o transition into what many call “real life,” I decided to go out and get my own apartment.  This means three things:

1. I have more bills to keep track of and pay every month
2. I will be cooking for myself instead of going downstairs for a all-you-care-to-eat deal every night
3. I have more space!

My place is located in North Campus (away from all the parties — I need my beauty sleep on the weekends) and has a gas stove and oven!  I am particularly excited about that because gas ranges are hard to come by for some reason, and I’ve always loved gas-powered stoves.  Here are a couple of pictures of my new apartment:

As you can see in the picture of my kitchen, there is NO microwave.  Let’s see how long I can survive without one.
AT&T hell, Time Warner Heaven

I wanted to get dry-loop DSL from At&T for the apartment, but it turned out to be one of the biggest travesties in the flurry of settling down in the apartment. It all started on Monday (Aug. 18) when I moved in.  I called AT&T to check on the status of my order.  Even though I properly input all the data in the online form, my order was missing my apartment number because someone actually has to put that data in and may have missed it.  After an hour on hold, I supposedly had that fixed and everything was set to come on Friday, the 22nd.  Meanwhile, I picked up a DSL modem from Best Buy.  Friday rolled around and I plugged that bad boy in.  Unfortunately, the red DSL light taunted me all day as it sat there, blinking, saying “Ha ha!  You do not have Internet service!”

I called back Monday to find out what is going on to determine my next course of action.  After 60 minutes of holds and transfers, the system hang me up.  I proceeded to call back to cancel the order.  The rep proceeded to suggest that my line may need repair, so I gave that a go.  Unfortunately, the system disconnected me again, and I approached my breakdown point as I called back to (definitely) cancel.  I was close to sobbing as I told the rep that I do not have infinite cell phone minutes or time and that I had it with the transfers, disconnects, etc. as I told him my entire story.  Needless to say, he was convinced that he needs to cancel my order… nothing more, nothing less.

Right afterwards, I headed to Time Warner Cable’s office to establish my new account.  I waited for about 30 minutes in line, spent about 10 minutes with a rep, got my modem, and drove home.  As soon as I plugged in the modem, I was up and running after 15 minutes on the phone.  GOOD JOB, TIME WARNER!

What AT&T did a good job of was checking back on me every couple minutes.  Nevertheless, I believe that telecom companies should have some sort of local presence for people to turn to.

Camera Disassembly

While at Grand Teton National Park with my family, I dropped my Canon PowerShot S3 IS right on the retracting lens assembly.  A secondary impact broke the LCD screen.  Fortunately, my parents brought their camera with them, and I continued taking pictures using that.  After settling into my new apartment, I got my hands on a digital SLR and called Fred (because he loves taking stuff apart).  After treating him to fried rice (that I cooked myself), we busted out the screwdriver to take apart the camera and see how things worked.  The both of us slowly took the camera apart as we marveled at its intricacy and identified which board does what.  Contrary to what many of my friends thought, we did NOT get shocked by the 330 V flash capacitor.  As a matter of fact, that was one of the first things we identified and said “no touchie” until we could safely discharge it.  Here are just a few pictures:

Gone To Texas - Rocking the House!

One phone call was all it took for a friend to whisk me away from Engineering Fall Gathering and to Gone to Texas, a welcome (back) celebration for students.  After that bit, there was a party with live music.  She started dancing, and I followed suit to not look like an idiot.  Meanwhile, I continued shooting pictures (I pride myself in that ability).  By the time we left, everybody was dancing.  We would sure like to think that we started all this!

1st Floor of RLM = Texas Petawatt Laser

In my head, there is a list of things I would like to do before I graduate.  It goes something like this (in no particular order):

• See the first floor of RLM
• Get Professor Hallock’s dog (Jessie) to bark
• Drive the solar car
• Be an orientation advisor
• Participate in the Texas 4000
• Be an RA

To my fortune, the automatic controls class got canceled for the day, so I was able to go to my apartment, grab the camera, and head on down to see the Texas Petawatt Laser on the first floor of the RLM.  Not convinced?  I even took a picture of a sign for evidence!

This is going to be a good year.  Many challenges await me, and I will divide and conquer with the help of my friends, family, professors, God, etc.

