A different type of writing

Today I was at the Barnes & Noble at the Irvine Spectrum. I was looking at random stuff between watching the Bears play a horrible football game and picking my dad up from the airport.

There was a big display dedicated to journals. I thought, I should try writing in a paper journal for a while. It is a storied and old fashioned way of doing things. Then I thought, I already have a blog where I write stuff; why would I write in a book instead?

The main reason I would write in a book instead of here is if I did not want to share or explain in writing my thoughts and feelings about certain people. I have posts started with substantial themes like my dad is failing as a father and some of my friends do not care about me. However, if I bring up any of those they would invite a detailed explanation, which I do not want to write.

The other category of things I would write on paper but not online are situations I do not want to give continuous updates on. For example, in my last post I mentioned a girl I met. She said she would be at a meeting last week. I was there, but she was not. So I figured out where one of her classes was and waited in the hall so I could talk to her. She told me she would see me the next day at another club meeting. Once again, I went there, but she was nowhere to be seen.

If I gave a play by play account of this, then I would feel I should give updates every week. If I did not make an immediate post, people might start asking "Did you see her?" every Thursday night. I do not know what my feelings are for her. Do I want to be friends? Do I want a romantic relationship? I have only talked to her twice; I do not know what she is like. Based on the list of similarities so far, she could be the female version of me. All I know for sure is I want to get to know her.

On Second Thought
Now I am rereading this post. I am not convinced by my reasoning. These are not good reasons for refraining from writing everything online. A lot of people could write a "I went here, I did this" type of blog. I want to write more. My worst case scenarios for not making certain posts are fairly dull. The only people I have told about this blog are people I am willing to tell everything to.

Thinking about it, you should know why I think my dad is failing as a father. One day it might make you a better parent. If I talk out why I might need some new friends, it might spur me to find the types of friends I want. If I share details of my life, someone who cares about me might ask a question.

These are all great possible outcomes.

The first time I started writing anything like a journal was senior year of high school. I started writing because there were great things happening that I wanted to remember. I wanted to capture the things that occupied my attention and interest from one day to the next. It is easy to remember the big long term things like taking classes in electrical engineering, starting as a volunteer worker, and being involved with a retreat program at church. However, it is the smaller things that add color and dimension to my life. There is a vast middle ground between the mundane and the monumental where I spend most of my time.

I want to get back to writing about the smaller things.

Pushing forward alone

Every day I try to make my life better than the day before. I get frustrated that some of the people around me do not share this commitment. They are content to waste their lives away or ignore the reality of their situation. Things at home are horrible. I am living with people who are old enough to be adults, but are not acting like it.

I want to talk about some of the great things in my life.

Thursday
I got a call from someone at Boeing. They reviewed my resume and want to interview me for a job. I have a phone interview on Friday. This is the first of the dozens of jobs I have applied to in aerospace where I have been contacted for a interview. I am excited.

At Long Beach there is a club that gets students involved with rockets. Through a combination of private companies, faculty support, and relationships with other organizations, students can design, build, and test rockets. Now that my schedule allows me to attend their meetings, I am getting involved with the group. They said to show up to the meetings and ask people if they need help.

On Thursday night I was standing off to the side looking for someone to help. Everyone was busy getting the rocket ready for launch that weekend so I was being ignored. I spotted someone else in the same situation, so I started talking to her. I discovered both of us:

1. Are taking classes in the electrical engineering master's program.
2. Have undergraduate degrees in physics.
3. Went to Berkeley. (She graduated a year before me.)
4. Were in the same physics class in Fall 2006, but have no recollection of each other
5. Took UCI Extension classes in engineering after graduating.

She is taking the same classes I took last year and wants me to help her. I am thinking of things we could do together.

Friday
The license test for amateur radio was held at my volunteer job. Of the 12 people I taught who took the test, 7 passed. People were pleased. A few of those who failed admitted they did not put in the extra time required. Next week I will run an intensive practice session for those 5 people who failed.

