Living the Life

I am happy with the way a lot of things are going. I have been busy doing great things. This is my spring break, so I am getting caught up on things. I watched the last couple of episodes of Justified which I enjoyed a lot.

Classes
I am taking three classes this semester.

• Microelectronics covers how CMOS circuits work. It is a lot of basic electronics stuff. Everyone in the class has covered it before in their electrical engineering coursework, except for me. However, I worked hard and earned the highest grade in the class on the first midterm.
• RF and Microwave Electronics uses wave equations and is more confusing than the other classes. We learned how to use a Smith Chart, which is a great way to estimate how to build an impedance matching network. There are also labs where we simulate radio circuits. I did very well on the midterm and have received perfect grades on my labs, even though my friends seem to be doing better work.
• Microfabrication and Nanotechnology is my favorite class this semester. It explains how to manufacture integrated circuits. It covers the process of cleaning silicon wafers, growing silicon dioxide, using photolithograpic masks, building nanostructures, ion implantation, etc. The math is very simple; it is all algebra. The hardest part is memorizing a lot of terms, processes, and chemical formula. However, someone (me) is very good at that.

I was not able to start my masters project this semester. However, I have an idea and a professor I want to work with. That will be the only class I am taking in the fall. I would like to take something else, but they are not offering anything else I really want to take :(

Weekend Stuff
It seems every weekend is busy. Last weekend I was in the desert to work on the relay race for my volunteer job. My part of it went well, but there were some serious problems caused by putting everything off to the last minute by many key people. Before that, I saw Terrance and Erin who were in town and celebrated St. Patrick's Day with Ryan and company.

Spiritual Exercises
In January I started attending a program on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola at a local church. A few of my friends from Beach Newman are taking them there as well. I meet with my friends every week to talk about them. Doing all of the daily meditations and contemplations takes a lot of time. However, I like how it is forcing me to order my time better. I am getting up early every day, going to mass, and completing the stuff. They are having a great effect on me.

Beach Newman
Related to this is how things with the Catholic club at Long Beach are going. There are a few people who live on campus who generously swipe people into the dinning hall. Last week I had dinner there on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. This is us having dinner last week.

I see these people a lot. On Monday I meet for dinner with three of my friends who are doing the Spiritual Exercises, on Wednesday we have our normal meeting and prayer group, and on Thursday we have Bible study, where I end up answering a lot of people's questions. Apparently I know a lot.

We had a big pro-life event last week. I was prepared for a negative backlash, but a lot of people were positive and civil when talking to us. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being a normal Berkeley response I was preparing for, it was a 3.

I have been involved with the leadership of a lot of student clubs in the past. From this, I have developed a sense of who will make a good leader for a group, sometimes months before the person realizes it. I have realized I am the person who will be leading club next year, unless I step back. There is only one other person who I think would be interested in the job, but he has been a bad officer in the club. A lot of people do not even know who he is. From my experience at Berkeley, I know exactly what needs to be done in the club. I have brought in some great ideas so far, and people realize everything I say is right on. I will also have a lot of time on my hands only working on my project.

Rest of Spring Break
On Wednesday I will be going for a local hike, as long as the rain does not muddy things. On Thursday I will be driving up to Berkeley for some alumni events which will be a lot of fun. I get to see people I have not seen in almost a year, plus a few I saw last month.

I am living the life and enjoying it!

Busy things

I just started am email to someone to explain a lot of things that have been going on recently. I decided, this should be a blog post instead.

A doctor has been treating my mom for pressure sores (open wounds on the skin from too much pressure on a point) for several months. While he had always said surgery was an option he was trying less invasive treatments first. A couple of weeks ago my mom went to another doctor who is treating her for a fever she has had on and off for a while. The doctor said she had a bone infection and needs intravenous antibiotics every day for the next several months. However, he refused to start treatment until her pressure sores were closed. So, the other doctor proceeded with surgery. After 10 days in the hospital, my mom came home. However, the recovery will take a long time, at least two months. She is in a hospital bed with a special mattress and can do almost nothing for the next few weeks.

Classes at The Beach started back up last week. I still need to figure out what project I am going to do and what professor to work with. Right now I am in three classes that look interesting. I am blessed to have gotten the classes I want, since most of the people I know were unable to get into the classes they wanted.

Now for something fun. Before classes started, I went to Lake Arrowhead for a weekend with some people from Beach Newman. We did exciting things like played hide and seek in a cabin with all the lights off and scary music playing.

About the Missions

A week ago I finished reading Converting California: Indians and Franciscans in the Missions by James A. Sandos. I liked it.

I picked up this book because I wanted to learn more about the missions and early California history. Unlike many people I know, I did not write a mission report when I was in fourth grade. I went to school in Ohio, so I learned about the native peoples of Ohio and some early settlement around the French and Indian War. Instead of building a mission, I created a brochure that highlighted some Ohio tribes for a tourist back in the day.

As explained in the introduction, several studies of early California history view the Spanish missions as either the greatest or the worst thing to ever happen to California and the native people. Converting California looks for the truth which is somewhere in the middle. I will highlight a few things I found interesting.

