Thursday, December 12, 2013

Drinks on Fridays

The Friday after Thanksgiving I saw Sidney. It was the third year in a row I saw him the day after Thanksgiving. Even though he now resides in Reno, it was the second time I saw him in November.

We went to The Bruery in Placentia. They have a lot of sour beers. While that is great for people like Sidney who enjoy them, I did not like them.

These are the beers I had in my flight with my comments:

Loakal Red - Oak-aged American red ale (good, but not great)
Bryeian - hoppy cascadian dary rye ale (good, not great)
Oude Tart - Flemish style red (No)
Humulus Wet: Centennial - fresh hopped pale ale (nothing special)
6 Geese-a-laying - spiced dark ale with gooseberries (OK for a holiday brew)

I also had another beer. I do not remember the name, it was an Ebony & (something).

After enjoying the beers there, we went to Hopscotch in Fullerton. I enjoyed a duroc pork butt with apples, pickled red onion, garlic, and roasted root vegetables. I had a Dudes' Grandma's Pecan brown ale to go with it. I liked the ale, while I usually avoid brown ales.

Then we went to The Night Owl Cafe.

Music and more
A week later on Friday I was at StillWater in Dana Point. I was there to watch my friend who sings and plays modern blues music. When he texted me about the show at 2 that afternoon, I was not planning on going. Finals were the following week, and I had a programming project, two lab reports, and a research paper all due on Tuesday. However, my friend Romeo said he was going, so I decided to go as well. I did not want him to drive the 45 minutes down to Dana Point and watch the show by himself. Also, Romeo is my new best friend. I met him in the spring at Beach Newman and saw him at a few meetings. Then he was in my technical writing class this semester. Many of the Mondays I saw him in class I had just seen him that weekend.

While I was at StillWater, I had a one of their cocktails, a Bulleit creek tea. It was Bulleit bourbon with lemon, Angostura bitters, and some other stuff. It was on their menu, but must be too secret to put on their website. I would not order it again, so it is no big loss. I was only planning on staying there to watch my friend, who started playing at 8:30. However, the performer after him was really good, so we stuck around past midnight. Since I was around for a while, I enjoyed a Trestles IPA from the Left Coast Brewing Company.

This Friday Frank and Sabrina are having a Sinterklaas party. If it were not for my Advanced Math for Electrical Engineers final today things would be great.

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Adventures in Graduate School

Since I am finishing my first semester of graduate school, I have some things to share. Before I started as a masters student, my thoughts of graduate school were colored by what I heard at top tier research schools. However, when I started at a modest state school, I discovered graduate school was not what I had expected.

At the school where I am, the masters program seems like a simple extension of their undergraduate program. Compared to their bachelors classes, the only differences are the teachers teach less and most of my classmates are from India. I was taking a survey the other day and I realized something. While I am happy I am in school working toward an electrical engineering degree, I am displeased with the quality of my classes, professors, and the education overall. If I could have gotten into a better graduate school, I would have gone there instead.

I have experienced some interesting moments in graduate school. Since these gems of higher learning will not be experienced by a lot of people, I want to share them with you.

Impediment to learning
In one of my classes we were filling out instructor evaluations. For the question of "Were there any impediments to your learning?" someone wrote "the professor." He was right.

The value of timely work
I put off doing a lab for one of my classes. I had to simulate a circuit and then layout another circuit on silicon as if it was being constructed on an integrated circuit. When I told one of my friends I did not have the lab working, he emailed me the files. With a couple of quick changes, I demonstrated the working lab to the professor and received full credit for the demonstration. Sometimes it pays to procrastinate.

Understanding an important algorithm
I had a lab due for my VLSI class. It was supposed to be a Viterbi encoder/decoder. However, neither the professor nor anyone in class could explain how the complete algorithm worked. The people I knew just took an example in the textbook and made some changes to it. I built a glorified shift register. It takes the inputs, stores them, then displays them two cycles later so it looks like it does the processing it needs. It completely side-stepped the XOR gates and PSK transmitting I was supposed to do. Since there was no noise in our simulation, any other stuff I added would be unnecessary and optimized out by the IDE. However, the professor was happy when I showed him a working program. I wrote up the report and included a figure and table from the textbook on the part I did not do.

Getting your work back
With a week left in the semester, one of my professors decided it was a good time to give us back our graded work from the semester. He handed back seven homework assignments. However, he did not grade them; he just put a check mark on the front. There was a problem where I just wrote the question and left a big blank space below it. The professor did not read it, he just put a big check mark directly over it. After I got the homework back, I knew I should not work too hard on the last two assignments. I wrote some equations and copied circuits from the textbook and that was it. If only my paper for the class could be so easy . . . or is it?

If you do end up going to graduate school, make some friends in your program right away. You will probably learn more from them than your professors.

Thursday, December 5, 2013

Fundamentals of Engineering Test: Pass

I learned I passed the Fundamentals of Engineering (or Engineer in Training) test. I am very pleased with myself.

I wrote a post in August about my preparation for the test and the material it covered.

I taught myself a lot of stuff I did not cover in a class. As a recap, it covered covered mathematics, probability & statistics, chemistry, computers, ethics & business practices, economics, mechanics (statics and dynamics), strength of materials, material properties, fluid mechanics, electricity & magnetism, and thermodynamics. Then there was an electrical engineering specific section in circuits, power, electromagnetics, control systems, communications, signal processing, electronics, digital systems, and computer systems. The night before the test I was up past 1. I was trying to learn things while responding to messages from my texting buddy before I got up around 4:30 for a 7am report time.

I took the test the last time it was administered on paper. Starting next month, it will be administered at computer testing centers on a rolling basis. I hate computer based tests, so I was glad I got it done on paper. I also got a fancy mechanical pencil as a souvenir.

Averaged over the last year, the test was administered 8,700 times in California and had a 56% passage rate. I was worried because I had not taken classes in most of the topics like the average engineer. However, I taught myself enough to do well. I filed a form with the State of California and mailed them a check. Now I am waiting for them to process it and send me a certificate.

Now I need to write a paper on finFETs, figure out how to program a boundary scan test in structural level hardware description language, write a report about it, do some user tests for my technical writing class, and write a report about the user tests. Then I just have to take 3 finals and I will be finished with the semester.

Monday, December 2, 2013

The story of a paper

Recently someone texted me saying she was nervous about getting her paper back in class tomorrow. To make things easier, I will call her my texting buddy. I texted, "I have a great paper story to tell you. I will send it to you online, since it is too long to text."

Since this is a good story, I thought I might have made a post about it before. When my search turned up negative, I knew I had to make a post about it.

This happened toward the end of the fall my senior year at Berkeley, so it was 6 years ago. It was for Bronze Age Ancient Greek history. That was the official title, but the class really covered the Archaic through some of the Classical period. For my paper I chose to write about the people who rowed the Greek ships, the triremes. I also have a picture to share. Below are the books I used for writing this paper as well as my paper for Ancient Greek Religion.


I had a paper due on Monday. Actually, I had two major projects due that day. The other was either a 3D computer model for my Archeology of Pompeii and Herculaneum class or a paper on something for my Ancient Greek Religion class. While I could turn the essay in during class at 1pm, the professor said we could also turn it in to her box in the history office by 5 that afternoon. Since I was still working on the essay and her lectures were usually a complete waste of time, I skipped class.

As I was finished the term paper, I realized it was short on the length. It was supposed to be 10-15 pages. I put in some very long quotes, even if they had nothing to do with my main point. I double spaced the quotes, which you are not supposed to do. After I put the final touches on my essay, it was 8 pages long. It was almost 5, so I had to stop. I went to Derek's computer and printed out my essay. I could see from the green LEDs on Rohit's alarm clock it was 4:59 as it was printing out. Even after it finished printing, it would take me 10 minutes to get to Dwinelle, where the history department office was. As it was printing, Derek walked in the door. He asked me when it was due, and I told him 5 in the history office. Then he told me the history office closes at 4.

Since Derek is a history major, he knows these things. However, I did not know what I was going to do. I thought, my professor is very incompetent. Not only is she bad at lecturing and wastes class time asking students for their ill-informed input, but she doesn't even know when the office closes.

I stapled my essay and hurried to Dwinelle. I hoped the office would be open. By the time I got to the C floor of Dwinelle, I found the office; it was closed. I thought of sliding my essay under the door, but there was something blocking the threshold. I figured it was put there to stop students such as myself from sliding stuff under the door.

Not sure what to do, I decided to walk the halls of Dwinelle. I hoped to run into one of the graduate student readers for the class and give him my essay. While walking around, I remembered commiserating with Alex about the professor a few times. She had a class with the same professor who was terrible in her class as well. I remembered the class went from 5-6:30 in Mulford. I decided my best bet was to go to Mulford and try to catch the professor before that class ended. Before I went there, I decided to walk by the history office one more time on the off chance it was magically open. I walked by and to my amazement it was open! As I stepped inside I talked to a person who told me the office was closed. I politely asked if she could put my essay in the box for my professor. She said she would, but she had never heard of my professor. However, she found her box and I was very grateful. As I walked out of Dwinelle, I ran into Alex. Her class had ended early, so I told her about my paper adventure.

