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.

How to be Geeky

Weird Al's White and Nerdy

This of course is in no way designed to be the end-all, just a humorous romp through some very.... nerdy... things.

First, the background.

You see, to be geeky, you have to know geeky things. I'm not necessarily talking about quarks and quantum physics. I'm also talking about the sub-culture of internet memes and crazy things that are fun and get referenced quite a bit. That way, you can pull from the same database of weird and wonky things and know what we mean by them. So, if someone fakes an accent saying "H'OK, so. Here's the Eaaarth" you know it's from The End of the World.

Next, you gotta play the part.

This is doing stuff like making awkward gestures, being unsettled in non-nerd social groups, and wearing coke bottle glasses. No, wait, that's the stereotype. Actually it's more about what you do when you find out the person you're talking to is a nerd. The vast majority of nerds can in fact blend in very well with their environment. The trick is to find other nerds and then nerd out together. For example, talking about games is OK since even jocks play games (otherwise EA wouldn't exist). The trick is if the other person says stuff like that they play World of WarCraft (or WoW, get with the lingo dude), then you might be on to something. Except for me, I don't play WoW. The real trick is if they play other stuff or are known to be extremely awesome on their server. Even better if they are into game design, as in have ideas about how to make games better, but aren't actually in the field. OK, they can be in the game industry, but that just makes them professional geeks that make money.

Then, now that you have revealed their geekiness, reveal yours. Often, geeks get extremely emotional about stuff they like. Thus, the whole Star Wars versus Star Trek feud we make fun of so much. So, get into it, start throwing around more geeky language (LOL pronounced 'lawl' is a quality and popular one), even if you don't know anything about what they're talking about. Just appear interested. Sometimes you can trick us if you just probe us and keep us talking. I'm serious. I've goaded many people into 30 minute rants while I sat and ate dinner.

And Finally, get street cred.

The thing about the nerd community is it can be very tightly networked. So, as your nerdiness spreads, other nerds will pop out and recognize you as a nerd. Unless you're one of those sneaky people who never post pictures of themselves that can be traced back to their forum screen names and so will only reveal themselves by telling you their screen name and then you realize you've been talking with that forum moderator that you keep having flame wars with on that one forum. That was a joke in case you were wondering.

Something to help you along is to surf YouTube. It is incredibly geeky. I'm not talking about those emo kids talking into their webcams, I'm talking about viral videos of crazy. Like this one:



See? They can also be AWESOME.

Well, have fun. Geeks can be fun to be. Just don't go too far, I'd rather not know you as that person I have to have a ban hammer ready for every time people start to talk about Mac versus PC and you complain that everything isn't Linux. Not that I have anything against Linux, it's just that there are some very, very whiny Linux people. =]

Laterz

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.

Re-Entry

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

As it turns out, it hasn't been altogether a bad week. Robotics is gonna be awesome and Shakespeare is gonna be awesome. Clinic has carried over from last semester (still on the critical path of you screw up the project fails).

So, the real question is what to do about my 3 Hums. One hasn't met yet since the professor is at a conference for this week. However, I know the professor, and it's gonna be on the Philosophy of Science. The second one is about Asian history, specifically the recent modernization and post-colonialism. After all, that's all we Westerners really know since most of the ancient stuff is still being translated/dug up/hidden by the government. Decisions decisions.

Now, the bad stuff. Mostly clinic. I'm currently figuring out a few new tricks to make testing easier in the future. Unfortunately this is a pain to learn and puts me behind on other stuff. Basically, I've managed to overwork myself again. I stayed up very late Friday morning (sun didn't come up while I was awake, so it's not an all-nighter!) finishing some tests. As par for course, I was the only one to get those tests done, mostly because it's the easiest piece to test and I've been ahead of the rest of the team for some time now. I also have to debug a nasty problem that was mucking up everyone's simulations, so that didn't help everyone else progress either. As I said, I'm on critical path, and just barely making my deadlines means the whole team falls behind.

