Finn

The other day, I got a call from my parents that I'd kind of been expecting for a while, it was the news that they'd put down our dog, Finn. He'd been on the ropes for a while, going from one set of symptoms to another, he'd stop eating and then start up again, his back legs weren't working super well, we didn't think he would make it to Christmas. Thankfully, he did!

Look, he's wearing a festive little scarf and everything! In any case, Finn was a great dog. He was affectionate, loved to curl up at the foot of your bed, and was pretty easily amused. All it took was a simple head juke to get him to start running a lap around the yard until he came back to you, at which point another fake-out would send him jetting off again. He mellowed out with age, stopped being super aggressive to other dogs, started moving more slowly as we all will, but was still pretty much a big ball of love. A constantly shedding ball of love, seeming to defy conservation of mass by leaving a trail of hair behind him year round. He got blind, he got deaf, he apparently suffered from dementia towards the end (we wondered why he was wandering around the house so much), he lost a tooth to a tennis racket during a game of fetch. He moved across the country a couple times, despite the fact that he regularly got carsick. He never ran away, but he did once almost attack a mailman. We generally don't talk about that last one.

In any case, he was a great dog, and veritably ancient, making it to about sixteen years old. I loved the snot of him and will miss him greatly.

2012: Resolutions & Goals

Oh my goodness! 2012 is upon us! And I have no resolutions or plans yet! Time to change that. First to note a key difference between resolutions and plans. This is probably a distinction that exists only in my mind, but I always think of resolutions as being a change in habits, while goals are, well, goals. To use a common example, a goal might be to lose weight. The resolutions would be to eat better, work out more, etc. I hope that explains the seeming dichotomy between the two.

Onto the resolutions then!
1) To be more in the moment. I worry. A lot. A huge amount of my processing time and allotment goes to 'but what if this happens', and it's rarely in a positive or productive way. I've been getting better at shutting it off and just focusing on the task at hand, but there's still miles to go, which leads directly to resolution two.
2) Not to get discouraged. If I teach my kids one thing . . . Wait, I need a problem statement. One, assume children. Idealized, spherical children for computational purposes. Okay, moving on. So if I teach my hypothetical one-day children one thing, it'll be not to get discouraged. If I can think of one thing that's slowed me down in my life, kept me from achieving certain goals, it's the fact that I get pretty easily discouraged. For a long time, my default response to when I was having a problem with something was to basically whine and moan and say 'oh, why am I not good enough'. Mature, right? Anyhoo, I've been working on it, but I still occasionally catch myself slipping back to my old ways. I wish there was something more I could do to measure this particular resolution of mine, but I can't actually think of one. Ah well.
3) Eat out less. Since going to grad school, I've been eating out a lot, as it's rough to carry all your food for a day around with you in addition to books, a laptop and various other sundries. This quarter I'm planning to brown bag more often, and also to bring a wide variety of snacks to school so I don't wind up buying so many of Espresso Roma's delicious, delicious cranberry muffins. Also, I'm currently implementing my 'bring coffee to school' plan already, which should save me a fair bundle. Seriously, I drink a lot of coffee. I estimate that if I bring my own coffee to school every day, I'd save a billion dollars. I may also be bad at math, but you get the idea.
4) Blog more! Which in turn means doing more things with my life that are worthy of being blogged and suitably recording them.
5) Keep in better touch with my extended family. I've done a pretty crap job of this over the years, it's about time I got on the stick about it.

And now for goals!
1) To earn my B rating in foil. This is gonna be a rough one, I've been a C now for about three years, and there are very few B level competitions in my area. Plus, my skill in actual competition is still hanging me up a bit. In a brief recap of my last major tournament (Duel in the Desert), I was beaten like a red-headed step child. It did not go well. So I'm gonna have to up my game this year if I want to get that shiny new rating.
2) Get started on my master's thesis. I'm on my second quarter of grad school, so I've got to get a project picked and started soon in order to be out in a reasonable amount of time. This will probably be the most involved project of my life, so I'd like to get started on it sooner than later.
3) Various interpersonal goals that you're probably not interested in.

Next week, robot stuff! And less self-indulgence!

The Kindle: A Year in Review

For Christmas last year, I got a Kindle, which I've really enjoyed. So I figured I'd take the time to discuss the experience so far. So, on the plus side: The screen is really rather excellent. There's no difference between reading that screen and reading an actual printed page, as far as I'm concerned. Also, the number of books that are now part of the public domain, or distributed by the estates of their original authors for free or at least very cheap. I've gotten to read a lot of older books that I probably wouldn't have otherwise. For example, I bought a PG Wodehouse omnibus that included a lot of Jeeves and Wooster stories, which were an absolute delight. I think I paid a total of a dollar for it and got several thousand pages of quality reading. I also got a free Agatha Christie novel, a super cheap compendium of Conan the Barbarian stories, the novels that follow The Three Musketeers for free, they're all a lot of fun. One of the main things I enjoy about it is that I can just get a bug in my ear to read something, and then have it ready to go in a moment.

On the downside, there are a few issues with availability. I've been reading a lot of Iain M. Banks novels lately and really enjoying them. So I figured I'd grab one of his earlier books, so I looked it up, and discovered that it apparently was not sold in the US Kindle store, which is problematic. I understand that certain publishers have rights in certain markets, but if it was a physical book, I'd be able to find a copy at a used bookstore or on Ebay or something. With Kindle, I'm limited to their store and the books they're licensed to sell. So that's problematic. Also, the price of many books on the store is more than their paperback equivalents. I understand this is an attempt on the part of some publishers to protect the sales of their physical products, but as a consumer, I'm somewhat indifferent. Their cost of production for the digital book is effectively zero, so the price should be at least somewhat less. It also works against one of the primary reasons I like the Kindle, which is that I don't have to find storage for all my books. Seriously, there's a lot of them, and I don't have a huge amount of space to keep storing them all.

So it's pretty excellent overall, with again, the few drawbacks that will probably get better with time as e-books become less of a gimmick and more of a standard.

From the vault . . . Camping!

So, to recap some fun stuff that happened several months ago, about one week into school, I went camping up in the Sierras for my friend David Brang's birthday! Six of us went, and had a grand old time jumping by a lake! Not pictured: Grace, who was busy taking the picture.

Shenanigans ensued, including fun with an axe, hikes, rainbows, several bears, a lake of icemelt, and another friend getting naked. Two of those six facts are connected! Thankfully, it's the last two. Well, thankfully for the rest of us, as his reaction to the lakewater was less than splendid.

For reference, my friend in question is the white blur on the shoreline. We also had some of David Brang's famous camping margaritas, which are rather generously mixed. Seriously, the man knows how to make a margarita. It helps to be mildly intoxicated, as you have to sleep with the full knowledge that a bear is probably right outside your tent.

So yeah, a great time! Can't wait to go again, for so many reasons, not the least of which is mocking my friend for getting older. What a sucker. Also, all photos were taken by Grace Bohn, who's pretty awesome with that SLR of hers!

First Quarter Round Up

Dear blog,
I'm sorry I've neglected you for so long. Look, I brought you flowers! Okay, I lied about the flowers. In truth it's been a really busy quarter. I restarted school, with some small success, fenced, did the climbing thing I usually do, and rediscovered my incredible need for caffeine. Sweet, sweet caffeine. Actually, it's often bitter, but whatever.

I managed to pass my first quarter reasonably well, so that bodes well for the coming year. I'm enrolled in a thesis program, so I'll be in this for two years. I'm doing a lot of coding, mostly MATLAB, and a lot of linear algebra, which is pretty standard I think.

So, let's review what worked and what didn't. Because nothing makes for a great blog like endless self-examination, right?

What worked: Studying with other people.
Okay, this is a no-brainer for most people, I understand. But I didn't really study with anyone in undergrad. Well, no engineers. It's hard to discuss structural engineering with political scientists and linguists, much as I probably wasn't a great sounding board for them. So studying with other engineers has been pretty helpful, especially near midterms and finals, as we could hole up in an office somewhere and review stuff for hours on end, clarifying small points for one another that we had missed somewhere. I felt like an actual grad-student!

What didn't work very well: Note-taking.
I had a couple professors this past quarter who did a lot of boardwork during lectures, illustrating everything and writing out all the equations, which made it pretty easy to take notes. I had another professor who basically projected the text on the screen and then pointed at the equations in question and discussed them at length. This didn't work very well for me, as I had a hard time figuring out what to write down and organizing what he was saying as he was saying it. So I identified this problem really early on, but failed to adapt and find another solution, and I think I took a hit as a result. I'm contemplating using a voice recorder next quarter in the eventuality that I can't take notes that work for me during the lecture alone.

