Midterms and Thanksgiving

Midterms and Thanksgiving are coming up, only one more month of school left. I'm doing great in EECS 215 (circuits) and EECS 270 (digital) but only decent in EECS 280 (C++). If there's one thing I've learned, it's that I hate high level programming. Not so much hate, more like just don't enjoy. Hopefully I can stick to C and ASM and lower level programming concepts when I get into the workplace. Unfortunately there's not much to say for now, expect updates in the weeks to come.

All good so far

I've been able to keep up my confidence so far, everything seems to be going great. Really enjoying my professors and I have two wonderful friends who have been crucial to my success thus far(I'm very lucky!) As of now I've been putting some effort into getting a summer internship, we'll see what comes up. I wish I could say more about what has been going on but school is quite consuming of my time. I'm still working off my lazy habits; I used this week's exams as an excuse to slack off on next week. With a 4 day weekend I'll play catch-up. Meeting a friend over the weekend to get most of next week's work out of the way. After this semester I'll be able to really gauge what I can expect in the future.

First week over!

The first week of school is over. It feels like going to college for the very first time. I am so excited to have a chance to really prove myself, it is very exhilarating. I've been devoting a lot more time to my studies and am readying myself for the exams and labs. This first month will be a true gauge of what's to come.

Just got back from camping

I went camping up at both the mouth of the Tahquamenon river and at Muskellunge Lake. My sisters, dad and I left on August 15th and I drove home with my dog Charlie this past Friday. Had a ton of fun, and played my Gameboy Advance a lot to pass the time. Unfortunately the game I bought for the trip was a counterfeit so I lost my save file after beating it (22 hours gone!). I'm in the process of getting a refund, the knucklehead actually expects me to send him back an illegal copy of the game before I get the refund, I'm pretty sure that violates some kind of copyright law. On top of that, as I was driving home a cop's lights went off right behind me. I got over and slowed down, and he shut his lights off and passed me. Guess going 10 over the limit was too slow for him haha.
When I got home two books were waiting for me, OpenGL Distilled and an Embedded Linux book from OReilly, can't seem to remember the name though. Almost done with the embedded book, I bought Running Linux and Linux Device Drivers to read next. I really enjoy learning about Linux, would love to make my own board and get Linux up and running on it.
Overall I'm having a lot of fun this month, and am excited that school is starting soon. I have all my books bought (probably saved around $120 by buying mostly used) and am hoping everything goes well for a research internship this year for school credit. I have pictures of my trip on my phone, I'll be sure to upload them. I especially am anxious to post the pictures of the night my cousin and I slept in this driftwood shack we found on the shores of Lake Superior at Whitefish Point. It was amazing being able to watch the stores and hear the waves crashing as we laid there, although it was a bit cold and windy. Good times.

Sushi!

Last week I went to Meijer with Cheng and his brother and we bought some supplies for Sushi. Here are the results!


This fine piece was the first roll made. The ingredients included Avocado, Shrimp, Egg, Cream Cheese and what appears to be a chopped seaweed and sesame seed mixture put on the rice. Very delicious, and as you may notice the tail was left on the last Shrimp to make it reminiscent of the "Dragon".


Here is Cheng spreading some うなぎのたれ(Unagi no Tare) or Eel sauce onto this fine Sushi roll. I nicknamed it the "Salamander" due to the stripes of Avocado and Smoked Salmon laid over the top of the Sushi. The inside contains Scrambled Egg, Cream Cheese, Imitation Crab, and Avocado.


Here is a picture of Cheng in the kitchen. I consider him my Sushi sensei.


As you can see, Cheng is big on being very hygienic when dealing with Sushi, as he washes his hands before handling the Tempura Shrimp.


Heaven on a platter.


My favorite dish that day. Cheng made Sushi using both half sheets of Nori and full sheets. The full sheets were used for the larger dishes. The Eel Sauce really works with this dish.


A closeup of one of the platters. So delicious!


And of course the master of Sushi himself!

Google Voice

So I got a Google Voice account, pretty awesome. Now I can comfortably give away my new phone number! I love google. I have them handle my e-mail, my searching, now my phone, and someday I hope the same for whatever else they come up with.

Call me! (734) 265-0307

Nunchuck!

