Holy Moly, It's been a while

Yeah, it’s been a while since I’ve posted on here: since then, I’ve switched to being a comp eng major, got my financial aid stuff, and am probably going to Columbia. Fun times.

However, it’s the first time that I’ve really felt the weight of the cost of my schooling. For some reason, I’ve never realized just how much $10,000 was worth (much less $20,000, or $30,000). It’s amazing that I consented to go to college with the costs as high as they are: I can understand why I did, but man, it’s just so much money. The cumulative spent could have been good seed money for a startup. I could buy 10 makerbots with $10,000. I could have an impact on billions of people with that much money. Of course, I don’t know how to do it: I just think it’s possible. The point is, I think I have a better handle on how enormous the amount of university tuition feels.

The upside is that I now really understand why scholarships are a good thing: having in mind just how much tuition I have to pay has changed my mindset from “scholarships are cool, but they’re not worth my time” to “why yes, my time is worth a few hundred dollars per hour (if I spend a day on an essay for a $1000 prize)”. It’s a wonder how I’ve gotten through most of college without realizing this.

For something completely different, I’ve cut less than 5 parts in two weeks for the reprap (or, it feels like it). I put together the electronics, only to find that I had some missing parts; after ordering those, I found that I was missing a few more, which I haven’t ordered yet. For some reason, the desoldering braid I have isn’t wicking very well, and I can’t get the wrong trimpots off my board. Then, just today, I burned my extruder board while trying to smd solder a voltage regulator onto the board. Apparently, either coins don’t work at conducting heat, or a thin air space doesn’t insulate very well. Or something else went wrong… at any rate, my life would be considerably simpler with a heatgun. I also need to figure out how to salvage a burnt pcb, but seeing as I also melted a button onto the board, it might be better to desoldering everything and then put it on a new board. No, I really don’t want to source all the components again, although I guess I could use the extra atmega168 I got, then.

Once you add in school, then it’s no wonder that I’m ready to be done… I’ve stopped worrying about whether the reprap will get finished before the end of school, because it won’t be. Now, it’s just a matter of making sure I get as much stuff done before I leave, so that whoever picks it up next year can do it without too much resilience; particularly, an extruder should get stuck together, or something resembling one. That, and obtaining a set of mini-mendel parts is my new reprap goal.

Presentation tomorrow, 2 tests due Monday, project due Tuesday: I guess I’ll go to sleep as soon as this banana bread finishes baking.

Good night, world. Sleep tight.