I'm a little bit late with this post, so it's going to be very short — this month was crazy. Back at the beginning of the month, I went to two different concerts, both the same band: Belle and Sebastian, twice in just over two weeks.
The first trip was with Nate and Carol, to New York City (Brooklyn's Williamsburg Waterfront, specifically), where the concert was outdoors. The threat of severe rain and thunderstorms loomed over the concert before it started, but somehow, we got exceptionally lucky and felt not more than a few drops. The concert was fantastic; we were standing only a few dozen feet from the stage, close enough that people who were right near us ended up on stage during the audience participation part of the show.
Looking behind us, we could see the entirety of the NYC skyline lit up across the river, which was really beautiful (I've been to NYC a few times, but almost always spend the whole time in the middle of Manhattan, so I've never had the opportunity to see the city lit up at night). Also, standing in the crowd just made it feel... like it was supposed to! Like a Belle and Sebastian concert!
The music was great, the show was great, the weather ended up being great. They hit more or less all of the songs that we wanted, and did a fantastic job, and the classic banter between the leads.
The second show was just as fantastic, musically, but sitting in a theatre led to a ever-so-slightly-less-perfect atmosphere (though it was nice to have functioning legs afterwards!). Still, I had a lot of fun both times, and it was nice to see Amy again and take her to the second show!
We hung out in Boston a bit that night, and went to Comiccon the next day, which you can read about on Amy's blog.
As long-time redditors, occasional enjoyers of fine cablecomedy, and reasonably-reasonable people, a few of us from RPI went to this weekend's Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. We had decided to go shortly after the announcement, and then promptly decided to not worry about it until last week, so there was a bit of a rush to plan things over the course of the last few days. It ended up working out just fine, though:
Friday afternoon, Connor drove Carol, Matt, Nate, and I down to Gino's house, in Cape May, NJ, where we stayed the night, meeting up with two of Gino's friends and an RPI alum, Pete. It was a long drive; we left at 16:30, and got to Gino's at about 22:00. After getting introduced to Gino's family and dogs, and not brainstorming sign ideas (I'd opted not to carry anything, as I had my big camera instead), I promptly went to sleep, leaving the others to paint their signs.
Getting up early (4:00) Saturday morning was a bit of a challenge, but somehow we got everyone awake, showered, and fed in an hour, somehow. We split into two cars — Gino took his friends and Connor, Pete took me and my apartmentmates. We drove to the metro stop at Shady Grove, about twenty miles from the National Mall; after that, it took well over an hour to get into the city, through the insanity of the mob at the metro station and everywhere else.
We met up with Mike as soon as we got into D.C., still a few blocks from the rally — it was about 11:00 at this point. There was quite a bit of hugging all around; I hadn't seen him since I left RPI in May, and never got to say goodbye when he moved to D.C. in August.
I should pause here and note that I spent a good part of the last two weeks playing Fallout 3, an action RPG set in post-nuclear-war Washington, so — even though I visited the city many, many years ago — until I set foot on the Mall, my primary memory of the layout of the center of the city involved far more mutated creatures and irradiated trenches than pristine roadways, green trees, and happy people... so that was a little bizarre.
The crowd was enormous; estimates seem to be ranging from 150,000 to 250,000, with the supposedly-most-accurate (and most recent) being 215,000 ± 20,000. We all entered the crowd together, but quickly got separated into two groups — Mike, Nate, and Carol forged ahead and managed to find a supposedly reasonably decent spot; the rest of us ended up wandering around trying (and failing) to find a place from which we could settle down and hear what was going on.
Unfortunately we didn't really succeed; we ended up milling through different parts of the crowd instead, looking at signs and taking in the fact that we were in Washington with a crazy crowd of people. I heard a small fraction of the rally itself (mostly just music), but I guess I really don't mind; I'll watch the recorded version at some point in the near future so that I can understand what was going on around me, but for now I'm mostly happy with how it ended up.
Gino and I eventually got split off from the rest of our group; we had walkie-talkies, but it took quite a while of wandering around to eventually find them. There was no hope for finding Carol's group, since the makeup of the crowd ensured that all of the cell service (on all four networks!) was entirely swamped, and they didn't have a radio.
