Who wants to guess what I'm up to?

It should be a fun evening.....

Lab 1, complete

Well we just finished Lab 1, the Traffic Light Controller for Junior Lab (EE316). It was hell. I enjoyed it, but I never want to be that stressed out ever again :). We learned a lot of stuff about designing things, and testing things, and proper planning. It will definitely be easier to design the next time around. We got it all done, just under the wire (haha, wire... alright that was terrible) but we got it done. The presentation went pretty well as well, all in all I think a success. I took a lot of photos during the two weeks as well, and they're on my Picasa hosting (I'm still deciding about hosting my own photos, Picasa is really nice, but I'm using the disk quota much faster than I expected I would.)

Here are the photos: http://picasaweb.google.com/mattkrass/JuniorLab/

I may reorganize those in to separate albums per lab or something later.

Random blurb en route to lab

Its been very hectic this semester, especially with a full 18 credit load (I added Digital Signal Processing) but so far I actually enjoy it. Discrete math isn't hard and I actually like it, the workload was a bit heavy but the professor promised to throttle it down. Instrumentation is an excellent class and is good on applying engineering to real world scenarios. On that front, so is the Junior Lab which is taking up most of my time this semester, I really like it, but its quite a bit of work on a really tight timetable. All in all I feel like I'm really using the stuff I learned finally, and I find myself remembering and using a lot more than I ever expected. That's all for this random blurb.

Posted from my BlackBerry

Lab 1. Its such a trainwreck!

Yep. Trainwreck of wiring. And it doesn't actually work...

Picasa!

So, I'm running the Windows 7 beta 1, and so far I love it, but the photo import wizard for my camera is just as stupid as the Vista one, so I started using Google Picasa, and I find it very useful, and then I decided to try out Google's Web Album hosting. I'm thinking my self hosted gallery is going to get replaced by Picasa because it works considerably better and basically automates the process for me, I can import the photos, stick them in the appropriate album, or create a new one, and it will automatically start synchronizing it with my Web Albums and uploading the photos, and it preserves the EXIF data too. It's pretty neat.

You can see my public gallery here.

This is the beginning.....

The beginning of the end.... the clock circuit is underway, now to build all the logic!!

Matt thinks he looks stupid

Do you think he looks stupid? Post a comment here to respond!

Excellent response

This just happened, and I found it very amusing:

Me: *holds up a block diagram on paper* Does this mean anything to you?

Mike Brennan: *peers at paper for a moment, belches and walks away*

Yeah I'm still here...

Sorry about the delay in posting, a lot has been going on, and the dust is now settled.

Since my last post the New Year has come and gone, that was an entertaining time, Diana stayed at my house overnight for the transition, and there was lots of delicious food, tiny hot dogs and even more tiny hot dogs. There was also a good deal of tabletop gaming, with a nice old fashioned Monopoly game with Di and my little cousins, then a long, arduous game of Empire Builder with my Dad and sibling, followed by a good deal of movie watching before Di had to head home. That weekend after was the FIRST Kickoff for the 2009 game, Lunacy and I went to Hauppauge with Diana to watch the event live with our old team, and then back to my house for a bit of hanging out. The next afternoon I went to visit my old, old team (who has too many websites to figure out....) then to fix some stuff for my uncle, then we went to pick up Diana for dinner, and then a movie rental (We got Click) and some late night hanging out with games and snacks at her dads house, before parting ways for the vacation. Monday I had to go to work, made some money, not a lot to say there. 

Tuesday I was supposed to see Diana one last time before I came back to Clarkson on Wednesday but a large snowstorm bearing down on us forced our trip back to school up a day and I never got to see her, that really bites, but such is life.... and now back at school things are picking up pretty good.

Now that I'm back at school, there's a few things to note. For starters I added a Digital Signal Processing class to my schedule, and I know have a completely identical weekly schedule to Matt Franklin, which is interesting, I'm either catching up to the brainiac or he's slacking, probably me catching up with my newfound caring about my grades ;-). Here's the quick roundup on my classes, and to save time, they're all 3 credit-hours.

• EE 462 Software Systems Architecture - A UNIX/Linux course, not all that exciting, should be pretty easy, and the professor is taking the "Pretend we've never seen a computer before" approach, which is a bit annoying. The material is useful, but I already know most of it...
• MA 346 Applied Algebra and Discrete Structures - Another math course, mostly on concepts and "Mathematical thinking", shouldn't be too bad, but not the most interesting, I don't know how useful it will end up being, we will see.
• EE 446 Instrumentation - Now this one is cool, and completely voluntary, I'm taking it to meet one of my two Professional Elective requirements. It's looking really interesting, not too hard, but nothing to slack off on, should be very useful too!
• EE 316 Computer Engineering Junior Lab - Now here is a huge course, this is the cream of the crop and will take up most of my time this semester. Big deal, but a really interesting course and I can't wait to see how it pans out, I think I'm going to really enjoy it, and again, useful!
• EE 401 Digital Signal Processing - Looks interesting, so far the only lecture we had was a rehashing of my last signals class, useful if it comes through on it's promised material. We will see...
• EE 360 Microprocessors - Again, looks interesting, but I'm not a fan of the professor. The material is good, the target platform I am not a fan of, but it looks easy enough and it should be interesting enough, and the material should be useful. More on this later as well...

Well, that's it, about $250 in textbooks, after discount hunting, borrowing, and resigning to not buy some books I just won't use really, which is scary. I am not going to be tutoring this semester, as I am taking 18 credit-hours, some of which are on my hardest classes I'll ever take as an undergraduate, and I'm excited, but a little nervous!

On another note, I'm now running Windows 7, Beta 1 on Gojira, and it's fantastic, I am quite impressed. It found all my drivers, the actual drivers from the manufacturer's, and installed them on first boot. Immediately useful out of the box almost. Not quite, but way closer than XP, or even Vista. Hell way better than Vista. It's also really light on the system, and much much faster then Vista, and even a bit faster than my old XP install. But that install was notoriously pokey in it's old age.

Well that's all, for now!