The last few days have been full of excitement for me, all on the job hunt front. First, I talked with the recruiter from AeroVironment. She said that they really liked my background, but they were essentially waiting to hire someone to be my boss before they made a decision on me. That was heartening, since it's been three weeks since I interviewed with them and I hadn't heard anything.
Next, Google flew me out the Googleplex on Thursday and put me up at a very nice hotel for a series of interviews on Friday. I had a lot of fun there, got a short tour of the campus and really enjoyed the people who interviewed me. Those interviews went better than any I've done before because...
The Googleplex!View Larger Map
I got a job offer on Thursday afternoon from DreamHost! They'll pay well, give good benefits, and they're really laid back. Since their downtown office is a block and a half away from a metro stop, which in turn is 3 metro stops away from Union Station where the trains come in, I can take public transit (real public transit, not buses which are a wholly unacceptable mode of transportation) in to work from almost anywhere in LA, I think. That makes this offer, in addition to a very good offer in its own right, an ideal safety net: if my girlfriend gets a job in one of those "anywhere's" that I can get to work from I have a job that I can take as well even if I don't get any other offers.
Of course, Edwards Air Force Base (remember the whole "Middle of Nowhere" thing?) is one of those not-almost-anywhere's from which I probably won't be able to get to DreamHost in any acceptable length of time. But AeroVironment in Simi Valley is even closer to Edwards than Pasadena (the nearest place I thought I might be able to get a job) and now I have a bargaining chip. I would be completely amazed if I got an offer from Google (they're in the middle of layoffs, so they can't be hiring many "Nooglers"). But hey, all I need to do now is graduate, and what can I say? I'm Feeling Lucky.
~KMarsh
29 March 2009
24 March 2009
Clubs, Projects, and Jobs
Barnstormers
First up, the Barnstormers have a new website. They actually don't know it yet because Claire and I have been building it at a temporary location on a domain that I own while I sort out getting a domain of our own. It uses the WordPress blogging software and I hope will be immensely more maintainable (and thus more useful) than the website Claire and I inherited from days gone by. The blogging I intend to use as news posts and updates. I'm not sure if I want the news to be the front page (as it is at the time of this post) or if I want the front page to be an introduction to the club and who we are.
Additionally, we are going to Edwards Air Force Base to get a tour of the Flight Test Center there. Edwards is where everything eventually winds up for testing before the Air Force will accept it and we have an alumnus who works there testing F-16 armament systems. Sign ups for HMC students to go on the Edwards trip are going on right now and we'll be heading out there on the 17th of April.
Theremin, Thoremin, Th[eo]remin-Bot
I believe I've mentioned that there is a student-run electronics lab club at HMC now. Not only does said club exist, but it now has funding. And to raise interest, our intrepid leaders, Nate and Raffi, have decided that the club will buy kits for students to fun projects and then hold a projects day at the dining hall to show them off!
I took one look at Nate's e-mail and decided that this was my excuse to build a theremin, since I didn't get around to it last summer. After poking around the Internet for a while I had found a few theremin kits that appeared to come mostly preassembled (no fun for an e-lab project) and this. Art's Theremin Page gives instructions, schematics and component lists for building several theremins including one using vacuum tubes to get a 5 octave range.
I told Nate that I wanted to build one and that if someone else built a tesla coil we could pair them into a Thoremin. I steal the name shamelessly from one of the suggested names for the following:
The other suggested name was Zeusaphone. This tesla coil is actually producing the music; sound is just vibration of our ear drums at some frequency in the audible range. By firing the tesla coil, say 440 times per second, we can create a musical note. By feeding its controller the waveform of a piece of music, the tesla coil can be made to act as an enormous speaker that happens to shoot lightening bolts. Similarly, below you can see the result of someone using a (much smaller) tesla coil as an amp for his guitar:
One of the other students in the electronics lab, upon hearing that I intend to build a theremin, decided that he wanted to build a theremin-playing robot for a class next year.
