August 24, 2008

Sarah: how to make friends and influence people

I discovered today that the most popular person at the market is the one cutting up watermelon samples. Specifically, samples of Heinz's watermelons, which come in a variety of sizes and colors (inside and out) and all of which are among the best watermelons I've ever tasted. I have a blister on my finger from cutting so many watermelons today.

I kept checking with Heinz to see whether I was putting out too many samples, but he says that people are much more likely to buy his melons when they've tasted them. I believe it--so many people wandered by, absently grabbed a free sample and brought it to their mouths while still walking, only to stop in their tracks and turn around to demand more information of me: "Are they all this sweet?" Yes. "How do I pick a good one?" I've cut up 8 watermelons so far today and haven't found one yet that wasn't fantastic. "How much are they?" $1 a pound. $1 a pound is pretty expensive for watermelons, and I've seen people's eyes bug out when their $10 watermelons get rung up (we have a $10 cap per watermelon). But they come back the next week and buy more.


One of the many lunch-sized watermelons that I schlepped home today. I don't know if it's clear from this photo, but the watermelon is about 10 inches long.

Considering that the farmers market is my favorite part of the week, I haven't blogged about it much. I think this is probably because I'm so exhausted at the end of it. But I think it must be said--working at the farmers market is great. I love the people-watching--you can never tell by appearance who is going to exclaim with great excitement, "Oh, honey! They have callaloo!" I love offering samples of Sungold cherry tomatoes to Japanese tourists snapping photos. I love seeing toddlers gripping tomatillos and staring at them with wonder. I love setting up Heinz's display of bell peppers in rainbow order: red, orange, yellow, green, and lilac. I love getting Camembert from the milk people and bread from the bakery, and tearing off pieces to eat while I work. I love the other people who work at the stand. And I really love having access to all the delicious, organic, picked-yesterday produce that I can carry to the bus stop.

After the crucial shower and nap on Sunday afternoon, I've usually recovered enough to do some cooking for lunches for the next few days. Tonight, I made a quiche. There are more pictures, along with directions, on Flickr. I'll just put the start and finish pictures here.





It's not fancy, or really even very pretty, but it tastes good, and it's fairly easy.

August 24, 2008 10:21 PM

August 23, 2008

Sarah: food again

I've been out of town for the past two weekends, which means that as of this morning my supply of fresh vegetables was down to three tomatoes and a few tomatillos. On principle, I try to only get produce from the farmers market. I know that I could go to a grocery store, but I kind of enjoy the challenge.

This morning I couldn't resist going to the Mt. Pleasant farmers market, which I normally avoid because I know I'll be getting free vegetables on Sunday. I wanted to make tabouli, but no one at the market had parsley, so I got purslane instead, and I didn't have any cracked wheat, so I used barley. It actually turned out really well--the barley has a nice texture, and the purslane stood up well to being chopped. My recipe, roughly, was:

1/2 c. dry barley (plus 1 c. water, simmered for ~20 min.)
purslane
1 small onion, diced
1 small cucumber, diced
5 small really tasty heirloom tomatoes, diced
1/2 c. each of lemon juice and olive oil, whisked with salt and pepper

August 23, 2008 03:23 PM

August 22, 2008

Skuld2006's Xanga: work is seriously off its rocker

. . . or maybe I am.  I've been so tired lately.  It's funny, too, because I haven't been working very many hours, only 2 extra this week and 6 extra last week, maybe?  Or maybe none extra last week, yeah, that's right.  But I work really hard.  Recently the work is on too short a time-scale with all decisions final until they are different.  I'm in a lull right now, between the end of one design cycle and the beginning of the next, so I can think and relax a little.  Also, I can turn my attention back to the pile-up of work I was supposed to be doing.  So I'm thinking again that maybe I should work overtime so that I can be less stressed out.  But I don't want to work overtime!  Can't I just be free to work hard at a normal pace with reasonable constraints and then go play afterwards?  Well, in truth, there's no reason why I can't, which feels like something DJ would say.  It's all in my head, really.  I could just work less hard, less fast, and with less of an insane perfectionistic streak.  But how?  I feel like it would be not me.  My favorite solution is this dream that I will eventually find a job that is interesting and extremely easygoing.  I think the corporate world's deadlines are not for me. 

On the other hand, I still feel like a bit of a wuss for being burned out by a 40-hour work week.  I don't know.  I will stay with my job for now, though.  It seems like not the right answer to go looking for another.  And I will try to go to bed early tonight.

August 22, 2008 12:58 AM

August 20, 2008

Tim: What a gorgeous evening!

Ahhhh. This afternoon was wonderful in all its pre-autumnal glory. On the way home, I looked out on the Charles River Basin and decided I wanted to go jogging, so I did. I came back (it was wonderful), showered, grabbed my copy of Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and a falafel from Falafel Palace, and retired to a park just up the way from my apartment and ate my falafel while reading about Haruki Murakami looking out on the same Charles River Basin and renewing his laid-away habit of running. Huh! Msr. Murakami also noted Cambridge's summer inevitability of Sam Adams Summer Ale, of which I've quaffed my share these last months. Fun to have some degree of empathy with possibly (for reasons I don't necessarily understand) my favorite author ever.

The director of biology sat me and the other intern down and told us that we should know where we want to be and run for it. She said she stumbled from one position to another almost by accident, and wishes she'd had a little more direction. I was chatting with one of the senior scientists (who's not all that senior, either) today and she said something similar! And neither of them are US natives; the director is Iranian by way of England and Australia and the scientist was born and raised in China, so it's not like they didn't take big steps for their careers. I guess I should give a little thought now and then to the idea that inshallah I'll be thirty, forty, fifty someday...

Also, thought this was funny: Someone did a quick survey and the Hillary Clinton alumni email list is putting its money on Joe Biden as Obama's VP pick. Though who knows how informed they really are -- Hillary got 23% of the votes. (Wishful thinking?)

August 20, 2008 12:09 AM

August 19, 2008

Sarah: fantastic weekend

This weekend I flew to Oklahoma to spend the weekend with my sister and brother-in-law, and to meet my incredible new nephew. Considering that he's only a month and a half old, and is still learning to control his limbs, the little guy is pretty captivating.

B and C are giving him a head start on potty-training: he has a tiny potty that he sits on (with assistance) whenever he needs a diaper change. He is actually quite patient with the whole process:



Still, we decided that he might like a little reading material to peruse while sitting on the potty. We started with Webdings and Wingdings fonts as inspiration, and painted a nice set of eight high-contrast images:



Early reviews were... somewhat less than glowing (to be fair, he was already crying when he got put on his potty, so his eyes were squeezed shut and he may not have actually seen our pretty pictures).



However, a second viewing met with more success:



Someday he'll no doubt be embarrassed by all of these pictures--but he's so damn cute sitting there in his little socks.

August 19, 2008 10:50 PM

Gui: Imagine

For the longest time I've been fascinated by what exists.

Classes like Responsive Drawing would really excite me - I was learning to draw what was there in front of me. If I spent enough time on it, I could even get to the point where the drawing looked surprisingly like the real thing! It was as if I were taking a photo, only it was slower and crappier! Very occasionally after the class, I would get inspired to draw, only to lose interest in the pursuit of an interesting object to sketch. By and large, I stopped drawing.

My writing was also reactionary. I was inspired to start writing when I started dating Jenn the second time - all sorts of happy thoughts and memories were banging around in my head, begging to escape. I continued refining my writing in this kind of autobiographical style; something would inspire me, and would keep echoing louder and louder in my head until I committed it to paper. Appeased, the memory would then recede and let me be.

Then something changed.

I'm not sure how it's come about, but recently I've been focusing much more on what's... not... there. What should be, but isn't. I guess it started when I started keeping a design notebook - at the repeated, persistent requests of several professors, I would write down or draw whatever was on my mind, then sign and date the page. 

