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.

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.

Photo Blog: Intel Site Visit

Well, we just had our Site Visit to the Intel Campus up near Portland, Oregon.

To get there, we had to catch a 6:15am flight, which meant we left HMC at around 4:45am.









































We made a wrong turn, and wasted some time, but got to the airport on time for loading.




During the flight, we got to spend some quality time with Professor David Money Harris and go over stuff we were still a little hazy on and some new ideas we were working on. Here is Braly going over some ideas for a floorplan for the chip. Sorry, spacing was tight. That's Julien's head in the background.







Being in the morning, we had a nice sunrise as we took off. =]














More quality time, this time going over the delay calculations. I wasn't sure I did them right, but after a brief talk with Prof. Harris, I was glad I estimated as close as I could get. Made me happy. However, Lolly and Julien weren't quite as comfortable, so they got some time to review the calculations while Michael and I tried to take a quick nap.



























We couldn't take pictures in the buildings, so no pictures of the presentation nor the really cool lab. I also forgot to take a picture of the nice lunch we had. It was thai food and Braly approved of the quality, so it must have been the good stuff.

But we did get to take a nice picture with the whole team and our liaisons. Left to right: Prof. Harris, Julien, Michael, Sanu, Ram, and Lolly.

It is now about 4pm, so after a cool lab tour and more ideas on how to make our chip, such as about five ways to have a backup clock for the chip, we started driving back to the airport. These two knocked out before I did. =]

Due to some traffic, we got to the terminal at around 6:10pm for a 6:35pm flight. So, Professor Harris drove up the rental, we popped out, grabbed our stuff and started to run. Down a flight of stairs, shooting across the street from the parking structure, into the terminal. A quick glance around to find the Southwest terminals, print our boarding passes, dashing to security, and as we scurried to the gate

we realized the flight had been delayed. Probably one of the few times you're ever glad it was delayed.

The weird thing was I was in the back, so I kept thinking how epic this looked, the classic mad dash to the airplane with the Professor in the lead, and I wanted to take a picture. Problem was, I was running at full speed too.

Luckily, this meant a quick dinner. I also joked with Julien, who is a french exchange student, that now he'd had a Quizno's sandwich for breakfast, thai food for lunch, and a burrito for dinner. Michael joyfully added, "welcome to America." Interestingly, Julien has quite the appetite and once we got back to Mudd planned on making a trip to Jay's Place for more food.

Out we leave the terminal.

Oh, and by the way, Lolly really hates pictures of her, so by now she was threatening physical violence on my person if I kept taking pictures.

Chilling waiting for the shuttle back to the parking lot where we stashed the Clinic van.

Back at Mudd, safe and sound, much wiser than we left, and a heck of a lot more tired. It's 11pm in this picture.

And that's that. A full day spent traveling and talking with people way more knowledgeable than us. We did get quite a bit out of it, such as some fun times together and learning about how Intel tests its chips. Oh, and we got to see the teraflop chip Intel built a few years ago. Crazy awesome stuff.

Now I just have to finish the MicroPs lab, a presentation on Haydn, VLSI research, Clinic Verilog code hacking, Cell library components......

filler

I'm busy. Clinic + MicroPs + Research + 2 hums = lots of work.

The fact that I still go to Crack in the AC and WarCrack regularly isn't exactly helping. Well, I guess I have an excuse for Crack in the AC since I run the thing.

Quick update, though, I have my MicroPs lab done in record time. 6.5 Hours. Oh yeah. I even have the thing able to take two buttons being pressed at the same time. I'll try to remember to post pictures.

In the meantime, pictures of research! Research testing the chip we made last semester in VLSI. It doesn't work.... =[

What I've Learned!

Now to share some cool things I've learned so far!

Did you know that an argument can be valid, but not sound and vice versa? Take for example the following argument: "If it is raining, the street is wet. It is raining, therefore the street is wet." This is perfectly valid. It is logically consistent. However, it is not sound since if I look out my window, it is not raining. Soundness requires the premises to be tested to be true and for the conclusion to be true. In the same token, "I am male, I am right-handed, therefore I can type" is invalid, but every statement is true. Fun.

