Turtles. Definitely turtles.

Today's Random Sequential Indicator is 6.5:  That's how many hours we have to go until until Christmas! As I publish this, Christmas begins less than a full-night's-sleep away. So I hope everyone has a great holiday and survives their families! Remember to take breaks :)

Now on with the blag.  I may have mentioned this, but ECE 371 (Microprocessor Design) was the highlight of the term.  The content was interesting, the assignments were fun, and the professor was awesome.  This all came as a bit of a pleasant surprise, as I really didn’t expect to enjoy assembly language programming in the least. 

Don't worry, this shouldn't make sense.

For everyone not familiar with assembly language, here’s a crash course: It’s a programming language used to talk directly to hardware, and give it extremely simple, basic instructions.  It is so simple that a program to display numbers typed by someone on a monitor would take literally thousands of lines of code to create, since each instruction really can’t contain much more than “add these two numbers together” or “check if this button has been pressed yet”.  Sounds boring on the surface, but the real power becomes evident when you are NOT waiting on a user for inputs.  When it is just hardware talking to each other, things start moving VERY fast.  As in, you could check to see if that button I mentioned earlier was pressed thousands of times in a second, and respond nearly instantly if it had been.  Or a robot could check to make sure it is standing upright a few thousand times every second, and quickly adjust its balance if it starts to fall.  I might not be making it sound like it from this explanation, but basically with a microprocessor you can control just about anything that inputs or outputs an electrical signal with incredible speed and accuracy; the applications are endless. 

For anyone who has experience with assembly language, all I have to say is: Yes, I agree it’s a really shitty development environment, but somebody has to do it.  It makes a lot of sense to me, and for some reason I enjoy it, so it might as well be me.

The other reason 371 was awesome was who was teaching it.  (He reminds me a lot of Mr. Renner, my favorite teacher from high school).  He is a really sharp guy, he’s very helpful, he is extremely knowledgeable in his field (He wrote the book on microprocessor design… No, really, he did.), he really enjoys his work, and he has a great sense of humor.  Which brings me to the reason I decided to write this post.   Many of the following quotes were simply too good not so share, and they have all been reconstructed from my notes as accurately as possible, so I hope you enjoy. 

·             “So, what happens when you supply a logic high to the Intel PXA270 reset port? Well, it turns on.  With the miracle of electronics and all that stuff.”

·             “I’ve been up here waving my hands around for quite a while, is there anything that anyone doesn’t understand, or should I continue?”

·             “Don’t try to keep all of this information in your head.  Unless your head works better than mine”

·             “I always complete the projects I assign just to make sure there are no problems, and this next project was a little tricky.  But, all I had to do was change one setting then my LED started blinking and I threw my arms up and started running around the house.  These things are still exciting even after all these years”

·             “What is 100 times 10?”  *Silence* “Now, don’t everyone take your shoes off all at once here…” (‘To take your shoes off’ is a bit of slang he invented meaning ‘to get down to business’)

·             “What do you do when you get your first job, and your boss gives you your first real design project, and it’s impossible?  You freak out, jump around, throw your clothes everywhere—but you can only do all that for five minutes.  Then you check to see if anyone else already figured it out.” 

·             The previous quote was A reference to his ‘5 minute rule’: “When given an impossible task, you get 5 minutes to freak out, but then after your 5 minutes are up, you have to get to work.”

·             “This ‘Talker Board’ is great: You can make it say anything you want—unless it’s X-rated.  Unless you bring headphones, then you really can make it say anything.   Ok, since I am being recorded that’s as far as we’ll go with that…”

·             “Why do you want your product to be able to be assembled by a robot? Well, because you don’t have to buy them coffee every day.”

·             “What do you do while you are waiting for your device to be fabricated? That’s easy—you just sleep under your desk until it’s done.”

·             “What do you have to add to asynchronous memory to make it synchronous? Oh, I don’t know… Turtles or something, I think…”

Remember, all of these were actual quotes from an EXTREMELY technical and detail-oriented class, which in many cases made them even funnier.  As an added bonus, he also teaches 372 and 373, meaning I will get to take his class every term this year! So expect more awesome quotes from him in the future!

Return to the Land of the Living

I made it through another term.  Barely.  I’ve been done now for nearly a week, and I’ve been graciously making use of my brief opportunity to avoid contact with society to, well... avoid contact with society.  It’s been a while since I posted anything here, and I intend to bring everyone up to speed, but first, in the style of NPR’s Planet Money, I have a an indicator to share first.  For anyone who hasn’t heard the show, they always begin by sharing the “Planet Money Indicator” of the day, in which they first read off some arbitrary number, then tell you what it means.  The guy who presents the indicators has a reputation for always choosing indicators of bad things, as they usually have to do with unemployment or foreclosures or such, but if you’ve listened to financial news in the past 10 years that shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.  Alas, I digress.   

Today’s Random Sequential Indicator is 0.4.   

That’s the GPA hit I took when I received the first B of my postbac education.  Yes, I got an Asian F in Calculus II this term.  Now, I know one B isn’t the end of the world, but if I said I haven’t lost any sleep over it, I’d be lying.  I’ve never felt more cheated out of a grade in my life, my 4.0 is dead, and I have absolutely no recourse.  Not once were course evaluations offered or even mentioned, and if I bring my concerns forward now, AFTER I recieved my grade, I would  just sound like a whiney student upset with his grade.  And I assure you that though that description matches, I have good reasons to be upset.

I know this must sound ridiculous: A postbac student who has already met the requirements to receive graduate funding complaining about a single B in a subject which is supposed to be difficult, in a course that was taught at a community college.  So I’ll stop—right after I say this: I can count the number of questions I got wrong on all of the tests, homework, and exams combined on one hand.  Tell me, does it sound like I understand 80% (a B’s worth) of the material?

I have good news as well.  First, a brief review:  I was feeling really nervous about ECE 221 (Circuit Analysis) at the beginning of the term.  I had never done anything like it before, and I hadn’t completed either of the prerequisite courses.  Story of my life, I know.  So I studied my ass off, and got 100% on the first midterm.  The material was new but not difficult.  Around week 7 or 8, I went into the second midterm with 100% on my tests, over 100% on my homework, and 100% in my lab section, and received a 72%.  That really shocked me, and so I studied my ass off for the final but only pulled a 78% on it.  Had you asked me a few weeks ago which class I thought I would get a B in, I would have said 221 for sure.  My calculations put me with an 85%, which is the sturdiest of B’s, really, but thanks to the miracle of everyone else failing too, I scraped by with an A-, which given the circumstances, I am completely satisfied with.

Finally, ECE 371 (Microprocessor Design) was certainly the highlight of the term in terms of both my final grade and my overall enjoyment of the content and assignments. Despite being tricky at times, it was very interesting and rewarding, and I enjoyed it a lot.  Also, the professor teaching that course is my advisor, so it was absolutely unacceptable for me to get anything short of an A.  I did very well in 371 from the start (including getting a 95% on a test that took place a week earlier than I was anticipating, due to faulty notes) so while I knew I would probably be getting an A, it was a real relief to see that it had actually happened.

All things considered, I ended the term with a 3.6, so I doubt my cumulative GPA is much below 3.9.  That’s it for my academic debriefing, more posts to come soon…