Three Weeks of Non-Stop Stuff

I just finished a busy few weeks. They are recapped with points.

• Took a midterm on assembly programming and processor architecture.
• Went on a radio test trip to the desert of California and Nevada. I spend a couple of hours in Las Vegas and the most fun thing I did was help a friend change a flat tire.
• Did a week's worth of reading in a day for a online discussion.
• Started a homework assignment one hour before it was due. I was too busy studying for a midterm to finish it.
• Took a midterm on power systems. I had to draw a lot of graphs to explain switching systems.
• Led a meeting at church to plan a retreat. We had agendas, milk, and cookies, but no one showed up.
• Had more homework. One of the problems was to find the collector current for each of the 24 transistors in the diagram below. I could not finish the problem.

• Organized a neighborhood meeting to start a disaster response team and prepare everyone for earthquakes.
• Had more homework due. I did not complete it because I was busy studying for. . .
• A third midterm. It covered output stages and op-amps. A simplified op-amp is pictured above.
• Worked on a lab report. I did three weeks of lab work in two days, only to discover my program did not work. However, someone in class realized the professor had a mistake in his code so I was able to get it working by lab time.

Another two points could be added about my time in the desert last weekend. However, that will get its own post when I get the pictures ready. For now I will say there was 100+ degree heat and at one point we ran out of ambulances.

This weekend is the big library fundraiser my parents plan. Helping them with that will take most of the weekend. While my midterms are finished for the semester, finals are coming in less than three weeks.

Even though I am busy, I am mostly happy. There have been times when I had absolutely nothing to do, and I like this a lot better.

A Retreat with Beach Newman

Last weekend I went on a retreat with people from the Newman club at Long Beach. Since CSU Long Beach often goes by the name "The Beach," they are called Beach Newman. Since I added Beach Newman as a friend on Facebook, I have some pictures from her to share.

The retreat ended up being more like a camping trip than a retreat. The theme was discernment. All of the speakers talked about how they discern things in their lives. Most of my comments will focus on the camping aspects. If you want to hear more about the retreat programming, ask me and I can fill you in.

On Saturday we hiked a path at the top of some hills while praying the stations of the cross. As we walked the trail, we stopped at crosses along the way. At the end there was a big cross and a great view of the surrounding area including Irvine Lake. We could see all the way to downtown LA.

To give an idea of the area, this is taken from where we parked. The big cross of the earlier picture can be made out at the top of the center mountain.

It also shows how the girls had no sense of adventure in pictures. While they all stood next to a fence for pictures, the guys piled onto a merry-go-round. You can also see the friendly dogs who followed us the entire way and knew all the right places to be for pictures.

The club had some military surplus tents for everyone and brought food. This kept the cost down to $30 per person. All of our food was pre-cooked, so it just had to be warmed up. The warming was done on fires we made from wood and fire logs we brought along. There was spaghetti, hot dogs, sandwiches, and even some eggs and bacon someone drove in one morning. Our food prep area was half of a room with a couple of fridges. We had to use a hose if we wanted water. I would say we had half a kitchen, but I think it was less than that.

On Saturday night the rain rolled in. We decided to move out of the tents and into the room where we had our presentations. Since everything was either dirt paths or grass, there was mud, water, and more mud.

In the morning I was one of three people from our group of around 17 who took the hike down the hill to take a shower. Everyone else thought it was too cold and the walk would be too muddy and too far. I do not think a little cold air and mud is too much to get through for a cold shower.

Overall the retreat had too much free time and not enough planned activities. Since I did not know anyone going into the weekend, I did not like the free time as much as many of the other people who already knew each other well. However, I met some good and interesting people I would like to get to know better.

Desert Travels and the End of Extension

As those of you on the RSS feed might have realized, I am having issues with the new blogger editor. Working in the HTML view, when I save and reopen the draft multiple break tags are added for no good reason. Then I discovered a red banner will appear telling me my HTML tags are unbalanced when I am in the middle of writing the tag. This might be hard for Blogger to believe, but people who write posts in HTML know what they are doing. While I am on this rant, anyone who needs a button to bold or italicize text in HTML should not be writing in HTML. Blogger should put the spell check button back, keep the upload image button, and throw out the other ones.

I was on a trip last weekend; before I get to that I should cover the weekend before that.

Two weekends ago I was in the desert to set up a radio relay network. It is for the annual Baker to Vegas relay race later this month. I learned a few things about radios and drove a couple hundred miles in a stick shift truck. I was assigned my job for race day later this month. I will distribute radios to ambulances, fix any problems they have, and check the equipment back in.

Even more exciting than the desert, two Sundays ago was the end of my UCI Extension classes! While my final project did not work, I did well enough on it to get a B+ in the class and earn my certificate in Digital Signal Processing Systems Engineering.

I took five classes through UCI Extension. My last two classes had some horrible moments. I wanted to quit and give up multiple times. However, I did not give up. I kept working on the classes with their assignments and projects, even when they were past due. In the end my persistence succeeded.

While my experience with UCI Extension engineering ended on a bad note (and in general I do not recommend it), it was not always this way. When I started it was great. In the spring of 2010 I took a class on MATLAB. I had never used it before, so I learned a lot. The experience of taking the class was fun and civilized. My homework was due on Sunday nights so I would spend several hours on Sunday solving linear algebra problems in MATLAB. While working, I listened to classical music and drank cocktails such as Jack and cokes. My class project was one of the most exciting projects I have ever worked on. I even celebrated the completion of it in great style.

After a few more classes, some anger, frustration, lost time, and money spent, I am finished with the certificate. I am happy to put it all behind me.