To the glee of those who resent football because for its resource-hogging ways, we lost to Texas Tech by a very, very slim margin.  I know some people who would like to be able to drive to campus just to study, access labs, etc.  Perhaps some of y’all can provide them with suggestions.  In any event, I did no studying or homework today, which means that I should be well-rested enough to do a lot over the course of this week to make up for that.

I woke up at 6 in the morning on Thursday to go to Professor Mack Grady’s renewable energy workshop.  I sat right next to the person I interviewed with, and I was one of the only undergrads at the conference during that time.  I really wished a proctor swapped shifts with me because then I could stay for the entire conference, but I still got a good bit during the two hours of talks.  In particular:

• Wind generation capacity is currently outpacing transmission capacity.
• If we were to plot the oil we used between years 0 and 2500 CE, oil would look like a small blip in history.  Being a finite resource, this emphasizes the importance of seeking alternative means to power our world.
• Plug-in hybrids and “smart grids” received mentions.

What do I think of the bailout package?  Well, after some deliberation, here’s an idea I’d like to present: For those with homes in verge of foreclosure, the owner can continue to make monthly payments on the principal while the government makes the interest payments.  This is almost like the subsidized loans that college students see.  This way, the government bails out Main Street AND Wall Street at the same time.

I am also concerned about the Chinese economy.  Some of you may recall the pet food recall from 2007 in which some Chinese manufacturers tainted the pet food with melamine to make the food appear to have more protein.  This caused thousands of pets to perish.  This year, melamine crept its way into the human food supply in the form of milk powder.  Without a doubt, this is a vagrant violation of trust, and China could face some tough times if companies start pulling out and making their operations domestic again.  A company doing this could earn some good PR, and this PR involves the company fulfilling its “social responsibility,” the company being patriotic, the company providing jobs to the people, etc.

Friday: Apparently, someone had a little bit too much fun with a label maker:

Part 1: http://engineeringtv.com/blogs/etv/archive/2008/09/08/university-of-texas-solar-vehicle-team.aspx

Part 2:http://engineeringtv.com/blogs/etv/archive/2008/09/09/samsung-solorean-solar-car.aspx

To some extent, I wish that the people who came up with the designs were able to be there and talk about their work.  Nevertheless, I am there to show that I am proud of what my team did because engineering marvels are made in teams.

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.

that was rather ironic I should type that

Wow… where can I invest in a market that’s doomed to go down?

I just put mine on, they’re dark blue

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.

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.

Reactions From My Peanut Gallery
As soon as I told one of my friends that I have taken delivery of a BlackBerry, the “CrackBerry” jokes began.  One video that I would like to share with you is this one: http://youtube.com/watch?v=vmEErhy7AIc For the record, I can still type in proper grammar using that dinky thumbpad, I can still shut off all contact from my cell phone when I need my phone to be quiet, and I sign off when I go to sleep.

So why did I not get an iPhone?  Well, I did not get an iPhone out of personal philosophy and because I had a deal that I just could not refuse.  For starters, my parents pay only $ 10 for having me on their family plan (1,000-minute pool, unlimited nights/weekends/intra-network calling).  As you will see later, the deal gets even sweeter.  Secondly, I like my buttons.  Considering that LCD screens are not very good outdoors, it was hard for me to place a call using a pure touch screen.  Finally, I really like my freedom of being able to do whatever I want with something I purchase — I should not have to pay just put in a ringtone I snipped up myself, and I do not like to be tied to one program for transferring media.

Getting Started
In the first 48 hours of owning the BlackBerry Curve, I was able to:

• Associate my phone with the house’s wireless network and make calls from it
• Load various applications over the air: Facebook, GMail, Google Maps, and Google Sync
• Make it mine
• Have six real meals
• Take two showers
• Sleep for 18 hours

Initially, I was dismayed when I could not connect to IM services using my wifi network, but a five-minute call to T-Mobile fixed this.  Their solution was to add a free add-on called the “BlackBerry Feature Enabler” (more information: http://www.blackberryforums.com/wifi-hotzone/98569-blackberry-feature-enabler-uma.html).  To my surprise, I am also able to IM and send email using T-Mobile’s EDGE network.  I believe that this add-on shows two things: (1) Competition is good and (2) T-Mobile and RIM are feeling iPhone’s heat.  Either way, (enlightened) customers win.

Making Calls / Connectivity
Let’s not forget that the most important function of a phone is to make calls.  It appears that the BlackBerry Curve defaults to the EDGE network for everything, including voice.  Although call quality was good, the UMA to EDGE handoff is evident with a click and sometimes does not succeed when I moved in and out of the coverage areas.

After getting back on the UT campus, I wondered whether the BlackBerry will succeed where the iPhone 1.x tripped.  The task is to connect to the wireless network using 802.1x authentication.  After parroting the configuration on my laptop and hitting Connect, I was able to make calls using the wifi network.  Being fortunate enough to have access to a network spanning across several blocks, I will have to test how well this device can hand off as I travel from building to building in the middle of a call.  Update: Inter-access point handoff was disappointing.  When I moved out of range of an access point, the call hands off to the EDGE network instead of another access point.

Also impressive was the voice dialing feature.  Despite some disappointment with it in the first few attempts, it was able to handle nearly any name I was able to throw at it (e.g. Engelkemeir).  Although the text-to-speech engine is as good as any college dean trying to pronounce a hard name, it was easy to see that the voice recognition system is not one of those that matches samples, but rather a real speech-to-text system that you would find on an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system.

Entertainment
While entertainment is the last thing people think of when it comes to a business-oriented device such as the BlackBerry, I still managed to clock in at least an hour of listening to music after dragging-and-dropping music to its MicroSD card.  I did testing using the included headset and a pair of Altec Lansing iM616 headphones.  While listening using the included headset yielded good results, listening using my headphones was plagued by a high-pitched whining noise.  To its defense, the Altec Lansing iM616 headphones is capable of reproducing a significant amount of detail in the audio, and some of that detail is, unfortunately, interference inside the device that propagated into the digital-analog converter.  Update: I tested music playback via the internal speaker not long ago.  A benefit to owning a smartphone is that internal speaker for those times when you are simply too lazy to plug in a pair of headphones.  While sound quality is acceptable, beware of high frequencies at full blast.

As far as I can tell, the process of enjoying media on a BlackBerry is quite simple and user-friendly: With little configuration, the phone’s MicroSD card becomes just another USB drive that you drag-and-drop to, and the connector for the headphone fits nearly any headphone set you can pull off a shelf.  Indeed, by using standard connections and protocols, consumers have more choices and less frustration.

Conclusion
While the iPhone made me go “ooh” and “aah,” the BlackBerry Curve succeeded in blowing me away.  Just like any new gadget I receive, I enjoyed playing with it to find out how it works and see how well it works.  If Research In Motion is indeed trying to promote themselves as having the phones with brains and beauty (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TC8N9t_8lHs), then they are on the right track.

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/