(11:43:22 AM) Friend: my calc teacher once called the Down Industrials a 30-dimensional vector
(11:43:28 AM) Friend: I’d love to be able to visualize that!
(11:43:30 AM) Me: Down Industrials?
(11:43:33 AM) Friend: *Dow
(11:43:34 AM) Friend: lol
(11:43:46 AM) Friend: that was rather ironic I should type that
(11:43:48 AM) Me: Wow… where can I invest in a market that’s doomed to go down?
(11:43:51 AM) Me HA!
(11:43:56 AM) Friend Yay shorts!
(11:44:03 AM) Friend I just put mine on, they’re dark blue
(11:44:12 AM) Me ha!
(11:44:19 AM) Friend can’t go out for breakfast in my undies

Note: In the finacial market, “shorts” refer to selling something not in your possession and then buying it back later.  Typically, you would want to “sell” when a stock is high and “buy” when it is low.  This is a dangerous endeavor and should not be tried unless you really know what you’re doing.

Yesterday: I got hit by a car while riding on my bicycle.  I was riding down Speedway towards Dean Keeton in the morning.  Since the signal ahead was for pedestrians, I sped up a bit to catch the upcoming green light and eventually came close behind a car.  Unfortunately, that car swerved into a parking spot near the Seay Psychology building and hit me.  Of course, I fell off my bike and subjected my laptop to a pretty hefty bump.  After I got up knowing that I’m OK, the driver got out of the car and apologized profusely.  I checked my electronics (which turned out fine) and the car (which only received some rubber from my front tire — rubs right off).  Seeing that I am all right, I laughed it off and said that I wish he/she signaled before turning; and seeing that no damage was done, we went on with our lives.

Today: There is a computer lab in the ECJ that I make my large-format printouts in.  Being recently-built, full-blown workstations, they perform reasonably well, although I think it could be even better because they stream the operating system from network storage to the desktops.  I disagree with that idea because I think (a) it creates a potential for network congestion and (b) they are working with full-blown machines with modern hard disks.  While that change was tolerable, my computing experience today went south… FAST!

Since I had the poster stored on the home directory on ECE’s servers, I had to transfer it using Secure Shell.  Since that was not there, I had to go back and upload the file to a more accessible place.  So far, I noticed that Firefox is being streamed using some VMWare product and took a minute to load.  After I came back, Firefox and many other basic programs were GONE.  Although Adobe Reader was there, I was unable to open the .pdf file by double-clicking on it.  Instead, I had to open the program and open the .pdf file the roundabout method.  Even as I did this, I received a security prompt that asked me whether I wanted to open a link or not.  Excuse me?!  Are they seriously streaming even basic programs through the network?!  I smell disaster when the entire lab (of about 30 computers) tries to stream something like LabVIEW to their desktops at the same time.  Alas, despite jumping through hoops, I was still unable to print the poster using the plotter and had to have someone else print it for me.

For me, the moral of the story is this: Imaging drives once every half a year really isn’t that bad after all.  Also, never, ever treat full-blown workstations like thin clients.

There are many ways to say “you need a new phone.”  The one I received was something like this: Whenever my phone’s battery is at a 20% state of charge and the phone rings (rumble pack, ringer, screen all come on), the voltage sags so much that the battery goes into protection mode (i.e. it shuts off completely).  Since I want a PDA phone from T-Mobile with the ability to make calls using the innovative HotSpot @ Home service, I effectively limited myself to a BlackBerry device, and thus begins my experience with the tried-and-true choice of enterprises worldwide…

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In September 2007, a lecture from Randy Pausch came up on Digg.com; and somehow, I had the two hours to watch his lecture and be inspired.  Since then, I bought the DVD (the best $ 7 I have spent), watched the lecture another two times, and stayed up to date on how he was doing.  Today, July 25, 2008, marks the day that I can stop checking, for Professor Randy Pausch has passed away from pancreatic cancer.  Although his doctors estimated that he had three to six months left at the time of the lecture, he beat it by a nontrivial bit.

I watched the lecture when I needed some inspiration, and there were a few things I took to heart, particularly his view on brick walls:

“The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough.”

… and there were other little bits like apologizing when you screw up, listening to critics, and showing gratitude.  Despite facing death, he defines living life to its fullest in my view by using his strength to continue to inspire others and raise awareness of pancreatic cancer.

Thank you, Professor Pausch, for your contributions to virtual reality and for inspiring many worldwide.  May you rest in peace and may God bless your family.  If you haven’t watched the lecture yet, you should watch it on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

Resources:

• Information about Randy’s Lecture: http://www.cmu.edu/randyslecture/
• News article: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25848017/

Approximately four months ago, I took the leap of faith and decided on helping my team in its bid to enter the North American Solar Challenge 2008. During final exams and in the two months after finals, I spent 60-70 hours each week working on the project, including weekends, nights, and even some all-nighters. We went to Cresson, TX on Thursday despite receiving the news that we were too late to have our car undergo scrutineering and that we cannot enter the event to show our car and to try to make good on our promise to give the organizer a “Texas-style dinner.” Now that I am back at home, I would like to take the opportunity to address some questions that some of you might have:

What happened? In a team consisting mostly of electrical engineers, mechanical and aerospace engineers are quite scarce. This caused a significant amount of lag in the building of the suspension. Furthermore, mechanical issues required us to machine more parts, and that could not be done without the use of our big milling machine in PRC (Pickle Research Campus). Nevertheless, if it were not for a new member that came out of nowhere (a Physics Ph. D student), this car would still not be driveable.