My other note taking habit is to copy over my notes to a fresh notebook shortly after the original lecture so that I have a neater, more clear set of notes, and so I can correct any mistakes I made while transcribing them the first time. Overall, it really helped, so I'll be doing it again next quarter!

What also worked: The UCSD shuttle system!
I made extensive use of the UCSD shuttle program, hopping the bus from the graduate student housing most days of the week, and taking the Hillcrest shuttle the other days. At some point I'll probably figure out some manner of cost-benefit analysis of this whole thing, but that'll have to wait until I'm gathering actual data, and have time to do it. So expect it by, say, the time I graduate? Maybe?

Anyhoo, this is a pretty media free post, so here's a video of something my lab is working on!



More posts soon, I promise this time! Please do not go back and read the archives, where I have promised similar things and then not delivered on it.

My Every Day Carry

There's a blog called Every Day Carry, better known as 'EDC', to which people submit photos of the items they carry with them everyday, in their pockets, purses or man-bags. For being a relatively simple concept, it's surprisingly engaging, and often just plain surprising. Apparently a lot of people carry guns! Who knew?

So my own carry is probably not going to be very exciting (I don't carry a knife, a gun, a cool tactical light, or even a multitool), but it is a little telling. I included the contents of my bag, as otherwise this would be really short. In fine EDC tradition, I'll start in the lower right hand corner.

1. Wallet, lip balm & keys
2. iPhone 3GS
3. Macbook (circa 2006)
4. Legal pad (for sketching out notes, scratch paper)
5. Moleskeine journal
6. Casio fx115ms calculator
7. Moleskeine notepad
8. Pilot G2 pen
9. Apple headphones
10. Saddleback Leather briefcase
11. Nalgene water bottle (not pictured)
12. Two gigabyte thumbdrive (also not pictured)

The telling part is my inclusion of the notepad and calculator, which to my mind scream 'engineer'. I must always have the means of performing long calculations at hand! Also, the briefcase was a present I got for myself a year or so ago from Saddleback Leather, a purveyor of fine leather goods. One of the main appeals of the bag was that it looked awesome, and came with a one hundred year warranty, which seemed to be a good deal to my mind. Some friends rib me about my 'Indiana Jones' bag, but since Indiana Jones is awesome, I failed to see it as a jibe.

Anyhoo, this will change with time, as my routine is about to undergo a major change, but covering every eventuality of what I'm gonna bring to school/life on a given day would be pretty pedantic and really boring! So this will have to be sufficient insight for now. Cheers!

Blade Caddy

My goodness, it's come at last. I've finally built something! My blog is true to its name! So, I had a problem. Foils are somewhat clumsy objects to carry around. Do you hold them by the points? The grips? Under an arm? They sell individual bags that you can use to carry several at once, but that didn't really appeal to me. So I figured I'd build a blade caddy. I already used lengths of PVC piping to hold cover my blades in my bag, to keep them from being damaged, so I figured that would be a good starting point. I sketched out a basic design, joining four of them together in a square configuration, with four 4.5" lengths of PVC at the bottom held together by three-way PVC junctions.

To hold the top together, I thought I could use two diagonal members, but it turns out that the 3/4" junctions I bought are specifically designed not to have piping run all the way through them, with a small lip preventing passage past an inch or so. So I wound up just using the same scheme for the top as I did the bottom, drilling holes to fit all of the foils. I also drilled some holes in the piping so I could hook in some small bungees that I could use to secure the foils inside, so that they don't fall out if I invert it accidentally. All in all, it seemed to work rather well! Then I tried fitting it into my bag.

So, I'd be a lousy carpenter, due to that whole 'measure twice, cut once' ethos. I knew I could fit a foil into my bag, and the caddy isn't significantly longer than that, so I figured it'd be fine. Turns out that the caddy's width top and bottom stretches the bag too much to accommodate it lengthwise. So, my plan for a caddy that would neatly fit in my bag is dashed, and all is ruin and decay. Woe am I, the engineer who didn't measure properly ahead of time! Actually, what I wound up doing is consolidating my equipment from two bags to one. So it actually still works out! Plus, it's getting some compliments at the club. So that's something.

Anyway, I'll probably wind up keeping it, as my previous 'two bag' solution, one for my foils and various gear and one for all my clothes was somewhat burdensome. I think this will work out better in the end, or I may even make some sort of cloth cover for the caddy, with a pocket or two, and a zipper so I can take it out easily. But that's another project, and thus, another blog post.