(In)Finite

November 11th, 2008

There are a lot of ideas floating around in my head right now that I wish I had the time and energy (and funding) to attempt.  Every day, my work as a grad student (read: professional Internet surfer) brings me new and interesting projects to attempt.  Most recently, I stumbled across the Arduino development board over at Sparkfun (if you don’t know the website I’m talking about, this discussion might bore you anyway).  There are at least half a dozen things I could instantly think to try with these, perhaps more.  I have never considered myself much of an ideas person, so this newfound restlessness and eagerness to create has me a little off kilter.  It has introduced yet another force into my life that competes constantly with other things like friends, education, work, sleep, etc for my time and energy.

A guy I work with here at ND had an interesting insight when I mentioned to him my time/priorities woes concerning an idea I wanted to try.  He said, “In my many years doing this kind of design work, I’ve found that any human being has time for maybe a dozen or so serious projects in his or her lifetime.”  It’s scary to think that I can come up with a lifetime worth of work during an idle moment on a busy afternoon.  I’m quickly learning that despite the extreme creative, physical, or intellectual energy I may have, there comes a time where one begins to realize that such energies are tragically finite, and prioritization of ‘projects of passion’ is the key to happiness.

This is perhaps the key to getting old.  When you’re a child, the sky is the limit and you’ll have time somewhere down the road to think, see, and explore every corner of your wildest imagination.  At age 22, I have finally run headlong into the mortality of the human mind.  What each of us does here is  finite.  Most of it goes with us when we are done.  The key is to find those things that are so important to you, that your passion for them will endow them with sufficient love and energy to carry on into the future.  That is immortality.

“What we do in life, echoes in eternity.”

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Quick Update

November 9th, 2008

I’m taking a short break from homework this evening to write a few things down.  I haven’t updated here in quite and while - something which probably needs to change.  I go through my days realizing that one of the personal advantages of blogging, writing, journaling, etc, is that it helps to sort out my thoughts and give a decent hindsight record for the things I do/say/think at any given point in time.  My personal style borders on the memoryless - that is, I have a 48-hour horizon in front and behind me that essentially comprises all things I am currently thinking about.  Everything else needs to be recorded and referenced for later.  Otherwise, it disappears into the void.

Speaking of which, I’ve been messing around with the GTD app “Things”, in both its mobile iPhone and Mac-based incarnations.  I have to say that it has been really useful so far and I hope to have the discipline to keep working with it, as well as the money ($40) to buy a permanent copy of it when revision 1 comes out here in January.  My only major criticism of the app is that sync is a complete mess.  The app tries to sync over your local WiFi network, which works fine if it’s your personal home wireless network.. but ND’s wireless network kills Things’ efforts to sync.  Something more robust and useable in the wide world (inlcuding wired, bluetooth, and over-the-net syncing) would be most favorable.

Running a 5k with no consistent training or running habits hurts.  I finished the race with a surprisingly decent time given my running history, but the hurt in my legs and joints right now reminds me just how out of shape I am.  I estimate that I’m about 15 pounds overweight right now and am trying to piece together some new excercise habits by the end of the semester.  With enough discipline I should be able to get my weight and general fitness back to ~Summer 2007 levels.  I was very proud of how hard I managed to train that summer and hope that I have it in me to achieve that again.

On the football front.. I can’t really report much.  ND Football is essentially in shambles again as we witnessed another pathetic loss to BC.  I always try to err on the side of positive thinking with this team, but these last few losses really confirm it:  the team is deflated.  They played with no heart.  Boneheaded mistakes combined with a lack of any semblence of intensity has me seriously considering the possibility that we will not go to a bowl this year - something I considered impossible in September.

My work project has picked up a little.  We’re moving closer to something tangible on this project and I’m very anxious to work with the new hardware when it comes back from the board house (actually, I need to send it to the board house first).

Outside of the project, there is academic hell.  I find myself harboring intense loathing for my classes and at least one of my professors.  Grad school classes are supposed to be hard.  I understand that.  What I can’t figure out is their approach to ‘mastery’ of the material.  Admittedly, some of my background is rather weak (I suck at calculus), but the way I struggle along with my peers suggests that the profs are more concerned with messing with our heads than they are with actual learning.  TCEs are going to be ugly.  The one saving grace is that I’m fairly confident re-tooling my area of concentration within EE will solve some of these problems.  I’m a highly visual/spatial/big-picture person and at least two of the courses I have lined up for next semester will serve those tendencies well (I hope).

I could spend hours on any of these subjects, but my 15-minute break is up.  Random Vect homework continues to be frustrating beyond reason.  I hope I sleep tonight.

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Rolling Right Along

September 20th, 2008

The Michigan State game was a little disappointing, but nothing to get too terribly riled up about.  Both teams fought hard and the Irish were unfortunately on the receiving end of some bad luck and unfortunate plays.  I have a great deal of confidence in our schedule from here on out (that is, except for USC, but I always hope to beat them anyways).  It’s been fun so far to see the band and the new drum majors out on the field or on tv.  The three of them are looking more comfortable every week and I hope (for my own ego’s sake) that somehow my legacy has influenced them in some way.

