This is interesting... I can't seem to title this post... I'll see if it works from a different browser after saving a draft...

Anyhow. Today was pretty sweet. Some of us were laser-cutting parts that we need for NASA out of thin plastic film for quite a long time. The way the machine works is rather neat; it just burns whatever lines you give it. One sets the speed it goes at and the power it uses. That's it. Then the laser goes along burning what you told it to burn and the ventilations system attempts to pump out all of the toxic fumes you generate. It doesn't fully succeed, but I'm going to go ahead and imagine that the smell would've been far worse if it weren't for the ventilation system.

So anyhow, one of the sheets of plastic we were cutting was really thin. I mean we had one that was five thousandths of an inch thick; that was the fattest one. The small one was to thousandths of an inch thick. We set power and speed lower for the thin piece of Kapton and then we started up the laser. It went along the bottom edge of the shape we were cutting and then promptly proceeded to miss the Kapton entirely.

This wasn't the laser's fault; it was positioning itself perfectly. The issue at hand was that the piece of plastic was really thin. Thin enough, in fact, to get sucked into the ventilation system. We had to shut everything down.

Eventually, everything was fixed and the now-wrinkled piece of Kapton was recovered from the ventilation system. Hooray!

...Something's being silly. I can't seem to get into my account from Opera. It wasnts me to switch my blogger account to a Google account. Oh yeah. It's always been a Google account. wtf.

OK. I got in. (I needed to tack on the @gmail.com). When I look at my post in Opera I can access the test box for the title, but I can't touch the bod. Also what I'd already written disappears. How odd. My hand is force. I will use the scourge of worlds: IE.

AH good. IE can't access the text box for the title either. Whatever. This shall henceforth be known as "The Post With No Name."

Adventures are fun

Haha. So. Here's the setting: it's the 4th of July. I'm bored. So are other peeps. We decide to adventure...

We start by heading towards Needham, but we've got very little gas. We turn to go towards Eliot and fill up on gas at the full service station right before route 9. We then head east on 9 because it's easier to get on the highway in that direction and we really have no plans. We try to get me lost by heading north and west. I keep on knowing where we are. Finally, I get lost. Then we cross 16. Damn. We work at it some more. OK. I'm lost. we stop to eat a snack at a Dunkin' Donuts.

We head out more or less randomly again still trying to go more or less northwest. Eventually we come to this sign.

I call a halt. This is where we adventure. It's raining, it's dark, it's perfect. WE head into the woods...

and come to a body of water. There's a bench next to it. Interesting. We wonder if it's a river or a pond or whatever so we decide to go along it for a bit. We pass a massive log and an almost climbable tree. We come to a place where there's something like a sandbar but with lots of sticks. I suggest going out to the middle of the river. They laugh at the idea, but I go ahead and try to see how far I can go without freaking out because I'm carrying my camera and cell phone.

I use a large piece of wood I found to help cross. One of my friends makes a snarky comment
about stepping on a shield. As it turns out, she was right! Incredible. I went on an adventure and picked up a quest item. Un. Be. Lievable.

I carry it with us the rest of the way. We eventually discover that we're on the Charles in Newton. On our way back to the car some guy asks if we were sword fighting. I answer that we weren't; I'd just found a shield in the Charles. He laughed and agreed that it was awesome.

Content.

Frustrated

Man. You know what's frustrating?

It's frustrating to want to talk to someone who doesn't speak your language.


You know what's possibly even more frustrating?

When they do speak your language except they're at this language immersion camp and they can't speak anything but some foreign language.


You know what might be even more frustrating than that?

Having taken enough of the aforementioned foreign language (albeit a long time ago) to try to talk anyways. Talk? Not really. Listen? Sometimes I can understand some things. Ish.



Most frustrating telephone conversation ever.
*exhales*
I needed to get that out. Thanks for feeling obliged to read b/c it's showing up in your rss reader or Planet Olin or something.

I promise a more upbeat post tomorrow. In fact, I'm pretty sure I know the topic. It should be fun!

Review: Never Eat Alone

I don't know If I'd actually spoil anything but I don't want to worry about it so:

SPOILER ALERT

Ok. You've been warned.

I often use my blog(s) as motivators to get me to do stuff. So. In order to get myself to constantly read, I figured I'd post about books I read. This should be good for my speed-reading and my general knowledge.

I might play a little bit of catch-up soonish as I've read a lot recently.

Today, I'll talk about Keith Ferrazzi's book "Never Eat Alone."

To sum it all up in one phrase: " Ask. You can't lose anything when you don't have anything."

Keith is big on a fairly direct approach. If you want to get to know someone, learn as much as you can about them. Then talk to them. Listen. Care.

I kinda like Keith. He's not a smarmy guy who's trying to get on people's good sides in order to get above other people. He's really into positive feedback. He offers help. This ends up creating a good rapport and goodwill. When he needs help he asks for it. The kicker: he doesn't keep count.

Keith also does things like recognizing the importance of talking to "gatekeepers." These are the people that get you on people's calendars. He talks to them, not through them and they are included in his little thank-yous he sends.

His general modus operandi is carry out all of the steps that normal people do when they become friends really fast. He learns about them. He talks about the intersection of their interests (he's studied up on this obviously). He finds their needs and fills them; he becomes needed. He pings people all the time (in taxis etc.). He follows up on everything, he hosts dinners, he finds mentors, he finds mentees. He gets close to the people who will get him closer to what he wants. This man is a machine.

