Mockingbird and Rice Sustainability

Yawn...
Man I'm getting in the habit of writing quite late...
So yeah, coming up with stuff to write is harder when I'm tipsy. Let's see... ah OK.

To Kill a Mockingbird. I just read it for the first time. Yeah, I know; quite uncultured. The book was pretty sweet (even if it was rather predictable). Poor kids right? Nah. Poor Atticus. Imagine being morally bound to put your children through hell. What if the story had ended less happily? What if Boo had not been there? Atticus would've had to deal with the fact that he sacrificed his kids to his morals. That sucks. I hope I'm never in a situation that pits my values against people I care about. I'd have to pick my values; that would suck.

Alt + Shift

Rice is flying out at a prodigious pace. I weighed 10 cups of rice (the amount we go through each day) using a very imprecise measure and decided that it weighs somewhere between 2 and 3 lbs (it's worth noting that these are 10 rice-cups which, I believe, are actually .75 cup so that's 7.5 actual cups of dry rice or about 12 cups of cooked rice). This means we can expect it (our 50 lb. bag) to last between 2 and a half weeks and 3 and a half weeks. I hope I can blame this on the scale cuz that is fast. On the upside, this bodes well for a future rice culture sort of thing that would encourage the use of East Hall lounges. W00t! As for sustainability, people are offering to chip in for rice, so I feel confident that won't reall be an issue.

In which Boris questions his ability to retain knowledge and then concludes that today was a good day

Alt+Shift

Tired. I just finished circuits. By which I mean I gave up on part of it. The frustrating part is that this is the lab we started before break (due tm) and we made all the circuits we needed and ran the first two experiments. I really wish we'd run the third; I cannot, for the life of me build a functional pMOS current mirror that uses the SMU as a current input. I just cannot. Failure.

Anyhow. I have cut my losses. It's been 2 hours since I started getting data for this experiment and I spent most of it failing with the pMOS current mirror. Did I mention I've built this circuit before? And it worked? Arghhh. I'm a tiny bit frustrated. I should know how to do this. I should know it. *sigh

On the upside of things FBE manufacturing has started. We now have 8 slug model sensor bars made. They're missing a couple of dots of superglue, but they count as done. Maybe we'll get some sales? /me crosses fingers

On the extreme upside, today was sweet. I can't even explain it. I suppose it's possible that I've been happier than I was at some points today, but I'm by no means confident that's true. It's like I was feeling pretty good. Then I got happy. And then I got happy again w/o the first happy having gone away. And I kept at it until it felt like I seriously couldn't process the amount of happy. It was messed up. Not that I mind; it was rather insanely cool (if a bit disconcerting).

Writing about it has actually made me happy again. I started this post with a headache and frustration and now I'm whistling along to some music with a silly, tired on my face. Today was a good day.

Plans for the coming semester

Lots of planning has been going on these past few days in my head. First, the classes I'm definitely taking: Anal/Dig, CompArch and Discrete. Then things get fuzzy.

I really want to do E-Board. This has dibs on my future time.

Then I'd like to do (Alt + Shift) Econ101 at Wellesley and also Dynamics. I've dropped the 24 credit idea at this point in favor of either E-board + 20 or Scott's circuit design co-curricular + 20 or something that will eat my time + 20. Basically, if I end up not being able to sustain my level of playing Smash Bros. b/c I'm too busy next semester, I'll be quite happy. I love being busy.

E-board sounds super-exciting to me. Getting to know the ins and outs of this place sounds fantastic. I love this place. I'm told I love it too much. I kind of tend to liken it to perfection in my head on a regular basis. This leads to me being disappointed in the actual state of affairs, which is only insanely awesome. E-Board seems like the place to be if I want to go ahead and make Olin more like my silly perfect vision of it. I just talked to cDellin and am now just more excited.

/me crosses fingers


Meta is being incredibly exciting as per usual. We are currently doing history which means we choose a topic related to Olin, find people who know about it/were here for it, get some documents and tell a sweet story. The kicker is the analysis portion of it. We get to do the Meta thing and use a mental model. W00t! Mel is doing the curriculum from a legal perspective. I'm thinking of doing either the Honor Board or the Honor Code. I'm thinking of setting it against mission statements in a startups or something. Anyhow, all of us had neat ideas. the lovely part is how much overlap there is between them. Man. So exciting. I love this class.

Sorry to people reading PlanetOlin who got to see all of my posts as new ones b/c I changed their labels. Now I know better.

Living the Code

Alt + Shift

Late, late, late. No time for Dvorak. Let's see...

Man. I really think the honor code should be viewed differently. I think it should be seen as a way of life instead of as a set of abstract ideals. It is not seen that way. Not at present anyways. I think this was the original intent and the far greater number of cases that the honor board saw in the earlier years seems to support that idea.

I realized that I've been on the honor board for more than a whole semester and yet I do not even know what the code says. I've taken rather drastic action by putting the image below as my desktop background. I feel kind of stupid; this is important to me. How can I be hypocritical enough to expect others to live this when I am not active enough to live it explicitly? Argh. Maybe Eamon is right. We should honor board each other more.

The honor board also needs to change in a number of ways. It needs to be more active. It also needs to be more connected with the rest of everything. It should have some connection to the GA or CORe or maybe even the e-board. This is important. These are the five points that Olin is supposed to be about. These are the 5 points that we are supposed to do something about.

Integrity.
Respect for others.
Passion for the welfare of the college.
Patience and understanding.
Openness to change.

Live the code.

Ahhh rice. Rice is great. 10 cups of rice can bring people together. The lounge was getting antsy because the now-expected rice had not come out yet and it was 10 PM. Bryce and I got a rice cooker and a 50 lb. bag of rice right before break and have been going through 10 cups a day for the last three days with the help of anyone and everyone we could find. It is yummy. This will have to do once the pizza culture evaporates. Teehee :-D

Alt + Shift

So I decided to learn how to type with a Dvorak layout over break. I used a neat program called Typefaster. I think I'll keep this short in the interest of time.

Learning a new layout is good in that I can easily break myself of my habit of looking at the keyboard when I type. It's also supposed to be more efficient, but I'm far too slow to be judging.

Alt + Shift

Ahhhhhh.... back to qwerty. Man I'm lame. I really wanted to type this post in just Dvorak, but man is it slow. I think I'll be starting all of my posts in Dvorak and putting an "Alt + Shift" in when I switch back to my native layout. I technically still have two lessons to go in Typefaster, but I supplement my lack of knowledge with a printout of a DVorak layout on a page of my notebook. Anywho, hopefully I suck less at this with practice.

Today I found out what happens when e-mails accumulate. Evidently I stress out. This is news to me. I recently started organizing my e-mails better and flagging important things so that I could just deal with important things in my "For Follow-Up" folder and handle the other e-mails later. Normally I have a few e-mails to follow up on at any given time. Today I reached 32. Arghh. It took me an hour and a half to get it down to 11. At this point I stopped stressing about it. Awesome. I really didn't know e-mails could stress me out...

Gulab Jamun

I had some Indian food for lunch today (at Masala Art). I got to be surprised when the thing I liked best was the chickpea dish; then again, it figures Indian vegetarian food would actually be good. I ate my fill. Then I ate some more. And then came the best part. Desert!

Desert was Gulab Jamun. These are, evidently, milk balls in syrup. They reminded me of marzipan and sweetened condensed milk and some Peruvian desert I can't put my finger on. They are sweet in the literal sense. Very sweet. And they are served with a sweet syrup. Soooo good. And they don't seem terribly hard to make. W00t!

In the hours before sunrise, Avi and I pimped out the WH 4th floor lounge. 2 TVs. 2 N64s. A PS2 and a Wii. Oh. Also a DVD player with S-Vid that we can use for our laptops. So cool. We now need to get another Super Smash Bros. cartridge and two more N64 controllers for maximum awesome.

PVC is Lame

So today I was planning on driving back to Olin around noon (after lunch). As soon as I ate breakfast at 11, I knew this wasn't going to happen. Being a realist, I changed my goal to leaving at 1. As it turned out, my dad asked me to help with fixing the irrigation system a little before 1. OK. There goes that plan. Anyhow, fixing the irrigation system didn't turn out to be all that hard; we were basically replacing one piece with another just like it.

The neat part was when we tried it out. Every winter we turn off all the water that would flow outside (pipes with water tend to freeze and explode in colder climes), so my dad went down to the basement to turn the water back on. Meanwhile, I was to wait next to the outside faucet and turn it off when water started coming out. Then it started coming out.

Out of a huge crack in the PVC pipes. The crack was massive; it went through 4 different pieces. I yelled down to my dad to turn off the water. Man that crack was impressive. So we couldn't test the irrigation system. At least we could get the pipes ready to fix. Wrong. In our attempts to remove the pipes we ended up doing a far better job shattering them. The best part was the end of one PVC pipe that remained inside a metal pipe (with some adhesive thing for extra points). We tried to lever it out, we tried to chisel it out, we thought about melting it out. Nothing. At some point we called it quits and I left for Olin; I hope my dad can get it out without melting it. The moral: PVC is weak; break it at strategic points instead of at random so that you can unscrew the parts that need to be unscrewed.

