By a Mudder, for you. My life as it relates to Harvey Mudd College (or perhaps Harvey Mudd College as it relates to my life). A resource for prospective students (aka Little Johnny, aka the prefrosh), their parents (aka Grandpa Moneybags), nosy current parents (what're you doing here Mom?), and anyone else who cares about the lives of Mudders (er...hello?).
About HMC, about me, for you. Please hold your applause until the end of the show (or at least intermission).
There is so much to talk about and no time with which to talk about it right now. Here, in fact, is a list. I'll talk briefly about some things in this post, and may expound on some in later posts; leave a comment if you want to hear more about anything in particular.
Friday was the Barnstormers' trip out to Edwards Air Force Base.
Saturday Proctor Elaine set up a trip for a bunch of us to go to some hot springs.
Sunday I went to USC for the Intercollegiate Swing Dance Challenge my sister organized.
Clinic:
Code Freeze was on Tuesday
Final report rough draft is due Friday
Next Presentation is on next Tuesday
Graduation is in less than a month.
First, the Edwards trip. I have a difficult time expressing how cool last Friday was. We got to fly the F-16 simulator, then at the end of the day we got to walk around the F-16 flightline and see the real F-16s up close and personal. Our guide, Nate Cook (HMC class of '95), told us what each new thing on the F-16 was and then took us into the hangar and showed us some dummy bombs that they have for testing. He talked to us about the difference between dumb bombs, which are purely ballistic, and smart bombs, which guide themselves in to their target. We got to see the Global Hawks in their hangar. One of them was fueled and it's impressive how much droop the weight of the fuel causes in the wings.
The trip to the hot springs was quite lovely; the springs themselves are at the end of a mile-and-a-half hike. I was getting nervous hiking all that way through weather somewhere in the 90s, but the springs are right on the bank of a creek that was flowing with frigid water, and we actually had to cross the creek to get to the hot water. That was a nice, refreshing end to the hike before we went to relax in the springs. I now have a lovely peeling sunburn across my upper back. It has a hand-print on the back of my left shoulder, where I could reach.
My sister called me to find out if anyone from Claremont was coming to her Swing Challenge at USC (she's the president of their swing club and has been working on making this happen for several months). I asked some of the dancers here and then told her that no, the Claremont Colleges Ballroom Dance Company (CCBDC) had not heard. She asked if they were the right people. After all, this was a swing competition. At Claremont, I assured her, "Ballroom" means "Dancing with Partners" instead of "Waltz, etc." (those five are more properly the "Standard Dances").
It ended up that most of the company members had practice that night, but one girl and I were able to make it, so the two of us represented Claremont in the Jack and Jill challenge. A Jack and Jill is a swing competition in which each person dances with another, chosen mostly at random (leads and follows dance with a partner of the opposite type). I didn't get through the first round (11 leads, and all of them way outclassed me) but I had a great time anyway. Our other Claremont rep took 5th place, though!
For now, that's it. I'll talk more about clinic when I don't have to be doing it quite as much.
Okay, so it's just two, but hey, that's infinitely better than none. I've even got some mathematicians here to prove it. I have leftover pieces of stock for my screwdriver, so I can give you a before and after picture of that, although I don't have any intermediate pictures: The cylinder on the far left is the acrylic stock for the handle. To prepare it, you need to face the ends (scrape off the rough edges made by sawing it off from the rest of the stock) and drill the central hole for the blade to go into. Both those steps are done using the lathe (drilling on the lathe will always feel odd to me, since it's the part that is spinning, not the drill bit). Next you use the lathe to carve out the cone. The milling machine then bores out the six flutes along the length of the handle, and it's back to the lathe to file the dome on the end into shape.
Finally the entire thing is polished -- first you sand it with coarse-grit sandpaper, then with two or three finer grades of sandpaper until you finish off by rubbing it down with toothpaste using a sock. If you do it right and put some elbow grease into it you'll get nearly a mirror finish to the plastic which is quite remarkable to see: scratches from machining the handle make the surface of the acrylic very cloudy and it looks like it will never again be as clear as the stock you were given.
The blade is placed into a holder that keeps it at the proper angle for machining the tip, the mill is used to take off the material from one side of the blade and then you flip the whole thing over in the jig to machine the other side. The other end is then faced to length on the mill and a tiny hole is drilled right in the very center of the blade near one end. A matching hole is drilled in the handle and the blade slides in and is held in place with a small pin. Before assembling the screwdriver, the blade is heat treated to increase its hardness and toughness and then polished in a sandblaster.
The hammer, shown disassembled with each piece next to a piece of stock where available, is a much more demanding tool, owing mostly to its increased complexity. This is a machinist's hammer, not a claw hammer, and it has two faces: a soft face made out of nylon for easily-damaged pieces and a hard-face for driving nails and other more traditional hammer tasks. The first piece I made was the hard face. The hard face is made of AISI 4340 carbon steel and machined entirely on the lathe. After machining it is heat treated just like the screwdriver blade. The 4340 steel is quite hard to begin with and is much more difficult to machine than any of the other materials we use in this class.
After working with the hard face, machining the nylon for the soft face felt like butter. There wasn't much to do for this beyond facing it and reducing the diameter. The only noteworthy part was tapping the hole drilled in the back side so that we can easily thread a set screw into it to hold it on to the hammer head.
The hammer head required quite a bit of machining, both on the lathe and the mill. It's made of AISI 1015 steel, though, and is much easier to work with than the hard face. First it must be faced and the smaller diameters must be reduced on the lathe. Then a hole must be drilled and tapped and a "spotface" (very small washer-like indentation against the face of the piece) produced for the nylon soft face to attach to. The other side is drilled out, then reamed to a very tight specification so that the hard face can press-fit into it and hold without slipping out. That hole has a countersink bored into it to make room for the chamfer on the hard face between the two diameters. The head is transferred to the mill where the flats are cut on the sides and the slot for the handle is bored.
Finally, the handle is worked from a piece of wood and the entire thing is assembled. To hold the handle in the head a slot is cut in the top of the handle and a wedge driven between the two pieces of the slot. The spec-sheet says that the wedge is made out of "Red Devil #4" which has defied my preliminary attempts to define.
Moral of the story: take a machine shop class. It's fun, and amazingly useful even if you never step inside a shop again.
One of my professors just called April the worst month of the year. I had never thought of it that way, but in a way it is, and has been since I was maybe 10 or so. The second half of spring semester always comes upon us suddenly: it's staggering (and more than slightly terrifying, truth be told) to think that I only have 6 weeks of school left: 4 weeks of classes, projects week (finals week, too, for seniors), and an empty week (finals week for the rest of the school).
The downside of this, of course, is the 4 weeks I have to get EVERYTHING done. That includes my Computer Vision independent study, Clinic, Clinic presentation, Clinic poster, Clinic report, Photography, Philosophy of Mind, and tools.
Tools is my current favorite. I'm making my hammer now, and I just finished all the work that I need to do on the metal lathe. A quick search of my archives tells me that I haven't actually talked about tools yet, which is strange since I really enjoy it and I'm taking it for pure enjoyment. Tools, or E-8, is one of the first engineering classes that prospective engineering students take at Mudd. It's the introductory shop course, called "Tools" because that's what you build. You use the sheet-metal shop to craft a tool tray, bending, cutting and welding sheet metal into shape. You use the metal shop to build a flat head screwdriver, and most of a machinist's hammer (something like this, with one face made of nylon and the other of hardened steel). You use the wood shop to build the hammer handle.
I have not yet made my tool tray, but I've finished my screwdriver and much of my hammer. The screwdriver handle is made from acrylic using the lathe and the mill, and the blade is made on the mill. The hammer is the most complex piece. The hammer head (a short piece of 1in steel bar stock) is machined on the lathe and mill to fit the handle and both faces. The handle is made with the band-saw and wood lathe followed by a LOT of sanding. The hard face is machined from carbon steel on the lathe, followed by some filing, and then heat treated to bring it up to full hardness. It's polished by sand-blasting and fits into the head by press-fitting. The soft face is made from nylon (the nicest material I've worked with on the lathe) and attaches to the head with a screw. I'll post pictures of my pieces when I get off my butt and take some pictures (possibly tomorrow).
The shop proctors tried to chastise me when I told them (on, say, Wednesday night) that I hadn't started my hammer yet (due Friday of the following week). I corrected them. I am not a sophomore engineering student with no time. I'm a senior computer science student taking this class for fun. I can be in the shop every morning for 3 hours if I feel like it, and if I don't feel like it, I can drop the class (HMC's drop date is insanely late in the semester) or turn in half a hammer. It's a good way to approach the class.
In other news, I photoshopped up my senior page for the yearbook yesterday. Each senior gets a full page in the yearbook to decorate as desired, so I sifted through my (meagre) photo collection and placed the pictures on a canvas in Photoshop. The pictures include me eating a Chinese-Donut-Burger, my barnstormers co-president, my girlfriend, my roommate (first three years; we have singles now), a prank some friends and I pulled, a prank some friends pulled on me, a few Halloween costumes (I'm the Rorschach near the top), me getting my head shaved for a friend who had cancer sophomore year (he's doing fine and back at school), the boxers a friend decided to hang on her wall after finding them in her laundry, the Mudd Amateur Rocketry Club at ROCStock a few years ago, Iris Critchell with her Cessna 172, and Rotsnake. And lots of gratuitous Photoshop effects.
I discovered Photoshop brush packs. Thus I have a coffee stain, ink stain, and crinkled-paper effects. The torn edges, actually, are incredibly simple to do in newer versions of Photoshop: turn on layer-effects and add a drop shadow, inner glow and outer glow to the layer. That gives the very slight drop-shadow to create some depth in the image and a thin white border to each picture. Take the eraser tool and grab a ragged brush, then erase the corners/edges of the photo. The white border now looks like torn paper where you've erased the image. I used this to create pinholes, torn corners where pushpins may have been ripped out, and half-ripped photographs. Putting the whole thing on a wooden surface gave it a bit more context, and I couldn't resist the coffee stain. The tape strikes me as a bit cheesy, but not too much and I had just learned how to make the tape.
As for post-graduation plans, I'm not sure yet where I'll be working; I have an offer from DreamHost, and I'm waiting on a few more. I'll probably take the summer off, though, and start in the fall. Over the summer I think I might take some classes at The Crucible in Oakland and visit old friends.
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...
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.
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 repositoryonline 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.
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.
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!
A senior at Harvey Mudd College, I've had a lot of times here -- Most good, some bad -- and made many unforgettable friends. I'm a martial artist and love physical activity such as climbing, parkour, and dance. I am majoring in computer science and run Linux on two computers that I scrounged from the computer graveyard.
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