I enjoyed the signs; this was one of my favorites, of course! There are many lists of awesome signs on the internet, and literally thousands of pictures of them on Flickr. Quite a few people stopped Matt to take a picture of the sign that Connor and Gino had constructed for him, "Boehner works hard on legislation", a horrible, horrible play on the obvious-but-incorrect pronunciation of the unfortunately-likely-future Speaker of the House's last name, targeting, well... 20-something white guys (the reddit crowd), a pretty significant chunk of the rally population. Anyway, he got a ton of laughs (a few crippling laughs, too!), and quite a few people made him stop moving so they could take a picture (though I've failed to find any of these on the internet so far). After all, it was primarily supposed to be a parody-rally.
Since we got separated, I don't have any pictures of Nate or Carol's signs, but I think Nate has some and will post them at some point. They had "I think Obama is pretty OK" (I wanted them to add a question mark, and a comma between the last two words, but they wouldn't go for it...) and "Don't Drink and Drive, KTHX", I believe.
Some crazy (despite what the sign says) people decided to climb into the trees around the Mall; I'm sure they had a much better view than anyone on the ground... lucky!
There was also a surprisingly large contingent of older people, which it was nice to see (going against reddit's assumption that they're most of the "problem"), though I'm sure the transportation problems were much worse for them, and quite a few babies, which just made me wonder what in the world was going on in their parents' minds.
We eventually headed to the Washington Monument, where the cell service was in a semi-functional state, and left Carol, Nate, and Mike a few voicemails and texts, before heading back to the subway. The trip back to Shady Grove took an exceptionally long time; while Connor managed to literally jam himself through the door on the first train that we saw, Gino and Matt and I missed at least six trains before there was one we could get on. We were to the point of "if we don't get on the next train, we're riding in the other direction for a while and then turning around" before we finally made it on. Once we finally did get on, people just refused to stop attempting to cram more bodies onto the train, resulting in a distinct lack of need to hold onto anything — we were just a solid mass, all holding each other up, mostly unable to breathe. It was pretty terrible, though got a lot better after a few stops.
One old man getting onto the subway didn't quite fit, and got his head and glasses crushed in the door (I think he managed to recover his glasses without them breaking, though I'm certain they weren't entirely in the shape they had been before he got on the train). It was somewhat horrifying how bad the crowd was at understanding what needed to happen to make things work...
We went to the Dogfish Head Brewpub, about ten minutes from the metro station, for dinner. Of course, at this point, we were still missing Nate, Carol, and Mike — we managed to get ahold of them and retrieve them from the metro station just in time for our reservation.
The food was great, and they put the ten of us in our own little room, which was nice. Connor and Pete were quite excited to visit (this part of the trip had been planned for quite a while as well), and I think everyone had a good time.
On the way out, we dropped Mike back off at the metro station, managing to actually say proper goodbyes to him this time, which was sad, but nice to have the opportunity! It was certainly nice to see him, even if only for a short while...
There's the Troy crew (plus Gino) with the only remaining sign (Carol and Nate managed to accidentally leave theirs in a Starbucks on the way home, unfortunately), getting ready to go to breakfast back in Cape May. Gino took us out to a little diner near the water, and then over to the Washington St. Mall to acquire fudge.
I'm not sure if he's sad we're leaving, or if he's ready to kill us if we don't leave...
We got back home just in time for some trick-or-treaters today; a weekend well spent, even if none of us have any idea what was going on the whole time!
During RPI's family weekend, the Rensselaer Aeronautical Federation was doing their normal semesterly "RPI Flyby", in which they take students up in their tiny (four-seater) planes and skim the skies above Troy and Albany. Matt and Gino went a few years ago, and somehow I convinced myself that it would be neat to go myself, if only for the photographic opportunity. So, I reserved the Sunday 10AM block for Matt and I to go, and... we went!
That's our little plane! We had a pilot and a copilot, and Matt and I got the back two seats. It was hard to get in, but once in, there was plenty of room for the four of us. We had headsets, and could hear both our pilots and the ALB tower, though we weren't able to talk back (luckily!).
I didn't realize how small Albany International Airport was; I'm pretty sure it's quite a bit smaller than Burlington, now that I see it from the air (Wikipedia says they're comparable (with BTV winning) in the number of aircraft which call them home, but Albany sees almost twice as much traffic).