Did you know that you shouldn't inhale the fumes from soldering? Even though the new modern solder has to be lead-free by the lovely new laws in place, there's a very high chance that giant roll of solder you're using still has lead in it. Granted it's pretty inert in the solder, and it has wonderful electrical and mechanical properties, but people freaked about lead in anything and so we've had to remove it. Stupid politicians. But yeah, it also smells really bad.

Did you know that the way we do secure communication on the internet is through encryption? One half of the encryption key is a public key that you broadcast. The second half is then created and sent specifically for your transaction. One the key is setup, you then have to encode and decode your messages, which can take quite a bit of processing power. So, people have figured out algorithms to help try and make this process faster.

Did you know that there is a non-zero chance for a tied electoral college this election year? What would happen is that the house would vote, 1 vote per state. Yay politics!

Did you know that East currently has no TV mounted on the wall? After the renovations, which got cut short because the contractors took too long, the mounting hooks were not replaced on the wall. Initial theory was that they were buried inside the wall, since to upgrade the dorm for the earthquake code the walls got thicker. However, searching for them with magnets has come up empty, so we're guessing they simply haven't bee put back in the wall.

Did you know that this year's Frosh are especially competent at showering people? Here's some pictures from our first dorm meeting to illustrate!






So, here we have people getting showered, and the requisite hug afterward. And finally, DONUTS! After each dorm meeting, we get donuts. Showerers and showerees get first dibs.

Anyways, that's it for this week. Clinic goes and eats more souls now.

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.

It's a Small World After All

Preface: if the pictures are too big or whatever, I'll try harder next time.

Harvey Mudd is classified as a small college. 700 Students. This means that you can potentially know everyone, and potentially everyone knows you. Of course, you can subvert the system by never leaving your room, but then usually your dorm/suite mates takes notice and try to contact, foiling your plot of anonymity.

Anyways, the advantage is you know everyone. One big giant happy family where it's familiar faces all around and since everyone lives on campus (OK, about 98% do all four years. We're guaranteed on-campus housing for all 4 years) you can walk down the hall and bug people about homework, life, or making a group to split a bill down at a restaurant down the street.

The disadvantage is you know everyone. Do something stupid, people will likely find out. Don't even try 6 degrees of separation, try 2, or maybe even 3 if you're a hermit, to everyone. And that's ignoring the lame degree of went to the same college, I'm talking about direct friendships / usual contact whether it be your groupie circle or through classes. So, if you want to slide with a B- and miss weeks of class, you'll have to try really hard. Some professors shoot their students e-mails asking where they've been if they miss class, and usually offering them homework and telling them to grab notes off someone.

Anyways, here's some pictures to illustrate:


My E80 group from Sophomore year. Well, you can't see Kacy's face, but you can see her hair at the bottom of the picture. Engineering Major here likes to do lots of team building, so often you do team projects. Like the whole class building a 6502 processor in VLSI. Yeah, trying to communicate between 14 students gets kinda hard.


People wanted to vacuum the lounge, so sofas got moved outside. It was also a nice sunny day and good breeze so very low smog in the air. The result? Outdoor lounge.


This is Jenny aka Alaska (because she lives in Alaska, duh). She's making LOL with her hands and face. What'd you expect? We're nerds. Although we're not all that crazy all the time. OK, so maybe we have a distribution of weirdness. The majority of students could blend in with the real world if they tried. We just enjoy being ourselves and messing around when we get the chance. And it doesn't matter how weird you are, you can always find someone weirder, so feel free to be crazy if you want.


People decided they needed to stack people on a couch. For some reason, not sure if it was intentional, the girls were on top. Yes, there are girls at this school. Freshman class had a whopping 42% females. Overall it's about 35% female for all the classes combined.

Unfortunately, Picasa is having issues publishing more pics, just like Skye, so I'll be back later with more. Maybe.