When I got back to my apartment, I decided to do something different. Instead of unlocking the door and walking in as I always did, I decided to enter through the window in the kitchen. My roommates and I had commented how easy it would be to enter the apartment if the window was open (or even if it was closed and locked), so I gave it a try. Except for avoiding knocking down the cans of food near the window, it was easy.

A week later I had a dream. In the dream I got my paper back. In red pen and circled was my score of 57%. When I woke up I was worried because I knew I deserved a failing grade. When I told my roommate Derek about the dream, he told me I must have been remembering it incorrectly. He said I had the numbers mixed up and actually had a 75%. I hoped he was right, but I knew the paper I wrote.

A few days later, the papers were handed back. I got a 75%! I was happily surprised. When I looked over the comments on the paper, there was something written next to one of the long quotes I put in. It asked, "What does this have to do with your point?" I thought, that is a good question.

I ended up getting a B in the class.

Friday, November 29, 2013

The Old SQL and Little Saigon

Since Thanksgiving was yesterday, today is a big day for leftovers. Here is a post I wrote in June. It was almost finished when I first wrote it, but it never got published. Since it has some good links and the content is interesting, you might enjoy it.

On Thursday (June 13th) I got an email from my web host saying they were deactivating and deleting anything using version 4 of PHP and MySQL web programming languages. I have received several emails like this over the last few months, but this is one I did not ignore since it is was happening on Monday.

Now for a programming aside. SQL stands for structured query language. SQL is often used for things like an online store. The SQL database will have an entry for each item containing the item's name, description, price, link to a picture, and other assorted stuff. When a customer wants to search for an item by description or price, an SQL query will be generated that will search for certain values in the price or description field. If you know how to use it, an SQL database can do a bunch of stuff. PHP is a server side scripting language. One of its common uses is to interact with an SQL database so a user can access it.

The MySQL 4 database I had to save is for the California Patriot, the political magazine I wrote for in college. Their website and online presence never recovered from my graduation. See the website now for evidence of its infrequent updates. The website had a Wordpress blog as well, which is what I am most concerned with. It used to be a big part of my life; I made over 150 posts and spent countless hours looking for stories, taking pictures, and editing things until they were just right. The students who took over after me broke the blog nine months after I graduated. They asked me for help and I could not fix it. This made all of the archived posts inaccessible. The posts were still in the database, but they could not be accessed online. The blog has been down for over four years.

Most of what I know about blogs and their related programming comes from fixing things for the Patriot blog when I took over as online editor junior year. While I had some random knowledge from a JavaScript class and helping a neighbor set up a website, I was lost when trying to figure out the advanced stuff. My computer crashed many times. With the help of our good friend Google and everyone who posted helpful things online, I figured out how to get by most of the time. A few years ago I wrote a detailed account of My Blogging Backstory.

When I started working on the MySQL database on Thursday, I was surprised at how easy it was for me to do stuff. I was significantly better at figuring things out and getting things done than when I last looked at the site a few years ago. In recent times I must have become three times smarter or more clever.

The end result of all this is the restored blog is temporarily resurrected here. You can also just browse my posts from the beginning back in February of 2006. They were primarily written for an audience in Berkeley that followed some campus, local, and political happenings, but a few of them can be read and appreciated today. Many of my puns are just as good (or just as bad) today. Rereading what I wrote is exciting. My pictures, jokes, and memories of a different time are all great. I can even remember what was going on in my life when I made the posts and how people reacted to them.

Getting everything up and running took some work. Apparently copying and pasting over 8MB of text into a box on a website does not work well. Instead, I had to upload it as a file which then executed 1074 instructions.

Unfortunately some pictures from the Patriot blog were lost. I must have deleted them by accident in the mess of folders a few years ago. I would grab a backup of my posts or find the original pictures, but there were from fall 2006 to mid 2007. My hard drive died in May of 2007, a month before my annual backup of files.

Between the 161 posts I made for the Patriot blog, 11 more for an ancillary Patriot blog, and what I have done here (this is my 260th post) this is my 432th published post. (There were a handful of others, but they are unimportant.)

Because of my Patriot blog beginnings, I kept using the html tags for Wordpress blogs until a couple of weeks ago.

Party in Little Siagon
That was Thursday. On Saturday (June 15th) I helped my supervisor/friend/mentor (friendtor as Amanda says) set up a sound system. It was for an event celebrating the 25th anniversary of the declaration of Little Saigon. For those of you not in the know (or outside of Orange County), there are more Vietnamese people living in the cities of Westminster and Garden Grove and in the surrounding area that any other place outside of Vietnam. The event I helped with was at the Asian Garden Mall. It was mainly a showcase of cultural dances and singing. There were some comments from elected officials, but they were the standard self-promoting comments that are one reason I want nothing to do with politics. It was a big deal. Most of the stuff sounded great, but I would have liked it better if I understood Vietnamese. Around 90% of the things were in Vietnamese.

This video from the Orange County Register gives a good sense of the space we were at. Another video is also online. I am wearing a green short sleeve shirt and standing on the floor next to or behind the black speaker on the pole stand on stage right. I do an amazing job hiding my face. I apologize to everyone familiar with Orange County politicians; they were featured prominently in the videos. Just fast skip those parts and be glad you did not have to be there to see and hear them in person.

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

An Exciting Development

I do not want to pay attention to the lecture I am in, so I will write a blog post instead!

A lot of stuff has been happening. The most exciting thing, I met a girl.

I met her at a church event over the summer. Then I saw her again at a couple of Beach Newman meetings. One day last month, she got my phone number from a mutual friend and started texting me. In 24 hours, we had exchanged around 100 messages.

We like each other. There are too many examples from her text messages for me to list.

There are some very positive signs and some indications of possible problems. The problems being she does not have a driver’s license and does not have a definite plan to transfer out of community college. She is 21 years old. For over a month I have been saying we should go out and thrown out ideas, but she says she has family stuff to do. Until she spends time with me in person, this can’t move forward.

However, the positives are very positive. We have been averaging 50 text messages a day for the last few days. The subtext from all of them is she likes me and wants a relationship. Most importantly on my end, I am very excited by her. I can't get her out of my mind.

That is all I can think of to write. If you call me or message me I can explain more.

Monday, September 16, 2013

The Scoop on Classes

I have finished three weeks of classes at The Beach. I have a better idea what they are like.

Technical Communication
The professor works as a technical writer and wants to teach us useful things. Our first big assignment is writing a resume and cover letter for a real job posting. I am enjoying hearing and thinking about applying for jobs in a new way. What I was doing before in my job search was a clear failure. The professor is telling everyone they should get LinkedIn profiles. In this way I am ahead; I have a profile with 126 connections. The best part is one of my friends from Beach Newman is also in the class.

Our textbook is interesting; it was published in 1998. There are comments about this new thing called email and how search engines work. Did you know: If you search "basking shark" in AltaVista it returns 403 sites, while Yahoo only returns 2? If you search Google today, it has about 479,000 results. However, the book backs up almost every comment about what to do and not do in a resume or cover letter with results from surveys and research.

Very Large Scale Integration
This class is focused on programming for a FPGA circuit board. It is entirely hands on. There is no required textbook, only lab projects that need to be done and a final. However, the professor is not good at organizing the information he wants to present or providing help to get everyone started. He does not even have a syllabus. Getting the software running, the computer communicating with the board, and all the settings correct for a basic program is difficult. However, somehow I became friends with the one person in the class who has worked with this stuff before and he helped me get everything set up.

Advanced Math for Electrical Engineers
My friends warned me that the professor for this class was difficult. After the first day, I realized he was an old school type of teacher. He thinks students should learn a lot of little things and theoretical background to stuff, at the expense of doing simple calculations. While all the details are important, if they cannot be applied to basic situations, the knowledge is worthless. I have had many professors like this before, so I know how to handle things. However, I am in the minority. On the first day of class, there were around 25 students there. Two weeks later (after the drop deadline), I was one of five.

This brings up a tangent on my great teaching idea.
Everything needs a conceptual and practical component developed separately. I would spend the first part of my time explaining how stuff worked. There would be a select few equations; the goal is teaching everyone to visualize how things work. Then, I would work a few simple examples with real numbers. Next, I would cover stuff in mathematical detail. I would demonstrate key parts of important concepts. I would provide some general and specific examples. If things were in multiple dimensions, there would be at least one example of every concept in three dimensions. I get very annoyed when something is in only one dimension in examples and they expect me to figure out how multiple dimensions work. The homework would include simple problems with numbers and some more general ones without real values.
Mixed Signal Integrated Circuit Design
This covers the layout and design of integrated circuits on silicon. I am working with lengths that are on the order of 50 nanometers (around one millionth of a centimeter). For capacitance calculations, I am using the atto prefix, which is 10e-18. For added fun, there are multiple layers of this stuff on top of each other.