That's the center of our campus in the middle of autumn. You can see pretty much all of the important buildings except Low and West Hall, and from this angle it's even more clear how ridiculous EMPAC looks next to the rest of the buildings. The smallest building, just to the right of center, is the home to my department.
The symmetry of Freshman Hill looks much more awesome from the sky than it does from the ground. My old home, Cary, is the topmost L-shaped building (in the upper-left, directly to the left of topmost-Barton's double-L structure). Davison, though worth less of a mention, is the white-topped L-shaped building in the bottom right.
Carol's house! (also Andrew, Christine, Jillian, Kim, Nick, Ryan, and Zarin's)
It was a really small plane... Before we got started, they asked us if we were OK doing negative Gs; I said "not really", and Matt was all "definitely", so, of course, we did them :-) They handed Matt a pen to hold on his palm and watch it float; I hadn't considered all of the repercussions of the word "negative" (I was thinking "zero"), so my camera smacked me in the face. Good fun.
Empire State Plaza! It's been a while since I've been there on the ground, but it looks pretty neat from the sky.
Over the long weekend, I wrote a very simple platformer for the Arduino platform, targeting a grid of 8x8 RGB LEDs as its display. It has ground of varying height, monsters to kill (or to have kill you), coins to collect, and pretty clouds, as well as the classic side-scrolling and jumping mechanics you'd expect. The controller is just three buttons on a small breadboard with long wires back to the board. It's obviously not very sophisticated, having only 64 pixels to display things with, but it was an entertaining "just because" project.
The code is open-source (though not very clean nor well-documented, as it was a rushed weekend project) under the 2-clause BSD license, as always, on my Github. The hardware is simply three momentary pushbuttons, an Arduino Diecimila, a handful of resistors, and one of Sparkfun's 8x8 RGB LED matrices — nothing special.
There's a (somewhat long) video that pretty much demonstrates the entirety of the game (unfortunately, it was captured with my phone, so you can somewhat see the LED refresh rate — though keep in mind that the blinking yellow coins are actually blinking):
That's a lot of traveling! Should be fun, though; I haven't been to D.C. in many, many years, and it'll be nice to visit Amy in her new native habitat. Luckily my schedule is extremely light on homework this semester, so it shouldn't be any trouble at all.
The first week of my senior year at RPI is now quite over! I have to say that while I do miss San Diego a bit, it is really nice to be back in the Troy swing of things...
Next week is Amy's first week of college, at MCPHS; she's still a bit nervous, but I'm quite sure she's going to have a great time! Apparently last night she was out and about Boston on a school-run scavenger hunt, which included a trip near a totally-packed Fenway Park. FUN! (not, apparently...)
My schedule has been under a great deal of flux over the course of the week, as it always is; since I got here, I added Rhetoric and Writing, then dropped it, added Computational Vision in its place, and dropped Processes, all for various reasons (mostly trying to balance the things that will make me crazy during the semester with the things that I'll enjoy). Initial impressions:
Computational Vision — While the professor didn't show up for the first class (instead sending recordings of himself for the TA to play for us), it seems like this is going to be a great class (I finished the first homework almost a week early, if that's any indication of enjoyment). Lots of image processing and fun stuff like that (the professor actually founded a company that makes panorama-stitching and medical-image-registration software, so it should be good).
Bio — Ha! I really can't stand the fact that I have to take this... but I've gotten around that problem this time (so far) by making friends with awesome people in my class! (I don't normally manage to do that). I do need it to graduate, though, and I've started taking it two or three semesters in the past only to drop it during the first week. Should be good this time...
Open Source Software — It's a class with Moorthy (and a few people from Kitware), so of course it's going to be great! Should be a relatively relaxing class, I think... we'll see!
Computational Finance — Malik (who I previously had for Machine Learning, which was probably the hardest/most-stressful/greatest-payoff class I've taken here so far) spent something like twenty minutes during the first class explaining how we should probably leave if we don't have calculus, multivar, linear algebra, and statistics down pat. I haven't taken any but calc... we'll see how it goes (I vaguely remember the same warning before Machine Learning). I learned more about economics in the first day than was taught in an entire semester of Econ 101 last year, so I guess that's good!
