Success, Failure, and Asides

Last week I had some successes and failures.

Since my grandma is leaving this week, I wanted to engrave something for her before she left. I go into LA to volunteer on Fridays, so I needed to pick up some wooden blanks on Thursday. The Michael's craft store near my house was being remodeled and their inventory did not include the exact size piece I wanted. So I left early for my Thursday night class so I could pick up some wood pieces from another Michael's. The store was relatively close to Long Beach, I just had to go up the 605, stop at the shopping center, and take the 605 back down to hop on the 405 or 22. They had the wooden pieces I wanted, so I bought them and headed out. It was a quick trip in and out.

When I got to class, I was a few minutes late (the first time this semester or last I can remember being late to class). However, it was just late enough so my lab was considered late.

While it was a success I picked up the wooden blanks, it was a failure my lab was late. Now I have a couple of asides.

Aside #1 - Class Times
In Berkeley they had something called Berkeley Time. It was an official policy that said all classes started 10 minutes after their published start time. This way, a class that went from 7-8 actually lasted from 7:10-8. Most other schools will say that same class goes from 7-7:50.

Berkeley Time is great for a few reasons. First, it is a better reflection of what times classes actually start. In the several classes I have taken at Long Beach and UCI, not one of them has ever started at the exact start time. They are usually 5 minutes late, but still end at their scheduled time. In contrast, my Berkeley classes almost always started on time or were 1 minute late in starting. Second, it is so much easier for a published class schedule and talking to people to say 3-4 PM instead of 3-3:50 PM.

Aside #2 - Bad Professors
I do not like the way my professor for the above microcontrollers class does things. He cares more about the format we use to turn things in than how much we learn and understand. While how submitted work looks is very important, taking off points for trivial reasons is shallow and pedantic.

The material the labs cover is not that hard or extensive. For example, I accidentally did the work for lab 2 and submitted it as lab 1. This can only happen if the labs make such small progress from one to the next they are nearly indistinguishable.

In his defense, the professor has an interesting teaching idea. He knows some people in the class want to work hard and get an A, while others only want to do the minimum to pass. On the lab assignments, he has an optional section at the end. If you chose to do the rest of the lab and not the extra part, you can only get an 85% on the lab. However, if you chose to do the last section, it is worth the last 15% of your lab grade. This way students can put in the extra work only if they want the higher grade.

More Success and Failure
The next day I went in for my volunteering in LA. I brought along a circuit board and the parts I had to assemble for the aforementioned class so I could work on it in the evening. I had to solder 192 connections to prepare the board. I also had to be careful, because I knew the senior electrical supervisor would inspect my work when I was done. After a soldering iron that stopped working after a few connections, burning my finger, and directions that had a couple of lapses, I finished the board in a few hours. However, while I was doing this in the late afternoon, the laser lab was locked up before I could engrave something for my grandma.


While it was a success I completed my board, it was a failure I could not get the item engraved for my grandma. This negated my success of the earlier day.

Yesterday I was testing the board. The only problems I found included one LED that was not working and another LED that worked 75% of the time. I will have to fix them somehow.

Great News!

Today my mom told me some news. I was excited. However, my reaction might make me a horrible person. A ticket was bought for my grandma to fly back to New York next week. Her twelve week stay will be over next week and I am thrilled.

It is not that I do not like spending time with my 92 year old grandma, or that I get overly annoyed by having to repeat myself as her hearing is terrible, or that her memory is inconstant, or that her cooking methods from last century take extra time and effort.

The problem is my dad and brother. They do almost nothing around the house or to help my grandma with things. When Grandma is staying with us, they retreat to the far corners of the house not to be seen for hours. The few things they did to help before Grandma's visit become even fewer.

Neither of them have jobs, but somehow the part-time now full-time student (me) ends up doing a lot of cleaning the house, making the meals, and helping Grandma with anything she needs help with.

I am tired of living in a house where a 92 year old woman and me are responsible for doing more work than two able bodied unemployed males. I would use the word adult or man, but those connote a level of responsibility neither of them are taking.

The last two and a half months have been the hardest of the past year.

Perhaps I am being overly dramatic. Maybe when I read this post in the morning I will decide I was too harsh. Or, I will agree with every word.

Back at The Beach

I finished my second week of the new semester at Long Beach.

My classes are Monday/Wednesday 3:30-4:45 and Tuesday/Thursday nights 6-9:45. This is great because I do not have to sit around campus with nothing to do for hours on end. I also get to miss most of the heavy traffic driving there and back. Like most people at Long Beach, I have no class on Fridays.

My three classes are Electric Control of Motors, Analog Circuits II, and Microcontrollers. The first two classes are taught by one of my professors from last semester. I like his teaching style and he knows I am a great student so everyone is happy. The motors class is the continuation of a class I liked in the fall, so it should be good. The analog circuits class might be trouble. It is a detailed examination of circuit elements like transistors and how they make complex circuits. The professor said it is one of the hardest undergraduate electrical engineering classes. While most people took the prerequisite for class last year, I took an equivalent prerequisite five years ago.