What were your contributions during the summer? While I consider myself as someone who implemented someone’s design and a troubleshooter, I was primarily responsible for the team’s logistics, which are “those little things” that are necessary for ensuring that everybody is taken care of and that we can actually go on the trip and return. If you want a comprehensive list of the things I did, I:

• Acted as an intermediary in the signing of the participation agreement between the event officials and UT’s business agreements department. This took four months and endless emails to straighten out.
• Obtained general liability and auto insurance for the event.
• Obtained decals for the trailer and team uniforms for the personnel. The biggest roadblock was that UT’s trademark and licensing department refused to allow corporate logos and the UT trademarks appearing side-by-side.
• Received my amateur radio operating license, as well as first aid and CPR certification.
• Gained familiarity with LabVIEW’s real-time/FPGA and PDA additions
• Performed some final assembly procedures

During the event, what did you notice? I saw some great ideas for how to make our car more water-resistant and a car with an absolutely brilliant body. More importantly, I noticed the amazing amount of help the teams give each other in resolving issues. It was exactly what I wanted to see: Even as we are all competitors, we are all ultimately friends in pursuit of one goal.

What frustrated you most? Dealing with trademark and licensing brought out the bureaucracy’s absurdity and took the Texas fight out of me. While we have some corporate supporters, we also received a significant amount of support from the various departments in UT. Since trademark and licensing refused to make an exception in the name of PR, I was forced to remove anything having to do with UT and give all the recognition to our corporate supporters.

As much as I wanted to recognize all our supporters and pay our dues to them, I removed the UT entities from the layouts, as seen above, and resigned myself to let the bureaucracy shoot themselves in the foot. That is, UT will not be recognized and I am able to face any music with confidence. Of course, my teammates and I had some other funny (and/or immature) suggestions:

• Replace orange with maroon and call ourselves “t.u.”
• Call ourselves United Technicians
• Replace all the UT logos with an image placeholder you’d see when your browser can’t find an image
• [Implemented] Replace the Longhorn on Samsung Solorean’s antennas with a Jack ball.

This frustrated me most because I considered the changes a waste of time – for every minute I had to make revisions, I was unable to work on the electrical system.

This is what you could overlook if you are pressed for time.

Why did you do this even though you know that you have a low chance of success? Besides practicing what I preached (which is not being a fair-weather fan), there are several reasons I signed on:

1. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. There are not many people who can say that they took part in building a solar car.
2. I have been with this team since they started considering building the next car, and I would like to see the project all the way to its end.
3. I felt that if companies believed enough in us to give us money or services, then I should place my confidence in the team as well.

Despite not reaching the ultimate prize even after having paid quite the price (in terms of money and health), I hope you are convinced that I received a significant amount of work experience despite not being paid.

A view of the cRIO box

What happens next? There is a great deal of unfinished business on the team, and I have every intention of finishing them in a timely fashion. Quitting the team is out of the question – the team is in a better state than when I found it, and there are still improvements ahead. I am now convinced that the solar car class is indeed a great recruiting tool, and it is being cross-listed across the aerospace engineering and mechanical engineering departments.

The car fired up for the first time Wednesday, and I was able to drive it in the Pickle Research Campus parking lot. This experience in itself made this entire journey worthwhile. As I sit here, I have no regrets over my decision. If there are any questions, please write it in the comments section, and I will address it in another blog entry. But as long as we have the money, as long as we have the people, and as long as we have an event, we will keep on trying. To my friends: Thank you all for your support in my endeavor.  To my teammates: Thank you for your time, effort, and patience while you worked with me.  To our corporate sponsors: Thank you for giving us the resources necessary to pursue our passions.  Finally, to Professor Hallock: Thank you for your guidance and (seemingly) infinite patience even as I dropped the ball during the three years of this journey.