Job Hunt
I have been applying for jobs this semester. So far I have interviewed at DreamHost and AeroVironment and I'm waiting to hear back from them. Google is flying me to Mountain View this Thursday for an interview on Friday, which I am really unbelievably stoked about. I've also dropped my resume to a few other places, but these three are the three I'm most far along with. (For those who remember, I'm also looking at Edwards AFB. I'll be talking more with Nate when we visit in April. Incidentally, AeroVironment is located in Simi Valley, shown in the lower-left corner of that map.)
I now need to admit my geekiness (you can prevent laughing at this sentence if you ignore everything above this point in the post, and all my past posts, by the way). I finally found a resume class for LaTeX that was close enough to what I wanted that I took the effort to modify it and port my resume away from Microsoft Word. The Word file I had was fairly finnickey and would not hold all its formatting if I tried to use ANY other programs to open it; Open Office (which I generally dislike), Abiword, and Google Docs all ran it on to a second page and so I always needed to be using a Windows computer (or a mac with MS Office) when I edited/printed my resume.
Now, I have a subversion repository online that holds the most up-to-date copies of my resume and cover letter. Feel free, of course, to take the .tex files and the resume.cls file to TeX up your own resume. If you're interested, you can find a rather nice IDE for using LaTeX on Windows here. Linux tends to come with LaTeX installed, and I think Mac OS X does as well. Of particular note in this subversion repository (you did find it under the "online" link above, right?) is the makefile. With help from professor Geoff Kuenning of the CS department I built a makefile that will typeset and display my resume and cover letter as well as add new files to the repository automatically and publish my resume to the web using a really neat tar-ssh-tar piping trick.
That makefile is exciting to me, but I accept that many of my readers will find it less than enthralling, so if you want me to talk about it more just let me know and I'll be happy to talk more.
Good luck to all of you who have applied -- admissions letters are in the mail now! If you didn't get in to Mudd, take heart; that you even applied is a good indicator that you'll get into another top school. If you did get in, congratulations! Let me know if there is anything you want to hear about. I also host "prefrosh" or prospective students, so if you want to come by for another visit let me know and I'll make the arrangements to host you when you show up. Finally, if you're not yet a senior then thanks for reading and good luck next year; you should also let me know what you're interested in hearing about. (And if you're not a prospective student but a prospective parent, one of my parents or one of my friends, then just enjoy reading).
Fail
One last thing before I sign out -- in addition to fouling up the account creation with DreamHost for the Barnstormers, I also clobbered my external hard drive last night. It takes power from my monitor, because that's the only reachable powered USB port I have. I usually turn my monitor off when I leave my room, but this poses a problem when I have a large backup running to my external drive. The drive is formatted with the fat32 filesystem (eew, I know) and so that crash caused some fairly massive corruption.
Interestingly, my data was all fine (except for the stuff copying over at the time) but my OS suddenly decided that the filesystem was read-only if I tried to delete the corrupt files. I ended up fixing it by telling gparted to check and repair the filesystem twice.
~KMarsh
First up, the Barnstormers have a new website. They actually don't know it yet because Claire and I have been building it at a temporary location on a domain that I own while I sort out getting a domain of our own. It uses the WordPress blogging software and I hope will be immensely more maintainable (and thus more useful) than the website Claire and I inherited from days gone by. The blogging I intend to use as news posts and updates. I'm not sure if I want the news to be the front page (as it is at the time of this post) or if I want the front page to be an introduction to the club and who we are.
Additionally, we are going to Edwards Air Force Base to get a tour of the Flight Test Center there. Edwards is where everything eventually winds up for testing before the Air Force will accept it and we have an alumnus who works there testing F-16 armament systems. Sign ups for HMC students to go on the Edwards trip are going on right now and we'll be heading out there on the 17th of April.