My third class, Microcontrollers, has a large programming component. I think most of it will be in assembly, which I have used before but not written. This will be my first real programming class, though I have taken a few fake programming classes before. If I can easily get away with copying and pasting the example code to do all the work, it is a fake programming class. The professor has a dry sense of humor, which I enjoy. However, he can make things harder than they need to be. For the first prelab, he had everyone make flowcharts, truth tables, and find a path through a maze (which must be computer drawn). I thought the teaching style of giving more work than necessary was left behind in high school, but I was wrong. It only took me a couple of hours to find a flowchart program online, download it, learn it, and make the required graphic. In that amount of time I could have written the program itself in C. It is great to plan things out before coding, but requiring that layer of work is beneath a junior level class for electrical engineers.

People I know
My classes have a few faces I recognize from last semester. As expected, an infamous person is in a couple of them. On the first day of class, she looked exactly the way I wanted to forget her, wearing the same grey and black shirt, off-white sweatshirt, and jeans she wore on our date. We still talk in class, but things are different. There is no excitement in seeing or talking to her.

The good news is I ran into my two friends I wanted to see. One of them even suggested we do our masters project together, which would be awesome.

When one of my professors (the good one) saw my schedule, he said I would be busy this semester. If I spend enough time doing work and learning things, this will be a great semester.

CO2 Laser, Medicine Man, and Saturdays at 4

I wrote most of this post in October, but neglected to finalized and publish it then. It talks about two Saturdays where I was out until around 4 in the morning. One day it was working on the engravings below, the next I was at a football game with some awesome alumni before going to my friend Ryan's party.

As mentioned before, I am helping restart a retreat program at church. To raise money for it, some people had the idea we should make crafts and sell them. The women who were leading this effort spent their time making rosaries, bracelets, and blankets. However, Peter (my friend from church) and I thought all of their crafts were too flowery. Peter thought we should turn their craft fair into an industrial craft fair. We would have wood and metal works available for sale, not just beads and cloth.

Unfortunately, the metal works did not work out. Both of us were learning how to use the CNC machine with disastrous results. Below are some examples of what we did using a carbon dioxide laser engraver.









For this project, I learned how to use a CO2 laser engraver. A computer views the laser engraver as a printer. Just send it a file to print, select the laser speed, power, and pules per inch and it will start engraving. The biggest problem was getting everything from different file formats into one program that would successfully engrave the material.

The laser could print in two different ways. It could rasterize and act like a traditional printer: it would print everything in dots when it went left to right, printing one small line at at time. Alternatively, it could engrave in vector form: it would use a continuous beam and move to trace out the letters. The vector printing was great for boarders, straight lines, and script fonts. It was exciting to watch.

In one of my classes in college, I did an experiment that measured the spectrum of a CO2 laser. Sean and I had to set up the equipment, align the mirrors and lenses, start a water cooling system, monitor the gas pressure, and try to avoid blowing a fuse in the power supply. That laser only went up a little past 1 watt. This laser engraver goes up to 25 watts.

Football in Pasadena
The game (Cal at UCLA) was horrible, but the people I watched it with were good. I saw such exciting alumni as Sidney, Melissa, Eric, and Cameron. There was even a guest appearance by Monica. Afterwards Sidney and I went to the apartment of the newly married Cameron and Eric. They made pizza and served fine cocktails. One of them was a Medicine Man. The recipe Eric used is from Serious Eats, which I have summarized below. It is an interesting drink I need to recreate myself.

Medicine Man
2 oz white rum
3/4 oz lemon juice
1/2 oz maple syrup
1/4 tsp smoked paprika
4 sage leaves, divided

Shake the above ingredients (minus 1 of the sage leaves) over ice. Strain into a glass and garnish with the last sage leaf.

After that, there was still enough time to stop by Ryan's Halloween party. Ryan and his girlfriend both had good costumes. They were Woody and Buzz Lightyear.

Checking the Television and some Star Wars

Last year, I realized many of the TV shows I was watching were shows that were great when they started, but have noticeably declined in quality since then. I decided, if a show is in its eighth season on later it is OK to stop watching it. Unless I still enjoy the show a lot, I do not need to contribute to marginal shows staying on the air just to make money for the network and people who make the show.

Instead, I watch early seasons of shows that friends have recommended to me. Last month I felt like I was in November of 2007. I was watching episodes of Dexter and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia that originally aired then.

Dexter follows the title character, a seemingly harmless blood spatter expert who works for the Miami police department. However, Dexter has a secret. He is a serial killer. I have watched the first two seasons and it is a great show. Unfortunately, Dexter is an example of a show that started out great and then crashed in quality. Aden suggested I stop watching after the fourth season.

As for It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, it is a dark comedy. The Unnamed Geniuses describe it in more detail.

The series follows "The Gang," a group of five depraved underachievers . . . [who] run the dilapidated Paddy's Pub, a bar in South Philadelphia. They are dishonest, egotistical, selfish, greedy, unethical, lazy, manipulative, deceitful, hypocritical, self-centered, vain, disloyal, unremorseful, overly competitive, immature, vengeful, antagonistic, and arrogant. Episodes usually find them hatching elaborate schemes, conspiring against one another and others for personal gain, vengeance, or simply for the entertainment of watching one another's downfall. They inflict physical and psychological pain. They regularly use blackmail to manipulate one another and others outside of the group.