So far, I have been working as hard as possible on the high voltage system, but with the deadline looming closer and closer, I had to switch gears.  If anything, I have started to work more hours.  My schedule now looks like this:

• Morning - 5 PM: Logistics work, with 1 hr. lunch break
• 5 PM - 7 PM: Dinner in apartment (I had an eating-out spree last month, so I definitely need to pull back some)
• 7 PM - 11 PM: Work on high voltage system and NI CompactRIO

It is quite a tiring schedule, and I wish more people would help with this project.  I also (somewhat foolishly) signed myself up to give high school students some presentations via the Women in Engineering Program (WEP).  I signed up because not many student organizations are active during the summer.  More importantly, I believe that it is important that I pass the baton to a group of younger students.  In any case, I followed through today with the presentations and learned that I love audience-presenter interaction!  Besides talking about the solar car team, I gave them some takeaways for their education now:

1. Be involved: It will give you the chance to learn things that are not in the books and give you hands-on experience with what has been discussed in the books.
2. Take pride in your work: You will set higher standards for yourself and be able to achieve more.
3. Don’t be a fair-weather fan in projects: Never, ever let a project fail without putting up a good fight and giving it everything you got.  You just might be the person who will make or break it.
4. Be patient: Innovation rarely happens overnight, and what you do may contribute to something bigger.
5. Take chances!  Make mistakes!  Learn from them!: Innovation does not happen without people pushing their luck, blowing something up (by accident), falling flat on their faces, etc.
6. Your education is a two-way street: Interact with your teachers, and you will be able to stand on the shoulders of giants.
7. Consider Every Option (even if it is not engineering): Find your passion and pursue it.  Choose a career path that makes you happy.  There are many needs that need to be fulfilled, and many of these needs require people with special qualifications.

Here are just a few pictures from this week:

Throughout the summer, I have been working 70+ hours per week on the solar car project.  It may seem like I have no social life, but nobody took me up on my offer to meet up — I’m on campus and can always spare an hour or two with you.  While on campus, I get the chance to see the demolition of the ESB.  Although they did not employ the typical explosives technique, their method is just as interesting: They are using a backhoe to take out the facade.  While doing so, however, they are spraying water to keep the debris and dust from affecting all of campus.  Here is just a picture of the process:

Although the car is coming along at a decent pace, I think it could be better and some people could be clocking in more hours.  Last week, we used one of the molds to make the lower portion of the mold.  Here’s a picture of the first steps:

Meanwhile, I have been working on logistics and the car’s electrical system (I am an EE, you know).  During this weekend, I pulled two all-nighters to help a friend get the National Instruments compactRIO-based battery management system working even better.  The issue that plagued us was the latency between user input and system response.  My teammate assigned the problem to me and warned me that it could cost me one week of work.  I slept on it last night and solved the problem in the matter of three hours.  By getting the hint that it is a network issue, I pulled out WireShark and started sniffing traffic between the compactRIO and the computer.  It turns out that having the FPGA’s front panel open overwhelmed the compactRIO’s network port and caused the latency.  After downloading the FPGA to the board and running only the realtime program on the computer, everything ran like butter.  When I talked about this with another professor I know, he brought up the question of how one can go about teaching how to troubleshoot.  I do not know whether this can be taught, but I do know that a good troubleshooter is well on its way to being a good engineer.

In one of the all-nighters, I encountered one of my most embarrassing moments.  The faculty advisor wanted to measure voltage across the battery pack.  Since I was slightly incoherent, I handed him the multimeter, but it was set to measure current.  Since current is measured through a shunt resistor in the meter, it would effectively be a short circuit.  Unfortunately, the faculty advisor did not catch my error and proceeded to make the measurement.  Instead, he received a very large arc as if he was welding something.  Fortunately, the system received only cosmetic damage and the multimeter is still fine.  The only loss was a multimeter lead, which was vaporized in the arc.

Elizabeth, her fiancee, and I went to Waffle House today for the first time.  The environment was quite fun, the waffles were yummy (not to mention cheap), but the darn jukebox’s labels were totally wrong!  Instead of playing “Brown Eyed Girl,” the jukebox played some R&B song.  Another mismatch prompted a waitress to ask me whether I recently divorced.  I laughed it off and let her know that the jukebox was mislabeled.

These are some good times… I sure would love some even better photographic equipment to capture these moments!

It has been about a week since I headed back to Austin to work with the solar car team.  Ahead of me is the biggest gamble I am taking.  With me are some of my best friends, who are also working on the car with me, and some of my worst foes, who are preventing the team from entering the race over some legal mumbo-jumbo.  There is still a great amount of work to do, but work is being done a lot faster with no school.

On the electrical side, we now have full battery protection and fan control on the National Instruments CompactRIO!  Although we spent about two days debugging the program when things were abnormal, we managed to get through it.  Here’s a picture of the CompactRIO hooked up to the batteries:

Amidst the mad end-of-semester, final examination rush, we started the process of creating the carbon fiber body.  Saturday was our moment of truth as we pulled the body out of the mold.  Although it took 8 people to get the body out, it takes only one person to lift the entire body: