pwnd & miscommunication

Wow. I have a lot of work to do. I just finished taking data for a circuits lab (2 hours starting at 2 AM). Now I think I'll go do some Meta. Soooo much work. Most of it's Meta in a variety of incarnations, butt he other subjects are pinging me pretty good too.

Today I learned a little bit about how misunderstandings make people angry. So for our communications paper in Meta, I'm doing the organizing. A few days ago, I sent out the general structure of the paper and assigned work to the four other people working on this in pairs. Now here's the fun part. A and B are working together; C and D are working together. A thinks my structure is one thing, but C thinks it's something else. Both groups get some sort of a start and then realize... well it's not going to work. The paper will not work if the pairs are doing things with a different structure (they're both doing case studies). So I met with A and C. We talked. And talked. And eventually we reached some manner of compromise.

Then I had a standard rice party and, unfortunately, all of Meta came. I say unfortunately only because of the way things played out. Neither A nor C had talked to their partners since they'd reached a compromise. So, when the topic came up, B and D had different views on the structure of the paper. Things got a little bit heated and the rest of Meta was sort of firefighting. It was good times.

The moral: discuss things. An e-mail can (evidently) be interpreted in different ways. Discussion allows for feedback and we all know that feedback is good.

(Random quip about miscommunication in the communications module; teehee)

In other news, I think I'll be moving my blog to Wordpress soonish. The rss feed from Wordpress doesn't butcher my formatting... yummy.

Cascodes & Flexibility

Ugh. I originally meant for this blog to basically answer the question "what did I learn today." While it has wandered a lot, I still feel this is more or less the main goal for me. Interestingly, people actually read it; thus, I have to actually put up readable stuff. For example, my favorite new nugget of understanding for the day involves how cascodes can be used to increase the gain of a current mirror differential amplifier. I'm sure a couple of you think that'd be really cool, but I feel bad for all the others who end up reading. That being said my goal is to write about what I learned so be warned technical stuff follows:

The quick answer is that Rout increases by about two orders of magnitude. Since the differential gain is Rout*Gm, it too increases by about 100. Yay!

To go through it in more detail:
We have two transistors in series that go from Vout to ground. The top transistor is called the cascoding transistor. Pretend for a moment it didn't exist. Rout would now simply be r0 for the cascoded (bottom) transistor due to early voltage. Once the cascode is put back in it gets a bit trickier. Using superposition and source splitting, we can get that changing the replica source on the cascoding transistor doesn't create any currents. Changing the voltage of the replica source on the early voltage resistor, on the other hand, ends up creating two currents. The first one is r0+r0||(1/gs). The other one is a current in the other direction that ends up canceling out part of the first current to yield a total current of dV(1/(r0*(1+gs*r0))). Then we get an Rout of r0(1+gs*r0). Since gs*ro has a typical value of around 100, this means Rout (and thus the differential gain) increases by roughly two orders of magnitude. Yay!

In other news, we learned something today at the Mr./Ms. Olin contest. I think Chandra might've put it best: Flexible men are hot. Keoni and Karst both did talents that involved flexibility; badass limbo and badass yoga respectively. Then, as per Chandra's hypothesis, Keoni and Karst ended up as the finalists. Most intriguing... /me stretches...

Simple Prophecies & f07 schedule

What did I learn today? Not much really... but I relearned something and that's almost as good. Today's lesson was simple: nothing's simple. We'll start this with a case study and generalize from there.

I was playing a game of Magic (a nerdy card game with lots of strategy for those of you who are somehow interested in reading a blog by me and not themselves nerdy enough to know this). There were four players in the game and it was a free for all. I had a weak control deck (and I do love control). This means that I'm not actually capable of stopping people from playing effectively with the cards I have; this means I'd lose if people went ahead and played effectively. Here's the beauty: it's not that simple. While I can't win with my cards, I can almost certainly weaken someone enough for them to lose. One player developed an early strangle-hold over me, so I ended up helping them weaken the other two. Then I pulled a nice little switch, suffered heavy losses and caused the utter destruction of the remaining strong player. This meant I'd let the other two build up somewhat... Rinse and repeat. I ended up winning a game that should've been hopeless. There's more to the game than the rules. There's intimidation and diplomacy. And of course the power of a reputation.

Reputations are great. They work in everything. My reputation wins me games of Magic and Smash and wins me money in poker. It gets people to ask me for help with classes. I'm sorry to any who are getting this as news: I don't know any more than you do. I simply learn well by teaching, so I like having people ask me for help. Yay reputation!

I guess what I'm rambling on about is the idea of self-fulfilling prophecies. I claim to be good at poker, people are wary, I make off with their money. Human psychology is great.

The moral (?) of the story: make sure people think you are the kind of person that you would like to be. You just might find that they end up being right.