Due to luck with traffic, I got to Olin at a pretty good time despite my delays. :-D

The most interesting part of the day was probably providing a nominal amount of tech support for my Mom. She had made a nice layout for something church-related and our printer is old (word on the street is we're finally getting a new one; ppl should listen to me sooner). What this meant is she had to print it out somewhere else, so she had to transport the file. My mom asked me to burn the file (all 21 kb of it) onto a CD. Unfortunately, the burner was being dumb and so this wasn't an option. I suggested e-mail but my dad beat me to the punch with a flash drive. A while later I got a call asking about where to plug it into a desktop. I told my mom and her friend to try looking on the back of the tower. Great success! My mom's friend was evidently very excited by the technology. Cool!

Inverse Economies of Scale

I like to think of myself as an extremist.

Today, I called Continuum, a design consulting company of about 100 people. I was planning on talking about how they used and perceived grades (ie transcripts) and GPAs. My conversation was cut extremely short; they didn't use GPAs at all. I thought I was an extremist. Not this time I guess. I might not like grading, but it's damned pragmatic. Anyhow, they must make decisions somehow right?

-Recomendations? No, not really. They like to establish good relationships and hope that profs and such will be all like "this kid's worth looking at." I was kind of confused by now. I don't like grading, but I think you do need something...this seemed like a long-shot, but I hadn't explicitly asked, so:
-Full Transcript? Absolutely not. Never in my interviewees experience (close to a decade). Sometimes GPAs were brought up out of curiosity, but transcripts? No. I am now racking my brain. Surely they have some way of judging, right? It can't just be: "Oh. You're from MIT. Welcome." I probed more until I finally got a reasonable picture.

Here's the big deals for them:
-Work experience: Have you done internships? With whom?
-Recommendation: I think this was unfairly downplayed. I'd go ahead and guess this is a big deal for them in hiring recent grads. She never said so, but this is something you can use when objective evidence is lacking and grades aren't being looked at.
-Portfolio: It took forever for my interviewee to mention this. Why? I don't know. In the end though, I think this is what made everything reasonable. If you want a technical job, show us your technical skill. Period. No fuss. Beautiful.

I guess smaller companies can afford the luxury of actually looking through candidates' work. Also, probably the luxury of having your candidates partially pre-screened because you are small and word of mouth recommending is a major form of recruitment. They avoid GPAs and transcripts because they can. Economies of scale are great for quantity; inverse economies of scale are great for quality. Sweet.

This doesn't mean that an alternative grading system is feasible; however, it does seem to imply that the portfolio idea that completely faded away might have some real value to it. Maybe I'll start keeping mine up to date? I hear our folders are still online anyhow.

In other news, I managed to run over 500 processes at once today. I was going to play some music, "The 500 Greatest Rock and Roll Songs of All Time," so I went to the folder and pressed CTRL+A. Then, when I was going to go to "Play in Winamp" I saw an option to "Add to Winamp's Bookmark List." Bad call Boris. Bad call. It was pretty neat to see them start going away in the task manager though.

Also neat, Continuum had a hand in designing Newton Peripherals' MoGo Mouse. It's a mouse. It fits in your PC card slot. If anyone has an extra lump of cash they'd like to spend on equipping their favorite Boris with a PC-Card slot mouse, I would be likely to reward them with hugs... please?

Bodies

I went to see the Bodies exhibition in NYC today. Finally. After having not gone twice while it was in Boston and once while it was in NYC, it seemed perfectly fitting that I wouldn't get to go see it again because my cat needed to go to the vet. Thankfully, my cat woke up much better and I finally got to go.

It was pretty awesome. The part that I found the most intriguing was the preservation of the circulatory system. They pumped a polymer through the blood vessels and then hardened it. Then they removed all of the organic parts in the area and ta-da! Out comes an incredibly intriguing network. The part where they'd done this for both the air-carrying portion of the lungs and all of the connecting blood vessels from the heart was intense.

I must admit that the freakout level of the exhibit was far lower than expected. Except for the breast with cancer; that was gross.

More important than any of this, however, was what I learned immediately upon exiting the exhibit: there apparently exists such a thing as "Alpha Male Ale" (at Heartland Brewery).
--"Made from Peruvian Maca Root, American ginseng, horny goat weed and honey, this unfiltered golden ale not only revitalized the male "spirit," but is fresh as well. 5% alcohol"
Nice.