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

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

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

Dreamin' Again

Wow...I'm really slacking on this. Anyway, a few weeks ago, as mentioned by Trevin (whose blog you should read, if you don't already), was the Career Fair. I feel like it was smaller than usual, although the spring career fair is always small, so it could just be perception (I haven't gotten around to going to the office of career services yet and asking). However, there was a company there called DreamHost. They are a web hosting company founded in '97 by four Mudders. They've managed to keep quite a bit of the informal, friendly feeling of Mudd in their company, which is completely amazing...check out their "don't be a jackass" policy (at Mudd we are told during orientation that you'll generally be okay if you try not to be a jackass...it makes everything a lot more chill than it might otherwise be).

In addition to being pretty chill, they're remarkably helpful. They have a status blog to inform you when things go down and a twitter account that will tweet status changes. Beyond that, they have the best administrative backend I've ever seen. They really make it a snap to do most things. The two coolest things that I've come across so far are the one-click installs and SSH access. The second, SSH access, is nice because it lets you have control over your own files in a way that is comfortable to most of the CS majors here at Mudd -- we use the Unix shell for much of our work, so we get quite comfortable using it. Most places only give you FTP access.

The one-click installs are truely cool, though. DreamHost has gotten together a number of popular packages (WordPress, Drupal, ZenPhoto, etc.) and created an incredibly simple installer. You just click on the package you want, it walks you through everything you need to create, and then deploys the package where you asked it to. It also has a button labeled "update" that will update your packages to the most recent release just as easily. Truly, it is crazy.

Anyway, I need to think up a really awesome domain name, and then I'll probably start blogging over there once I graduate.

I'll try to have more updates for you this semester....

~Kyle Marsh

Prezi: The Coolest Thing Since...Dinosaurs, I Guess. Or Rocket Ships. Those are cool too.

One of my clinic teammates is really excited about making good presentations. This is great, because he's imparted that excitement onto our team. Probably everyone reading this has heard advice like "don't read off your slides" and "Don't write paragraphs for each bullet point", but I'm willing to bet that relatively few of you have ever tried to make a presentation that completely gets away from the PowerPoint paradigm. PowerPoint, an ancient relic of a past age that's too cumbersome to know that it's dead, encourages slides that look like this:

+--------+
| Title |
|*bullet |
|*bullet |
+--------+
or perhaps this:
+----------+
| Title |
|*bul |pic||
|*bul |___||
+----------+

*edit: HTML's reluctance to insert multiple spaces into a web page made this asciiart somewhat unpleasant to draw...Non-breaking spaces fixed it.

This makes for a very dull presentation, even with an enthusiastic speaker. This is, certainly, a valid style of presentation, but relatively few topics actually benefit from it, and very few presenters know how to make it work to their advantage. It became mainstream because it was just about the limit of what PowerPoint (and computers, really) could do back in the old days. PowerPoint, being a part of the most prolific productivity software suite ever, reached the masses, and an entire generation of students was brought up learning how to use it and carrying that knowledge into the business world.

Unfortunately, they mostly learned how to use the very basic features. PowerPoint has grown beyond its original limitations, but people have stayed behind and still mostly use the basic templates depicted above.

Enter Keynote. I am a PC user -- I run Windows XP on my Tablet PC and Ubuntu Linux on my (distressingly old) desktop. That said, Apple's Keynote software left me speechless the first time I used it. Nearly as intuitive as the iPod, I sat down and knew how to do nearly anything the instant I first tried. It made building a presentation fun, like the classier breed of really horrible Flash games you find online and can't stop playing.

The two presentations that my clinic team has done were built using Keynote, and both were probably among the best presentations that have been given for clinic projects (in my completely informed and unbiased opinion). Instead of bullet points, we had little circles representing our users that scooted around the screen, and lines that appeared between them, and several other gimmicky animations that really made the presentation far more interesting that a static screen full of bullet points.

3 days ago Marty came into my room and said "I just IM'd you a link...check this out." The link was http://prezi.com, and the "this" to check out was one of the samples at the bottom of the home page. Go there. View the three samples. You'll be amazed.

This is cooler than dinosaurs, cooler than space ships, cooler than those awful flash games, and even cooler than sliced bread (although there is some debate about the dinosaurs). This program, called Prezi by taking the Hungarian dimunitive form of the English word "presentation", tries to escape slides altogether. It is a seriously cool piece of software that really has the potential to change the way people give presentations.

Three of my clinic teammates have signed up to be Beta testers, so with any luck our final presentation will be given using Prezi. For those of you interested in it, you can check out the Prezi blog at http://blog.prezi.com and you can follow several of the founders on Twitter.

~KMarsh

And so I emerge victorious from the black depths!

Welcome back. Sorry it's taken me this long to update, but I am indeed back at Mudd and the semester has gotten underway. Today's title refers to my first time in a darkroom since senior year of high school. I'm taking intermediate B&W photography this semester and the darkroom here is somewhat different than what we had in high school. It's also in the sub-basement of the physics building. Next to rooms with really big lasers.

In other news, I decided not to continue with Russian this semester, so in addition to photography I'm taking Philosophy of Mind on CMC, Clinic, Tools, and independent study with Professor Dodds. It's a light semester with only 12 units (I can't get on the Dean's List for this semester because of this, for instance), but I think I'll be very happy with my decisions.