After reading that, I might be a horrible person for enjoying the show.

There are some good things coming up soon. Mark your calender for:

Justified January 17 on FX
The Walking Dead February 12 on AMC
Mad Men March 25 on AMC

Take some time to check out Justified Tuesday night on FX. The seasons have story arcs, so the start of the season is a great time to pick it up. You can also learn why one of my friends wanted to be Raylan Givens for Halloween.

On a side note, if you want to make friends in graduate school talk about AMC's original shows like Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead. It worked great for me. Well, reevaluate great after this, but I did make a friend in another class.

I recommend all of the shows I mentioned in this post.

There is one more thing I must tell you about.

The Star Wars Holiday Special

If you are a big Star Wars fan, you should see this. It aired on TV once in 1978. The reaction was so bad it was never shown again, never released on video, and George Lucas has done everything short of denying it ever happened. While I heard about it a while ago, I only saw it this past Christmas.

The only copies that exist are private VHS recordings of when it originally aired, so the quality is bad. However, the extant recordings have the original commercials, which are almost as interesting as the special itself.

If you are interested (and have over an hour and a half of time), there is a YouTube video for you to check out. If I had to explain the special, I would guess a lot of drug use was involved when they were creating it.

On a less abrasive Star Wars holiday note, Did you know they released a Star Wars Christmas album? I only learned of it when my friend Sidney shared some of the songs with me. Since the album is not currently for sale, you will have to make due with these recordings. If it were not for this, how would you know what to get a Wookie for Christmas (when he already owns a comb)?

A few mornings I woke up with one of those Star Wars songs playing in my head. A couple of times I had Charlie's "Dayman" song instead.

What states have you been in?

When I was at my cousin's wedding in June, she mentioned an ongoing contest she has with her family. They compete to see who can visit the most states.

For the purposes of their game, a state can only be claimed if a person meets one of these three criteria:

1) Spent the night
2) Ate at a local (non-chain) restaurant
3) Got a speeding ticket

This led me to make a map of my own. However, I have used a stricter standard for counting states, districts, and territories I have visited. In blue are states I remember spending the night in. In grey are other areas I entered into the boundaries of. I spend Labor Day Weekend 1989 in Nebraska and Iowa, but I have no memory of them so they are grey. I have spent a lot of time in the District of Columbia, but since I never spent the night there it is grey.

Alaska and Hawaii are not pictured and I have been to neither of them. I have not been to any of the US territories, so they are not pictured either.


Overnight states (blue): 27
States I entered (grey): 11 plus D.C.

The still outstanding places are Maine, Connecticut, Delaware, North Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Alaska, Hawaii, and the unincorporated territories of American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

If I was in my cousin's game, I would have a sizable lead over all of them at 29. However, anyone who has a parent in the military has an advantage in games like this. I lived in four different states in three different time zones before I turned 11.

How many states have you visited?

This Side of Paradise

I finished reading This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The book follows Amory Blaine as he attends school, encounters people, and how he reacts as a person. Amory was born in the late 1890s. He attended a boarding school and went to college at Princeton. When he graduated he was in the Great War. While the book is not an autobiography, it is close to one. Fitzgerald drew extensively from his experiences and modeled characters on people he knew.

My favorite part of the book was being in the world of the early 1900s. It was a time of debutantes, letters of introduction, and clubs being vitally important in college society. The world of 100 years ago was so different from today. Yet some striking similarities are still there.

I find myself comparing Amory's life to my own. Most things are differences, but I can understand how he operates. If Fitzgerald was born 90 years later and wrote the same book about his experiences, it would have a lot in common with my life. We are both from upper middle-class families, went to good colleges, and try to make sense of our lives after graduation when everything around us is falling apart.

The writing style and format are interesting and vary from section to section. For example, one part of the book is written in narrative drama, which is like a play. All of the dialogue is preceded by the name of who is speaking. A few parentheticals describe how the actors should deliver their lines. There are even stage directions saying who is in the scene. I like dialogue written like this better than the standard method. Many times in books I am not sure who is speaking a line until I read a few lines beyond. The format also helps me stage the scene mentally.

Amory is a fan of literature and he mentions a lot of the authors of the day. While I have not heard of many of them, a few of them are on the list of writers I want to read. There are also several poems in the book written by the different characters. I try to imagine their world where people use the mail to send poems to their friends.

One part of the book I kept reading myself into were the romances. It was just a couple of months ago that I fell into and out of love, so I keep comparing the experiences of Amory to my own.

When I finished reading the book I did not know what to make of the ending. Was it good or bad? I went back and reread a couple of sections to find some explanations. One of Fitzgerald's well known quotes is "Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy." I have not decided if the ending is triumphal or tragic.

What elevated the book to above average quality for me was how I related to Amory Blaine. If you are interested in reading the book after what I have described you should read it immediately. The book ends a few years after college, so that is when you should read it.

I look forward to reading more of Fitzgerald's works.