and generally is not afraid to go against the party. On the other hand, this makes him a little unpredictable, so you can't take what he says now as the truth. As I mentioned before, he swung way way right for a while. Thankfully he's a bit more sane now, and even had the guts to pull out quite the Vice President choice. He has been solid on a couple of main issues, for example abortion, so you can definitely line up or rail against some of his core ideals.

A minor note. Everyone keeps complaining about this recession. Economists will tell you it's part of the natural economic cycle and a requirement to help trim down the business sectors and make things more efficient again. We skipped our last two, one being around the dot com bubble bursting which was offset by a booming housing market. Not surprisingly, that formed a housing bubble which is currently deflating. So, recession is an OK thing, just as long as it's not a nose dive. Don't I sound like a horrible person, promoting rising unemployment and failing businesses?

Now here's something they're both weak on. Energy policy. On one hand, giving a bit of relief on energy costs would be nice. There's the Alaskan oil, offshore, shale, etc. Why not knock off the speculators a little with some drilling. Just the perceived promises of future supply can kick the prices around quite a bit. On the other hand, just because it's there doesn't mean we should use it. I'm impressed the American people finally got out of their cars for once instead of being the gas gluttons we usually are, and as a result the price of fuel dropped. Basic economics at work.

The truth is, we should move to less polluting and more renewable areas, like solar, wind, and so forth. Problem is solar only works where there's sun, and we only capture around 12% of the energy right now. Wind is OK, but they can be an eyesore and you need strong winds to make it worth it. Something that only happens in select regions. Nuclear is nice, but unfortunately the capital costs are huge, and there's the small matter of what to do with the bloody nuclear waste. Water generation is actually the best in efficiency, but setting up dams and getting the giant turbines are huge, not to mention the destruction of the riverbeds by the giant lake you form. The thing is that these potentially pollute less than continually burning gas and oil for power, not to mention we're taking advantage of the more natural forms of power available in nature.

I will be the first to admit that none of these sources of energy are perfect. None are the perfect panacea to our problem. Some are actually a little impractical, especially since energy harvesting systems and batteries aren't quite there yet. But that just means research needs to get on top of this issue. Many other nations are starting to catch up or even overtake the US in terms of research and academic abilities, and we need to step it up. For example, we're losing the biogenetic research to Asia. They house their scientists in the latest labs with huge amounts of funds and almost no restrictions. We lock them into academia with bureaucracy and them scrambling for fellowships and grant money. Nothing wrong with competition, but the spigot could be loosened a little.

So now we come to my problem. Who the heck do I vote for? Also, in case you didn't notice, I contradicted myself by saying the government should spend less, but then I advocate more research funding. In the end, there is no perfect answer. All the economically sound ones are unpopular with the general populace. How many like hearing that unemployment is a good thing? However, all the popular ones (like health care for all) are economic suicide, not to mention most major government projects to "help" the underprivileged have a bad habit of backfiring in some weird way. So, you do need to cut the candidates some slack because neither of the poles are going to work perfectly.

I personally happen to agree with McCain on more issues than Obama, and I simply don't think Obama is ready. He feels a little too tricky and changes his mind too readily. Maybe next time when he's solidified a little and shaved off his more radical ideas. Then again, I'm not enthralled with McCain and how some of his policies are flat out wrong. Not gonna be a great next four years either way.

Here's my wimpy advice. Stay away from the soundbites, from the sensational news, and take a look at the facts. Try to not listen to the current claims, they're propaganda to get your vote. Take a look at their past voting history, their decisions, and what they've done. As much as they swing around now, they'll return to their old ways. For better or for worse.

And even if you hate both of them, what can you do? It's still a two party system, and you might as well throw away your vote because Ron Paul is not gonna win.

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.

Thing I Wish Existed in Real Life

OK. I'm sorry. I claimed I would be giving updates regularly and epically failed yesterday. Will try to do better in the future.

To the topic of the day, stuff that is not in real life that I wish did exist. This is not a definitive list, and again probably has very little to do directly with Mudd.

Magic. In the most basic of definitions, this is pretty much anything that bends or breaks what we consider reality. For example, invisibility potions and being able to conjure up fireballs and all that kind of stuff. There's actually been some interesting pieces of work that consider what the world would be like if magic was the norm and you even went to college to learn about magic and elven history instead of thermodynamics and quantum physics. But yeah, that would be kinda cool. Of course, knowing me, I'll be the moron with little to no magical aptitude and have to make due buying wards and enchantments from the local shop.