I started it by proclaiming that I would draw one robot a night. This lasted three days. The notebook immediately fell into disuse. Then... I think work got boring for a stretch of a few weeks. I wasn't challenged creatively, my imagination wasn't put to good use. My mind wandered, my subconscious stewed, and out from the boredom ideas started popping into my head.

At first, the ideas were all modifications. In-the-box ways to implement fixed goals - build a force-controlled actuator (i.e., the never-ending battle), attach part A to part B in a way that doesn't snap, etc.

But then...

I started paying attention to whims. A completely impractical three-legged robot, that served no other purpose than to exist. A shock absorber, designed to be elegant while maintaining a scrap of an excuse of function. A gorilla's arm, pared down to the absolute minimum of structure and power. Robots made entirely of discarded appliances. A set of frictionless crutches, meant to be worn over long periods of time without chafing.

I didn't set out to design any of these things. I didn't set a goal, I didn't pick a target. They washed over me, and I got to my notebook fast enough to let them out. Fair enough, I thought to myself, these are engineering artifacts that I might have come up with had I actively decided to work on a given problem.

But...

Today, I drew someone from a dream. I've never seen her before, but I know her. I know her face, the tattoos on her back, the color of her eyes, her hair. She's... taken form. I'm in some form of... shock. I'm staring at a woman who I've brought into being from my own subconscious, nothing more, nothing less. I've never seen anyone like her, she's never existed, and yet here she is. She's from... my mind. What the hell is going on. Who is that woman, who drew her, what is going on.

Something inside me is fundamentally breaking as I stare into her eyes.

I've become fascinated by what doesn't exist.

August 19, 2008 05:10 AM

Casey: Folk Festival Summer

I really need to spend a summer going to folk festivals. I love them.

I had the best time at the Philly Folk Fest this year. I was nervous about going by myself and jumping into a committee that I basically knew nothing about, but it worked out perfectly. Central Control is responsible for all of the rented tables and chairs at the festival. We also help out with moving musicians between stages and anything else that happens to come up.

I drove up to Schwenksville on Wednesday to work pre-fest. I barely started putting up my tent when a call came:

Rob: "So, do you want to go to work?"
Bill: "Don't ask her that, obviously the answer is no."
Me: "I guess I can, I'm not really doing anything else today. I can set up my tent later."

We then preceded to move a bunch of tables and chairs. We did the same thing on Thursday. It was actually really fun to sit in the back of the cube truck while it drove frighteningly fast across the pothole ridden ground. There was only one especially scary point when someone with zero experience was driving the truck and slammed on the brakes because he didn't realize that anyone was in the back.

It was so nice to be outside doing manual labor after an entire summer of being shut up in an office. After all of the heavy lifting, I walked to the swimming hole with Gus and we took a dip in the water. That night it rained and we listened to the evening concert from out campsite, underneath the shelter. We were right on the edge of the campground, in the corner, next to the Camp Stage.

I ended up with the Friday 8am-4pm, Saturday 4pm-midnight, and Sunday 12pm-8pm shifts. We did a bunch of last minute set up (beer garden, cafe etc.) on Friday morning and then I hung out with Zach and watched the evening concert. There was this amazing ukelele player - Jake Shimabukuro (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9mEKMz2Pvo). I bought his CD. I really want to learn the ukelele now. I also made a new friend named Neora. It was her first year at fest and we got into this whole discussion about sexuality and religion over dinner. She was born in Israel and is now studying in Philly to become a rabbi. She was also queer. She didn't have a campsite yet, so I invited her to camp next to me. Unfortunately, she ended up leaving the next day because she just wasn't prepared for camping - she had forgotten all this important stuff like her toothbrush, flashlight, and medication. Maybe I will see her next year. That night I went for a walk around the campground and ended up staying up until 4am.

Saturday was my favorite. I watched a showcase in the morning that might as well have been called "the lesbian showcase" because more than half the performers were lesbians (Chris Pureka, Nicole Reynolds, Ellis). Later that day, Janis Ian performed. I was impressed with the lesbian presence on stage. I also wandered around all the crafts, which is always fun. That made me want to learn glass blowing. At 4pm, my shift started and there was nothing to do. We all sat around being bored for the longest time. We amused ourselves by trying to annoy obnoxious ticket-holders and taking photos of the Saturday Sweep. This year the theme was PFF Prom so all the guys from Security were dressed in ball gowns.  Around 8pm, we all went backstage to help out during the evening concert. I was very excited about pushing drum sets on stage and setting up water bottles for the performers. Every time I went on stage, I would text Zach to see if he saw me. Winnie and I were fooling around backstage and got chastized for laughing too loudly - apparently we were getting picked up on stage. Luckily, the stage manager has a crush on Winnie, so we didn't really get in that much trouble. We snacked on hospitality food between acts. Most of Saturday night was singer/songwriters who carry their own instruments, so there wasn't much to do. It didn't get that exciting until Judy Collins arrived. We had to escort her on and off the premises - she was kind of a diva.

On Sunday, my highlight was transporting Trout Fishing in America from the Lobby Stage to the Main Stage. I was mostly pleased because I did it all by myself and I did an excellent job. I loaded up Judy's car with their instruments, drove them down to the Main Stage, and then gave them a ride back up to the CD-signing area. (My favorite song by them: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QB2m5nJnHnI). Later, the tall guy pulled me aside backstage because he had lost his phone and was hoping I could look for it since he was performing in 40 minutes. I found it in the car and brought it back to him with 20 minutes to spare (I also pulled down the curtain on the Tank Stage, which is why it took so long). He was so relieved and gave me a hug hug. I also saw Kimya Dawson and Great Big Sea perform that day. At the end of the concert, we had to break down all of the tables and chairs in the concert area (including reserved seating, hospitality, cafe, and beer garden) - which took something like 2-3 hours. By midnight, we rolled back into the campsite.

The next morning, we retrieved all of the tables and chairs from the campgrounds and ensured that everything was accessible for the rental service to pick up.

Now I have everything to look forward to for next summer and a standing invitation to attend the Mariposa Festival in Canada (http://www.mariposafolk.com/signpost.php?dest=festival).

August 19, 2008 03:45 AM

August 18, 2008

Tim: Today today today

I woke up this morning and intended to clean out my inbox and start packing and cleaning (I move out of my summer sublet on Saturday; I'm camping out with the Somerville kids for three nights before moving in to Olin on Tuesday evening). Instead, I realized it was a beautiful day.

After going shopping and purchasing my last summer week's worth of food (mostly bagels and things that go with rice), I took a freezing cold shower (the hot water has since returned) and mucked around with the Boston Harborwalk Fort Point Channel mp3 tour. It took me half a damn hour to get the mp3s onto my Zune, by which point I had lost interest -- I'd at least seen the neighborhood before, on the way to taking my GREs (which were successfully reported! despite my never showing ID -- oops?), and I kind of think they're astroturfing some of the neighborhood's cool factor. So I got off the Red Line at Park Street instead of South Station and walked around the Commons and Garden for a bit before starting in on the Freedom Trail, which I followed all the way up to the Bunker Hill monument in Charlestown. I got to walk on the USS Constitution about five minutes before it closed for the evening, which was kind of cool! I have some generally unremarkable photos which I'll probably post eventually. I think it's pretty badass that the Boston Massacre victims are buried right next to Sam Adams. We knew how to agitate, back in our day. Also, brick townhouses on Monument Ave in Charlestown: gorgeous! (Zillow says they're in the $800-1000k range, which might be attainable someday, and WalkScore gives them a respectable 81 for walkability. Though now I'm spoiled - Central Square has a score of 94! Olin? Like, 50. D:) I say things like "yeah, I don't really worry about my future salary" but then things like real-estate break that down.