I discovered a soda vending machine was giving away free cokes. I wanted to know how much the machine was charging, but after I pressed the letter/number combination it dispensed a can. I demonstrated this for my supervisor, who enjoyed the coke.

That night I had dinner with Kim who I know from Berkeley. She and some friends were in town for the weekend and we ate at the Smoke House Restaurant near Universal Studios. I found the place on yelp and everyone liked it. Then we went to a bar for soju, which is a flavored Korean alcohol. However, they only had one soju left and the beer on tap was still warm. To make up for this, the waiter gave us a free corn and cheese appetizer while we played a long game of Uno. I had not done anything in Koreatown since Salgu and David (some other people I know similarly from Newman activities in Berkeley) were around over a year and a half ago.

Plans getting derailed

Last post I talked about some good things I have done recently. However, there have been a few bad developments.

My plan was to apply this month and start an MSEE (masters of science in electrical engineering) in January at Long Beach. When I went to fill out the application I discovered Long Beach has closed all applications for next semester. They cited budget cuts as the reason.

This has disrupted my educational plan. I looked into other schools to apply to, but they do not look feasible. All the prerequisites I have taken were focused on what they would ask me to take at Long Beach. Other schools could have different requirements and ask me to take different classes. There is also geography. Long Beach is ten miles away from my house and I can take either the 405 or surface streets depending on traffic. If I started at Pomona, it would be a 45 minute drive if there was no traffic. If it was a busy time, I would be stuck on the 22 and the 57.

I am considering plans for what I will do with these eight months.

I have talked to the people at my volunteer job about what skills I should learn. So far, many people have said I should get a commercial radio license. It is similar to the radio licenses I currently have and am teaching a class on. I have to pass two multiple choice tests of 24 and 100 questions. I am also thinking of getting a radar endorsement along with the license. It only requires passing an extra 50 question test. Radar is closely related to radio and is mentioned in many of the job postings I have seen. A few people have also mentioned getting a Cisco network certification. I have to learn how networks work, how to configure them, and then pass a test. These are all things I am interested in that would also help me get a job.

My top priority is getting an outstanding grade in the one class I am taking. If I can do that and get to know the professor, I will have a better chance of getting into the MSEE at Long Beach. After that, I want to lean as much as I can and gain as much experience as possible at my volunteer job in Los Angeles. I will also apply for jobs that are closely related to the experience and classes I have from the last year. There are some great opportunities for people with some of the skills I now have.

Back at Long Beach and a radio class

One year ago was a landmark week for me.

From August 28th to September 3rd 2011, I was finishing a class in control systems at UCI (a real class, not one of the extension jokes I took) that had homework due, three hour lecture sections, and difficult lab reports. It was also the first week of classes at CSU Long Beach. I would drive from my morning class in Irvine, to Long Beach for classes in the afternoon. That Monday was not only the first day I was taking a class at Long Beach, but also the first time I had ever been on the campus. At UCI I was leaning about Bode plots and root locus, while a county over in Long Beach I was figuring out a new campus and enrolling in classes without enrolling as a student. There were also some memorable people I met at Long Beach.

A post from that time captures everything that was going on.

I just finished my first week of the semester at Long Beach. I am only taking one class this term because I am not in the electrical engineering master's program yet. I can only transfer six units into the program, so I would not get credit if I took any more classes. My current class is titled linear systems analysis. It will use matrices, vectors, z-transforms, Laplace transforms, and some other stuff. A lot of the class looks like a review of stuff I have worked with before.

At my volunteer job, this week was the second session of a three part class I am teaching. I am explaining to city employees everything they need to know to pass an amateur radio license test. While I know some of the theory about radio, I have almost no practical experience. Luckily, there are people with practical experience who will jump in when someone asks a question I do not know the answer to. However, some of these people will go off on tangents that take up time.

Of the dozen people in the class, there is a wide range of knowledge. Some of them know a lot about electronics, while others have trouble understanding the metric system. All of the feedback I have gotten is positive. Yesterday one of the people brought me a new set of markers for the whiteboard.