Theremin, Thoremin, Th[eo]remin-Bot
I believe I've mentioned that there is a student-run electronics lab club at HMC now. Not only does said club exist, but it now has funding. And to raise interest, our intrepid leaders, Nate and Raffi, have decided that the club will buy kits for students to fun projects and then hold a projects day at the dining hall to show them off!
I took one look at Nate's e-mail and decided that this was my excuse to build a theremin, since I didn't get around to it last summer. After poking around the Internet for a while I had found a few theremin kits that appeared to come mostly preassembled (no fun for an e-lab project) and this. Art's Theremin Page gives instructions, schematics and component lists for building several theremins including one using vacuum tubes to get a 5 octave range.
I told Nate that I wanted to build one and that if someone else built a tesla coil we could pair them into a Thoremin. I steal the name shamelessly from one of the suggested names for the following:
The other suggested name was Zeusaphone. This tesla coil is actually producing the music; sound is just vibration of our ear drums at some frequency in the audible range. By firing the tesla coil, say 440 times per second, we can create a musical note. By feeding its controller the waveform of a piece of music, the tesla coil can be made to act as an enormous speaker that happens to shoot lightening bolts. Similarly, below you can see the result of someone using a (much smaller) tesla coil as an amp for his guitar:
One of the other students in the electronics lab, upon hearing that I intend to build a theremin, decided that he wanted to build a theremin-playing robot for a class next year.
Job Hunt
I have been applying for jobs this semester. So far I have interviewed at DreamHost and AeroVironment and I'm waiting to hear back from them. Google is flying me to Mountain View this Thursday for an interview on Friday, which I am really unbelievably stoked about. I've also dropped my resume to a few other places, but these three are the three I'm most far along with. (For those who remember, I'm also looking at Edwards AFB. I'll be talking more with Nate when we visit in April. Incidentally, AeroVironment is located in Simi Valley, shown in the lower-left corner of that map.)
I now need to admit my geekiness (you can prevent laughing at this sentence if you ignore everything above this point in the post, and all my past posts, by the way). I finally found a resume class for LaTeX that was close enough to what I wanted that I took the effort to modify it and port my resume away from Microsoft Word. The Word file I had was fairly finnickey and would not hold all its formatting if I tried to use ANY other programs to open it; Open Office (which I generally dislike), Abiword, and Google Docs all ran it on to a second page and so I always needed to be using a Windows computer (or a mac with MS Office) when I edited/printed my resume.
Now, I have a subversion repository online that holds the most up-to-date copies of my resume and cover letter. Feel free, of course, to take the .tex files and the resume.cls file to TeX up your own resume. If you're interested, you can find a rather nice IDE for using LaTeX on Windows here. Linux tends to come with LaTeX installed, and I think Mac OS X does as well. Of particular note in this subversion repository (you did find it under the "online" link above, right?) is the makefile. With help from professor Geoff Kuenning of the CS department I built a makefile that will typeset and display my resume and cover letter as well as add new files to the repository automatically and publish my resume to the web using a really neat tar-ssh-tar piping trick.
That makefile is exciting to me, but I accept that many of my readers will find it less than enthralling, so if you want me to talk about it more just let me know and I'll be happy to talk more.
Good luck to all of you who have applied -- admissions letters are in the mail now! If you didn't get in to Mudd, take heart; that you even applied is a good indicator that you'll get into another top school. If you did get in, congratulations! Let me know if there is anything you want to hear about. I also host "prefrosh" or prospective students, so if you want to come by for another visit let me know and I'll make the arrangements to host you when you show up. Finally, if you're not yet a senior then thanks for reading and good luck next year; you should also let me know what you're interested in hearing about. (And if you're not a prospective student but a prospective parent, one of my parents or one of my friends, then just enjoy reading).
Fail
One last thing before I sign out -- in addition to fouling up the account creation with DreamHost for the Barnstormers, I also clobbered my external hard drive last night. It takes power from my monitor, because that's the only reachable powered USB port I have. I usually turn my monitor off when I leave my room, but this poses a problem when I have a large backup running to my external drive. The drive is formatted with the fat32 filesystem (eew, I know) and so that crash caused some fairly massive corruption.
Interestingly, my data was all fine (except for the stuff copying over at the time) but my OS suddenly decided that the filesystem was read-only if I tried to delete the corrupt files. I ended up fixing it by telling gparted to check and repair the filesystem twice.
~KMarsh
20 March 2009
Be Prepared
So camping went...not as planned. After driving up to Santa Cruz, we stayed at Marty's uncle's house for the night. We got in at 01:00 and got up when the (very loud) espresso machine dictated. Once awake we discovered that some of the trails we planned to hike were closed and we couldn't get some of the permits that we needed on the weekend (it was Saturday). Poor planning on the part of the person who planned the trip. Oh well.
We had a backup plan. Sort of. We made one up on the spot, so that's kind of the same thing. We decided to make a day-hike of what would have been the last day of our trip and then go the rest of the way home to the north bay -- all three of us live within an hour's drive north of San Francisco -- and then go to the Boy Scout camp in San Rafael to camp for a couple of days.
We started our day-hike and had to ford a stream. Our oxen didn't die, fortunately, but Marty didn't have AMAZING HARDCORE WATERPROOF HUNTING BOOTS like Liz and I and so he hiked the rest of the 10 miles in wet socks. He had 5 blisters afterwards and decided to bail on additional camping. We took him home, spent the next day working out details of getting permission to camp on the Boy Scouts' land (a mini-adventure of its own) and then went out to spend one night camping.
Along the way we came across something that I had forgotten was up there: an old B-17 engine. One of the last B-17's manufactured crashed there on its way to Hamilton Air Force Base and one enormous radial engine is all that remains. I decided that my portfolio theme for my photography class would be HMC students doing non-academic things that they really enjoy, so I took some pictures of Liz with the engine and our packs, tying in to both her love of aerospace and of backpacking. When I finish shooting this roll we'll see how they turned out.
The moral of this story is something that I didn't realize until I'd been at college for a while: things don't always have to go as planned and that doesn't have to be a bad thing. I often get an idea of how something is going to work out in my head and then get stressed, consciously or unconsciously, when real life gets a hold on my plan, even if my "plan" is just my unofficial, unconscious view of what I expected to happen. It's amazingly freeing to step back and realize that it doesn't matter...we can have a fun time by completely ignoring the plan and doing something totally different.
Be Prepared is the title of this post, and the motto of the Boy Scouts, but being prepared can take on many forms...often it means having a well thought-out plan, but it could just as well mean be prepared to throw out your plans and do something different. If you're prepared, it'll work out fine. I was just told by someone that you need a well-formulated plan so that you have something to deviate from when you get into the field.
Although that was a good stopping point right there, I thought I'd bring this back to Mudd. I mentioned above that my photography theme is pictures of Mudders doing things that get them really fired up. I decided on this because I'm graduating in May and wanted to explore what it was that made me love this place for the last four years. I remembered back to freshman year when I was amazed to find the breadth of personality here at this tiny, technical (officially liberal arts) school. We have all kinds of people who enjoy all kinds of activities:
Jacques and Tavi, my freshman year, taught a class on Maori fire-spinning, called "Poi" which I really enjoyed. Jason was so good at unicycling that he can ride his unicycle up and down stairs and "idle" in one place talking with you. Brett drives to the mountains and tries to convince people to go mountain biking with him. He also sculpts. Scott flew RC planes and turned down at least two good job offers to go get a PhD in some form of aeronautical engineering. Marty plays Go. Alex was offered the role of Simba in the Disneyland Parade, although he turned it down because he would have had to take a year off of Mudd. Matthew auditioned for the Dapper Dans: Disneyland's barbershop quartet. A surprising number of Mudders are on the ballroom dance team. Liz bakes cookies for the dorm and sews magnificent costumes because she feels like it. Camillo dropped out because he decided his passion was in the martial arts and last I heard he was teaching German Longsword lessons and learning parkour.