I really like watching snare drum hits and low bass thumps on oscilloscope visualizations.

What's the difference between a Fast Fourier Transformation and a Fourier transformation done quickly?

Anyway, to-do:
- Show some progress towards any of the mid-term goals mentioned previously (oops)
- Clean out inboxes
- Begin packing
- Clean out room
- Buy some non-ugly clothes for crying out loud

Funny how it looks like the list of things I was going to do this weekend. ;P

August 18, 2008 03:12 AM

August 16, 2008

Gui: My favorite ice-cream truck in the world...

Ghetto Ice Cream Truck

August 16, 2008 02:35 PM

August 13, 2008

Ash: The Summer of the Perfect Storm

I’m pretty sure some of my experiences this summer resulted from what I’m now calling the perfect storm.  I was in a group with guys that when put together acted like they were in a frat.  Once they were told this behavior was not appropriate, they got a lot better.  One of them did refuse to speak to me for the rest of the summer, but that is his loss.   To remind you of the ratios I face: my project group 1:16, my branch 1:30. I’m that one.  I think those only added to the problems I faced.  There were enough guys around that I made only a tiny dent in the population.

The guys still have their moments. I’ve now learned that a good way to answer the phone is by grunting. Yes, grunting.  I’ve also learned that breakfast is eaten at 10 am and takes a half hour, then lunch takes another hour at 12:30, then they get hungry a little while later. Burping is also totally cool at every occasion, as is walking into the office scratching your crotch.  I find it funny that none of them can use foul language around me without acting like they’ve offended me.  They really should try living with me.

I did talk to the only other female engineer I know here before she disappeared to work on a project and she realized then that there were only two other females in engineering she could name. They were all heads of branches and thus management, not engineers.  I didn’t even know the other two. With her gone it got a bit isolating, but I was saved by the one other female on the hallway who is on the administrative side of the division.  I went weeks without talking to women at points, and it did get old.  Having no role model is a tad tough at points.

I’ve been asked “what guy did this for you”, I’ve had to spend hours trying to track down information I “didn’t need” or that someone else clearly had (actually only the vendor had it and I needed their contact information), I’ve had to stand up for every calculation I make, I’ve been told I can’t tell the guys they are wrong but they can tell me they are wrong any time they want, I’m always the first to be questioned, I’m generally ignored but have almost come to like it,  if I stick up for myself then I’m a witch. The list goes on, and half of it is very stubble.  It took four weeks for the guys in the building to start talking to me. The first time one did it I almost fell over. Now all the guys, even the ones on my project seem to be ok with me being around.  However, look at how long it took.

It’s funny now;  I almost love this place. Yes, being female here sucks sometimes, but I love the work.  It’s the type of work that I throw myself into and come out knowing a lot more. It’s hands on, pushing the envelope, and amazing.  It frustrates me that I watched the male interns drop right into the social structure of the group and it took me 10 weeks, so right as I’m about to leave I finally fit in, and even then it is slightly questionable. I’m still on the fence about coming back. No place is perfect, but going through this again is not something I look forward to.  I am a woman in aerospace and an electrical engineer, and latter makes for few women, but being one of the former means even fewer women. I’ve already started cracking this place, and cracking a new place is not appealing.

To all who have listened to me complain, wine, and generally be grumpy, I’m sorry and thank you. Thank you to those who have pulled me through this summer (Allison, Amy, Ben). One of you continually removed me from the situation when things got bad and welcomed me into your summer adventures. The other two of you acted as voices of experience from both sides of this debacle and kept me going.  One of those two continually reminded me that no matter how small I felt here I was very important, and to just keep hanging in there.

And I did hang in there. In four days I’m on an airplane out of here with very mixed feelings about the experience. I’ve learned a lot about engineering, and likely more about me. I know now that I am a lot stronger than I thought I was.

August 13, 2008 04:49 AM

August 11, 2008

Tim: VOSTA? and unfiled updates

Mid-term goals:
- Develop a coherent style and/or philosophy of management and/or government. Apply it through CORe and/or SCOPE.
- Understand the wars/genocide(s) in former Yugoslavia/Serbia/what the hell ever happened in that region anyway. AHS Capstone?
- Scope out labs; figure out where I want to go to grad school.

This weekend was good for me psychically. Nantucket with Jobim, Angela, Andrea, and her family on Saturday -- we daytripped out and stayed at (count the links) Andrea's mother's boyfriend's sister's house. It was a beautiful day at the beach, and I got to try my hand on their inflatable windsurfing board, which was an impressive amount of fun. The thing about Nantucket is that even mentioning Nantucket (and most of the Cape, really) makes you sound like a pretentious bag or an aspirant to the landed gentry. Fun to experience, though, and I'd go back in a heartbeat! Today I spent several hours at Simon's cleaning out my inbox, biking straight past 1369 in Inman in the process (and good riddance). The yerba mate latte at Simon's is interesting but at medium size, the flavor of the mate is almost completely lost in the milk (with or without its charming trademark latte-art heart).

Thao Nguyen with the Get Down Stay Down are playing TT's on Tuesday! It's an 18+ show, even. I'm picking up tickets tomorrow; give a holler if you want one.

My damn laptop keeps locking up on the docking station. I reimaged at the end of the year but whatever causes the hanging has persisted / was reinstalled. Boo. Makes it a lot harder to, you know, use.

I expressed a number of interesting sentiments tonight. I intend to follow up on essentially none of them. Is the unimplemented, examined life as fatal as the merely unexamined? Perhaps it's worse: overexamination leads to paralysis, thus compounding indirection with hesitation.

I wonder what this semester will be like. I have a lit class at Babson that meets for 2.5 hours on Tuesday nights. The Stars and Dandy Warhols concert in early September is on a Tuesday night. Crap guys what do I do! I guess I have already seen Stars this year and don't really need to see the Dandy Warhols, but augh. Torquil Campbell! Amy Millan! I hope you will forgive me. Then again, I know that professor, and she will definitely forgive me. Hmmm.

In secret, we believe we're nothing nothing nothing that we need.
I almost really really like Mates of State. I would probably LOVE them remixed or covered. By the Postal Service. Yes.

Two weeks of work left!

August 11, 2008 03:42 AM

August 09, 2008

Casey: Oh Man

The summer is wrapping up, which is good and bad.

I only have 2 more days left of work, which is kind of exciting. I've actually grown to really like my job at Constellation Energy. Even if I was doing kind of boring stuff and spent way too much time staring at a computer screen, all of the people were really fun. I liked the office environment a lot. The only eh-part was that guy I worked with on my project. He was fine to work with, but I didn't actually enjoy his company at all.

This weekend is going to involve lots of working on my SEA Semester application, packing/cleaning, and taking care of Kelly (she just got her wisdom teeth out). My parents are planning to move to Pasadena, MD (to a little house on the water) some time in the next year so I need to leave the house in some sort of respectable state.

On Wednesday, I head out for the Philly Folk Fest. I get back on August 18th and then I'm touring a Nuclear Power Plant the next day. The day after that, I'm leaving for Nebraska for a family reunion. I'll get home just in time to leave for Boston. Busy, busy, busy - which is why this is packing weekend.

Luckily, I'll be back in town for the National SWE Conference in November. YOU SHOULD ALL COME. IT'S GOING TO BE AWESOME. I <3 BALTIMORE!

Right now there's some sort of anime convention. I was walking to the other side of the harbor last night (to watch Casablanca on Federal Hill) and there were all these people wandering around in funny costumes with badges.

I also met this woman who did a SEA Semester in 1993 as a freshman in college. She told me the most amazing stories about standing watch at 3am while strapped into the bow of the ship - the night sky reflected against the ocean as far as you can see. I'm so excited for it. Now if only I wasn't so nervous about everything going wrong with my application.

