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

Food Glorious Food

I’ll be trying to update about once every other week. At least until school starts. Or I run out of ideas. Whichever comes first. You can also use the RSS feed feature to check up for when I update.

One of the biggest concerns for most people is what you’re going to eat when you go away. First, let’s get something straight. Your mom and dad are no longer around. So, you’re not going to get your favorite lasagna dish or fresh soup or favorite sweet and sour pork chops. If you’re a regular on-the-town kind of junkie, well, feel free to run rampant in The Village or a quick trip down to any of the other food joints around.

As for the rest of us who prefer food that doesn’t come off a menu or waiting in a giant line for reservations, we have the dinning halls. You might still have to wait in line to get your food, but at least you’re not paying gas to drive out. Convenience is nice and sometime people shy away from going down to Pomona to eat because it’s too far. See how lazy you become when you get to college? OK, to be fair, it might also be because you don’t have time to spare due to that giant project that is due tomorrow, but usually it’s because we’re lazy.

The meal plan is a required part of your life at Harvey Mudd College with the exception being if you live in Sontag or a special Atwood suite, and are not a freshman. Basically you choose a number: 8, 12, or 16. Bigger number means you pay more. It also corresponds to how many meals you get per week and how many Flex dollars you get. Please note there is NO rollover, so on midnight between Saturday and Sunday your amount gets refilled. This leads to a phenomenon knows as “Flexing out” where you go down on Saturday night somewhere and check how much Flex you have left. Then you try to spend as much as you can. Be sure to get there at least before 11:30pm, or else the line might be long enough for you to not Flex out in time. Flex dollars are usable for a variety of things, including snacks, drinks, more meals at dining halls, muffins at the breakfast cart, chocolate on Scripps, etc.

Meals are used one per meal, and only up to one per meal. Since all meals in their eyes are created equal, breakfast costs less Flex than dinner but both are worth a single meal. So, if you plan on using Flex to supplement your meals, use it on earlier meals. The meals themselves are actually pretty good. They do have a tendency to be a little greasy or over flavored, like how their idea of Asian food is throw as much soy or teriyaki sauce at it as you possibly can, but it’s better than a lot of colleges. It’s also buffet style, which is a blessing and a curse. Be very wary of the Freshman 15 here. They also have a decent rotation of foods and a few staples that you can fall back on if nothing appeals to you. I have seen some people eat cereal for dinner. One of my friends eats nothing but white bread, chocolate chip cookies, bananas, milk, and vitamin supplements. I’m not sure why, but the guy isn’t diabetic yet. They have served stuff like hamburgers, pot roast, curry chicken, soup bread bowls, lasagna, gyros, Swedish meatballs and noodles, and turkey cutlet to name a few. Don’t worry if you miss a dish, it’ll be rotated back in eventually.

One of the coolest things is that the chefs have been given plenty of freedom. It’s become a familiar event when one of the chefs concocts something new, like a Mexican pizza or something, and offer it up alongside the usual fare. I strongly advise you try them at least once. Not only is it nice variety, but usually they make good stuff. Just goes to show they can cook and not just mass produce a recipe.

Now, Harvey Mudd has its dinning hall called Hoch-Shanahan, or the Hoch (pronounced like “hawk” in Mudd slang). However, we’re right across the street from Scripps College, which has its own dinning hall, and a few blocks from CMC with their own. And lucky us our meal plans work on all the Claremont College Campuses. So, if you’re tired of the hamburgers from the Hoch for lunch, enjoy a nice trip down to CMC and their giant sandwich bar. Pitzer is known for organic options. Pomona is more of what you’d expect in an older back East College. Mudd tends to be a bit more fast-food in nature. Plus, you can use your Flex at their shops as well. So, you can head down to Pomona and the Coop and buy stuff there as well as the stuff on Mudd at Jay’s Place. This actually creates something interesting, since they get money based on attendance. By spending your meals or Flex on another College, Mudd has to send part of your meal plan payment to them, and the same thing if an off-campus student spends their meals on Mudd. Thus, it’s an incentive to make good food that the students like to attract more students, thus earning them more money. Pretty cool, huh.

If you get off the meal plan or have access to a kitchen, there’s also your own cooking, which is very much subject to the chef’s abilities. Or you can get yourself a microwave and lots of Ramen, but I wouldn’t advise that. At least bring a rice cooker and some furikake, although that’s not too healthy either.

In short, you won’t starve here. Or if you start looking starved, we’ll track you down and force feed you.

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?