Quick update. The classes I'm taking next semester are: Anal/Dig, CompArch, aVLSI, Discrete Math, IME2 Economics @ Babson (micro), and Deviance and Conformity @ Wellesley (intro sociology). I guess I was totally lying when I said that I had "dropped the 24 credit idea at this point." Oh well.

Organization a la Boris

If you're reading this through planetolin or another feed reader that doesn't show this as bold. This post reads far better if you click through to the actual post. I'm rather annoyed my formatting doesn't show... :-(

So this is post actually comes from people asking what I do to keep organized. People are particularly intrigued by Boris, an apparent nerd who's constantly on his computer, using little notebooks to jot notes. Does he use them to keep organized? What does he write in them? Does he have a record of that time that I... uhmmm... never mind. He has everything on Outlook... are these connected?? Anyhow, these questions and more will soon be answered. Read on fair internet friend.

So here's my slew of organizational tools:

Real-World (physical)
2 moleskine notebooks
moleskine cahier notebook
pad of small paper

In-Between-World (computer)
Outlook
EditPad Lite
Word
Excel
Timesnapper

Fake-World (interwobs)
Netvibes
Stikkit

Aight. So I use a lot of junk. True enough. Now here's what it does.

Let's start with the moleskines. Apart from making me seem incredibly pretentious, these notebooks (yes all three) are constant companions Pocket Notebook 1 is dedicated to school. It lives in my left pocket. It has some of the best notes I've ever written. The reason is that I take shoddy notes over several pages of legal pad and then shrink them down to moleskine size; writing things after you see the big picture in a concise format does wonders. This notebook also holds random thoughts about projects, notes on interview with people, class rules, circuit schematic... if it happened to me and it's related to school, this book wants it. This past semester it has also served as the place that I do my time-tracking (I'll talk about this s'more later). Pocket Notebook 2 is not dedicated. It welcomes everything and anything to it's home in my right pocket . Dreams I remember, emo journal entries, directions to your house, bad drawings, the size of my car's windshield wipers, games of tic-tac-toe. Man this book's messed up (I just flipped through the pages). At the back, it holds my expense tracking (more later). Cahier is evidently moleskine's word for super-thin, flexible, cardboard-covered notebook. It is short term memory. I only end up using about half of it because I tear out pages when they don't allow me to see everything they have on them at a glance. Things here are waiting to be added to lists, schedules, or some more permanent type of storage. This is the notebook that I really don't part with. I remember one time in recent memory that I didn't have it on me. I was quite unhappy. I don't like relying on my memory... My Pad is good for reminders. It is almost always blank and it draws my attention to it strongly when it's sitting on my desk with anything written on it.

Outlook runs my life. Yay outlook calendar! The other cool thing it does is have a great folder called 'awaiting.' When I want a response to an e-mail I cc myself and a rule puts it in the 'awaiting' folder marked as read with a green flag. This lets me see at a glance what e-mails I'm waiting on from the 'for follow up' search folder. EditPad Lite keeps notes on things. It's basically notepad with tabs and less memory hogging. Generally these have something to do with an item on one of my lists... I'm actually starting to phase out EditPad for Stikkit, but I think it's only a partial phase out. Word is used for things that I want to look pretty. Admittedly, this is fairly rare, but sometimes I'll write up ideas from my notebooks here to be kept for posterity. Excel is responsible for both my time and expense tracking. After writing down whenever I spend time productively, I type it up on Sunday during dedicated organization time. I do the same with my expenses and end up with pretty charts and graphs that make my life easy to understand. Or at least specific facets of it... Anyhow, Timesnapper also helps things easy to understand by taking a screenshot every minute. Great for figuring out how much productive time I should be tracking!

Here's where the fun starts in earnest. Netvibes holds all of my lists. There's a school to-do list, a single action list (eg fill out expo form), a multi-action list (eg document olin experiments) and two special lists. One of these, 'waiting for' is passive. This is where you go when you're stopping me from getting something done by not having done something yourself (yet). The other one is the red list. Nothing is n the red list when I go to bed. Things on the red list must be done before I'm done with my day. There are a number of secondary lists that I only check once a week during my dedicated organization time. These are things like 'skillz I want to learn,' 'money I'm owed' and 'books I want to read.' And then there's Stikkit. This neat little web-app has completely taken over the job I had remember the milk doing (SMS reminders) and the job I had del.icio.us doing (tagged, searchable bookmarks). It is also taking a lot of 0f EditPad's job. Stikkit now holds most of the extra stuff about my to-do list items. These are great b/c they're searchable, taggable and online. Sorry EditPad, but you are quickly becoming obsolete...

So. Let's review. All of my notebooks have any information I feel is important shunted onto Netvibes as items on lists, onto Stikkit (or EditPad) as notes, onto Word as something nice or onto Excel to be made pretty. In theory, I should also be using my scanner to get things (including my notebooks) digitized and organizable, but this isn't happening currently.

Wow. That's a long entry. Peace out.

Outlook says I'm at an important appointment...

Sorry all. Not really feeling up for writing a post. Sneak Peak at the first post after I feel decent: How Boris does organization (moleskines, netvibes, stikkit and more!)

Need Sleep.

Summer (un)School & caffeine

All right. So I've actually gotten a couple requests for specific blog posts. I'm not going to field any of them today b/c I've got lots of work to do and I'll be in class in less than 7 hours. Yay! Also I'm a little bit sick. Instead I will writ about something fun and exciting. This summer I'd been planning on doing a lot of random learning. In fact, my goal was to do as much work during the summer as I did during the school year. Things I plan to learn include, speed-reading, circuit design and web-design. I also plan on improving thing like my shorthand, unicycling and typing speed. Self-directed learning at its purest.

Enter Mel. Now I'm planning doing this in a more organized fashion. In particular, there will be documentation and constant discussion. Mel and I are definitely overlapping in the web design portion of things and we decided to learn Esperanto too. If anyone would like to join us that'd be sweet. I think I'll be starting a blog for this unschooling experiment come summer-time. If anyone wants to be added to the authors, please give me a heads up. Also if anyone's around Boston and wants to join in on just random talks/chats or whatever that'd be neat too. Learn by yourself; share with others. Getting things down in print forces understanding. The particular format is still not even in the works, but the idea exists and if Meta's taught me anything it's that the idea and the energy are the parts that matter. The rest is just details that will more or less fill themselves in.

6 hours 20 minutes till I am awake and in class; two more assignments before I go to sleep. This is the first time I've taken caffeine for wakefulness purposes since uhmmm... that time in November and before that uhmmm the December before that... yeah... did I mention I was kinda sick?

Stikkit review & stikkit plans

All right. So Stikkit gets a rating of "pretty badass."

I decided to give Stikkit a run and see how I liked it. I use only a few of its multitude of functions. I'm a firm believer that a product that does one thing best is better than one that does lots of things OK; to that end, I've gotten it to be best for a couple of things, I'll see if more show up later.

Basically I use Stikkit for:
-SMS reminders
-Bookmarks plus
-Quick, random notes
-Details for to-do lists

SMS Reminders:
This is super-simple and super-useful. I love outlook. It let's me know what's up. That being said, Outlook is a pull system. Even Outlook reminders aren't really push. They only work if you're at your computer at the time. With stikkit, I can turn on SMS reminders and then just write something like:
reminder name
thursday at 15:00
detail, detail, detail.
remind me
On thursday, half an hour before 15:00 rolls around, I get a nice text message with my stikkit's text in it. Nice!

Bookmarks:
In Stikkit there's this thing called the stikkit toolbox. It's a little button with some neat javascript functionality. You click on it and it pops up a stikkit with the title of the website you're on as the first line (title) of the stikkit. It puts the URL as the second line. Then it skips a line and adds any text you had selected on the site. This is great for picking up interesting tidbits that you can go back to. And, of course, you can add whatever before it gets sent to stikkit (eg tags).

Quick, random notes:
This is basically self-explanatory.

Details for to-do list:
This one is sweet! So I keep to do lists on netvibes. They're nice, but they are, by nature, super-short. So, I have one item on my list that say SigSys - hw 8 (thurs). Then I have a stikkit titled SigSys - hw 8 that says:

SigSys HW8
due Fri, Apr 27th

(H8.1) text problem 8.6
(H8.2) text problem 8.8
(H8.3) text problem 8.10 a c
(H8.4) text problem 8.11 a
(H8.5) text problem 8.12
(H8.6) text problem 8.18

Additional problems will be posted soon

@olin,sigsys

I can search for it easily and I have more details within easy reach.

Boris' fixins:
Here's how I made it more useful for myself on netvibes (my home on the internet). I made 2 widgets that use the external widget module (). What you need to do is add source code to it for it to do things. The really simple widget is just a nice view of my stikkits and my stikkit bookmarks (this is a compilation of links made from urls in stikkits). I use it b/c the rss feed that stikkit provides has a non-zero refresh rate. Also it lets me see more things at the same time. By far the more interesting and useful widget is my new stikkit widget that lets you create new stikkits from inside netvibes. So hot. If anyone wants me to set them up with stikkit, netvibes, some combo or any other program/webapp that I fanboy all over: I really enjoy making other people's computers the hotness to doing thing that I should actually do; just wing me an e-mail.

So there's plenty of features I've yet to use. The calendar ends up getting filled with things I put in for SMS reminders. The peeps feature is completely unused. This lets you just keep data on ppl and stuff and seems worthwhile. Also the to-do list feature seems like a nice way to add detail to my current lists that I'm not using. So many features... In fact, I talked to Mel a lot and she has an idea for this sort of database for sharing notes by book and page and lots more etc. etc. I'm going to see if I can make it work with stikkit and s'more programs; the key is machine and human readable...