I am not him. I cannot do life like him. That being said, we have very different priorities. I am very self-validated. Keith gains meaning from others, from interactions. I enjoy these interactions and will try to do more with them, but they will never be life-defining to me. I still plan on having few friends who are big enough in my life to be called life-defining. Keith is fine with celebrating his birthday at a business conference with his business friends or at his NYC home with his NYC friends or etc. etc. It's fantastic.

It reminds me of "The Tipping Point". Some people have few deep relationships, others have many shallow ones. If we think about these as two axes, the area defines how social a person is. My goal is to increase my total area by creating more shallow relationships; I have plenty and plenty of deep ones already. Good luck self.

On a completely different note, I decided I'm not following enough blogs (16). Send me links to good ones or just post them in the comments. Thanks all!

Vinny's

So I've been going to Vinny T's on a weekly basis since I got to Olin this summer.

Their food is not exceptionally tasty, but I absolutely love the restaurant. They have huge, starving-college-student sized portions; and for a bit more they have incredibly big family platters that are meant to serve 3 or 4 people. To me this means I have dinner for a couple of days or something of the sort. More important than their portions, their service is great. They take huge reservations in stride professionally and without batting an eye.

They're cool with things like "20-25 people I think... I'll call if it seems like it's going to be more..." Oh yeah. They also deal with huge bunches of loud college kids quite well. It's really quite a pleasure to eat there.

So. Here's my plan.

I recently decided that it'd be awesome if I could get non-student members of the Olin community to come. Last time we had one prof, and this Thursday I expect two more and one prof's family.

I'm really excited to do this on a regular basis. I hope I can keep it going during the year; it'll be much harder b/c the dining hall is such an easy option. And of course scheduling is annoying. There are conflicts every single day, so its actually been a moving appointment. We've done Monday, Monday, Friday, Wednesday and next week is Thursday.

If you're an Olinite reading this in the Boston area, but you're not at Olin itself, send me an e-mail to be included in the invitation e-mails for these dinners.

I am really excited for Thursday.

FPGAs

These things are sweet. Like, really sweet. The idea is that you write a program and the FPGA implements it in hardware (it makes a digital circuit with a portion of its hundreds of thousands of gates).

The parts I like are the cost and how much they jam on the board. All the stuff on the board can be used as either inputs or outputs (depending on what they are); also there's some mode-controlling stuff on the board, but let's ignore that for now.

I'll describe one that's just shy of $100. It has 8 LEDs, 8 switches, 4 push-buttons on the board itself. Then it has an additional 60 I/O ports that can be used for whatever. Some of these (24) are split off into groups of 6 pins that you can plug something called a Pmod into. These are extensions that they've already made for you such as video I/O or audio I/O or motor control etc. Oh yeah. It also has a 4 digit seven-segment display. This lets you make the simple squarish looking digital clock type numbers. And there's a slot for a 1/8 VGA LCD screen. Sexy.

Anyhow. I keep on coming up with reasons to buy one that aren't good enough to get me to do it. Case in point: for about $200 I can make a TV card for my monitor. I mean. OK, I could play Smash on my monitor. Or I could get a $50 TV card. But the FPGA can also do other stuff. But for $200 I could buy a new TV. *sigh* I need better arguments for myself. If anyone can come up with a compelling reason for me to get an FPGA other than their shininess, that'd be awesome.

I'm pretty sure this device has made me the happiest and most victorious-feeling for the most mundane tasks. For example, I felt accomplished after following a step-by-step screencast to make the FPGA count in binary and display the 8 MSB in LED form. And now, I'm failing to use the seven-segment display to make it count with numbers. Actually, I think I've gotten it to do it, but too fast for my eyes to resolve... I'll work on that.

Highrise

Oh man. Highrise is yummy. Thanks to the people who suggested it to me!

I've got only like 20 contacts up so far, but I should get much faster at this as I get a bit more practice and actually establish a system. I've had to do every single entry like 5 times because I keep adding things when I think of them. "Oh yeah... photos!" also phone number formats, labels, and, this one is key, birthdays.

This works really well as a tickler for birthdays or, hell, anything. I'm going to chuck all of my single task to-dos here and keep Mindmeister for projects and other more complex things. The ability to have tasks linked to people is rather awesome.

Complaints: Well I do have a lot actually. Inputting people is slow. I can't add a photo or put on a label until after the initial creation.When I add a label I have to click OK instead of pressing enter. Little things, but things that shouldn't exist in a serious site. I mean, I have on my list of to-dos for Olindocs "make OK pressed by enter." Honestly. Not pro dudes. Oh. I also wish I could label contacts en masse. But I can't. Lame. This requires much more forethought. Or going back to fix things. Or both.

That all being said. This is one-time. I can more than deal with it. It's notes are awesome. I'm not sure if i talked to anyone who reads this about one of my original plans when I first got a Moleskine. It went like this:

I'd meet someone. I'd get their name. Then I'd pull out my Moleskine and scribble something. I'd then have a normal conversation with them; except for the part where I'm writing stuff in my notebook every 5-15 seconds. Well. Highrise gives me a reason to do something like this. Except not until after the conversation and only with people I don't see all that often. Not quite as cool but hey.

The free version of Highrise has this limitation about having a single case. This means you can only have 1 foldery thing that keeps different things related. OR. I could use either labels or an additional contact to keep a project together. Pretty hackable.

In short: Highrise = cool. I will report on any changes in my opinion if it goes to pretty good or less or OMG this is the mostest awesome! or more.