Summer Highlights:
Going to Bethany Beach with all my high school friends
Seeing Bitch perform at the Capital Pride Women's Party
Learning to play Bridge
Taking a belly-dancing class
Baltimore Erotic Arts Festival
Visiting Boston - where I drank lots of tea with good friends and found awesome shoes
Going to Flicks on the Hill every week

etc. etc. It was a good summer.

August 09, 2008 03:08 AM

August 08, 2008

Boris: Mostly Asleep?

I had two really weird dreams last night.

In the first one, I stuffed someone’s shot in basketball. The weird part? I was playing a sport. Haha j/k. The weird part is that I’m almost positive that I actually swung my real-world arm and hit my bed.

This was followed by a dream where I dropped something acidic on three spots of my hand. My brain insists that it was “about as acidic as capsaicin.” I have no clue how acidic capsaicin is. Also, pure capsaicin doesn’t look like the oil in my dream. Anyhow. The weird part was that I felt it on my real-world hand for what seems like a couple of hours. I was asleep so maybe my time-perception was off, but it lasted through several unrelated dreams…

I think those are the two weirdest dreams I’ve had and remembered since the one with the cartoon fish that ate my older brother or the ridiculous one with the Scooby-Doo meets Paper Mario styled monsters that were trying to find me, my friends and my family in some weird mansiony thing. Those dreams are like 6 years old or something though… dreams are weird.

August 08, 2008 02:10 PM

August 07, 2008

Boris: Biphasing again - now with gratuitous physical exertion

So I was looking at my schedule for this coming semester and some of the times lined up all pretty for me to schedule a nap…

So I’m doing biphasic again. I’m also going to be working out and doing something aerobic - a combination that I haven’t done for something like 4 years. The first time I did biphasic I was hitting 4.5 hours every day. And I would get tired/bored when people weren’t around (eg 04:30). So I’m going to try to avoid some of that this time around.

My schedule works somewhat better for it this year. Instead of staying awake and bored until 5, I’ll be in bed at 2 or 03:30. This should help with boredom at night and it gives me a nice chunk of time at 06:30 when the Babson gym opens.

Sadly, the schedule is a bit less straightforward. I wake up every day at 06:30, but there’s two different times I go to bed. On Wednesdays, SCOPE steals a nap. At the end of the day I’ll average just under 5 hours a day of sleep. I will, however, be adding in a bunch of physical activity so I might find myself needing more rest - we’ll see.

There’s two ways to go about a new sleep schedule. Gradual transition and habit forming or sleep deprivation. The second one is what I’ll be trying this time around. The abrupt change from summer sleep hours and the addition of running or swimming should make sure my body is begging for whatever sleep I decide it can take. That’s the quick, if plausibly painful, way to go about it. At least I’m not doing an uberman schedule where I don’t sleep at all for the first three days or anything that extreme…

Still haven’t figured out why I like toying with my sleep so much… I’m sure I’ll babble about how it goes in my blog

August 07, 2008 03:18 PM

Kelcy: Summer

I've been making lists in my head for a while now. I can never remember everything at the same time, so I'll start up some lists that will be continued in future posts (probably).

Things that I will miss at the end of the summer include:
-The mockingbirds in the parking lot at work that sing car alarms and lock beeps. It's sad and entertaining at the same time.
-Making my own food and planning my own meals.
-Going to the gym almost every day.
-Feeling both in shape and shorter than usual compared to people around me. (Even though Jendy and I are still tied as the tallest girls in the Takahashi clan other than Michi.)
-The distinct lack of concrete deadlines. I still have a lot to do, just no solid due dates (yet).
-Time to walk to a bar, drink, walk back, and do nothing for the rest of the night.
-Visiting relatives.
-The Nice Girl.
-The Cute Guy.
-Many of my co-workers. Heck, I'll miss working in such a young office in general.
-Driving myself wherever I need to go.

Things I definitely WON'T miss:
-The guy who often sits next to me on field work chewing noisily. He smacks his lips and chews with his mouth open and it sounds absolutely DISGUSTING! I've never had a peeve about that sort of thing before, but with these noises, I usually want to either throw up or cringe like there are fingernails running over a blackboard.
-Maryland's summer heat and humidity.
-One or two people interactions that make me think I'm living in The Office and they just haven't gotten around to telling me yet.
-Apartment drama.
-The hood.

August 07, 2008 03:04 AM

August 05, 2008

Liz: IDDS

So for those who have wondered what I’ve been up to this past month (or why I keep popping up around Boston), I’ve been at the International Development Design Summit (IDDS). Our final presentations are tomorrow and you should definitely come if you’re in the area! I’m on the team that is designing a device to prevent HIV/AIDS transmission through breast milk. It’s been a challenge and a lot of lab work, but I’m really excited about what we came up with (which is a good thing being that I have to write a provisional patent for it tonight).

Hope to see you tomorrow!

———

Final Presentations – Wednesday 6th August @ 4pm in Bartos Theatre(Media Lab)

More than fifty participants from over twenty different countries have been working hard for the past three weeks to create technologies with the aim of improving the quality of life for some of the world’s poorest communities.

There will be a brief presentation by each team at 4pm in the theatre, followed by a reception, poster session and prototype demonstrations. Posters will be up until 6 pm, so feel free to drop by when you can.
To find directions to the Bartos theatre please click here

This year’s projects include:

A device for decreasing the transmission rate of HIV/AIDS from mothers to their babies.

A charcoal crushing machine to help make charcoal briquettes from carbonized corn cobs.

A rope way system to help craftswomen in the Himalayas get their products to market.

A pearl millet thresher.

An incubator for low birth weight babies in the developing world.

A super low-cost computer for educational programs.

An interlocking stabilized soil block maker.

A pico-hydro electric generator.

A hand-held tool for isolating DNA for improving diagnostic capability.

A device for generating electricity from a treadle pump.

Please spread the word about this hugely important event and feel free to invite friends and colleagues whom you think would share our interest and enthusiasm!

August 05, 2008 10:45 PM

Tim: large and economy-sized

If you've talked to me lately I've probably babbled at you about David Foster Wallace's 1996 opus Infinite Jest and how shockingly amazing it is. I'm re-reading it and I'm up to page 128 of its 981-excluding-footnotes pages. Because I'm actually this obnoxious and the book is actually that amazing, I'm going to proceed to quote a couple of completely non-representative passages at you, one because I love the dialogue and one because it made me giggle in quite an undignified fashion. Enjoy! Or not! See if I care!


(Hugh Steeply is an intelligence agent under the aegis of the O.N.A.N. [Organization of North American Nations, a new pan-NA government] Bureau of Unspecified Services. Remy Marathe is a triple-agent, belonging to the particularly-dreaded Wheelchair Assasins Quebecois-separatist terrorist group, who he is pretending to pretend to betray, hence actually betraying, to secure advanced medical care for his wife, who is suffering from advanced ventricular restenosis -- a disease virtually unheard of before the Continental Reconfiguration.)