We have all sorts here, and it really makes it an amazing place.
~KMarsh
We had a backup plan. Sort of. We made one up on the spot, so that's kind of the same thing. We decided to make a day-hike of what would have been the last day of our trip and then go the rest of the way home to the north bay -- all three of us live within an hour's drive north of San Francisco -- and then go to the Boy Scout camp in San Rafael to camp for a couple of days.
We started our day-hike and had to ford a stream. Our oxen didn't die, fortunately, but Marty didn't have AMAZING HARDCORE WATERPROOF HUNTING BOOTS like Liz and I and so he hiked the rest of the 10 miles in wet socks. He had 5 blisters afterwards and decided to bail on additional camping. We took him home, spent the next day working out details of getting permission to camp on the Boy Scouts' land (a mini-adventure of its own) and then went out to spend one night camping.
Along the way we came across something that I had forgotten was up there: an old B-17 engine. One of the last B-17's manufactured crashed there on its way to Hamilton Air Force Base and one enormous radial engine is all that remains. I decided that my portfolio theme for my photography class would be HMC students doing non-academic things that they really enjoy, so I took some pictures of Liz with the engine and our packs, tying in to both her love of aerospace and of backpacking. When I finish shooting this roll we'll see how they turned out.
The moral of this story is something that I didn't realize until I'd been at college for a while: things don't always have to go as planned and that doesn't have to be a bad thing. I often get an idea of how something is going to work out in my head and then get stressed, consciously or unconsciously, when real life gets a hold on my plan, even if my "plan" is just my unofficial, unconscious view of what I expected to happen. It's amazingly freeing to step back and realize that it doesn't matter...we can have a fun time by completely ignoring the plan and doing something totally different.
Be Prepared is the title of this post, and the motto of the Boy Scouts, but being prepared can take on many forms...often it means having a well thought-out plan, but it could just as well mean be prepared to throw out your plans and do something different. If you're prepared, it'll work out fine. I was just told by someone that you need a well-formulated plan so that you have something to deviate from when you get into the field.
Although that was a good stopping point right there, I thought I'd bring this back to Mudd. I mentioned above that my photography theme is pictures of Mudders doing things that get them really fired up. I decided on this because I'm graduating in May and wanted to explore what it was that made me love this place for the last four years. I remembered back to freshman year when I was amazed to find the breadth of personality here at this tiny, technical (officially liberal arts) school. We have all kinds of people who enjoy all kinds of activities:
Jacques and Tavi, my freshman year, taught a class on Maori fire-spinning, called "Poi" which I really enjoyed. Jason was so good at unicycling that he can ride his unicycle up and down stairs and "idle" in one place talking with you. Brett drives to the mountains and tries to convince people to go mountain biking with him. He also sculpts. Scott flew RC planes and turned down at least two good job offers to go get a PhD in some form of aeronautical engineering. Marty plays Go. Alex was offered the role of Simba in the Disneyland Parade, although he turned it down because he would have had to take a year off of Mudd. Matthew auditioned for the Dapper Dans: Disneyland's barbershop quartet. A surprising number of Mudders are on the ballroom dance team. Liz bakes cookies for the dorm and sews magnificent costumes because she feels like it. Camillo dropped out because he decided his passion was in the martial arts and last I heard he was teaching German Longsword lessons and learning parkour.
We have all sorts here, and it really makes it an amazing place.
~KMarsh
13 March 2009
Leaving on a Jet Plane
Okay, so that title is misleading. I'm actually leaving an a Mercedes-Benz older than I am with a diesel engine and a currently temperamental starter motor...so surprisingly close to a jet plane, in reality. My girlfriend, a clinic teammate and I are all going backpacking in the Santa Cruz mountains starting tomorrow. Spring Break starts tomorrow, so it's pretty good timing. Not like we had it rigged to turn out that way or anything....