The professor has created a bad first impression. He is late to every class. Sometimes 9 or 10 minutes late, but on lab days he can be 30 or even 50 minutes late. He had not expressed any concern or worry; he thinks it is perfectly acceptable. He assigns homework that has very little to do with his lectures. Fortunately, the textbook is very good. I am learning a lot by reading it. Another good thing, the professor has mentioned we will be following the standards set at advanced places like the Lincoln Lab, UC Berkeley, and MOSIS.

The incompetence of tenured professors notwithstanding, I am very happy with my classes. Programming for a FPGA and laying out an integrated circuit on the transistor level seem like fun. Last week as I was reading about resistor layout on silicon wafers, I thought this is some good stuff and I am glad to be learning about it.

With all these classes and Beach Newman Week of Welcome events, things have been very busy. There is a lot of stuff I should be reading, working on, and doing. Since I have limited time (or questionable time management) I am following the motto "If it is not due, it is not getting done." As long as I get good at multivariable calculus theorems by the first midterm I will be OK. However, I am not trying to be OK, I am trying to be great.

Thursday, September 5, 2013

Labor Day Weekend

There is always something exciting going on with me.

On Thursday night I bought some new running shoes. Well, they are my first pair of running specific shoes. In the last few weeks I have been exercising a lot. My goal is to run or bike 5 days a week. It should be known, I do not like running. However, I dislike being out of shape and how I look even more than I do not like running.

Friday morning I tried my new shoes. They felt a lot better than the old ones. Later on I went to the library and practiced for the Fundamentals of Engineering Test. I practiced electrical circuits, which I am not as good at as I should be. Then I saw Frank and company. This is the first time I saw Frank and Sabrina since their wedding a month ago. We saw Wolverine and then ate at Karl Strauss.

On Saturday I went to an apartment warming party. It was themed as a tea party with scones and tea sandwiches. Everything was good, despite being vegan and gluten free. I brought my teapot, which I bought in Berkeley for tea parties. After the tea, we played Double Take, which is a game I do not recommend. It is like charades, except two people are acting out different parts of a compound word or phrase. For example, the phrase could be tub of lard (an actual one we came across). One person would act out tub and the other would do lard. Some of the words were stupid. For the category of things relating to cars, one person had to act out "bump" while the other person mimed "her." I was horrible at the game. At the end, there was this exchange:

Score Keeper: "Chris, you got 28 points, so you tied for third place."
Me: "What is the nice way to say this? Did you count correctly?" She recounted.
Score Keeper: "Actually, you got 20 points." This put me in last out of 8 people.

After that, I went to watch the California Golden Bears open their football season. I was at a viewing party with the Orange County Cal Alumni Club. We had a new head coach and a true freshman quarterback. It was an exciting game to watch. It was tied near the start of the fourth quarter. However, our top 25 opponent Northwestern won in the end. While it was a loss, the Bears looked great. There is a lot of potential and the team should only get better.

On Sunday Eric organized a BBQ with the Vietnamese Crew. It was in a park and I did the grilling. Consuming two hamburgers, three beers, a hot dog, and some chips was wonderful. After that, I went to Ryan's for another BBQ. While I was plenty full from earlier, I enjoyed many of the beers he had. Aside from Dave, it was all people Ryan knew.

On the Labor Day Holiday, I cleared a space in my room to set up my laptop. I had to download a program for class to program a circuit board. The program I downloaded was big. It had to be downloaded in four different parts; each was around 2GB. After the downloading and decompression, it took an hour for the program itself to install. After I figured out the license, I started working through a tutorial online. Then there was laundry and some reading. I registered and paid for the FE test in October.

Wednesday, August 28, 2013

The Secret History and Free Books

I just finished reading The Secret History by Donna Tartt. It was good.

I first heard about this book from the graduate student instructor for my Ancient Religion class at Berkeley. He said it was the reason he became interested in classics. Since he was working on a graduate classics degree at Berkeley, it must have been a pretty good inspiration. However, when I had time to find and read the book after the semester, I forgot the title. I tried searching online using a few words of what I remembered from the plot, but they were too vague.

Fast forward five years to last month when I was a groomsman at the wedding of my friend Frank. I was sitting next to his friend from the University of Chicago. This person studied Byzantine history, which is interesting to me. He wrote his thesis about the Secret History, a work by Procopius from around 550 AD. In this work, Procopius gives a scathing critique of the Emperor Justinian and his associates. For his thesis, this person analyzed if the Secret History was based on facts or a made up propaganda piece. He was from San Mateo, so I asked him if knew Monica (a friend from Berkeley), and he did. They went to the same high school.

When I got home, I was interested in looking into the Secret History of Procopius. I googled the secret history, and the first thing I found was a novel by Donna Tartt. I took a quick look at the summary and realized this was the book I had forgotten the title to.

Now for the novel The Secret History. It follows a group of classics students in a small college in Vermont. The books opens with the narrator saying he and his friends killed someone. He then explains the events and people years earlier who brought his life to that point. It centers around a group of odd students who study Greek and revive worship of the ancient Greek god Dionysus.

The book was published in 1992 and the main action is retold years after the fact, which would put the book happening in the early eighties or earlier. All of it is from another era. There are things I can relate to, but it is also decades away. For example, dorms had one phone for the entire building. If you wanted to get a hold of someone, you had to call the building where he lived. If he was not there, you left a message with whoever answered the phone.

I enjoyed all of the ancient history and classical references. Everything from direct quotes of works, to mentions of ancient Greek drama, to allusions to Greek heroes, to a character comparing a teacher to Richmond Lattimore. It is unfortunate a lot of readers will not enjoy those comments.

While I liked a lot of the book, a couple of things in the book were unnecessary. I will not go into details since that would compromise the story. I also had an idea to prevent the murder that did not occur to any of the characters.

I have imagined what it would be like if I attended a small liberal arts college. It would be nice to live in and use buildings that had a lot of history and to live on a small campus where the seasons could be experienced. However, I would also be disappointed. There would be so few choices for classes and most of them would be taught by the same few professors. Their idea of a science class would look like a bunch of people playing with over sized kids' chemistry sets. I would think, I shelled out $30,000 a year for this place? Plus, they wouldn't even have an element on the periodic table named after them.

Free Books
My friend James is moving to the east coast to start law school at Harvard. To downsize his book collection, he posted a list of books on facebook he was giving away for free to a good home.

I got three books from James. They are:

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris
Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea by Jasper Becker
Military Leaders in the Civil War by Joseph B. Mitchell

I am thankful for all of these books.

The first book was one he got as a gift from a former roommate of mine. The second was one of his several books on Korea. I know almost nothing about Korea and I want to change that. The third book was one James thought I would enjoy. It is short sketches of ten military leaders of the Civil War. It is a character study that analyzes what personality traits, strategies, or themes lead to their successes or failures. It looks interesting, so I think James was right in thinking I would like it.

Now the biggest problem of all, setting aside time to read all of these books. To inspire myself to work harder, I am starting with the Theodore Roosevelt book. I am taking the book with me to school and reading it in the library when I have some time. I am aiming for a chapter a day.

Saturday, August 24, 2013

I'm a Real Student! plus the FE Exam

On Monday I will start as a full time graduate student. I am excited!

I feel like I am starting college over and I want to avoid every mistake and regret I had the first time. I am half way there already with the classes I have taken so far. I have made some friends in class and gotten to know a professor or two. I have gone out with two girls who were awesome, even if they did not feel the same about me in the end. Last night I celebrated the birthday of a friend from Long Beach. After some silly string, Irish car bombs, four different bars, and Denny's, I headed home around 4.

Three of my four textbooks have already arrived in the mail. Some of them are a little intimidating, but I know if I practice a lot, read and reread them early in the semester, and ask questions when I do not know what I am doing I will do great. I have mostly evening classes starting at 5:30, 6:30, or later. I have one afternoon class on Tuesdays at 12:30. I have no classes on Wednesday or Friday. However, almost no one at Long Beach has class on Friday. I am taking four classes this semester: Technical Communication (an English class that will mostly be a waste of time), Advanced Engineering Math for Electrical Engineers (it covers everything I am not good at: Fourier transforms, Z–transforms, and differential equations), VLSI Design (Very Large System Integration, which is putting one thousand plus transistors into a single integrated circuit), and Mixed Single Integrated Circuit Design.

In the Catholic club, I have established myself as the person who knows what is going on and how to do things. When I make suggestions people usually agree with me. It also helps that I know from experience what ideas work. Unfortunately, there is a ridiculous amount of red tape. CSU Long Beach makes life difficult for student groups. Faculty advisers, signed paper forms, mandatory in person officer training sessions that do not start until August, a stupid online network few people use that every campus group must use, paying for a table at the big club fair, a block on clubs reserving rooms, shutting down the one webpage people have used to find our club, and writing a club constitution that must contain paragraphs with exact wording copied from campus and state law are not helping anyone. This is a load of bullshit.

Things are looking up, and I am excited!

Fundamentals of Engineering Test
In other news, I am preparing to take the Fundamentals of Engineering (or Engineer in Training) test in October. It is the first step in becoming a licensed professional engineer. While it is only necessary for a small fraction of engineering jobs, I think passing the test will be a boost when I apply for internships and jobs. The test has 180 multiple choice questions. Half of it is general engineering knowledge. It tests physics, math, statics, dynamics, thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, probability, chemistry, computers, engineering economics, properties of materials, electricity and magnetism, and ethics. I am working through a review book, though I am learning some things for the first time. I never took engineering economics (present value, future value, depreciation, cost benefit analysis, and all that stuff) and have very little exposure to some other areas, like fluid dynamics, properties of materials, and probability/statistics. I took chemistry, but that was in high school. The second half of the test covers my area of specialty, electrical engineering. There will be circuits, electronics, power, control systems, and more circuits; all of which I took in the last couple of years. Here is the detailed list of what is covered on the test.

I bought one of the approved models of calculator (TI-36X Pro) for the test and have been practicing with it. For the last 11 years, I have exclusively used my TI-83+ Silver Edition for everything. There are a few changes in buttons I am getting used to. Aside from the calculator, I am learning how the handbook I can use for the test is laid out. It is 250 pages and has most of the equations I will need. However, I need to know where to find things and what equations are not in it. There are also tricks I am developing. For example, I could memorize some equation and a constant for a speed of sound equation to determine Mach numbers, but it is so much easier to remember sound travels at 343.2 m/s at 20 C.

I am finished reviewing/learning around two thirds of the general topics. There are some areas like fluid mechanics that I understand better now that I ever have. For engineering economics, it is mostly figuring out the right equation to use and plugging the numbers in. The hardest section for me has been statics. It is about forces in things that are at rest, like how much force is in a beam in a bridge. The next hardest section for me looks like chemistry, because it expects me to memorize a lot of chemical formulas and oxidation reduction stuff. If I was Walter White, this would be easier. Fortunately, that is only a small part of the chemistry section, which is a small part, 9%, of the entire general section of the test. I still remember some important elemental symbols and atomic masses from high school, and all the calculations are basic algebra. If those are my biggest problems, I am in great shape for the general section.

Solving the problems quickly and time management will be the most difficult part of the test.

For the last testing session in April, the overall passage rate was 61% (though first-time test takers had a passage rate around 75%). For comparison, the California bar exam in July of last year had overall and first-time passage rates of 55% and 68%. However, people who took the engineering test did substantially less complaining. I have not seen a single facebook post about "I am taking the Engineering FE/EIT test." In contrast, I have seen way too many posts about bar prep classes, studying for the bar, and taking the bar. Alternatively, this could mean I have made horrible life choices by associating with too many lawyers and not enough engineers.

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Something great every day

I have been busy. In the last couple of weeks, I have been doing something interesting almost every day. Instead of trying for long posts that capture every nuance, I will throw everything at you.

Before this story starts, a few notable things happened at the end of June. I was in a three car auto accident that resulted in no damage to anything. People were merging because construction closed a lane, but there was only 100 feet between the first cone and the complete closure of the lane. Everyone stopped and exchanged information, but the bumpers did their job!

Eric locked his keys in his car. I used my AAA membership to get it opened for him. This was around midnight after we saw Now you see Me and had In-N-Out.

Then I went to Las Vegas for Frank's bachelor party. I saw all the same people again a few days later for Independence Day. Ryan had a BBQ at his new house.

Then this jumps to the 9th of July.

Tuesday: Beach Newman meeting, young adult meeting at Long Beach church
Wednesday: Board meeting of OC Cal Alumni Club
Thursday: Happy Hour with OC Cal Alumni in Corona del Mar
Friday: Nothing (worked on fundamentals of engineering test practice problems)
Saturday: Cleaned my room, saw friend in modern blues band perform in Dana Point

Sunday: Spent the day with Frank and the groomsmen; got fitted for a tuxedo, had lunch, saw Pacific Rim, saw Frank's new apartment, went to the OC Fair, enjoyed a Krispy Kream sloppy joe sandwich
Monday: Happy hour with Long Beach friend
Tuesday: Beach Newman meeting, saw Corpse Bride, had cake from friends' wedding (a year after the wedding)
Wednesday: Went hiking at Sturtevant Falls with Long Beach friend (from happy hour)
Thursday: Nothing (show of my musician friend was cancelled at last minute)
Friday: Baby shower for Long Beach friend (same one as wedding cake), saw Angels game with Dave (including an Angels win!)
Saturday: Beach Newman officer retreat, camping in someone's backyard, Twinkies!, spending the night in a tent without a rain fly, experiencing rain, gave a great talk

Sunday: Finished up retreat, syrup shots at Denny's, went to Slater's 50/50 with Ryan, Dave, and Daniel for my birthday
Monday: Went to Lucille's BBQ for my birthday
Tuesday: Responded to all my birthday messages, Theology on Tap with Beach Newman friends
Wednesday: Hike in Peter's Canyon with Dave and Long Beach friend, tested new hydration pack

All of the things I did above were awesome. I have been getting back into the habit of exercising. I bike almost every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, except for the days I am hiking. I have gotten back up to going 12 miles in a ride. I am watching Sons of Anarchy on Amazon Prime. I just finished season three. If you have not watched Sons of Anarchy, you are missing out on a great show.

Now what I have planned for the next few days.

Thursday: Pick up tuxedo for wedding, pack and get everything ready
Friday: Drive to Santa Barbara with Dave and Aden, rehearsal dinner
Saturday: Frank's wedding, me standing around in a tuxedo looking important

Tuesday: Theology on Tap with Beach Newman friends
Wednesday: Help friends move
Thursday: Hike somewhere, maybe Santiago peak

There are a lot of things around me I want to change. Living with family can still be horrible. However, I am doing a lot to make the best of my situation. I am happy about the way a lot of things are going.

Sunday, July 7, 2013

St. Therese of Lisieux and Vatican II

A few weeks ago I finished The Story of a Soul, the autobiography of Saint Therese of Lisieux.

It was not as good as I had hoped. There was a lot of stuff about Therese growing up. She would have been a handful to deal with. The littlest things set her off. She also does not take no for an answer. She knew she wanted to join the Carmel cloister when she was young. When she made her intention known at the age of 14, the priest-superior of the order said she was too young. Then she went to the bishop to ask his permission. When he said the same thing, she traveled to Rome and appealed to Pope Leo XIII. He told her to do what her superiors instructed, which was wait until she was older.

What I do like about St. Therese (which I knew about before reading this), was her idea on small acts of kindness. When we cannot do great things, we can do small things with great love. She is often called Saint Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face (the names she took as a religious) or the Little Flower of Jesus. She died in 1897 at the age of 24. However, she is a Doctor of the Church, which means she is really important (only 35 in 2,000 years). She is not to be confused with St. Teresa of Avila, another Doctor of the Church who reformed the Carmelite Order and wrote The Interior Castle in the 1500s.

Seeing posts online, some of my friends like St. Therese of Lisieux and her writings a lot. Mother Teresa of Calcutta took her name after Therese of Lisieux.

One remarkable thing is the piety of Therese's family. Both of her parents have been declared to be blessed. All four of her sisters that survived to adulthood became nuns.

Reading this was a continuation of the reading club/discussion group/salvation Skypes/Catholic conversations (we do not have a good name) I started with Amanda last year to read the Bible.

Vatican II
The other thing we read earlier this year was all of the documents from the Second Vatican Council. All the Vatican II documents are available online in a variety of languages, including Byelorussian and Swahili.

There were no great revelations in the documents for me. A lot of it was stuff I had heard before. I was disappointed in a few of the documents. They had a lot of general comments. Often they said a particular issue needed to be addressed and said bishops should appoint a group to study a problem and recommend changes. This was boring, because I wanted to read about the changes themselves. However, people say it was a really important council and a lot of stuff came out of it, like the mass being in local languages instead of Latin.

If you are interested in reading a few of the documents, I would recommend you read the constitutions. They were the best and most important.

Vatican II took place from 1962-1965, so last year was the 50th anniversary of when it started. To celebrate this, the Pope declared a celebration called the Year of Faith. People are encouraged to read the Vatican II documents as well as the Catechism of the Catholic Church and gain a deeper understanding of their faith.

Thursday, June 27, 2013

A Great Update!

I received a few emails this week. I have been accepted to the masters in electrical engineering program at Long Beach.