"Divided loyalties are one thing. But if he does it for love -- well then you've got a kind of tragic element that transcends the political. wouldn't you say?" Steeply smiled broadly down at Marathe.
"Tragic saying as if Rodney Tine of Nonspecificity were not responsible for choosing it, as the insane are not responsible," said Marathe quietly.
...
Marathe had settled back on his bottom in the chair. "Your U.S.A. word for fanatic, 'fanatic,' do they teach you it comes from the Latin for 'temple'? It is meaning, literally, 'worshipper at the temple.'"
"Oh Jesus now here we go again," Steeply said.
"As, if you will give the permission, does this love you speak of, M. Tine's great love. It means only the attachment. Tine is attached, fanatically. Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith."
Steeply made motions of weary familiarity. "Herrrrrre we go."
Marathe ignored this. "Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A. only pretend you do not know. Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticisim with great care. What you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. Die for one person? This is a craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie, go mad, have sickness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you."
"How are your wife and kids doing, up there, by the way?"
"You U.S.A.'s do not seem to believe you may each choose what to die for. Love of a woman, the sexual, it bends back in on the self, makes you narrow, maybe crazy. Choose with care. Love of your nation, your country and people, it enlarges the heart. Something bigger than the self."
Steeply laid a hand between his misdirected breasts. "Ohh ... Canada....."
Marathe leaned again forward on his stumps. "Make amusement all you wish. But choose with care. You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice. You, M. Hugh Steeply: you would die without thinking for what?"
...
Marathe said, "This, is it not the choice of the most supreme importance? Who teaches your U.S.A children how to choose their temple? What to love enough not to think two times?"
"This from a man who --"
Marathe was willing that his voice not rise. "For this choice determines all else. No? All other of our you say free choices follow from this: what is our temple. What is the temple, thus, for U.S.A.'s? What is it, when you fear that you must protect them from themselves, if wicked Quebecers conspire to bring the Entertainment into their warm homes?"
Steeply's face had assumed the openly twisted sneering expression which he knew well Quebecers found repellent on Americans. "But you assume it's always choice, conscious, decision. This isn't just a little naive, Remy? You sit down with your little accountant's ledger and soberly decide what to love? Always?"
"The alternatives are --"
"What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love? without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love?"
Marathe's sniff held disdain. "Then in such a case your temple is self and sentiment. Then in such an instance you are a fanatic of desire, a slave to your individual subjective narrow self's sentiments; a citizen of nothing. You become a citizen of nothing. You are by yourself and alone, kneeling to yourself."
A silence ensued this.
Marathe shifted in his chair. "In a case such as this you become the slave who believes he is free. The most pathetic of bondage. Not tragic. No songs. You believe you would die twice for another but in trugh would die only for your alone self, its sentiment."

==

(Hal Incandenza is an adolescent ranked junior tennis player at the Enfield Tennis Academy in fictional Enfield, Mass, which is somewhere between East Newton and Allston. He is a "big sibb"-type person for several younger players.)

"We're all on each other's food chain. All of us. It's an individual sport. Welcome to the meaning of individual. We're each deeply alone here. It's what we all have in common, this aloneness."
"E Unibus Pluram," Ingersoll muses.
Hal looks from face to face. Ingersoll's face is completely devoid of eyebrows and is round and dustily freckled, not unlike a Mrs. Clarke pancake. "So how can we also be together? How can we be friends? How can Ingersoll root for Arslanian in Idris's singles at the Port Washington thing when if Idris loses Ingersoll gets to challenge for his spot again?"
"I do not require his root, for I am ready." Arslanian bares canines.
"Well that's the whole point. How can we be friends? Even if we all live and eat and shower and play together, how can we keep from being 136 deeply alone people all jammed together?"
"You're talking about community. This is a community-spiel."
"I think alienation," Arslanian says, rolling the profile over to signify he's talking to Ingersoll. "Existential individuality, frequently referred to in the West. Solipsism." His upper lip goes up and down over his teeth.
Hal says, "In a nutshell, what we're talking about here is loneliness."
Blott looks about ready to cry. Beak's palsied eyes and little limb-spasms signify a troubling dream. Blott rubs his nose furiously with the heel of his hand.
"I miss my dog," Ingersoll concedes.
"Ah." Hal rolls onto one elboy to hike a finger into the air. "Ah. But then so notice the instant group-cohesion that formed itself around all the pissing and moaning down there why don't you. Blott. You, Kent. This was your question. The what looks like sadism, the skeletal stress, the fatigue. The suffering unites us. They want to let us sit around and bitch. Together. After a bad PM set we all, however briefly, get to feel we have a common enemy. This is their gift to us. Their medicine. Nothing brings you together like a common enemy."
"Mr. deLint."
"Dr. Tavis. Schtitt."
"DeLint. Watson. Nwangi. Thode. All Schtitt's henchmen and henchwomen."
"I hate them!" Blott cries out.
"And you've been here this long and you still think this hatred's an accident?"
"Purchase a clue Kent Blott!" Arslanian says.
"The large and economy-size clue, Blott," Ingersoll chimes.
Beak sits up and says "God no not with pliers!" and collapses back again, again with the spit-bubble.
...
Hal some weeks back had acquiesced to Lyle's diagnosis that Hal finds Ingersoll -- this smart soft caustic kid, with a big soft eyebrowless face and unwrinkled thumb-joints, with the runty, cuddled look of a Mama's boy from way back, a quick intelligence he squanders on an insatiable need to advance some impression of himself -- that the kid so repels Hal because Hal sees in the kid certain parts of himself he can't or won't accept. None of this ever occurs to Hal when Ingersoll's in the room. He wishes him ill.

that is all goodnight!

August 05, 2008 01:35 AM

August 01, 2008

Kelcy: Subconjunctival Hemorrhage

Tuesday evening my Aunt Yuko (and her husband and two kids) hosted a ton of local relatives at their pool. Guests included Aunt Suzanne and her three kids, my Aunt Denise with her husband and three kids, my Aunt Nobuko with her husband and two kids, my mom and my stepfather. I arrived as soon as possible after work and jumped in the pool for about five minutes before leaving to get some dinner. At dinner, my cousin Kei pointed out that one of my eyes was red. I said it was probably a bug bite or chlorine reaction. People standing around looked at me, said it was probably fine and would go away on it's own. I swam for quite a while later, and took a shower. When I finally took a look at my eye, there was a giant red spot in the white of my eye, sort of like the image below, except a lot of it was underneath my eyelid.



I freaked out. People looked at it again, and most of the adults said it should be fine. I stand there worrying about driving back that night, whether I needed to go to the emergency room, what to do about work the next morning, if I somehow had a blood clot or other serious health injury to deal with, etc. However, after independently confirming what people told me, it seems like my eye thing is a subconjunctival hemorrhage, i.e., a broken blood vessel in the eye. Apparently it's as close to nothing as you can get. A smoke and mirrors issue. It looks bad, but is apparently trivial (and even common, though I had never heard of it before). The medical recommendation is to do nothing and wait for it to go away, which it should in about a week.

Wednesday morning I was still pretty freaked out. I also felt pressure behind that eye, and that freaked me out more, because none of the websites say anything about that and it isn't supposed to be at all painful. I called work and said, "I can't come in today; my eye is bleeding." How weird is that?

I was in today and did fine. No complications. It looks much better, but I'm sure I could still freak out a little kid with it. I never expected to have hemorrhages, no matter what kind, at 21, even if it is a trivial kind that afflicts people of all ages. I spoke to my mom, and she says that she gets them, too, so maybe it was caused by some inherited factor. Or possibly by all the heavy lifting I do at work or at the gym. Or something. At least my preferred method of dealing with medical complications (ignoring them until they go away) was the correct one in this case.

Also, I caved and finally got some Caladryl today for the vicious mosquito bites and poison ivy that have been plaguing me.

August 01, 2008 02:53 AM

July 31, 2008

Kelcy: Hi.

I'm not playing the catchup game right now. I haven't posted because I've been busy and haven't felt like it, but I hate playing catchup and I refuse to do it right now. Right now my life is going through a series of highs and lows. Hopefully it will average high. I just wanted to get a post in and assure people that I am, at least in some tenuous fashion, alive. More news later -- peace out.

July 31, 2008 03:10 AM

July 28, 2008

Casey: INTERNAL DEBATE

I really love rugby. A lot. I like that there's a really important mental/attitude aspect of it. I like my teammates. I like having an excuse to run around. I like making a fool of myself on the field. I like being part of a team. I like that practice is so conveniently close-by.

But . . .

I'm also becoming increasingly invested in my belly dancing practice. I would love to be a good belly dancer someday and I feel like belly dancing is something I could seriously do for the rest of my life. I also feel like I could conceivably get better at it - whereas rugby *might* be a lost cause.

Maybe it's too much to do both? Maybe I should just pick one to focus on? I could start my belly dancing career now or postpone it until I can't play rugby anymore (i.e. after college).

Not really sure what I want to do.

July 28, 2008 10:54 PM

Boris: OTA fun - continued

OK. So in my last post I showed a first order Gm-C low pass filter. Now I’ll show you how to design your own filter. Let’s say we want a filter with the transfer function V_in/V_out=s/(τs+1)². This is a second order filter that selects for a specific frequency and attenuates everything else - the farther away from the selected frequency you are, the more attenuation there is. If you’re familiar with Bode plots, it just looks like a triangle with the peak at the selected frequency.

Step 1: Write down transfer function

This is probably the hardest step in the end. Figure out what you want and write down the correct transfer function for that goal. Won’t really go into this here - there’s a bunch of classes where you learn such things and a blog post won’t scratch the surface.

Step 2: Write down Differential equations for transfer function

To make this easier on myself, I’m going to define a couple of things. The output voltage is Y and the input voltage is X. Additionally, since the system is second-order, we know there are two devices with state (capacitors in a Gm-C filter). One of the caps can be on the output as we saw in the first-order low-pass, but the other state element can’t be on the input because the input value has to be instantaneously correct. This means we need an intermediate value that we’ll call U.

If we multiply our transfer function out we get Y(τs+1)²=Xs
Now we change the s to a derivative and drop constants (we only care about the form) to get Y”+Y’+Y=X’.
We rearrange to get Y”=X’-Y’-Y. No we need to split this up into first-order diffeqs. We pretty much start by writing Y’=____ and filling in the rest so that the original equation holds. One way to do this would be to use Y’=X-Y+U where U’=-Y. Another way to do it would be to use Y’=-Y+U where U’=X’-Y. Note that if we take the derivative of Y’ in either of these, we get our second-order diffeq back.

We’ll use Y’=X-Y+U and U’=-Y.

Step 3: Make the circuit

OK. Now we know that there’s a capacitor on Y and a capacitor on U. So let’s start there:

Now we consider the capacitor equation I=CV’. This means that the voltage is, without constants, the antiderivative of the current. So the current going into the capacitor at U must be U’. And we know U’ is -Y so we attach an OTA to implement that. We then do the same thing for Y by noting that the current into that capacitor must be Y’=X-Y+U. We hook that up with another 2 OTAs and we’re done.

Step 4: Check

If you run through the analysis, you’ll find that the you get aY”+bY’+aY=X’ where a and b are constants you can set by tweaking your choices of C and Gm. So it can’t exactly match our original, but it’ll function almost the same.

If you think this sounds cool, try your hand at making the circuit for the other set of diffeqs we generated (Y’=-Y+U and U’=X’-Y). You get a hint: there are actually three capacitors in this design, but it’s much easier if you only consider two of them to hold state. The third one is used to get a signal you need by taking a derivative or an integral depending on how you look at things. I’ll post the answer later and link to it in a comment.

July 28, 2008 04:35 PM

July 27, 2008

Tim: things i need to do today

- go jogging, right now
- go shopping
- do laundry
- clean up my room
- brew a pot of coffee
- identify bioengineering programs to research
- have tea and cake with the vicar

scene!


Saw AYLI on the Commons last night. Way, way not my favorite Shakespeare comedy.

On the line "newfangled as an ape":

newfangled: c.1470, "addicted to novelty," lit. "ready to grasp at all new things," from adj. newefangel "inclined to take" (c.1386), from new + -fangel, from root of O.E. fon "to capture" (see fang). Sense of "lately come into fashion" first recorded 1533. (dictionary.com.)

So he's calling her easily distracted. Huzzah!

This next semester is going to be generally pretty intense. I'm registered for 20 credits, but I knew that wasn't going to last and I think I'll drop HDK's phage class unless the syllabus seems unusually compelling. Also, if I keep having to talk people down from hysterical and uninformed accusations of my incompetent, elitist failure, being CORe VPSI is going to take a bigger emotional toll than I really want it to. We'll see how that goes. Alisha (Olin BioE prof) and I met at Ula Cafe in JP yesterday and talked about grad school and SCOPE and confocal microscopes and faculty drama and it was good and grounding and purpose-giving. Not that I really know what I want my life to look like, but I have a better idea of how to take the first steps. Also, noticed that I have unrealistically high expectations for myself and corresponding insecurity in essentially all aspects of my life! Should work on that, somehow?

Okay! Let's make this happen.

July 27, 2008 02:48 PM

DJ: Windows XO and Other Stuff

More Slashdot pickins’:

OLPCnews has an analysis of the Windows XO hype and recent demo. I’m a bit disappointed actually, in that smug and condescending sort of way. Do these engineers understand what it is they’re up against? Have they looked at the Sugar interface? Because my SCOPE team took the same naive approach to running Windows on bare-bones hardware, and our requirements were a lot less stringent than theirs.

With what amounts to a glorified copy-paste of Windows XP Home Edition, they’re hedging their bets on riding the coattails of XO’s hard-won popularity with educators and administrators and politicos. Those people may not understand or value the Open Source difference, but they understand cheap, and they value child-friendly. You want to really impress them? Kill the clutter. I know you hold the patent on folder trees, and you’re proud of it, but that design metaphor has no place in the start menu of a learning machine, and it enables your featureaholism. Tsk.

Also, in IT news, a possible ID on the DNS flaw, and San Fran PD really needs to get its shit together.

July 27, 2008 03:58 AM

July 25, 2008

Boris: OTA fun

OK. I’m going to go through two examples. The first one is a first-order low pass Gm-C filter. I’ll just show the circuit and then we can analyze and note that it works. Then I’ll show you the cooler part - design.

We’ll write a transfer function that we want to implement. Then map that to differential equations and go from the ODEs to circuits. I think I’ll finish out 1 way of implementing the transfer function and leave the other one at the diffEQ step in case someone actually wants to try their hand at a little bit of circuit fun. I’ll put up a link to the solution too.

OK. So here’s what a 1st order Gm-C low pass filter looks like. Why is it called a Gm-C filter? Well, you know how in an R-C filter, the R and C determine the time constant (tau)? Gm is a conductance (the inverse of resistance) so it similarly sets tau.

The Gm comes from the OTA. Recall that an OTA outputs a current proportional to its differential input voltage? In math: I_out=G_m(V₊-V_-). Now we note that V_out=V_- and V_in=V₊ in our circuit. We also note that all of the output current has to go into the cap and that the cap follows I_out=CV’_out. We combine our equations and get CV’_out=G_m(V_in-V_out). Let’s use τ=G_m/C. S’more rearranging gets us τV’_out+V_out=V_in.

Unless you’ve taken a class that teaches it, you’ll have to trust me that you can effectively call a derivative s and all the normal rules of multiplication etc apply (a friend of mine would tell you it’s because Liebniz’s notation is a strong notation). So we go ahead and do that and get V_in/V_out=1/(τs+1) which is the canonical form of the transfer function for a first-order low pass. Nice.

Hmmm… this is being longer than I thought it would be so I’ll be splitting it up. Next time we’ll look at a second-order filter that selects for a frequency: V_in/V_out=s/(τs+1)².

July 25, 2008 03:23 AM

July 23, 2008

Boris: What I’m doing this summer - part 3

So far I’ve talked about reconfigurable hardware in general and then the specific set-up of the FPAA. Now I’ll start talking about what’s actually inside the CABs (computaional analog blocks).

First there are simple transistors. There’s both nMOS and pMOS varieties and you have access to their gate, source and drain - fairly straightforward. There are capacitors where you have access to both leads. There are some current mirrors which make it simple to replicate a current without having to go through the process of mirroring the current yourself at the transistor level. Then there are a couple of more complex parts. These are the Gilbert multipliers and the OTAs.

Gilbert multipliers are probably the first use of the translinear principle (TLP). In short, this concept allows you to multiply and divide currents by using logarithms and then addition and subtraction and then exponentiating the result again. I’d explain it further, but I actually made a wiki page for my OSS (Olin Self-Study) that I really like. There’s actually a two-quadrant multiplier at the end that should give you a good idea of how these things could work. If some parts of the wiki seem difficult to understand due to the writer, please let me know and I can hopefully fix it up. Or feel free to fix it up yourself if you’re familiar with TLP. Gilbert multipliers are great because they allow you to directly multiply two signals at substantially faster-than-digital speeds with much less power usage and with orders of magnitude fewer transistors. The catch you ask? Well you can only really trust about 6 bits of a signal and then multipliers love to overflow. So your input signals can only be about 3 bits if you want to guarantee that you don’t get overflow… There are workarounds to maintain precision and speed, but they involve adding parts and complexity. This of course makes you use more power, but you still get orders of magnitude more efficiency than a digital multiplier.

This leaves just one part. The OTA (operational transconductance amplifier). These are actually fairly simple and extremely powerful. They have a differential voltage input and output a current that’s proportional to the difference in the input voltages. As a simple example, let’s do a voltage follower. Put your signal on the positive input. Now tie the negative input to the output. The output will now source or sink current until the output equals the input. This is somewhat similar to an op-amp, but different because the output is a current instead of a voltage.

OTAs are actually quite powerful and provide a fairly straight-forward way to go from a transfer function or differential equation to a circuit. I’ll show you that in my next post…

July 23, 2008 01:56 PM

July 22, 2008

Casey: Recap

A Collection of Moments:

Standing in the bathroom while Kelly tightens my new earing with a pair of pliers. "Oops" My stomach drops as I try to figure out what just happened to my ear. All I know is that it hurts. "I thought the ball was metal . . ." No blood, thank god. "Kelly, I showed you how I scraped it, it was ceramic." "Oh . . . yeah . . . sorry." "I think we're going to have to cut this off my ear . . ."

I found the perfect parking spot, just around the block, before rushing into Center Stage for the International Drag Pageant. Best drag I've seen in my entire life - almost spooky. I stayed for the sports-wear and evening-wear events - I love how drag sports-wear just means shorter skirts.

I show up at Artscape just in time to meet up with Kelly and see Rusted Root. She has new friends who make more instantly. Friends multiply. I leave before the exponential curve gets too steep.

Just in time to make my first appearance at the Charm City Art Space to see Jen's friend's band - Timber. There was vaguely a mosh-pit for like 5 seconds, just long enough for me to get pressed up against the wall. Too bad I wasn't pressed up against Jen. I'm bad at flirting. It's too much pressure. I should text her, but I can only think of things to say that I should have said yesterday.

Back to Artscape for SOJA and The Wailers. We buy beer at Club Phoenix, "A Place For Everyone". As we leave, a man sitting at the bar introduces himself and asks if any of our friends are gay - gesturing at the guys. Heads are sadly shaken. This is officially my first time in a gay bar in Baltimore. When we get back to the house, we finish eating the Vietnamese Spring Rolls that Daniel taught us how to make and play Marco/Polo in the pool. My hair is still wet when I take a shower in the morning, before heading to work.

July 22, 2008 02:53 AM

July 21, 2008

Boris: What I’m doing this summer - part 2

All right. Now that you’ve taken a quick view of reconfigurable hardware, we can look at the FPAA in particular. How is it different from an FPGA? Well the main difference is how information is encoded.

Instead of passing information as digital ones and zeroes, analog processing allows you to take advantage of the full available voltage range and even curents to carry information. This means you can do great things like carry 5-9 bits of information on a single wire. So what’s the catch? Well analog signals aren’t as pretty as digital signals. If you only have to differentiate between 0 and 1, you’re going to have a much easier time at it than if you have to be able to differentiate 2.4 and 2.5. And in some cases it gets much worse than that - if you’re using a voltage as to control a transistor’s gate, minute changes are vastly amplified. This means that you’re accutely vulnerable to many things that digital systems barely have to consider.

Are your lines near each other? They’ll have parasitic capacitances that’ll couple them. Did you route it using a global line instead of 2 nearest-neighbor lines? You can expect different performance and in some cases even complete loss of functionality since the parasitic capacitance from routing is extremely significant. Are you in place that has a temperature? If so, you’ll get thermal noise that’ll mean that all of your signals have some randomness associated with them. These problems, especially the last one, are not easy to solve.

So why bother? Well, like I mentioned, you can carry more data on a single wire. Why does this matter? Well you can do things like run two relevant signals into a multiplier that uses only a handful of transistors and get out a direct answer. This is far faster and less power-hungry than the digital method of splitting your signal up to 1 bit per wire, running it into a many-stage multiplier that is far slower and takes hundreds of times more transistors and eats through way more power. Sound awesome? That’s because analog is awesome - just difficult.

So how does an FPAA work? Let me start by describing the structure. There are two main parts to the structure, the routing grid and the CABs (Computational Analog Blocks). If we look at a single column, there are lines that run the length of the chip (global verticals), lines that run from one CABto a neighboring CAB (nearest neighbor lines), and lines that only run within a CAB (local lines). Each horizontal line is attached to something in the CAB. Thus, to connect components, you just have to attach two horizontal lines to the same vertical line. This is done by turning on switches. Additionally, there are horizontal lines that can handle inter-column connections in a similar manner.

The actual switches used in the FPAA are (who’d guess it) analog switches. They are actually capable of being partly on. This allows the connections to take part in calculations if you’re clever enough to work them into your design. The way these switches work is by using floating gate transistors. Transistors can pass an amount of current that’s controlled by their gate voltage - building up charge on a floating gate allows you to set a voltage and then simply leave it alone without having to constantly source the appropriate bias voltage.

So what’s in the CABs? Well this actually varies. Some of the common things in CABs are nMOS and pMOS transistors, capacitors, OTAs (Operational Transconductance Amplifiers), Gilbert Multipliers and current mirrors. What are all of these? I’ll give some explanation in my next post.

July 21, 2008 04:35 PM

Boris: What I’m doing this summer - part 1

So I’m working with FPAAs this summer. What’s an FPAA? Well, it’s not too inaccurate to say that they’re like FPGAs except analog… But in case that doesn’t mean much to you, we’ll take a quick walk down the:

History of Reconfigurable Hardware
Many moons ago, somebody thought of the idea of using a read-only memory (ROM) as a simple programmable logic device (PLD). The idea here is that a memory maps an address to an output. Let’s say we have n address bits. There are 2ⁿ possible logic functions using these inputs. A ROM will have an m output bits. Of the 2ⁿ possible logic functions, we can consider that our memory mapping is effectively implementing m of the logic functions. If we think about it this way, it becomes evident that a ROM will allow us to implement m logic combinations of n inputs and can be programmed to implement any logic combination of our choice. If you’ve heard of PROMS (Programmable), EPROMS (uv Erasable) or EEPROMS (Electrically Erasable), this is the concept behind them. They’re perfectly general, but they’re slow, power-hungry and even glitchy during transitions.