A Soul/Spirit Analyzer. Maybe it's just me, but being able to analyze and detect qualities of the soul/spirit/spirit would be really cool. For example, you could do a scan and find out that your anger problem stems from a certain incident or preconceived notion, and then perhaps it would zap it or you could deal with it. Something similar to perhaps how in Psychonauts you go into people's brains and help sort out their issues. Maybe it's because I have too many issues myself or it's my self-improving nature.

Lightsabers. Seriously. Best weapon evar. Cuts anything except another lightsaber. Has this really cool hum. And it can deflect laser blasts. LAZERS! You just don't get any cooler than that.

Gundams. OK, I know they break physics since they're the biggest robot around and yet are the most agile, but the very concept of a giant battle machine with weapons and beam swords flying around and doing ninja-esque moves is pretty sweet. Space combat is also really fun since there's no natural "down" so in effect you have to watch in all 6 directions for enemies. Read Ender's Game for some interesting theories about Zero-G battles.

Zero-G generation. Zero-G chambers, directed zero point energy, lots and lots of magnets. It doesn't matter. Being able to float around and be weightless is pure awesome. Enough said.

Heads Up Display. Eventually the Cyber Warrior program will equip our soldiers with something like this. The idea is a HUD which provides useful information. Stuff like health status (heath bar?), quest log, overhead view of surrounding people, highlight useful objects, infrared overlays, and of course a reticle and ammo readout just in case those terrorist wanna bring us a traditional war in our home towns. Everyone suit up with your carbine rifles and shotguns, and the HUD will even help highlight enemies, allow team communication, and notify you friend from foe. Even just an automatic "quest log" to keep track of your to-do list would be sweet.

So, there you have it. Fun stuff that could be really cool to have around in real life.

Oh, and check out Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-Long Blog. You won't regret it.

Being a Band Geek

Now for something not Mudd related.

I happen to be musical in ability. Granted, I couldn’t make a living out of it, but I can play instruments competently and sing not horribly. In High School, I played in the Band. I in fact played the flute. Yes, I am in fact a male flute player.

Being very involved in Band in my recent past, I still have quite the affinity for it. Having a younger brother who is also in Band doesn’t exactly hurt either. Recently we got to see a Drum Corps show at Mount Sac. For those of you non-band geeks, a Drum And Bugle Corps (we tend to just call them Drum Corps) is kind of a better marching band. However, as its name implies, there’s only drums and bugle instruments. Drums encompass all percussion, so there is a pit line. There is also a Color Guard team that performs with them, adding color and cool rifle tosses to the mix.

The key is that they are really really good. If you check out teams like Blue Devils or the Santa Clara Vanguard on Youtube, you’ll see just how awesome their formations are. Trust me, getting formations correct is really really hard. The thing you’re missing is the sound. As cool as they sound on screen, it’s nothing to a live performance. Think wall of sound. Surround Sound. Dolby 5.1 Bose speakers movie theatre sound. It’s insane how powerful these guys’ lungs are. Cool stuff. So last Saturday we got to see the Blue Devils and the Santa Clara Vanguard blow away the competition. Sure it’s the beginning of the season, so they’re not quite up to their usual stuff, but it was still really cool.

In more recent news, the Band marched in the local Fourth of July parade. Luckily (or unluckily) my brother is the historian for the Band. This means that near the end of the year he’s going to get very little sleep and free time as he edits the giant Band Slideshow for the end-of-the-year banquet. It also means that we need to start getting footage now, in the forms of me walking along the parade route with the Band taking video and my dad taking pictures. So, kinda hot and a good leg workout. Hopefully the camera wasn’t shaking too much. We throw away footage that will make the viewers motion sick.

I guess you could say I’m still a Band geek. I still play the flute on occasion. It was weird when I found I was marching in sync with the Band, left foot on the downbeat. I bet I could still out drill-down most people. And being old and graduated, I get to moan and groan about how my days were so much better than the current Band. It’s kind of a right to be able to say “in my day.” Partially it’s mocking the stereotypical elderly person in the movies, but we seriously marched uphill in the sun to conditions ourselves. Both ways along the field. With horns up.

For your viewing pleasure, some Drum Corps videos:
Blue Devils 2007 1st Place DCI Championship Show

Santa Clara Vanguard 2007 DCI Championshhips show

Yokahoma Inspires, one of Japan’s new Drum Corps

Being a Real Engineer

Double feature today.

Now that I’ve been in a real job for a while, I can make a few statements about a job and how well Harvey Mudd prepares you for it. OK, it’s not a real job, it’s an internship, but I’m getting paid to do it.