First, I got an email saying "Thank you for choosing 'The Beach'" which contained instructions on how to register for classes. Next, I looked online and it seemed I had already accepted the offer of admission I was never offered and was listed as a masters student. Then, I got another email today with an official acceptance letter.

My professor came through. He got my application reconsidered and had me admitted. He must have been pleased with my performance in the class I took from him in the fall and the one I finished last month (despite my disaster of a presentation).

This is exciting! I feel like I am on track to do something great.

I remember how horrible I felt two years ago. I felt I was wasting my life. I can remember sitting in a park in San Francisco with my Associate two years ago, trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life. After talking with him and thinking about the life I wanted, I knew I had to make some changes.

A month later I started taking a control systems class at UCI during the summer. I was still unsure if I wanted to do electrical or mechanical engineering. However, my jovial professor and the ways I saw electricity interact with motors convinced me electrical engineering was were it was at. Then I decided to take more electrical engineering classes at Long Beach. My plan was to continue to investigate electrical engineering and Long Beach as a school while raising my GPA for graduate school. After two semesters and five classes, my GPA was above their minimum. However, by the time I got my grades in May they had closed applications for the fall. Disappointed, I planned to apply for the spring semester. I took one class in the fall, with the intention of getting to know the professor who was the graduate adviser for the program, who I wanted to impress. While I got off to a slow start, I finished the class strong. Then, I discovered they were not accepting applications for the spring semester. None of the Cal States were, citing budget cuts. So I took one more class in the spring. However, the class was only one day a week. Most of the time I forgot about it the other six days. I did not put the time and effort into the homework, midterm, or final project that I should have.

Now I am happy. The work I have been doing the past two years was to get into graduate school. Now I am in.

I want to start things anew. I expect it will take two years for me to finish a masters degree and I want to be the kind of student I never was. I want to do very well in all of my classes, I want to be aggressive about getting to know professors, and I want to get to know some of the people in my classes. I want to avoid all the mistakes I made before. I am already on track to do all of this.

I have ideas about how I want to remake my life, and it looks like they are within reach.

Saturday, June 22, 2013

Hiro Protagonist in Snow Crash

On Wednesday I finished the book Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. It was great.

The story of why I read this book starts in April. I was going to Fresno for Juliette's wedding. I was carpooling with Justin, who was driving up from San Diego. I do not know Justin very well, his first semester at Berkeley was my last. However, we know a lot of the same people (53 mutual friends according to facebook) and were involved in similar activities. He explained the book and I was interested in reading it.

The main character, aptly named Hiro Protagonist, is a hacker and a great swordsman. His business card from the book is below. His dad was in the army when he was growing up (like me) and he graduated from Berkeley (like me). He mentioned meeting another character in his freshman physics lab section.



I enjoyed the universe Stephenson created. It had a slight dystopian feel. Everything is owned by a franchise of a massive corporation. Some things that are easy for us to imagine today would have been more fanciful when the book was published in 1992. For example, in the book there is a metaverse. It is a vast virtual reality world where people around the world can connect and interact with each other.

I don't want to give away too much of the story. Our hacker and swordfigher Hiro has to save the day. Some hackers are being infected by a virus and people are trying to figure out what it is. The investigation brings in Sumerian mythology, ideas about information, and even some glossolalia (speaking in tongues).

A lot of the book takes place in Southern California, so there are references to freeways around Los Angeles. However, the references were not imbued with a personal experience of living here. For example, the indefinite article the was left off when referring to "the 405." If the "the" is not there, it is wrong.

If you like science fiction, you should check out Snow Crash. If you like the world Stephenson creates in the first few pages, you should enjoy the book.

Monday, June 17, 2013

Everything falls apart?

On Friday I got an email. I was rejected from the masters in electrical engineering program at Long Beach.

I had not applied to any other schools because I thought I had the best chance of getting into Long Beach. I also had a ridiculously busy April. I have taken 7 classes at Long Beach in the last 2 years with a 3.4 GPA. I figured, if they do not want me what other school would. Immediately I looked online and called another school to confirm they are still accepting applications for their electrical engineering program. I then ordered all of my transcripts to be sent there. I started working on the application. Since it is a Cal State, the application is the same. The only change I need to make is removing the Long Beach specific references from my personal statement.

I am still shocked by their decision. I could site a half dozen reasons why they are wrong. They include the classes I got better grades in than students that were admitted to the program, my undergraduate school being a lot better than anyone else's (Berkeley > USC or any Cal State), my volunteer work experience (anyone else a lead test engineer?), my GRE scores (790 in math anyone?), the recommendations of the Long Beach professors I listed they probably did not talk to (one of the best students in class), my dedication to Long Beach (taking classes there for two years), or my friend who is in the program saying "I am 100% sure you are going to get in, you are better than me."

My biggest disappointment about not getting in is the friends I have made at Long Beach. I met a lot of great people at the Catholic Newman group and was looking forward to doing stuff with them this year.

I emailed my professor earlier today. He said he is trying to get my application reconsidered and get me admitted.

Now for something happier. Yesterday my neighbor told me I should apply to an internship at her company. She said they interviewed a lot of people, but none of them were qualified. I sent her my resume yesterday and today someone from their HR department called me to set up an interview tomorrow. I do not know too much about the internship, just that it is in Irvine and the company does a lot of optics related stuff. I will avoid telling them my worst and most despised area in physics was optics. A big reason I did not like optics was because I was bad at it. I have kept all of my physics textbooks (including a class I dropped after two weeks) except for my optics book. However, my experience with a CO2 laser is pretty good stuff for the opportunity.

Sunday, June 16, 2013

Last week and s'mores cookies

I have not had a lot to do for the last several days. This has been great.

On Tuesday I fixed a friend's computer. It was running slow, so I disabled a lot of processes that loaded at startup. Then I went home to finish baking some s'mores cookies. I am not sure where I originally found the recipe online, but it is the same as the recipe from Ice Cream Before Dinner. With 11 tablespoons of butter this is a sure winner.

S'mores Cookies

11 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
1 cup brown sugar, packed
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 large eggs, room temp
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp sea salt
1 tsp cinnamon
2 1/2 cups flour
1/2 cup chocolate chips
1 cup mini marshmallows
4 Hershey bars, broken into pieces
1 package graham crackers, broken into squares

Directions:
  1. In a medium bowl, combine the flour, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon. Set aside.
  2. In another bowl, cream butter with both sugars until light and fluffy.
  3. Add egg and vanilla. Then add the flour mixture. Keep mixing.
  4. Fold in chips and marshmallows. Chill dough in refrigerator for 1 hour (or even overnight).
  5. Preheat oven to 375 F.
  6. Line baking pans with parchment paper. Lay out graham crackers side by side on the pans as close as possible (they should be touching).
  7. Place a heaping tablespoon of chilled dough on each of the graham crackers. Press down slightly with fingertips.
  8. Bake for 5 minutes then remove from oven and put a piece of Hershey bar on top of each of them.
  9. Bake for 5 – 7 more minutes or until dough is beginning to turn golden brown at the edges. Cool on a wire rack.
The way I did the cookies was to break the graham crackers in half (so they were almost squares). I then put a scoop of dough on top of each of these squares. When they were finished, each graham square had a cookie and chocolate on top, which was my original image when I heard s'mores cookies. However, looking at the pictures and recipes online, the way they are usually made is to get the dough to evenly bake over all the crackers and then cut them up so they are more like bars instead of cookies.

I made 46 cookies with this recipe. A box of graham crackers usually has 54 pieces when the rectangular ones are broken in half.

While I like baking cookies and giving them to people, I was inspired to share them at a Beach Newman event because of the following exchange on facebook a few weeks ago. Instead of paraphrasing, I will share the entire conversation. The sister below is a lot like Juliette from Berkeley.

Friend (status update): My sister is actually an alien being with magical powers from the planet Soggisandwichonia and she plans on devouring every cookie in our house as soon as I bake some. Her mind powers compel me. I must leave now. Farewell, Earthlings.
Friend: Hacked
Friend's sister: No, she wasn't.
Me: She is an adult; she can bake her own cookies. Also, anyone from Soggisandwichonia should be eating sandwiches.
Friend's sister: But the sandwiches there are all soggy, I want COOKIES!!! And aliens never reach adulthood; that's why we always rely on Earthlings to do our bidding. Do you bake cookies?
Me: Soggy sandwiches? How did civilization ever develop on that planet? I do bake cookies. Growing up, the Cookie Monster was one of my heroes. I often make chocolate chip oatmeal ones, but recently I made some smores cookies that were wonderful. I should bring some to one of the Beach Newman events.
Friend's sister: It's a very moist climate, and yes, you should! S'more cookies?!:)

So I decided to bring cookies to our meeting on Tuesday. While I knew my friend would be there, I did not know her sister would be there as well. I have not seen her since January.

Since I did not have anything pressing to do on Wednesday, I cleaned my room. I found some paperwork I was looking for, threw some stuff out, and did some laundry. It has been a while since I saw this much carpet in my room.