Also, I can't just mess around anyone. That means stuff like Mass Effect and Fallout3 and learning Japanese are back on hold. =[

In other random news, apparently Nvidia has managed to give us 3D vision from our monitors. Basically it uses the same technology that is used in 3D movies today, but created on the fly from your graphics card. The downside is it requires 1) a 120Hz monitor, 2) a GeForce 8 series or better graphics card, and 3) that you wear glasses. Now, the glasses are apparently not the yellow abominations you return after watching other 3D cinema and are apparently pretty stylish. Plus, the Nvidia team apparently to be doing a good job of letting you know what does and doesn't work. Plus there's the disorientation that you're in 3D now. Especially in First-Person-Shooters where we've been trained to think we're looking at a 3D world already with perspective and enemies behind cover 20 yards away. But, it's supposed a pretty sweet gig. Not gonna change your world or make or break new games, but a nice feature that if you have disposable income to spend on, is kinda cool. I don't have that disposable income handy. =]

Here's to an exciting semester! Cheers!

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.

Community Comparisons

Still on break. HMC returns on Jan 19th. So that means one more week to fix all that Clinic stuff I still have to do. Gr....

Anyways, on to the topic of the day: communities. While a loose term, I'm going to reference it in regards to the supportive (or lack thereof) nature of people doing similar things.

Let's start with the DotA community. If you're unfamiliar, DotA stand for 'Defense of the Ancients' and is a WarCraft 3 Frozen Throne custom map. It is also perhaps the single most played WarCraft 3 map, with a huge community, patches, it shows up in competitive leagues, and basically tends to be a big deal. It is based around teams of players each controlling a hero. The goal is to push into the enemy base and kill their super structure, a tree or a throne. As the game progresses, the heroes level up, gain cool powers, and you can buy items to further augment your heroes. The core gameplay though is very micro dependent (fine control of your hero and its actions) as well as team coordination (acting as a team when fighting, allocating who does what, etc.). Team coordination in some ways trumps the micro aspect since 4 heroes attacking 1 hero should win, unless that 1 hero is ridiculously overpowered due to levels or items.

So, here's the crux of the matter. The DotA community is not very supportive of new players. In fact, there are times when people have actually told other players to leave because they were so bad at the game. There's also what are known as griefers, or people who intentionally do things to annoy others. Some of these actions might be intentionally dying to the other team to give them an advantage, or leaving a game in progress (no one new can join and now the team is down a hero). Why? Because people want to win, and DotA is very team dependent, so if you have a bad team people get frustrated. However, in the long run, there seems to be a problem. If you chastise all the new players and get rid of them, what happens? There is no influx of new players, old better players might eventually leave, and now you're stuck with no players. Of course, there's a few really stubborn players who keep playing, and there's definitely some helpful players out there, but in general the community is pretty hostile. Most new players only get better because they are trained by experienced players, usually friends who introduce them to the game. I actually started playing because we have a DotA game night each week at Mudd. I'm still pretty bad.

Now, the HMC community. I tend to cite this as the reason I decided on Harvey Mudd College, and it didn't disappoint. The very concept that it's a high performance school, but everyone lives on campus and the professors are there to teach make an uber combo. Plus there's other perks like the hands-on work and such. At the core, though, I'm a big fan of how supportive the community is. It's a place where if you have questions, someone is bound to know the answer and is willing to explain it to you. I managed to debug and learn about boot failures when my computer went bonkers right before finals week. I've had people explain crazy algorithms to me. I was just interviewing at JPL and explaining what I knew about a CS class that I hadn't taken, and the interviewer thought I had taken the class. I eventually told him that this was just from learning from the CS majors complaining about chunky string and that I didn't know how to fix the problem itself in detail. I've also spent many hours walking others through problems of their own, sometimes in sacrifice of meeting my own deadlines.

Now, it's not all flowers and rainbows. I've mentioned in others posts about the downsides of such a tight community such as if you do something stupid everyone finds out, or that if you're the jerk people end up not liking you can't be anonymous. But, overall, I enjoy the community of Harvey Mudd College. Plus, we have professors who participate in some of the randomest stuff, like dressing up as Santa so we can take pictures with him. Go Prof. Yong!

And now, for no good reason, a video.

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?