Constant HB & me @ Mel's

I read through a lot of Honor Board minutes from the bygone days to the current days. I seriously question how much things have changed. It seems that Olin has always been moved by a small subset of the population. It also seems that our conversations today are just like the ones they had 6 years ago on the board. Sad... I'll write more on this once I have a more cohesive view on things...

In other news, Mel put up a post kinda in response to a post I made! My name is in the first sentence! w00t! ...The idea of an epic intra-Olin flame war in the blogosphere has been floated...
Also random: I'm gonna stop with the [Alt+Shift] tag.

Failures in learning & front and (center?)

Early post? Yup indeed. I'm going to be driving go karts and shooting peeps with lazers later tonight and so yeah. Early.

Let's start with numbers. These all come from Promoting Active Learning by Meyers and Jones.

-While teachers are lecturing students aren't attending to what's being said 40% of the time.
-In the first 10 minutes, students retain 70% of the info
-In the last 10 minutes, students retain 20% of the info

Well damn. That sucks. So what do we do? Mix it up.

I was talking to Mel and she's an extremist on this one. She thinks 'unschooling' might be effective. The premise [Alt + Shift] is that people are far better at learning things that they find interesting. Unschooling takes this to the extreme sand says "OK, we'll have some resources, but you figure out what you want to learn and how. Then do it." That's really intense. The idea sounds wonderful, but I'm more than a little skeptical about the pragmatic side of this sort of thing. How many people are truly motivated enough to push themselves hard? As hard as school pushes them? I think I could do it. But I'm not completely sure. And I tend to think highly of me in this regard. Learning on your own is hard. It's also often unbalanced. I think I might spend a disproportionate amount of time lifehacking and stuff or playing Smash. Oh wait. I do. All right so that's not the issue. The real question is one of content. Are certain topics really crucial to have mastered at a certain point in time? If they are, unschooling does not seem like the way to go.

That all being said, I guess this is my goal for the summer. I'm sure I'll whine about it when I'm in the middle of it. I have a lot I want to learn. By myself. Because I'm excited. I hope it works. /me crosses fingers

Interesting note about teachers paying attention. Evidently, teachers tend to neglect their dominant hand's side of the room. So if you want to be the center of the teachers attention, front and non-dominant or front and center are fine. But be wary of the front with weak hand.
Stikkits seem promising; I'm starting by using them to replace del.icio.us among other things...

Olin's lab notebook & taking Stikkit for a spin

[Alt + Shift] Man I'm not getting any practice with this whole Dvorak thing... arghh... I think I'll switch outright in the summer, but time is too pressing now...

Anywho. I'm writing at this time because I was talking to Mel about everything ever. Man we covered sooo much. What I'm most excited about is archiving Olin. This is going to be my big college-building thing this summer and into whenever. I already registered a domain (olindocs.com) and that domain currently holds absolutely nothing. Mel was thinking along similar lines once upon a time and she happened upon a couple of apps; the one that;s closest to doing what I want seems to be dspace, but I honestly wouldn't know because I haven't had time to look through it yet. It needs to be searchable and taggable and probably provide some default hierarchy. It needs to hold all of the documents from past and current classes.

Most importantly, I think we need something like a lab notebook. We are supposed to be an experiment. We should have a record of what we do so that it' replicable beyond Olin. Also, this information should be easy to access for anyone that's interested. Hopefully it'll also mean that students can find stuff from old classes more easily, but that's secondary to the idea of archiving to document our experiments.

I'd love to write more, but I (yeah, even Boris) need sleep.


In another thing that came from our conversation about archiving, I think I'll give Stikkit a try. I've read about it and it always seems cool, but I've yet to try it... odd. I'll see how I fare. If what I've read is true, I might give up my first two tabs on netvibes and my always open editpad for this... I'll definitely say something if it 's that good.

Amy Gutmann & I am a gemini

I went to the social justice reading group tonight. It was pretty cool; I think I'll be a regular in the future. We'd read a chapter on multicultural education by Amy Gutmann. She's kinda old-school. I don't really like her writing or the numerous assumptions that she seemed to like so much. The main point she was driving was that, [Alt + Shift] in a democratic society, the goal of education is to educate people such that they are capable of having and exercising civic equality.

This was pretty much her only standard. In fact, the whole chapter on multicultural education seemed completely superfluous; it wasn't treated any different than any other issue would be.

The goal of democratic education is to further civic equality.

If something furthers that goal, it is good; if something hinders progress towards that goal, it is bad. Supremely simple. Caryn even told us that Amy Gutmann is against (private/magnet/etc.) schools because they do not properly prepare people to be civic equals.