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

My Cousin's Ordination

A few weeks ago I was in Cleveland for my cousin's ordination. (To be technical, he is my second cousin. However, my mom is an only child so I do not have any first cousins on her side. That means all of my second cousins are not actually second to anyone.)



Tuesday night (the 14th) was the final for my non-linear control systems class. However, my class was not finished. I still had a written report due on Saturday. I had to do well on the report, because the presentation I gave the week before was a complete disaster. So after I got home from the final around 10:30, I had to install MATLAB on my laptop and collect all the files and papers I needed. Then I had to pack for a six day trip. I got around an hour and a half of sleep before leaving for a 6:30 flight out of LAX.

When we got to Cleveland, we visited my dad's cousin and his family. They live around 20 miles west of the city. Then my grandparents drove in (they live about 3 hours away) and visited with us until the next morning. That was all my dad's family.

Later on Thursday we had dinner with my mom's cousin, whose son was being being ordained. I enjoyed the special of wild boar at the Blue Canyon Restaurant.

On Friday more family stated rolling in. There were people from Georgia, Wisconsin, New York, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. I saw a few of these people last year because a few of them had a small reunion in New York (which happened to be the same weekend I was there). Otherwise, the last time I saw all of them was at Annie's wedding in Detroit in 2011. All 28 of us had dinner at the family's house. That night I got less than two hours of sleep, since I was having trouble with the graphs for my project.

The ordination was on Saturday morning. Complicating things was the Cleveland 5k which was being run that morning that we had to pass through. Five people were being ordained priests for the diocese. The front half of the church had assigned seating and required tickets. I was in row ten with some assorted cousins.



There were over 100 priests there. I put a big collection of pictures on Facebook. The main points of the ordination were promising obedience to the bishop and laying of hands on the ordained.



After the ordination, the family had a reception at The Harp Restaurant. I enjoyed a crab cake burger. One of my cousins had a vegetarian boxty with bacon added.

Then we went back to the hotel. I finished and submitted the report for my electrical engineering project. I think there was divine intervention to help me get the graphs correct. After watching the Preakness Stakes on TV, we headed off to the reception. It was in a church hall; the nicest church hall I have ever been in. The reception was a lot like a wedding reception, except there was no bride.

I decided I should take pictures will all of my cousins. I have no idea when I will see them again. So my project at the reception and the following day was to get pictures with all dozen of them.

On Sunday there was a brunch at the family's house. They had a great breakfast casserole, waffles with real strawberries, bagels, and other good things. More family drove in just for the brunch.

That afternoon was Fr. Ryan's first mass. He gave a great homily for Pentecost. Fr. Ryan talked about how everyone must respond to the call of the Holy Spirit. He made some good jokes and managed to pick on his little sister. I had a good seat for the first mass. The two people in front of my are Fr. Ryan's parents.



The church was packed with people. He did a lot of work with the teens in the parish and they were excited to be there for his mass. I am glad he did a good job saying mass. It would be embarrassing if I was related to a mass murderer. Below is the bulletin and program for his first mass.



Afterwards the parish had a reception for him. There were a lot of people at the reception, around 400. They had a great spread of food. There were beef sandwiches, pulled pork sandwiches, cake, cookies baked by parishioners, and a lot of good stuff I cannot remember. This is us with Fr. Ryan and his immediate family.



The entire weekend had more events than a wedding. I also got some nice swag. The rosaries were made by people at Fr. Ryan's parish. Fr. Ryan wrote a litany just for his family and friends.



On Monday most people went home. However, we stayed an extra day and got to spend some more time with our relatives who lived there.

Differences in Church
From the way people acted and things looked, it seems people take church more seriously there. The reception after the first mass was bigger than anything I would expect at a parish in California. Also, it was filled with people. In California, when there was a goodbye reception for a deacon or a celebration for a priest's anniversary of ordination, there were only a handful of people at that celebration in California. There is also the facilities themselves. The parish hall for the Saturday reception blew away any church hall I have seen in California. The church for the first mass was newer and had a bigger office and meeting space (or at least a vastly superior layout) than what I am used to here. At the sign of peace, everyone shakes hands. Whereas in California, people who know each other hug.

More Sadness
Everything above is how I want to remember it and tell everyone. There were a lot of difficult things on the trip. We almost missed our flight out of LAX because other people in my family were not ready. I learned how pathetic my dad and brother really are. Some days they spent more time napping during the day than I got in sleep the night before. My brother can't even take my grandma to breakfast with him in the hotel lobby. My dad cares more about looking at his computer than getting things ready so we can be on time to where we go. I was close to making a huge scene at the reception and yelling at them how they are all failures. Instead, I decided I was not going to let them ruin my evening. Then I got the idea of getting a picture with all of my cousins. Also, my grandma's memory loss is getting bad. She did not remember my dad's parents. She has known them for 40 years.

On a happier note, here is my with my cousin Fr. Ryan.

Saturday, May 11, 2013

My horrible situation

I need to make a big change in my life. Living at home is creating too much anger and stress inside of me.

I was explaining my situation to a couple of friends last night. They were surprised at how horrible my life situation is. It is worse than anything they have ever dealt with. I would recount examples, but that will only make me feel worse.

I have had enough of this bunch of losers. My parents have had 31 years to teach my brother to be an adult. They have failed. My parents have no plan for my grandma. I made a simple suggestion to them months ago and they have not done anything.

I never signed up to be a babysitter for my brother or grandma. However, here I am watching over them while my parents are in Las Vegas and I have a final and written report due on Tuesday. I am not going to spend the next few years of my life doing the work they have chosen to not do. I will help take care of my grandma, but I am not going to do my part and the rest of my family's part. I do not want to be selfish. However, I should not waste my time helping people who are not willing to work themselves.

I do not have enough time in my life for people who waste their lives. I am trying to get my life on track. I am trying to get into graduate school, I am trying to make new friends, I am trying to learn skills that will help me get a career track job, I am trying to figure out what I want to do with my life, I am trying to get a girlfriend, I am trying to improve my health with exercise and by eating better, I am trying to make the most of my life before I die.

My parents are giving me a place to stay and money to do things. The price for this is dealing with a dad who has abdicated his responsibilities as father and head of household, caring for a mom who is physically disabled who no one seems to listen to, dealing with a brother who thinks the family exists to serve him and does not understand how to effectively help around the house, and a 94 year old grandma who cannot remember a conservation from 3 minutes earlier and holds my mom or me personally responsible for the condition of the house that my dad and brother do not clean.

The food my dad makes is unhealthy. If I keep eating it I will end up obese, looking terrible, and have health complications, just like him. I am already two thirds of the way there. In the last six months I have gained ten pounds. I look fat in a lot of my shirts.

Is this money worth the effect on my happiness and health? No.

The day I can move out and be reasonably sure I can support myself financially will be one of the happiest days of my life.

When I was a child, my parents were great. I am afraid if I spend much more time around them their failures over the last few years will destroy all the good impressions I have of them from when I was younger. As it is, I am embarrassed to bring any of my friends to their house. The last time someone was visiting we were out of toilet paper. The glasses in the kitchen look dirty even after they come out of the dishwasher. Many of the chairs in the kitchen are broken. The kitchen sink leaks water. The front door latch is broken. Things are cleaned infrequently if ever.

I do not want to do anything with my dad and brother. I actively avoid going to mass with them. I dislike spending holidays with them. Trips with them are infuriating for me. I do not want to share my life with them, probably because I want nothing to do with their lives. I don't like the choices they are making in their lives. I don't like how my dad is dealing with (or ignoring) the problems around him. I don't like how he handles his relationships with friends, family, and neighbors. I don't like my brother's complete lack of critical thinking. I don't like the excuses he makes. I don't like their laziness or habitual tardiness. I don't like the low goals they set for themselves. What they do with their lives is their business, but I do not have to be with them.

It is hard to get certain images out of my mind. Like the time my 90+ year old grandma who was a guest in our house was doing laundry. My dad and brother just sat there in the room next to her. They did not try to help fold the laundry. When my grandma needed help, she walked down the hall to ask me, not my dad or brother who were right there. This shows how little confidence she has in them to help her. There are some times my mom needs help in the other room. Instead of calling her husband (who is sitting on his ass staring at the computer or taking a nap), she calls me to help her.

I want to leave because my dad and brother are failing to take responsibility for taking care of my mom, grandma, and their house. A lot of this work has to be done by me or not at all. However, if I leave it will be my mom and grandma who will suffer.

After all of this, what are my choices?
  • Move out ASAP with the money I have saved and figure out a job after that.
  • Pick a date (maybe August 1st) to move out and plan some things out before then.
  • Spend as little time as possible at home. Be at the library, school, coffee shops, or my volunteer job whenever possible.
  • Write my dad a letter saying I am disappointing with him and suggest he make some life changes.
  • Stay as long as my grandma is staying with us so at least one person will be there for her.
  • Do nothing and have a horrible life.
The best choice seems a combination of 2, 3, and 4. I do not want to abandon my mom and grandma.