Packing was kind of a rush job tonight and I'm going to have to have some discussions with myself and my trailmates tomorrow morning about the distribution of group gear and what really needs to be brought. I'm bringing my SLR camera and tripod, which, admittedly, are luxury items and quite heavy, but I also am saddled with more communal gear than I realized initially, since much of the contents of my pack is fairly static and mostly communal. Let me explain that:
I was a boy scout. I am an Eagle Scout (for those not in the know, you can only be a boy scout until you're 18 in most cases, but if you make it to Eagle then you're always considered an eagle scout in the present tense). This means that I take a lot of stuff with me when I go camping that I never use and never want to use. This includes first-aid kit stuff -- bandages, alcohol pads, and tape -- and more general things like extra rope, straps, plastic bags etc. I leave a great deal of this in my back and often forget about it. I'll have to check with the rest of my group to see if anyone else has first-aid gear or any of this other stuff so I can see what can be left behind as overly redundant.
I say overly redundant because gear does break, and you can't be stuck out in the middle of nowhere with no way to fix it and no replacement. We're bring two stoves, for example. The only meal we actually need to cook is dinner on the first night, but most other meals would be unpleasant to eat cold. We're also bringing 2 water purification pumps which is a bit redundant in my eyes, since I have a bottle of Polar-Pure. Polar-Pure is an iodine water purification that uses a small bottle with iodine crystals to saturate a small amount of water that can then be poured into much larger water containers to purify the water inside them. It tastes better than most iodine systems, but still not as nice as a pump, so my teammates will probably opt for both pumps. I still won't leave the iodine at home, though.
As an interesting aside, the sale of Polar-Pure was heavily restricted in California for a time (and may still be) because it is the only water purification that I know of that uses pure iodine crystals, and people were using the crystals to synthesize meth. Talk about a disruptive few spoiling it for the rest of us. Anyway, I really need to be asleep an hour ago so I can get up to finish last-minute work before spring break.
Look for an update when I get back from my trip, though!
~KMarsh
Packing was kind of a rush job tonight and I'm going to have to have some discussions with myself and my trailmates tomorrow morning about the distribution of group gear and what really needs to be brought. I'm bringing my SLR camera and tripod, which, admittedly, are luxury items and quite heavy, but I also am saddled with more communal gear than I realized initially, since much of the contents of my pack is fairly static and mostly communal. Let me explain that:
I was a boy scout. I am an Eagle Scout (for those not in the know, you can only be a boy scout until you're 18 in most cases, but if you make it to Eagle then you're always considered an eagle scout in the present tense). This means that I take a lot of stuff with me when I go camping that I never use and never want to use. This includes first-aid kit stuff -- bandages, alcohol pads, and tape -- and more general things like extra rope, straps, plastic bags etc. I leave a great deal of this in my back and often forget about it. I'll have to check with the rest of my group to see if anyone else has first-aid gear or any of this other stuff so I can see what can be left behind as overly redundant.
I say overly redundant because gear does break, and you can't be stuck out in the middle of nowhere with no way to fix it and no replacement. We're bring two stoves, for example. The only meal we actually need to cook is dinner on the first night, but most other meals would be unpleasant to eat cold. We're also bringing 2 water purification pumps which is a bit redundant in my eyes, since I have a bottle of Polar-Pure. Polar-Pure is an iodine water purification that uses a small bottle with iodine crystals to saturate a small amount of water that can then be poured into much larger water containers to purify the water inside them. It tastes better than most iodine systems, but still not as nice as a pump, so my teammates will probably opt for both pumps. I still won't leave the iodine at home, though.
As an interesting aside, the sale of Polar-Pure was heavily restricted in California for a time (and may still be) because it is the only water purification that I know of that uses pure iodine crystals, and people were using the crystals to synthesize meth. Talk about a disruptive few spoiling it for the rest of us. Anyway, I really need to be asleep an hour ago so I can get up to finish last-minute work before spring break.
Look for an update when I get back from my trip, though!
~KMarsh
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