Her other big thing, although it didn't come up in our conversation is the importance of open debate. Here I agree with her wholeheartedly. Debate and argument and disagreement and expression of differing opinions rocks. It moves things along. And in that spirit, I will proceed to take some potshots at her way of thinking.

According to Gutmann, our democracy has a duty to attempt to educate it's residents in such a way that they can have and use civic equality.

Let's see... our democracy? I think not. We live in a republic. The system was originally designed such that electors would choose a president. This has since been perverted to a situation that gives us the illusion of living in a democracy. Despite this, there are many things that keep it from being a democracy. If we were democratic, our government would represent the people. Thus, we'd expect to have 2 or 3 senators from the green party and an analogous number of representatives in the house. This is not the case.

Our current system would theoretically allow for a 49% minority to be fully unrepresented if they were uniformly distributed. Our system of election relies on clumping of people with similar viewpoints; it's a fair bet, but kinda dumb.

As for educating students to be and act with civic equality, I don't think this is a good goal. My school for example, had a part of it's mission statement that says we are seeking to produce leaders. This is good insofar as I'm concerned. I like it. I don't want to have the ability to exercise civic power equal to everyone else's. I wan to have more. I think I should have a greater influence.

Everyone at Olin represents a large societal investment. We have, by and large, gone to good schools with good teachers. We are currently not paying tuition to learn. Why is this worth it? because society expects us to give a large return. If we only give back an equal amount, we wouldn't be worth suh a huge, sustained investment of time, money and effort. So yeah. We also talked about lots of other stuff... oh liberals (says the socialist).

One of the neatest things was when Caryn guessed that I was a Gemini. I said something along the lines of I really have two views on everything... Oh well. I guess astrology is true. By two views I mean that I like to have an ideal view and a pragmatic view. For example, I think socialism is ideal, but I think socialism would be a huge mistake in our current society. i think some socialist things can be incorporated, but we'll generally be better off working off of the strengths of our capitalist republic. Also, Caryn makes yummy food.

Some world thoughts

[Alt + Shift]

Man. It seems like I have less and less time nowadays. Today I will talk about divestment.

I have heard a lot of very smart people express views that divestment is a great cause. I have heard a lot of very smart people claim that divestment isn't going to work or even that it's actually bad. So what's up?

The theory behind divestment is to put pressure on companies in Sudan by driving their stock prices down. In particular, activist groups target specific companies that end up having their profits flow into the government (mostly Chinese oil companies). The idea is that the companies will in turn pressure Khartoum (the government) by considering leaving the country unless action is taken to get investors to put money back into the company (by ending the genocide).

Lets run down some reasons why people have said divestment might be a bad idea:
-Opportunity cost of helping is high
-It's too indirect and won't be effective
-Taking money away from the economy harms the people
-If money becomes an issue, Khartoum might not continue giving southern Sudan oil money

Opportunity cost. This refers to the idea that one might be able to do more good by hurting people to gain money if you can help more people in the end. The idea is completely sound, but I doubt many people would actually do this in such a way that it's actually more helpful (assuming that divestment is helpful).

Indirectness. OK. So this is the one I consider strongest by far. It just won't work. People can take their money out of companies operating in Darfur, but the market is self-correcting. If a company becomes undervalued, someone will buy up its stock. It's the smart thing to do. The game plan of divestment involves having companies' stock be grossly undervalued. It won't happen. There will be people who'd rather make money. I guarantee that.

Taking money away from the economy. Yeah this will harm people. That being said, the companies targeted are not companies that are being the livelihoods of the common folk. They are having their profits go to Khartoum. On the other hand, in a longer view this could cause cause more abuse to make up for the money lost.

This was a new one to me. Evidently Khartoum's peace deal with the south involves the south operating autonomously and receiving a hefty portion of the oil money. Cutting the total oil money might cause Khartoum to keep all the revenue instead of sharing it as per the agreement. This of course, would not be fun.

Anyhow, just some thoughts. Please discuss.

Lounging with Rice & Fun-times

Lalala. Quick post.

Rice rocks. It's becoming an institution. I sent out an e-mail for rice at 22:00. I got to my room at 22:00. 2 people were waiting. By 22:03, the line had expanded to 7 people. We ate all 10 cups and all that was left over yesterday. [Alt + Shift] Then people wanted more. This is insane. The lounge was left crowded for about an hour with people from rice. Soooo awesome. I hope things like this will be enough to reinstate lounge culture in East Hall...

/me crosses fingers.

Yawn. Oh man. I'm gonna have me some more fun (read: work) and then head to bed for a few hours before more fun-times.

bang bang work control

My brother came up from VA to wreak havoc on my studies. It's pretty bad. I didn't do any work Thursday, Friday, Saturday or Sunday. I have about 16 hours of awake left today. Let's see how many I can make work hours...

I know I'm a bit weird, but I visualize mechwarrior right about now... "all systems online"

[Alt + Shift]

Problems with learning & Rant Responses

Alt + Shift

So the other day Meta watched a movie called "A Private Universe." We also watched some other video, but I forget what that one was named. Anyhow, the movies were all about how traditional teaching methods fail. The movie was the result of an NSF study and was really quite striking. For example, they asked 23 Harvard students, alumni, and professors "What causes the seasons?"

Two of them got it right. Two. That's so sad. Most people cited the elliptical orbit of the earth and claimed that winter was when the earth was farther from the sun. I'd bet anything that every single one of these people knew that the southern hemisphere has summer when we have winter, but they never caught that fallacy. The most interesting part was their theory on how these people arrived at this misconception: The people doing the study proposed that the way textbooks diagram the seasons is what causes the misconception. In order to show the tilt of the earth, textbooks regularly show the diagram from an angle. This perspective drawing makes the orbit of the earth seem very elliptical when in fact it's just barely shy of being circular.

There were other examples including questions about what causes the phases of the moon and whether or not sight depended on the presence of light. My other favorite one was one about lighting a bulb using a battery and a wire. The interesting part was where all of the people were sure they could do it. And then they couldn't. Teehee.

A quote from a friend: "Think about the median person in America. Now think about how 50% of the people are dumber than that."

So I got a few responses to my little rant. Just to emphasize apathy at Olin, I got to see all of 16 people go to my class election assembly. Sad. Truly sad. Only about a third of our school votes in the Honor Board. Oh so sad. What do we really expect out of a representative government like our nation purports to have when we don't even vote in a situation where our vote does matter. It matters very visibly. btw - about half of voting-age Americans vote in presidential elections. That's not that much, but at least it's more than our tight-knit community can muster.

Not to worry. I still love Olin. I understand people are really really busy. In fact I accounted for 16 people at class elections and about half of that again had good excuses. And I wasn't really asking around or anything. Yay busyness, yay overload, yay Olin! (yay burnout??)

Apathy at Olin & crunch time

Late: [Alt + Shift]

So today I wanted to rant about Olin. Particularly apathy at Olin. So I was at an spc (strategic planning committee) meeting and looked around the room. During the meeting there were 8 people who were current members of the e-board or candidates for the e-board. There were as many as 27 people and as few as 19 people total at the meeting. That's not so bad. The real problem is that it's always these same people who go to all of the committee meetings, town meetings, informal discussions etc. etc.

We are a school of 300 people. There is no reason that people should be completely unrepresented. I don't know how one even goes about trying to represent people who do not show up to discuss their opinions. We end up with systematic bias.

Guess what? The people who go to meetings about strategy for the school want things to change. No duh. I'd really like to know what the silent majority thinks. What do they see Olin as?

Are we a school that pumps out great engineers? Engineers with context? Leaders? Socially conscious world citizens? Are we a school that wants to effect change in engineering education? Is our main goal to influence other schools through our experimental methods of education? Or are we looking to better the world via graduates who help out?

I think the students at Olin do not matter. We are not the focus. There is a higher cause. 300 students don't matter at all when compared to all of the students that stand to gain from our ability experiment. This doesn't mean that I think our students should get a bad education; we need well-educated students to have meaningful experiments.

I just think we should be aware that our education won't be perfect because we will be experimenting. I don't think we want to have good proven classes. This is against our nature. We are meant to experiment. We can try a method, document its progress, do some tweaking and come up with results on what we thought. Then we can move on. Stable classes that are only taught one way year after year should not be our realm. Leave that to MIT and friends. We are quick, we are nimble. We can be inspirational. We can change engineering education and the world. If we have graduates who serve their communities, great. This is the proof that some of our experiments went right. This proves our credibility in the field of experimental learning.

At spc they asked us what we'd like to see our graduates doing in 10 years for us to consider Olin successful. I'd be satisfied with nothing short of our graduates being emulated.

My big bro is coming tomorrow for 4 days. Man... when am I going to get my work done. Oh well. I trust I'll get it done at some point. I generally do.

Making Firefox beat Opera

This is a bit different. Today I bring you one of my favorite hacks ever. I've been reluctant to let go of Opera in favor of Firefox for one reason: I want my tabs along the side and not the top! But now it's all better. [Alt + Shift] It does, however get kinda hairy...

Step 1: Move your tabs
Navigate to the chrome folder in your Firefox profile and add a css file.
-Go to run and run %APPDATA%
-Navigate to mozilla and profiles etc until you get to chrome here's where I ended up:
--C:\Documents and Settings\bdieseldorff\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\k5ok4umo.default\chrome
-Now add a neat little css file to do what you want. I have one up for any interested people here. The name must be userChrome.css
-Chuck that into your "chrome" folder and restart Firefox.
Well damn. That needs work.