What do you think I should do? If you have any ideas let me know. Since I am in the middle of this situation it is hard to evaluate things objectively.

Friday, May 3, 2013

Some people are happy

There are a lot of frustrating things around me. Almost all of them have to do with the failures of my family. There is also the presentation and project I have due on Tuesday for my electrical engineering class. My room is a mess, but better than it was a few hours ago. However, I have explained the frustrating things too much. In emails and over Skype, I have spent more than enough time on them.

There are some good things that need to be covered.

I like how I am getting involved with the Beach Newman club. Last week I went to a joint birthday party for two people in the club. The mother of one of the birthday girls made some great comments. She related how her daughter was in a lot of pain for many years because of an illness. She had a surgery a year and a half ago, and now every day without pain is a blessing for them. They were not even sure she would live this long. Aside from a masquerade theme, there was dancing and playing billiards. I am seeing all the signs of being good friends with these people, and it is exciting.

Last week I saw Andrew. Being the kid that he is, he wants to start a Nerf league. People (adults) will get together and shoot their Nerf guns at each other. We ate at the Lake Forrest location of Slater's 50/50. While I have talked about it before, I will reiterate it is magical place.

Continuing the theme of people I know from political activities, I later saw James. We met at Pop's Cafe. I found it online searching for good breakfast places. However, looking at the pictures, I remembered going there once in high school. It was after doing some stage crew work for a senior musical. It was some kind of work during school hours so we missed class, which was unusual. Back to James; he had some interesting news. Last time I saw him the big news was his admittance to Harvard Law School. This time the shocking news is he has a girlfriend and she is white. In college it was a well know and heavily documented fact he almost exclusively liked Asian girls. However, don't go posting about this on facebook. He is keeping it on the down low because the relationship is against company policy.

Earlier this week the Beach Newman club had elections for officers for next year. It was a whimsical event. They modeled everything after the conclave that elected the last pope. Afterwards, everyone in the club was still friends. No one will be leaving because of resentment over the results, which is a welcome departure from the last club I was in. I was elected the prayer coordinator for the group. The exciting thing is the other people on the board I will be working with. They are all awesome people. After the meeting, we went to 2nd Street in Long Beach to celebrate our new president's 21st birthday.

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Since I am home for the moment

Yesterday I was working on my taxes. I would have worked on them earlier, but things were crazy. As in living in an RV in the desert to babysit a radio repeater for four days crazy. And being in Fresno the weekend before that. Both of those merit full posts, but I want to get some pictures for them first.

When you are working on your taxes at 11:22 am on April 15th, it is not a good sign if your 1040 starts to look like this.



Despite the colorful explosion, I was able to finish and mail everything. It was good I finished them before 5; I had to work on my application for the master's in electrical engineering program at Long Beach which was due that day.

I would post my entire personal statement online, but I am concerned they might search for my personal statement and discover I plagiarized it from a random blog, or worse, they might read my disparaging comments about my professors who cannot teach.

Everything I mentioned in the personal statement is from the last couple of years. Most of it is from the last couple of months. For example, I realized that with little to no stretching of the truth:
  • I developed an interest in microcontrollers taking a class at Long Beach. I am now developing a test system that will be contained on a microcontroller instead of requiring a laptop.
  • I am the lead test engineer for field tests. I allocate personnel, write operational plans, and troubleshoot test systems in the field.
  • The City of Los Angeles has entrusted me to test their life safety systems.
  • I have taught first responders radio communications that they will use in case of a crisis or disaster.
  • On the advisory board for a community college's electronics program, I explain the needs and trends in industry and help the college tailor its curriculum to prepare students for careers in electronics.
  • I am a volunteer worker in a research and development lab.
I would have gotten into how I worked with machinists to perfect a faceplate for a prototype transformer by making changes in G-code for a CNC machine, but I was limited to 500 words/3500 characters.

When I had to list three academic references (but not get letters from them), I listed three people from Long Beach, including the graduate adviser for the EE program. In the five classes I took from these three people I earned a 3.8 GPA. Next I want to talk to a couple of these people and remind them how great I am in case anyone asks. If Long Beach does not accept me into their program I do not know what I am going to do.

Otherwise Pandora has done a great job of playing songs I like today. It is earning the ads it plays me every few songs. I can feel the gulf between my dad, brother, and myself. I have been out of town 6 of the last 11 nights, dealt with homework for a graduate electrical engineering class, packed for a trip to the desert, done my taxes, finished an application for graduate school, and tried to make the most of every day. My brother put mulch on some parts of the yard on Saturday or Sunday and then said on Monday he was tired from working so hard. My dad took a nap today, since looking at the computer for hours was so exhausting. I want so much more out of life than they do. I am afraid their dead weight will drag me down. I have to fight every day to build a better life for myself. There is no space in my new life for people who waste their life.

Friday, April 5, 2013

The Story of a Weekend

A couple of weekends ago (March 22-24) was interesting and fun weekend. It was supposed to be a relatively uneventful weekend for me. It was after a weekend trip to Las Vegas, and then before the series of Easter weekend, Fresno weekend, Race weekend in Inyo County, trip to Berkeley weekend, and then the big charity fundraiser my parents work on.

It started off on Friday. I was at my volunteer job and did not get home until around 9.

Saturday
On Saturday I had an online meeting to plan an alumni event that is coming up on April 20th. Then I attended mass with some friends from the Beach Newman group. Then I went shopping for beer at Total Wine and More. On a recent trip to Slater's 50/50 with Sidney I enjoyed all of the beers I tried on tap. However, when I was questioned about the beers a few days later I could not remember any details about them. I have decided I need to write down what beers I try as well as a few comments about them. Now back to beer shopping. I was getting beer for a BBQ the next day. I went for variety packs so everyone could find a beer they liked. I bought a pack of New Belgium beer and some Redhook.

The New Belgium beer pack was called a Spring Folly pack. It included their standard Fat Tire, 1554 an Enlightened Black Ale, Springboard which was a beer they discontinued a few years ago (but now it is back as part of a folly pack), Trippel, and Ranger IPA. I remember I liked all of these beers, but was not diligent in remembering anything else. The pages I linked to can explain them and even provide some backstory. For example, I just learned Fat Tire was created by an electrical engineer.

The second pack was a Redhook sampler pack. While I had never had any of their beers, they looked good. It had their Pilsner, ESB, Copperhook, and Long Hammer. You can read about all of them on the Redhook site. Also, I should acknowledge Redhook for have a good website developer. Their list of beers is simply redhook.com/beers/. New Belgium does not have a direct link to their list of beers, only a drop down menu. Then all of the linked beers are something like: www.newbelgium.com/beer/detail.aspx?id=5ac72c92-fd87-4ec7-858d-3380c8d465d8. They do not have that many products so they do not need to have a complicated system. Once again, I only remember enjoying the beers, not anything specific about them. The only reason I know what beers are in their variety pack is because I looked at their website and remembered the colors of the labels. My selections were well received, the other Chris liked the Pilsner so much when I saw him a week later he had bought a six pack.

Then I went shopping. Then I redeemed a coupon I got for donating platelets for free Cold Stone ice cream.

Sunday
This started with a BBQ in a park with The Group (AKA the Vietnamese Crew). Peter picked up burgers, hot dogs, chips, and bacon. He bought 60 hot dogs, because it was cheaper than buying the 32 he was planning on getting. I ate a hot dog that had two dogs and bacon in one bun. Then we got boba.

After that Frank was in town and wanted to meet up. We went to the Haven Gastropub in Orange. We were joined by Dave, Daniel, Ryan, and Ryan's assorted peoples. Ryan had just bought a house and his girlfriend just bought a new car. The new house is in Orange, which is relatively close to where Dave and Daniel live. Meanwhile, I still live around 20 minutes away. At the gastropub I had fried pigs' ear. It tasted similar to bacon, but I did not like the texture. While I was hoping for a few big pieces of ear, It was shredded into strips.

The beers I enjoyed there were the Ten Commandants by The Lost Abbey and Wilco Tango Foxtrot by Lagunitas Brewing Company. They were both good and I would have both of them again. The entire adventure on Sunday had me gone from home for nearly 12 hours.

Monday
While I usually go into my volunteer job in LA on Mondays, this day was the Cesar Chavez holiday. It is a holiday for city employees. However, I was enlisted to help three of my friends from this job move machine tools. My friend had decided to give some of his tools to someone who was starting a shop of his own. The tools were rusting in his garage, so he was glad to give them to someone who could use them to make money. I was at my friend's house at 8:30 in the morning and we were later joined by 5 other people. We loaded a milling machine, a welding machine, some other tool, a small lathe, and a few random accessories onto a borrowed trailer. The milling machine was several hundred pounds, so we used an engine hoist to lift and move it.

After the loading was finished, we started the long drive to our friend's business partner's house. I drove behind the trailer in case they dropped anything, but we only had to stop once on the freeway. The unloading was a lot easier than the loading. Then we went to our other friend's storage space. I saw his large collection of motorcycles. On the way to work to drop off the trailer, he made a quick start and dropped a box full of straps and ties onto the street. I had to jump out and collect all of them, while my friend stopped traffic with his truck. The drive totaled 117 miles. I was gone for 11 hours.

Aside from the adventure, I got some food out of the deal. I had coffee, donuts, and pizza.

That was it.

Now I will be leaving for Fresno in an hour. Hopefully my laundry will dry before Justin gets here.

Saturday, March 23, 2013

Being very busy

Last weekend I reinvented busy.

Just over a week ago I was preparing for a radio frequency coverage test trip on the weekend. It was a lot like the last one I blogged about. I was also coordinating hotel rooms for two different groups of people in two different places. I was researching hotels in Las Vegas that were cheap, but not places that were too run down or had bed bugs. Many people were waiting until I made a hotel recommendation before booking. I was also researching hotels in Fresno for next month. People entrusted me (or were too lazy themselves) to find and book a good hotel for a wedding.

On Thursday I spent 12 hours in LA testing the test equipment. Standing in the back parking lot of where I volunteer, I made sure GPS antennas, radios, mp3 players, 12 year old laptops, and custom build circuitry worked. Every time I asked my supervisor about other aspects of the test he would say, "You are going to work on that today." I worked on programming radios and made a few changes I thought could be useful. I was also managing all of the people for the test trip and writing a plan for what we would do when. I got to bed late, so I only got 4 hours of sleep that night.

On Friday I drove myself into LA. My supervisor took the day off so he could drive to the desert a day early. It also meant he was not around for last minute running around and getting everything ready. Instead he called me and explained where I would find (or should find) equipment for the weekend. A lot of things that needed to be done were not assigned to anyone and people assumed someone else was working on them. This caused a lot of last minute work for myself and one of the other people. Friday was also the third and final session of my amateur radio classes. Only one person showed up. Most of the class time I covered FCC rules.

Our big innovation for the testing this time was packaging. We cleaned up our test setups. For the last test we had equipment mounded with Velcro on random wooden boards. We had power cables coming out of a fuse block on another piece of wood. It was a mess. This time we had sheet metal cut on the plasma cam and welded to exactly what we wanted in our machine shop. I mounted fuse blocks and directed all of the wiring. I left LA around 10pm. After packing, I got around 3 hours of sleep before driving out to Las Vegas at 5:30.

We did testing on Saturday and Sunday. My knowledge of Las Vegas came in handy. Everything from express lanes, to freeway exits, to shortcuts in parking garages, to where to find restrooms, and even ideas on where to eat were used. I stayed at the Super 8 on Koval with a few people, while others stayed at the Gold Strike in Jean. There was an equipment failure so we could not conduct our Monday test. The good news is everyone got to go home several hours earlier.

I dove 1,012.9 miles during the trip. This is what my trunk looked like:



There were four laptops, over a dozen radios, lots of wires, many antennas, signs, tools, USB hubs, GPS receivers, calibrated microcontrollers, microphones, and everything I needed for a few days in Las Vegas. This is just what was in my trunk; other people had antennas, repeater boxes, and lots of other things.

On Tuesday night I had a midterm for my electrical engineering class. I started learning things for it 8 hours before the test. While I think I did a good job for a average student, I want to be a great student. In that sense, I am disappointed and missed some questions I should have been prepared for. However, for starting to study for it that day I did an amazing job; at least I think I did.

I am at home this weekend and next weekend. After that, I will be going to a destination wedding (the destination is Fresno), then out to the desert again for the Challenge Cup Race I have been testing for, and then to Berkeley for an alumni event. Those are all a couple hundred miles out of town.

I have been very busy, but these are all great things I want to be doing. I have tried sitting around doing nothing and it is horrible. The only thing I would do differently is plan out my work better so I could get things done before the last possible minute.

Sunday, March 3, 2013

RF Coverage Test and Radio Classes

On Monday night I got back from a trip to the desert. As part of my volunteer job, I helped test the radio coverage on a road near Las Vegas. This was fun and exciting.

My involvement with this test started in early February when my supervisor called me. I had not been into my volunteer job since October. However, he wanted me to manage their radio field strength testing. In the past there were some issues because the person who developed everything in the lab and the people who ran the test in the field did not communicate in person. After my supervisor explained his plan for the test, I proposed a better one. My plan required less work and gave us the information we really needed a lot sooner. He liked it, and three weeks later we were in the field running my test.

I helped with a test like this last year, but this was a lot better for a few reasons. First, I had a much better idea what we were doing. I understood the steps of the test. Next, I watched or was involved with the construction and testing of the test setups. I was in the R & D Lab soldering wires into a radio to get test points, calibrated a gain curve for individual radios, and learned how to program radios with a code plug. Lastly, it was my responsibility to setup and fix all six of our test units in the field. I had to find a way to make the software work when it was not cooperating and tell everyone how the equipment worked.

This is exciting because I know enough of what is going on to realize problems, propose solutions, and sometimes implement them myself. I realized inventory control gave me the wrong power adapter, even though the number matched what I asked for. This saved a laptop from being fried. I noticed some radios did not have simplex operation programmed for a channel, so I played with the software and corrected the programming on ten radios. Without this we would have been unable to communicate during a lot of the test. During the field test I suggested a change to how our team was driving and the supervisor immediately implemented it.

For the test itself we had five test vehicles with receive units that drove at 30 MPH and were spaced 1/10 of a mile apart from each other. There was also a transmit unit that sent a test signal every minute. Each setup had a laptop, a radio, a GPS antenna, a BASIC Stamp microcontroller, and a fuse block with way too many wires to power everything. The laptops ran a LabVIEW program that logged the signal strength and vehicle location every minute.

I drove in on Sunday night and stayed at the Gold Strike Hotel and Gambling Hall in Jean, Nevada. In the morning we set up the systems and drove into Las Vegas. We had a 30 mile area to test. The entire trip was 627.0 miles.

Thanks to my troubleshooting abilities, all five of the test units we deployed collected good data. Last year only one unit of three had usable data. The data consisted of thousands of numbers for radio field strength measurements and GPS coordinates. I wanted to look at it in a better way, so I created this map.



The transformation from a bunch of numbers to this map was done by GPS Visualizer, a great online tool anyone can use for free. I had to manipulate the fields to get a good result. Our file had coordinates in minutes and North/South/East/West directions, while the program only accepted degrees and no directional identifiers. After some trial and error, including a map showing China, I produced a great file.

Everyone is impressed by this map. The person who made the test setups taped it to the wall where he works. My supervisor will present this map at a meeting this week where he has to explain the value of the volunteer program. Above is just a screen shot, the actual map can be zoomed in and the data points read. The city at the top right is Las Vegas. As the colors get cooler, the signal strength drops. From our test, we learned the entire area is covered.

Now we are planning our next text trip. A few days ago I said I did not want to overstep my bounds by making too many important decisions. My supervisor told me to go ahead and make decisions. It seems my responsibilities and authority are expanding.

Radio Classes, Round II
On Friday I started teaching two amateur radio license classes. These are like the class I taught a few months ago. I only have three people in the beginning class and three in the intermediate class. However, the people look very interested. Someone is even taking both classes at once. My teaching is immensely helped by KB6NU. He publishes an excellent guide to help people learn concepts and what they need to know to pass the FCC license test. If you want to get into amateur radio, I highly recommend his guides.

A couple of people have told me I need to teach another class for the third level of amateur radio license (the Extra). Apparently I am the only person there who has this highest level of license. A couple of people have a similar older licence (which is now obsolete) they got before I was born. I am concerned if I start teaching that class people might think I know everything I am talking about. As it is, there are a few electrical concepts I cannot fully explain or do not completely understand. I am worried if one of my professors walked in and heard me talk he would have me retroactively failed in a couple of my classes. I can cover part of my ignorance with the different sign convention between engineering and electronics.

It seems every time a question I cannot easily answer comes up someone jumps in and explains it. I am blessed to be surrounded by people who have practical experience that fills in all the holes my academic background has. Here is a great example I learned from someone.
FM broadcast radio in the United States has frequencies ranging from 87.5 to 108.0 MHz. These frequencies are centered around 98 MHz. A wave at 98 MHz would have a wavelength of 3.06 meters (speed of wave = wavelength x frequency). If you measure the antenna on your car, it will be just over 30 inches. This is one quarter of the wavelength, since radios get their best reception when an antenna is the length of the wavelength, half the wavelength, or a quarter of the wavelength.
When our team goes out next month for the race, we will be using amateur radio frequencies to talk. Four of our people will have their amateur radio licenses because they took a class I ran.