The license test will be on Friday, so I will find out how people do then. I have printed a lot of materials and directed people to some excellent online resources. As my supervisor says, if most of the people pass the test, it shows the wisdom of management and its ability to do great things. However, if most of the people fail, it will be because the instructor did a poor job and it is all the instructor's fault. I told him he could cut my pay if the people did poorly. (As a reminder, this is an unpaid job.)

I am very pleased with how some things have developed in the last year. However, there are still things I want to change.

My Grandma and Father Joe

I am currently in western New York visiting family. I have seen over a dozen cousins (first cousins once removed and some second cousins), four great aunts/uncles, and some other assorted people.

However, the main part of the trip is to check on my grandma. She is 93 years old and having problems associated with getting older. Her memory is starting to fail. It seems like it is only short term things, but we are concerned it could become (or already is) more serious. We have to stop her from driving. A couple of weeks ago the priest at her church called us to say she almost ran someone over. My parents are trying to take her car away without directly saying "You can't drive." She lives alone, so we are telling her she needs to start wearing a medical alert pendent. This way, if she falls, she can use it to call for help. We set this up even before she told us that last month she fell and an ambulance had to take her to the emergency room. We want her to live in her house as long as possible. She has lived in the same house since she was 5 years old.

These are unfortunate things that happen as people get older. All we can do is deal with them.

However, during this trip I have seen something worse than getting older. It is being healthy and wasting your life. While my grandma is running around and doing as many things as her energy level and body will let her do, reasonably healthy and much younger people are sleeping the day away or spending it looking at little screens. There are people in the neighborhood who will sit on their porch and gossip all day.

My Grandpa Joe
Now I need a happier topic. I never knew my grandpa Joe. He died while my mom was a teenager. However, all accounts say he was a character. This is the story of how he got his nickname of "Father Joe."

One day my grandpa Joe and his friends went to a bar. The staff was not coming around to take their order. Since they were waiting a long time and were tired of being ignored, one of my grandpa's friends looked at him and said rather loudly "Father Joe, what will you be having?" When the staff overhead this, they thought he was a priest and immediately started paying attention to his group. After that the name stuck. Anytime he was with his friends, they called him Father Joe.

I recently saw the family of one my grandpa's best friends, Frank. His family would take trips with my grandpa and do a lot of things together. While Frank is deceased, his wife and all of his children knew my grandma, grandpa, and mom when they were growing up. All of these people think my grandpa is one of the greatest people ever. I heard more than once, "Father Joe was the best."

For example, Father Joe taught a couple of them how to drive. When they were old enough, their actual father Frank started to teach them how to drive. However, he did not have the patience to keep teaching them so he stopped. When Father Joe heard this, he took it upon himself to teach them. He did not give up until they could successfully drive.

Baseball, milling, and a form

In the last few weeks I have been to two baseball games. I have not been to a baseball game in two years, so I wanted to go to one at some point this summer.

For the first game I saw the Angeles play the Kansas City Royals. I was joined by James, who is a devoted fan of baseball. However, the Angeles lost.

The second game was on Friday. The Dodgers decisively beat the Cubs. It was also Star Trek night at Dodger Stadium. This involved William Shatner throwing out the first pitch and reading the Dodger's lineup. There were also fireworks after the game set to music from Star Trek. I sat in the free food pavilion. This is an area in the stadium where the price of the ticket includes as many Dodger Dogs, soda drinks, nachos, peanuts, and popcorn as you can get. While I ate three Dodger Dogs, it looked like most of the people around me ate even more food. I got the ticket and saw the game with my friend Andrew, who I know from a mutual friend from high school.

Friday was also an Andrew double play. Earlier that day I saw the Andrew I know from college who had just finished law school and the bar exam. He is currently living in Los Angeles, but will be moving home to Orange County at the end of the month. Since I was volunteering in the city, we met at Philippe's. Andrew explained that is the place he always ate at after he went to the shooting range nearby.