Ed.: the majority of this was written on the plane from San Diego to JFK, and then emailed to the QChat client dev list (plus a few extras)
Almost exactly three months ago, I boarded a plane from Burlington to San Diego, solo, entirely unsure of what lay ahead. I'd been to San Diego before — for a few hours — and I'd heard only good things about it from people who live in the area, but beyond that, nothing. I knew that I would be interning at Qualcomm, writing embedded software — that was about all I knew beforehand; I had yet to be introduced to QChat, and I certainly hadn't met anyone I would be working with.
My second day (the first was consumed with intern orientation activities, and discovering that I had to walk 2 miles to work and back every day) was filled with introductions to everyone, which, being as shy as I generally am, was expected to be as intimidating as could be. But as soon as they started, it was clear something was different here. From Ali, the first QChatter who I met, who toured me around and helped me get settled in, to Vikram, who I didn't meet until many weeks into my internship, as he was on vacation when I arrived, everyone was ridiculously friendly, approachable, and helpful.
I've worked with many teams of varying shapes, sizes, and purposes before (though less often in the real world), and the QChat client team is unquestionably the first to be this universally awesome. Throughout the whole summer, there was a complete lack of raised voices (except in laughter and jest), blame-laying (I think I was the worst offender there, because I wasn't totally used to the laid-back workflow yet), and argument — which made it extremely easy to quickly become comfortable with the group and the atmosphere and get to work.
I might have gotten too comfortable — after being here for three months, I felt so much like a part of the team that yesterday's departure was quite hard to bear. Unfortunately I didn't manage to find everyone (Shobha, Sachin, Sanket, and Vikram, at least, and Teja was still on vacation — so an extra goodbye and thank you to all of you) to say goodbye to, but if I'd hung around for much longer, there would have been a few tears, and we didn't need that.
I won't miss fighting with the ever so wonderful prototype handsets, nor cursing the engineer who thought that using the C escape character as their path separator was a good idea (or that you needed two characters to represent a newline — basically, I won't miss Windows), nor silly little things like timecards, but the list of things that I will miss is innumerable. The whole team, for starters — every single one of you. The spirit of QChat. The long walks in the San Diego sunshine into work every morning. The daily status meetings (you guys will think I'm crazy, but I was already missing these when they stopped halfway through — it was good to see everyone every day and get a handle on what was going on in the beginning of the day; I learned a lot about what we were doing just from listening to the chatter there, and I hope if you have another intern next summer, you'll do daily status at least for the first few weeks). I'll miss our little faraday cage, and the wonders of release days. So, so many things.
I think the moment it all really clicked for me was that one super long (4 AM) sanity day. I think it was my third or fourth release; hanging out with everyone just trying to finish up (through the USB hilarity that ensued that everyone who was there surely remembers); ordering Indian food (my first time!) and being introduced to that by the people who know it best (by the way, the countless anecdotes about home from everyone makes me feel almost obligated to visit India... someday!)
And then on the opposite end of that was Shilpa's goodbye lunch — the end of the team as I knew it for most of the summer, and the first realization that the summer really was coming to a close. It was certainly a bonding experience for me; a chance to hang out with a majority of the team and talk about anything but work. I think that was actually one of my favorite days of the summer, bittersweet though it was.
So... I don't know. Maybe I'll run in to some of you again; it seems incredibly unlikely that I'll run in to all of you again. If I end up back in San Diego, I'll be sure to look you guys up, and if any of you are ever in Albany, Burlington, or Boston, send me a note! You never know where I might be...
And who knows what might happen in May! I certainly don't...
Thanks for everything, and goodbye (for now), and good luck!
Awesome headphones, which will be getting their own post shortly.
Front Right
My phone, without which I would be horribly lost.
Back Right
Amy made me this wallet... three years ago, I think (Amy, it might need repairs or replacement at some point!). I was going to fan out the contents, but basically the whole picture would have to be blurred out due to the various CC/ID numbers. It also contains transportation passes for three big cities (NYC, Boston, and San Diego), and a surprising number of gift cards (bookstores and iTS, mostly).
And a folded 8.5x11" map of Qualcomm San Diego, which has been there since the third day of work:
Now it's your turn! Mine wasn't very surprising at all...