Step 2: Make it actually do what you want
Get Tab Mix Plus and set your options to work well
-The options we care about at the moment are under display
--Tab width: choose something between 100 and 250 ish. I
--Use bookmark name as tab title is nice too.
--Restart Firefox

Not too shabby. But the weird gradient needs to go. Up until here I'd been following guides more or less, but I got myself a lucky hack...

Step 3: Make it look nice
Get PageStyle2Tab and wonder why it makes everything all better.
-Restart Firefox
-That's the only step. While I have pseudo-educated guesses, I don't really get why or how it works. But it works and I haven't found anything else that turns the trick. *shrug*
SCORE!!! css hacking, Tab Mix Plus and PageStyle2Tab FTW!!!!

Man that felt awesome. I should also take a quick moment to endorse All-in-one Gestures. It was the other part that I needed to switch from Opera and was substantially easier to implement (read: basically done for me by Mozilla). w00t!! Anyhow, I'll miss a couple of things, but Firefox also has a trick or two that Opera can't touch so I think I'll be OK.

Olin meets netvibes & projects meet time restraints

Alt + Shift

After writing this post I noticed that I didn't rant about how good netvibes is. That would not do so here's the appropriate rant:

It is good. Oh so very good. It is my homepage. It owns a huge portion of my life. Thankfully, Outlook, netvibes and Moleskine have still left me with a 30% share in my life.

Eeek. Forgot to post yesterday. I have to keep up with this better. So I came up with a neat idea about creating netvibes modules that can be used by Olin students. The idea is super-simple and a basic level of implementation is ridiculously easy. I made a collection of links level module for sigsys: and one for circuits: . These modules are currently just collections of links but I'm working on making ones that will use rss. For example, there could be one that updates every time Brad puts up a new circuits handout. Pretty neat I think, but I doubt I'll have a lot of time to put into this until the summer.

Yesterday some Meta ppl ended up going to 7-Eleven. It was pretty awesome cuz we totally brought back the 90s w/Marco's music. Nice. 4 and a half weeks left. 5 projects left for meta. Sweet.

Trip and aftermath & Indian deserts 2.0

Alt + Shift
So I haven't been writing b/c I've been out of town. I went home to NJ as a staging area for a trip to NYC with some friends. Alli, Beto, Molly, Bryce and I had loads of fun and were basically keeping busy from the time we woke to the time we got to bed. We went to Chinatown, the American Museum of National History and, of course, Les Miserables!

Les Mis was substantially different this time around. There was far greater emphasis on intonation of speech than there usually is (sadly, this came at the cost of some raw power in the singing). There were lots of little word or even verse changes here or there, but the single biggest change struck our group close to our communal heart: Molly's favorite song was completely left out.

Man. I've spent about 2 hours tidying up e-mails and reading rss feeds and stuff b/c I wasn't here for one weekend. I was out for 48.5 hours and checked my e-mail for urgent stuff twice in that time, but I still managed to have 2 solid hours of stuff to sort through. There's also my weekly figure out what's up that got completely skipped; I should do that tomorrow... along with lots of homework. Yay!

I had Indian food again today. Raghu had lots of people over to his house and there was a bit of an adventure when Joe's car broke down and my car got an extra passenger. At the end of the day though, the food was great. I've decided that Indian deserts rock my socks. They had something, I think it's called kir, that one would drink. It had almonds and stuff (dairy?rice?) and was really awesome. Anyhow, good times; great food.

Social Investing & a joke

Aight. Big conversations.

I want to address the issue regarding the efficiency of trips to developing nations. I tend to be radically against these. I hate church mission trips to Mexico and feel the same way about habitat trips. These seem like a huge waste of money, time and effort. I know kids who have gone on two-week, thousand dollar trips where they spend a week helping build a house and a week on vacation. Why? Because it would look good for college. Sad. So very sad.

I've heard that the theory is that they will be changed by their experience regardless of their original intentions. *sigh. Is that the best we can do? Spend tons of money and then cross our fingers and hope it changes them in the long run?

No. We can do better. Amy Smith does it right. Her kids are already passionate and then they are thrust into a situation that's truly different. They really see. They try to help. They create deep bonds. They identify; they empathize. And the proof is in the numbers. She said that most of her students end up running with it.

Fantastic investment.

This joke really struck my fancy so I thought I'd share:

God created Adam and everything was great. After a while Adam started to grow bored until one day he goes to talk to God:
- Hey man, I'm getting kinda bored...
- Let me think about it...
The next day God walks excitedly up to Adam:
- Dude. Dude! I figured it out.
- Oh yeah?
- Yup. I can hook you up with the perfect companion. She's hot, she's smart, she'll cater to your every whim; dude, she's perfect.
- Nice. What'll it cost me?
- It'll take an arm and a leg.
- Well shit.
...
What can I get for a rib?