In the late 1970s another methodology that used programmable array logic (PAL) came forward. PALs were only programmable once, but their speed and efficiency was much improved from previous PLDs. The PAL was effectively used to replace a bunch of discrete logic elements in a circuit; you’d slap down a PAL instead of a dozen discrete TTL (transistor-transistor logic) devices. They used silicon antifuses that it would burn out to get a particular configuration. Eventually a couple of companies came up with ways to make rewritable verisons of these and called them fun acronyms like GALs (Generic) and PEELs (Programmable Electrically Eraseable Logic).

The next evolution was the CPLD. In this chip, you pretty much got a bunch of PALs connected together with some smart circuitry. The most important step in the evolution was probably that it would take serial input from a computer and have an on-board circuit parse all of that into programming for its cells. This made it possible to program thousands to tens of thousands of gates. Until recently, the big difference between CPLDs and FPGAs was that CPLDs were non-volatile, but now that many FPGAs can self-start and that almost all CPLDs are rewritable, the distinction is less clear.

Which brings us to the currently-sexy FPGA. FPGAs can have thousands to millions of gates that it can have reconfigured. These things are quite fast and very useful. I can’t really speak for CPLD usage, but Wikipedia claims that they are about as useful as FPGAs and that the choice between them tends to be more about money or simply personal choice than actual technical difference.

These more complex devices are great because you get to abstract layers away. You no longer have to worry about the little gates or sometimes even the big muxes or many other things. You can simply program things like case statements and see the magic happen. I will admit that I’m occasionally less excited about these things when tried to debug them but *shrug*. They’re pretty awesome.

That brings us fairly up to date on programmable logic devices and reconfigurable hardware. I’ll talk about what’s in a fancy new FPAA in my next post and you get to hear about some its ups and downs…

July 21, 2008 01:12 PM

DJ: Moving Right Along

So word on the street is, Yours Truly has a new job at a new place. Given that it follows on the heels of several months of vain searching, I must admit I am a little incredulous. Saturday, however, I received a packet in the mail which would appear to confirm that the rumors are true.

I must apologize for being perhaps unnecessarily tight-lipped throughout the process. I don’t know what’s fair to say in times like these when the chicks are not yet hatched, and for some reason it also feels a bit odd talking about all the places I didn’t get an offer from. That being said, here is some food for thought.

Job-hunting and social networking tools are at their most valuable when you’re able to devote time to them exclusively in the narrow niche where they provide the most value: Monster for generating queries from recruiters; LinkedIn for keeping contact info on recruiters, colleagues, and potentially on interviewers at the companies where you enjoyed interviewing; and don’t forget those all important Gmail / Outlook filters, to keep you from seeing all the chaff when you don’t need to.

On the other hand, I would avoid at all cost using LinkedIn to make contact. Do not end a phone conversation with “I’ll look you up on LinkedIn”; at worst, you’ll fail to find them, or at best, you’ll waste money sending “InMail” if you don’t already have their address as proof that you “know” them. LinkedIn makes sense as a business networking tool inasmuch as it is ad-free, clutter-free and appropriately organized; but everybody’s gotta get paid, and theirs is an obnoxious model for doing so.

The recruitment process works a bit differently depending on how skilled the work and where you are looking. In particular, Boston’s tech sector, which demands a range of skill-sets for a wide variety of employers, is well exploited by a number of specialized staffing firms. It’s a win-win-win arrangement, and for a rookie like myself, one that can make all the difference. Interview skills are a huge, huge part of landing any professional job, and while they were ultimately not beyond me to obtain, learning them was not entirely intuitive.

I find that this all-important knowledge has to be acquired in layers, each of which can lend a sophomoric sense of completeness although it is in fact an incremental improvement. For instance: early on I learned to approach interviews as a fun and exciting process of candidate-to-employer fit. This made me less nervous, but sometimes came off as bold and cavalier. Some interviewers played well with this attitude; others seemed to think I wasn’t taking matters seriously and would ask disorienting questions to take me down a peg.

In response, I began to approach interviews with more humility, which made managers a bit less ornery but didn’t improve my rapport or help me answer the open-ended questions. After discovering I had a flair for technical interviews (due largely to freeform reasoning skills acquired at Olin), my problem began to take on a definite shape. It was polarized between my strong rapport with the engineers and weak rapport with managers. I put more effort into having prepared answers to the tough questions they might ask, but it’s hard to be prepared for absolutely anything, and so ultimately not being able to think fast on my feet was a liability.

Between early March and mid-July, I interviewed at maybe a dozen companies, and several times was asked back for a second or third interview. I can’t estimate what fraction of those failed to turn into offers because of interview slip-ups versus there simply being a more qualified candidate; I was, however, able to get specific feedback in many cases from the recruiter working on my behalf. It confirmed that although I was well liked, I often did things, without realizing, that could hurt my chances. I meandered in my responses. I equivocated. I sounded disinterested in parts of the job. I entered “buy mode” without having first successfully “sold”.

A breakthrough came when my agent at Sally Silver, working with me on the Yellow Book case, requested an in-person meeting to help prep for my interview there. Sally herself was kind enough to drop by and lend some insight. After going over a laundry list of common faux-pas, we were able to identify some of the root problems with my interview style:

1. I spent too much of the interview talking (rather than listening and responding) because I was starting on the defensive. This led to a poor initial impression and drastically increased the surface area of my speech.
2. I answered questions before I knew exactly what information the interviewer was looking for.
3. Even when I tried to, I didn’t walk into my interviews with enough stock answers to questions, or enough questions of my own to ask.
4. I tended to lose energy over the length of an interview.

All of these factors contributed to the muddiness of my responses and increased the risk of saying dumb things. Number three turns out to be the hardest to fix, as it requires some homework. But none of these are unfixable problems of social functioning–they can all be countered with knowledge. Sally made the following suggestions:

1. Carbohydrates and caffeine do not supply steady energy. Since I only drink water during the interview, I shouldn’t go into it caffeinated, lest I crash. Sally suggested I carry some Powerbars in my pocket, but I’ve found that a few eggs for breakfast is enough to carry me through. Much like lembas, they are most potent when unadulterated.
2. Balance of discussion is important to how you’re perceived. Trying to answer opening questions like “Tell me about yourself” yields one-sided talk with a lot of “noise”, stuff other than what the interviewer actually wanted to know. These questions are asked for two reasons: the interviewer doesn’t know what to ask, or he just wants to see what you’ll do given the space. Unless your “rocket pitch” is exceptionally strong, it’s good to prompt for a more specific topic. Ask what stands out in the resume as of interest, and take opportunities in your answers to collect more data and keep the dialogue going.

Almost immediately afterward, my fortunes turned for the better. I got two offers, which presented a rather difficult decision, to put it mildly. I made my decision charts, I paced, paced some more, but eventually I just had to get out of the house for some fresh air. I don’t have a lot to recommend about that. It’s hard. Sure felt good to be able to put the choice behind me, though.

I start tomorrow. Not sure how I managed to finagle that, but it’s high time I be back in an office More details will be forthcoming.

July 21, 2008 03:40 AM

July 19, 2008

Casey: Maybe I'll grow up to be a pin-up model?

So, tonight I attended the Baltimore Erotic Arts Festival - which was fantastic. I always love burlesque and there was lots of it. It's always kind of cool to be in such an extremely sex-positive space. Plus I got to gossip with Adele and made a new friend named Courtney.

However, I learned that there's a photographer in Baltimore who has a studio for shooting pin-up model photographs! This pretty much seems like the coolest thing ever and I kind of want to do it. The only part that concerns me is the bit about preparing for your photo-shoot where she specifically expects your legs to be shaved. I don't think I'd want to shave my legs for this. I kind of want to email her about it though - it's probably not a big deal.

I feel like if I was going to do it, I might as well go all out and do the calendar. Maybe I should start saving up! I could schedule something now for Thanksgiving Break.

July 19, 2008 05:10 AM