While working at my research fellowship, I am provided with the opportunity to demo some of the stuff I'm doing to high schoolers next month. I wanted to do something interesting, and decided to use the Wii nunchuck as an example of an interface device that is used with the I2C that I implemented. As of now everything is working great (it's cool to get consumer electronics, especially video game devices working). I plan on writing a small java terminal game where the player is controlled by the nunchuck. Something more interesting than seeing data from the nunchuck. I'll have pics up tomorrow.

Jack Kent Cooke Fellowship

Have been participating in a research fellowship for the past few weeks at University of Michigan. For those interested, I created a link at urop.salgat.net

Grades are in!

Received a B in Linear Algebra, was to be expected. Here's to the summer!

Internship

Just received a letter stating that I was selected to receive a Jack Kent Cooke Fellowship for this summer. If I am chosen by a faculty research sponsor I get to spend either full or half time (40 or 20 hours a week) doing research at UM-Ann Arbor. I am really excited at this opportunity, and am very thankful to Mr. Harrill and Dr. Naber for providing the recommendations that made this possible. Here's to hoping everything goes smoothly!

Finals Week

Today marked the first day of finals week. My finals include Differential Equations, Linear Algebra, Engineering Physics, and Computer Science I (C++). Today I finished the Differential test, and tomorrow is Engineering Physics. For whatever reason I am really relaxed, who knows why.

I was getting sick of studying this past weekend and took an hour to write a little paper that introduces the basics of C programming, download-able here (pdf warning). It's nothing special, and I don't intend to distribute it like I did with my AVR screencast tutorial. Something fun to do I guess.

Back from SAE funded trip to Cobo.

Just got back from a trip to the Cobo center to watch a presentation on the Honda Insight and the Hondajet, presented by Yasunari Seki and Michimasa Fujino of Honda. That Hondajet is pretty awesome...

1 Month Left!

One month left of school! Just finished the Linear Algebra test covering eigens. I feel I did good, but I goofed up on the last problem. I made the foolish assumption to rely on my calculator. I used rref on a matrix with a variable, and since the rref function for the 89 runs it symbolically, it did not care about the fact that one of the row operations it made would be undefined at h=6. Lesson learned, never go beyond reduced echelon form (ref) using the calculator.

In other news, I've been messing around with Gameboy assembly. I decided to pick a very simple commercial platform to work with, just for the sake of learning (and fun!). The gameboy architecture is very simple and easy to work with, and after scouring the four corners of the internet through mountains of dead hyperlinks, I gathered up the necessary resources to both compile assembly into a gameboy ROM and even found a nice tile editor that outputs to Gameboy format. Since this is the original one, all I have to worry about is pixelated images with 4 colors. I don't intend to delve too deep into it all, just make a simple game to learn a bit about it. The Z80 like architecture is very familiar looking and has some interesting changes for use with the Gameboy. I chose to stay away from C simply because the libraries out there were next to non-existent and I wanted as much control and experience with the raw hardware as possible. As of now I have just a sprite that moves around the screen with arrow keys, but we'll see what I come up with in the future.

Accepted!

Accepted to University of Michigan - Ann Arbor for the Computer Engineering program! While optimistic, I still realize that I need to make sure I can obtain the funds to afford to go there. We'll see what happens, pretty excited, but also have to keep in mind that I need to make sure I do well in Linear Algebra. Had a 70% my first test which even with my recent 98% test score is making life real hard in that class. Only time will tell!

UPDATE: Was just accepted to University of Michigan - Dearborn, in case I decide to go there instead.

Studying!

Nothing really interesting happening, just studying a lot these past 2 weeks. Received a 96% on my Physics test, but I have no idea how I'll do on the Linear Algebra test this Monday. It's not so much knowing the content as knowing all the terminology, which is a pain. Three different ways to represent the same thing, along with each having it's own terminology as to how to do the same thing. Oh well, just gotta keep studying.

It's always slow at the beginning of the semester.

Nothing new really going on. I do have FAT32 down and hope to have a SD card breakout board ship to my house soon so I can start learning how to interface with that. Hope to be able to setup a simple SD Card reader, possibly have an interface through UART to my PC for a terminal style interface. I am pretty disappointed with the resources for learning how to navigate the FAT32 filesystem. It came down to 2 sites I used to learn it, the official specifications given by Microsoft (which are in some other language) and a guide by this guy that was not specific enough for me. After creating a partition on my hard drive, zeroing it, and putting FAT32 on it, it finally became clear to me. It's pretty simple when it's all laid out for you.