Molding files to my needs & the Olin feudal system

As part of my MetaOlin IS, I'm reading through all of the honor board minutes I can get my hands on. The first step was easy; most of the minutes were easy to find on a network drive. That being said they were all organized at different times by different people and even in different formats.

The different formats were easily the most annoying.

Since word documents are slow to load, mutable and otherwise annoying I decided to make everything a pdf. I started out by using PrimoPDF to print to pdfs; however, Zamzar was a much faster solution. This site lets you upload files and then it converts them to another format; super-chouette! Changing names in batches is much easier with 1-4a Rename.

Also, Foxit Reader is much faster than adobe acrobat reader.

So I've had this conversation a number of times. The basic premise is that everyone at Olin has to swear loyalty to someone in the class directly above them. The question is: which senior has the biggest kingdom? Please speculate in the comments.

Alt + Shift

Google Trends & Day Defined

Alt + Shift
Y'know what's neat? Google Trends is neat. Sure Google TiSP is convenient and Google Paper helps the environment, but do they have the potential to be neat for long enough periods of time that I deem it necessary to have a three key-press shortcut to it? No. That honor is reserved (among others) for gTrends. So what's so cool about gTrends? This:Sad. The legend isn't part of the picture and I'm too lazy to do it properly with screenshots. Anyhow. Blue is "GTD," red is "lifehacker," and orange is "43 folders." Basically Google trends gives you an idea of how much each of these terms is searched versus time. We can see that lifehacker seems to have a similar slope to GTD (short for Getting Things Done), but 43 folders, a more hardcore, niche GTD site, seems to be struggling when it comes to generating new awareness. Largely, the people who would use 43 folders tend to know about it and don't need to Google it whereas lifehacker is a word that's tossed around and might make people curious. Sweet! Here's another example I found fascinating:
The red is genocide, the blue is Darfur. This one shows quite a good correlation and shows off another sweet feature of gTrends; it attempts to link relevant news stories to these search trends. For example, the big spike at B is linked to a news story with the headline "Darfur Rebel Group to Sign Peace Deal." The last bit of data on the graph is the reference news volume. I don't know what this is so I'll make it up. I think they probably just search to see how often your search term appears in news. Not surprisingly, current events search spikes will closely correlate to news spikes, but things more independent of news, like GTD and related sites, will correlate badly.
Anyhow-the moral is: gTrends is super-cool. If you have some cool trend searches, put them in the comments.

So this is from a conversation I just had about my posts. I plan on posting once a day. This, of course, is based on my definition of a day. My very pragmatic definition is that a day ends when one goes to sleep for the night or when the sun rises. Similarly a day is considered started when you get up after sleeping for the night or the sun rises. Some of you'll be all like: "Dude, there's some time when you're asleep that's neither..." Nobody cares. You're asleep; it doesn't matter what day it is.

Work Time & a compliment & victory

Today we look at a little of what I recently learned about my learning. For those who don't know, I keep track of all the time I spend productively pretty meticulously in a notebook I keep with me. I have recently been putting the data on my laptop so that I can make charts like this:

Some neat things to note are that circuits actually beat out Meta and that each of those counts as almost two of the less time-consuming classes. And here's another chart:
This one splits my work by day of the week. Unsurprisingly, Tuesday wins by virtue of being right before Wednesday (read: day everything is due). Sunday was a surprise; I apparently work quite a bit on weekends... who knew?

I got what may well be my favorite compliment ever today. It's awesome when you get a compliment from someone you really respect and look up to. :D

Alt + Shift FTW!!

Honor and Background

I didn't post yesterday. :-(

So I'm doing a project for Meta about the Honor Board or Code. I'm currently making my way through all of the HB minutes ever. I went into it expecting to find that the code and board had lost some meaning and importance over time. At this point I'm inclined (Alt + Shift) to believe otherwise. From the minutes in 2001:

"Do something clause: violation of the code does not necessarily come before the honor board

Need some guidelines about what types of cases go before the board (e.g., all academic cases); difference may not always be clear. Basic idea that the honor board is the last resort, not the first? -> do something clause instructs individuals to deal on their own before contacting the board."

This makes me believe that the code was seen as more applicable and the board as less important. That being said, I expect to find a reaction to that where the board becomes stronger. In particular, I need to find when it expanded to 14 people (I'm running off the assumption that it was not half the school partner year). So many years of minutes to chop through. Well y'all will probably get to hear about it again when I make more sense of things.

Why I have a blog:
I was reading lifehacker and I clicked a link. Then I clicked another link on that site. This brought me to a blog on Yahoo that asked the question: "Why don't young people appreciate the time and effort I put into this blog." The dude out in about four hours a day and had a blog that was passable at best. He thought it was because young people could never handle doing something like keeping a blog themselves. So here I am. Proving him wrong in that regard by proving him right in the opinion that I'm sure he holds: young people are contrary.
I'll post again later tonight to make up for the day I missed. That'll show him. :-)