Nerd alert:  That said, they’d better be ready to throw down some sick mace action Stanford weekend.

There are many other things going on that I could rant about tonight, but probably not now.  Also, if you are so inclined, check out the official A State of Trance podcast on the iTMS.  I won’t say that Armin is for everybody, but I certainly enjoy his work.  Check it out.

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Relapse

July 27th, 2008

I have to say that I’ve been missing WoW for the first time in a year.  No ideas yet as to why, but I’m using every ounce of my strength to avoid it.  This may have something to do with the untimely death of my gaming computer and my current quest to rebuild it.  Somehow I need a game to justify rebuilding this thing and with the new expansion coming up, returning to my old MMO ways could be it.

With grad school starting in full force, this is obviously a bad idea.  I probably won’t return, but just feel weird because if there ever was a ‘withdrawal’ period, this is certainly it.

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The Project

July 17th, 2008

So just in case you haven’t heard, I’m going ahead with this whole graduate school thing right here at Notre Dame.  I’m happy to keep the familiar people and surroundings as I ease into this new mode of life.  Really buckling down and focusing on my career and academic goals is a fairly new feeling for me.  The work is rather interesting so far and I really want to make a big splash around here.

As for the project:  I’m being financially supported for the next two years as a part of a CCLI grant through the National Science foundation.  In a nutshell, this project aims to explore some new approaches to the undergraduate curriculum around here.  Due to the wide availability of consumer electronics, cell phones, ipods, etc, most new engineers entering EE are already reasonably familiar with the concept of signals and interactions between digital systems.  This is a lot different than the previous generation of EEs, most of whom got their start messing around with resistors, capacitors, and inductors, learning more about circuits and electronics (or at least interacting with these things) before they start college.  As such, most traditional curriculums are geared towards starting with the basics (ie: circuit analysis, ohm’s law, etc).  Students of ‘yore could understand these things very readily.

Unfortunately, most young people today grow up without any relevant hands-on experience with electrical components due to the fact that integrated circuits and their corcuit boards have gotten so small and complex that it’s difficult to understand their operation without the truckload of theory and arm-waving that goes on during the first couple semesters of any traditional EE experience.  Digital information, on the other hand, is a much more straightforward thing for new EEs to understand due to most no doubt having had hands-on experience with devices that operate on the principles of data representation and exchange.  The sleight of hand that was formerly needed to convince students of the ‘black box’ operation of these systems now seems to come naturally to so many.

It’s the sign of our times:  I know what goes in, I know what I want to come out, and I don’t give a crap about what goes on in the middle - pure black-box thinking at its finest.  It’s the proverbial hamsters-on-wheels scenario: the inner workings are so bizarre at times that it’s not even worth asking why on earth we decided to do it that way in the first place.

At any rate, my work doesn’t have any direct intervention in this philosophy.  I will, in effect, be taking every lab, instrument, and piece of astronomically-expensive piece of equipment I used as an undergrad, and will ram these components together at high speed, hopefully producing a product that students will use in a ‘vertically-integrated’ environment throughout their 3+ years wading through the murky swamps of EE.  The short (ha!) checklist of what we’re trying to make:

1. Do anything and everything, including stuff we haven’t decided on yet

2. Be cheap

3. Be sexy and robust

4.  Interact with a cross-platform software suite (of our making) that does everything

5. Also be capable of doing most of these things without intervention from the computer

6. Be extremely interactive and customizable - essenially ‘pins-out’ through and through

7. Be expandable

8. Be as close to completely open-source as possible

9. Cure cancer

I’m still working on how that last part is going to play out.

I remain optimistic about the outcome of things and the massive amount of prototyping that will be going on over the next two years.  I’m looking closely at Atmel’s new AVR32 line of application processors (which, apparently Erik is shooting/shot into space - http://nanosat.wustl.edu/projects/).  They are certainly sexy little ICs, but will definitely be a challenge to design for as they represent a relative design complexity upgrade for me akin to learning to drive the space shuttle with my feet.

Awesome.

Enough ranting.  More on this later.  I need to find out about the university’s licenses of OrCad or Eagle is simply going to kill me.

Phew.  I’ll see you kids at the backer.

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Back in the US

June 11th, 2008

China was all kinds of awesome.  I was a huge fan of the food and thoroughly enjoyed seeing such an ancient yet rapidly-changing country.  If you’re a fan of facebook, I’m sure you’ve seen most of the pictures by now.  There was a lot to see and a lot to reflect on, and hopefully I will get down to writing a more thorough breakdown of all of the things that happened over there.  My family enjoyed the gifts I brought back for them, including the paintings for my mom, the sword for John’s graduation, and the jade pillow for my grandma (oh yeah, and everyone else got chopsticks and a sake set).  I had the most intense case of ‘it’s a small world’ on the way back - a prof I had interviewed with for a position at Purdue was sitting in the Tokyo Narita International Airport waiting for the same flight back to the States.  There was a brief and awkward moment of recognition followed by the silent agreement that we weren’t going to exchange a single word for the duration of our travels.