Earlier that day the excitement continued at my volunteer workplace. I wrote G-code to mill a box for a circuit board. I wrote the code from nothing and after some testing I had a complete program. I did not have time to run the final version, but I am confident it will produce a successful final product. My program even finds the exact position of the part to within a thousandth of an inch. It then calibrates its motions so the cutting is perfectly centered without any subsequent user adjustments.

The oddest thing I did last weekend was make changes to a health care form. My friend's wife works for an insurance company. Her boss asked her to make some changes to an application form. However, she has no experience with forms or with advanced features of Word. Since she knows I am good at computer stuff, she asked for my help. After trying to add features like drop down menus in Word, I decided it would be easier to migrate the form to pdf. In case you do not know, moving a file with boxes and a lot of formatting from Word to an Adobe format is a disaster. It rendered one straight line as a dozen distinct line segments that were not in a straight line. It also made one long shading box into many rectangles. It was a lot harder than it should have been and Adobe Designer does not have layers. I added fillable fields, radio buttons, checkboxes, and drop down menus. After some feedback and several hours of work, it looked a lot better.

CNC Machining and Mold Making

Through my volunteer worker job with the City of Los Angeles I attended a class this week. It covered how to use a Haas CNC machine.

A computer numerical control (CNC) machine works by following user written code to machine a part. You put a block of metal into the machine and it will drill a pattern of holes, hollow out areas, engrave text or a design, and even smooth the piece's edges. Once you write the code and press start, the machine does everything and all you have to do is come back when it is finished. Then you can put another piece of material in, press start, and make another identical part. It is a great machine.

The class detailed the operation of a Haas brand CNC machine. It covered how the control interface worked, a few practical tips on some buttons, and how to program in G-code. The G-code tells the machine which tool to use, where to make cuts, and how fast to go. They had a control unit at my seat so I could practice inputting everything on the machine as I learned it.

I was able to attend this factory training for free because the city department where I volunteer bought a CNC machine. It is a big piece of equipment. It is the size of a small car and costs tens of thousands of dollars. A few months ago I tried to learn how the machine worked without the benefit of this training. I managed to crash the machine, which is very bad. A crash happens when the tool collides with something it is not supposed to like a vice that is holding a work piece in place. However, I am blessed to be working for understanding people who were not mad at me when I crashed the machine, broke a drill bit, and damaged the vice.

I enjoyed the class a lot. If I was not academically inclined, I would strongly consider making a career out of working with machines like that. If you want to know why I am doing electrical engineering instead, consider a more comfortable work environment, less physical exertion, safer working conditions, and a higher salary.

After my last CNC class on Thursday, I took and passed my third radio test. I now have an Extra class amateur radio license. Next week I will apply for a special vanity call sign to use when I talk on the radio.

Casting and Mold Making
While I am on the topic of training I got into because of my volunteer job, I have a few pictures from December. I took a class from Smooth-On (part of Reynolds Advanced Materials) on casting and mold making. It was a hands on class so I got to practice the process.

Here are a couple of terms from the process. Molding is the first step when a negative impression is taken of an original. Casting is the second step, when the material for the copy is poured into the mold.

First, an original item is placed in a container. Since the mold material is good at getting into things, the original has to be glued to the bottom of the container. Next, the mold material is prepared. Smooth-On makes user friendly products, so all you have to do is mix equal parts of what is in the blue container and the yellow container. The user then has around ten minutes to pour it into the container around the item before it hardens. For our training, they had small statues about three inches high for us to make molds for. They must have planned ahead for me; they had a statue of a pig for me to make a mold of.

After the mold had a few hours to sit, we removed the original and prepared the casting material. It had a similar two part mixture. I added some blue color and poured it into my mold. A couple of hours later, it was time to demold and I saw my pig.



The process even picked up the signature of the original artist on the pig. I was able to take home both the cast pig and the mold I made it from.



It was fun to learn how everything works. If I had any great ideas on how to make money with this knowledge I would give them a try.