In addition to all the academic classes I'm taking I also am taking 2 ballroom dance classes on Pomona. Pomona has a dance department whose students study modern dance, ballet, and other expressive dance forms. Mudders can take those classes for Humanities credits (that department is where I did my humanities concentration in Movement Studies, actually), but the ballroom dance classes are perhaps more accurately called "lessons" and are taken for PE credit (0 credits at Mudd, but you're required to take at least 3 pe classes before you graduate. I think I'm up to 10 now, 2 of which I helped teach...). The head of the Claremont Colleges Ballroom Dance Company, Paul Roach, is a recent Pomona College alumnus and teaches the ballroom classes. He's a very funny guy and has a unique style of teaching dance to large groups that I find to be very similar to the style employed by my martial arts instructor before I left for college. This semester I'm taking Silver (intermediate level) International Standard Dance and Silver Social Dance.

Standard is Paul's personal favorite dancing, and it is much more commonly danced in competition than socially (except, perhaps, for weddings you rarely see it in social situations) so that class is very exacting. That class drives us very hard for technique. The 5 Standard dances are Waltz, Tango, Foxtrot, Quickstep and Viennese Waltz. This semester we are starting with Waltz and then moving on to Tango. Last year Liz and I took the Bronze (beginning) International Standard Dance class in which we spent most of our time on Quickstep, but also learned some Waltz and ended with Viennese Waltz. I've never danced Standard Tango and I'm really looking forward to that.

The social dance class is one of the most fun things I've ever done in my life. Bronze Social was alright, but the goal there was mostly to teach an enormous group of people the basic steps to a number of common dances (Cha-cha, Salsa, Triple-Step Swing, Polka and Lindy) and to try to get people out of their shells and make them more comfortable in social situations (while Mudd is the most technical school of the 5-C's, the others are no slouches and the difference between college students and high school students is, in some cases, only spelling, so social interaction can be a foreign concept to many people.

Silver Social, on the other hand, is an amazing class. Paul deliberately told us not to form lines like most of the dance classes and the result is a very organic and fairly chaotic group of fairly good dancers who are learning how to be themselves while dancing and look good while having fun on the dance floor. It is more fun than I can do justice to and I suspect will be a very, very good source of stress relief later on in the semester.

Dancing is fun, and I'm really glad I started taking these classes while I was at college.

~KMarsh

Would M'lady Care to Dance?

The Scottish Rite Temple in Oakland, California plays host to the quarterly Gaskell Ball. Gaskell's is a social ball set in the Victorian era.  The signature dance is the Viennese waltz (danced in the old social style, rather than modern ballroom style) but other dances make more than token appearances, such as polka (deadly, high-velocity, skipping), heel-toe galop (aim and charge at other couples in utter chaos), polka mazurka-waltz (slow Viennese waltz with a kick every half turn to warn off hapless dancers and small children), schottiche (German interpretation of what the French thought the Scotts were doing...or something), and some insane set dances with names like "The Jolly Dog Polka" and "Sir Roger de Coverly" (the latter is often followed on the setlist by the "de Coverly Recovery Waltz").  They have a live band, Brassworks, who, incidentally, played at SteampunkCon earlier this year.

The regulars are generally the same people who work at renaissance faires and things like The Great Dickens Christmas Fair.  This means two things: first, the people are a little bit strange.  Second, the costumes are AMAZING.  Many of the people make

 their own costumes and they are phenomenal.  My girlfriend made my vest and tailcoat as well as her dress.  She's actually the only active member of the sewing club at Mudd aside from Professor Sparks, who makes positively stunning quilts.  They hope to get more members soon, so if you've an interest in sewing (or learning to sew) you should be pleased to hear that you'll have an outlet at Mudd for your creative urges.  And time.  Sort of.  This dress took Liz 2 years from start to finish, but most of the work was done last semester in preparation for Gaskell's (the ruffles, unseen in this picture took 8 hours of labor each...there are 5 of them.  I can't possibly imagine spending an entire work week doing nothing but ruffles).

Oh, and I mentioned the bizarre dance that is the Schottiche earlier.  It's danced to 4 counts as follows: step-step-step-HOP, step-step-step-HOP, step-HOP-step-HOP, step-HOP-step-HOP!  You can do any number of variants, like the Goose-step Schottiche for a military aspect, the Vecchi Schottiche for a sketchy old man aspect, or the ever-popular Penguin Schottiche for a hilarious and somewhat cute aspect.  This dance is usually danced in the shuttle position (partners side-by-side, hands held across the front of their bodies) rather than a traditional ballroom position: your partner's knee comes sharply up with each HOP....  Penguin Schottiche, however, is usually danced in something akin to a conga line.  Oh, and Schottiche is pronounced "shoddish" (like the pokemon).

In addition to dancing, I also took pictures.  I'm taking Intermediate Black and White Photography next semester (in addition to 2 dance classes, clinic, a philosophy class, and independent study...) and my grandparents gave me their old Canon A1 to use.  It's about 30 years old and hasn't been used in nearly that long so I took it with me to the ball to see how it worked.  That film is in the shop tonight getting developed (the first three pictures here were taken on my digital camera), so stand by for an update when I get it back and digitized.  Until then, happy holidays!

~KMarsh