Right now I’m looking at closing out my first two weeks a graduate student here at ND.  The project I’m working on is pretty cool and I’m really hoping that my efforts on it this summer make a good impression with my advisor and the EE department as a whole.  Even though I’m already known around here, I feel like I had never had or taken the opportunity to really shine and show these people what I can do.  I have had my advisor and the two other CCLI faculty on this project as class professors before, but it’s been almost two years since those classes and it’s time to reestablish myself with them.

The CCLI investigation should have me playing with the RPI Mobile Studio IO Board project for a while.  It’s unknown as to whether or not we will eventually adopt this learning system as a stepping off point for the curriculum changes proposed in the project, or if the lessons learned from exploring with the board this summer will convince us that the entire solution needs to be packaged in-house.

The band softball team is kicking butt already.  We destroyed Beers Law 20-1 on Tuesday and hope to repeat this accomplishment against Eigenvalues tomorrow.  The team has been a cool way to keep in touch with many band people, some graduated, some not.  EO and Merten are on the team and they always seem to add their own bits of fun and personality to things.  Hopefully I will stay in touch with them throughout the awkward grad years.

Outside of research I have been keeping busy scrounging for an extra part-time job and working out whenever I can motivate myself to do so.  It’s hard to get the routine going again, but I’m confident that something will solidify by the end of the month.  China jet-lag had me getting up early enough in the morning to allow time to run and eat a healthy breakfast, but alas the insomnia has worn off and I am back to my old ways.  It would help a lot if I could find a consistent lifting partner.

I was cool to be home and see my brother’s graduation party.  Both John and Mike are headed off to college this coming fall.  The inter-school rivalry (however small) between Notre Dame and Purdue should provide a few laughs next year (God, I hope we win).  I’m sure that John will have a good time at Purdue.  It’s a good school with a lot going on and many different niches to find, including clubs, academic societies, and band.  My parents think he wants to transfer to ND for his sophomore year, but knowing John he’ll probably settle in just fine and find his own identity in West Lafayette.  Notre Dame is a great place but I think my experience here may have skewed his expectations of the atmosphere and the people.  I’m sure he would have been happy here, but sometimes these things happen for a reason and he will end up wowing some people at Purdue.

That what I have for now.  I keep promising myself that these updates will get more regular so that the quality of each topic will get better and less rambling.  Alas, I will have to save that for the next post.

-R

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China!

May 22nd, 2008

We’ve been in China for a couple of days now.  The sights have been really cool, including the Great Wall, Tiannamen Square, Forbidden City, and the Imperial Summer Palace. The food has been really good, albeit a little strange at times - I think it has freaked out more than a few people on this trip.  Last night someone in our group started a rumor that the soup was ‘pig brain soup’, causing a brief panic amongst the more squeamish individuals.

I hope to try deep-fried scorpions before we leave.  I’ll post a more detailed update later on.

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Pushing paper

January 7th, 2008

My Christmas break job gives me a newer, more expanded appreciation for the fact that I am not majoring in accountancy. It never ceases to amaze me that a single transaction, even for something as simple as a waffle iron rental, can generate such a flurry of papers, checks, forms, and other strange actions simply to ensure that somebody (read: nobody) will be able to refer to it seven years later.

Good grief. At least the money is good. I’m back in the ‘Bend on Saturday.

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Passing the torch

December 10th, 2007

Tomorrow brings the final decision.  Though I am relieved to be effectively ‘retired’ from this adventure, I do not relish that which will be my final act: to make three people exceptionally happy, and three others equally unhappy.  All of them are great people and I have been glad to work with them throughout the entire process.

Though it does not affect me directly, it is still an emotional thing.  This marks the point where I no longer have any direct control over the content of my legacy.  These three talented people will carry it on in their actions in the coming years.  I can only hope that they will count me among those who inspired them to do greater things.

It’s funny, talking about my own legacy.  I don’t believe I’ve ever left anything that can be significantly referred to as a ‘legacy’.  Most people go through countless years of life before they can truthfully claim to have ‘left something behind for those that follow’.  A lot of this is egotistical nonsense, but it still rings of truth.  I have never been a part of something so much bigger than myself and truly hope that I have left it positively imprinted.

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And away we go

December 8th, 2007

Finals are upon us.  This has been an insanely crazy and awesome fall semester that has gone by all too quickly.  Now is the time to assess and conquer those last few obstacles before we all get a well-deserved rest.

Lurking in the distance:

DM final selections

Three exams, one paper

Miscellaneous grad school and job application deadlines

In related news, Red Death was a pleasant success that achieved the necessary triefecta of a successful college night: (1) People passed out in strange, awkward, or novel places, (2) A trashed house featuring floors so sticky that they steal one’s shoes, and (3) hilarious and awkward hookups all around.  Stay classy kids.

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