First, a quick overview of my job. I’m an intern at CornerTurn. They’re a small company that broke off from a larger firm so that they could do engineering without all the bureaucratic methodology. They specialize in special application boards, although they’ll do a variety of tasks. One of their claims to fame is a special internet router designed for boats. People on their yachts want high speed broad band internet, but that requires a giant satellite dish. So, they designed a special router that can use multiple antennas and combine their signals into a single internet connection. This means that they can use a couple of small antenna, and treat it as a single Ethernet connection to your computer. Pretty neat, or at least I think so.

My particular job is to do whatever they want. This so far means that I’m working on three separate projects in parallel. First, I am building a printed circuit board for monitoring liquid levels in a storage tank. Second, building scripts for hashing data from a remote sensor that’s been acting up. And lastly, trying to understand and apply energy harvesting for another remote sensor.

The cool thing is I’ve actually been helpful. Not in the thanks for doing the grunt work helpful, but some of my ideas have actually found important results. Looking at the second project, I’ve been building MATLAB scripts to parse data that we get from a sensor. It’s supposed to find itself using GPS, and then report. The problem is that for some reason we’ve been having periods where there’s no GPS data in the database. So, I’ve been parsing NMEA protocol and console dumps trying to help track down the problem.

One of the things I did was to use what I’ve termed gap analysis, or plotting the duration of the time gap in the signals. I’ve recently learned that gap analysis is a term for something else, so probably delta analysis would have been better. This creates an interesting graph where these peaks show up, indicating a giant gap in the data stream. I’ve also created ways to compare these gaps in the NMEA packets the database makes with the attempts of the sensor to try and transmit a GPS fix, and to track throughput of packets. One key element we found was the sensor would try to transmit, but either it’s getting lost or the database drops them. It’s still unsolved, but hopefully we’re moving forward.

As far as Mudd getting us ready, I think the answer is they’re doing a good job. I have had to put my knowledge of energy and computer science into practice already. I’ve done some physics and mechanical applications. As a bonus, the theory has given me a really strong base. Sure I don’t know everything, but they can start explaining something and I’ve figured out what’s going on and what they want by the end of their explanation. Plus it’s not all spoon feeding, I’ve been working mostly on my own to figure out the energy harvesting, and that’s been quite the experience. It turns out that there are lots of options, not just solar cells. There happens to be vibration and heat as well, but those only seem to work well if there are strong driving forces. Not so great in the middle of nowhere, which just so happens to be where we want this sensor to be.

All in all, it’s been pretty good. I even get my own desk that’s getting filled with lots and lots of datasheets. That’s right, better get used to scouring datasheets people, they’ll be with you for many years to come.

Home Away From Home

No, this is not some philosophical insanity about where your home is or touchy feely piece about being far away from home.

I happen to live in Hacienda Heights, California. For the non-locals, that’s about 30 minutes drive southwest of Harvey Mudd. San Gabriel Valley region. As such, my perspective on the whole living in the dorms and away from my home and family is pretty lightweight. In fact I go back at least once a month since I have duties running Powerpoint for my church.

Since the school year has ended, the dorms shut down for everyone except the summer researchers and Summer Math kids. Summer Math is an opportunity to take your entire sophomore year of math in about six weeks. I personally thought it was intense, awesome, but not for everyone. Especially if you mess up your sleep schedule on Monday and have to wait until the weekend to reset it. Back to my topic, the dorms shut down. So, everyone has to move somewhere else. For me, that was back home to Hacienda Heights. For others, it was off to apartment for jobs or internships or summer camps.

It’s a weird transition moving back. One of the best things about college, at least for me, is the freedom; the ability to set your own timetable, your own rules, and reap what you sow. As I discussed in a previous post, you have to set priorities about how you spend your time. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), Harvey Mudd College is not a place where you can have it all; unless you’re some weird mutated genius protégée who can do all the homework for all the classes for the whole the week in one hour.

Coming back home to where you live by the rules of your parents, the bills, the chores, the siblings, and of course no more college high-speed internet, which I might add is very important for some of us, can be a little jarring. I can’t stay up until midnight anymore, although that’s from the requirement I wake up at around 6am for work. I can’t just walk down the hall and check out what the lounge is doing. I can’t take a bike ride down to the Motley or see a performance from an orchestra.

On the other hand, it’s back to the real world. Yes, there are such things as rising gas prices; and they’re rising like WHOA. There’s this thing called money which you’ve been hemorrhaging to pay for tuition that comes in handy for stuff like food and electricity bills. Oh right, and you will not live perpetually in a world where all your friends live about a five minute walk away. Sorry. And no more F&M means you have to vacuum the house regularly.

So, I’d have to say it’s a blessing and a curse. I get to do more real world stuff like make money for a change and learn to cook, but I can’t chill at 2am in the lounge watching people get drunk. Wait, that’s a plus as well.

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.