The big initial reason for the sudden expansion into California was to secure the coastline for Spain against other powers, such as Russia.

There was conflict between how the Spanish military and the Franciscan friars wanted to treat the native peoples. Then among both groups, there was a variety of individual attitudes toward native peoples. There were some amazing friars and soldiers, but there were also some who shamelessly exploited the native inhabitants.

The missions and presidios brought the native peoples a common language. This allowed different tribes to communicate with each other in common goals, like plotting against the Spanish.

Fr. Serra was a good guy. He believed that he was saving the souls of native people by bringing Christ to them. Everything he did was to advance this goal. His personal actions imitated Christ. Before he went to Alta California, Fr. Serra said that if he is killed by the native people that they should be forgiven. When one of his brother friars was brutally killed, he urged mercy and forgiveness for the murders.

Native people who lived as part of the missions had a shorter lifespan than those who remained in their normal dwelling places. The friars were aware of this, but did not have a ready explanation. Diseases such as syphilis were easily transmitted. In the late Eighteenth Century, the germ theory of disease was not known. Common procedures like tattooing and medical treatments of the day including scaring skin transferred blood between people. I learned syphilis was present in the new world before European contact, but was then spread around by Europeans.

A Documentary
After I read the book, I watched Serra: Ever Forward, Never Back, which aired on EWTN in November. The docudrama was nothing great, but it complemented the book nicely. It focused on the parts of Fr. Serra's life the book did not. It also included some footage of where Serra grew up on the island of Majorca, Spain and where he was a missionary in Mexico. Some more information about the program, which was filmed in California, is also online.

Nov 24, 2013 was the 300 anniversary of Fr. Serra's birth. He is beatified, so he is one step away from becoming an official saint.

Weekend Excitement: Hollywood Sign, Beer, Quantum Mechanics

Last weekend was fun. I will start with Sunday, since it has a picture to go with it.

Hiking in Hollywood
On Sunday I went for a hike with some other people from Beach Newman. We went to Griffith Park near the Hollywood Sign. It was fun.

Below are the directions of how we hiked. Material in brackets is stuff I deduced from Google Maps after the fact or heard from people, but did not personally check out. Investigate more before you take anything in brackets seriously.

To get to the parking lot, take the Gower exit off of the 101, go north to make an immediate right on Franklin. Then make a left on Canyon Drive (a small street after a couple of lights) and follow it to the park. It looks like the address of 3200 Canyon Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90068 will get you there. Parking there was tight. It was mostly parallel parking on the street or a dirt lot. I found a spot in the lot because I was willing to dive all the way to a small space at the end. Getting out was harder. If it was not for the help of several people there directing me I would have steered my tire off the curb and had a costly and horrible day.

For the hike itself, start by continuing on the road (Canyon Dr) from where you parked. There will be a place where people skateboard on the right. Keep following the road. [Google Maps shows there are paths that go left or straight as the road bends right. These might be alternate routes.] Keep following that, and it will take up into the hills. After the road has climbed in elevation, there will be another dirt road that veers off to the right. [It looks like that will take you to Griffith Observatory.] If you want the Hollywood Sign, stay left. Since the Hollywood Sign is visible earlier in the hike, it should be easy to make this turn. A little further on, there will be a path that goes left and descends the hill. This will take you toward the horse stables. Instead of that, stay right for the Hollywood.

Eventually, the trail will dump you onto a paved road. We went left which will take you to a good, but not close view of the front of the sign. [If you take a right, the road will bring you to the back of the Hollywood Sign.] The picture below was actually taken on private property we were not supposed to be on (though many people were on it). However, we took a small shortcut and bypassed that sign completely. [It looks like the private road dead ends without a better view.]



There is space next to me so we can photoshop in the other two people who ran away before we took a picture. We went back the same way, which made for a 5.4 mile round trip. On the way back we had pizza at Fresh Brothers. We enjoyed their Hawian Style and Old School (meatballs layered with pepperoni and smothered with spicy Giardiniera) pizzas.

Quantum Mechanics
On Saturday I meet one of my friends from Beach Newman. When I last saw this friend (his name is Chris), I told him one of my goals for Christmas vacation was reading a book on quantum mechanics. He thought, it would be great if he could read it too and we could discuss it. We are reading Volume III of The Feynman Lectures on Physics. They are freely available online and designed to be easily read on any device. Chris is reading them on his phone.

We talked about the first three chapters of it on Saturday. While I took two semesters of quantum mechanics as part of my physics education, I did not understand things as well as I wanted to. I did not have a conceptual basis of what was going on that could help me figure things out. So far I am enjoying the reading a lot.

Some Beer
After that, I went to Ryan's house to celebrate his birthday. Since he is a fan of pale ales and Stone Brewing Company, I brought him some Goose Island Ten Hills Pale Ale and Stone Levitation Ale. I liked the Ten Hills, but the Levitation was not as good as I remember other Stone products being.



In case you cannot tell, we are playing Mario Kart on the Nintendo 64. Ryan got it for Christmas. I have never liked playing games on it because everyone is significantly better than me. I never had a gaming console growing up (I never wanted one), which might explain some things about me.

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.

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.

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.