First, I got into USC’s combined plan program.

Second, I got into Columbia’s combined plan program.

Third, PROFIT!!!!!!! (or extreme dancing)

I’m pretty stoked right about now. I don’t have to go to USC, and I got into Columbia’s combined plan program for computer engineering (rather than the saner choice of electrical engineering).

The only problem is that Columbia has the power to force me to take another programming course, since I haven’t taken a computer science course at UPS (really, optimization and discrete mathematics don’t count). This may or may not interfere with my research at calpoly: I hope it doesn’t, but I’ll need to send a bunch of emails and sort it out.

Well, here’s to things working out.

So… life.

The reprap project is on the ropes: I spent a week cutting around getting 3.5 parts done. I have maybe 4-7 weeks left to finish it: the math just does not add up. My project partner is MIA, and Digikey is holding up my order for some reason, perhaps because I ordered a bunch of cable to be custom cut. At any rate, I still have some of the harder parts to cut ahead of me, and the homework is not going to let up from here to the end of school. I haven’t even started with the extruder, which is going to be a pain in the butt by all indications.

My god, this thing just isn’t going to live.

And while I’m trying to make this work, I’m ditching pretty much every other project that I’ve cared about; all the art, all the music, all the code. Maybe it’s just the late-night super-hot pho talking, but I’m despairing: not terribly hard, but it’s a notable local minimum.

Also, I’ve been rejected from almost every REU program I applied to. I’m not sure what I’m going to do this summer if this falls through: I was banking on getting a good REU (not just ‘any’ REU), so I haven’t looked into doing things elsewhere. What’s for certain is that I can’t let myself stay at home again (and my dad won’t let me just stay at home, either). Self-motivating is extremely difficult, even more so when I happen to be at home, which seems to introduce a whole new level of laziness. I just can’t let myself spend 2 months working on a single algorithm again…

Finally, all my applications for continuing my education are still up in the air.

I’m kind of stressed. My optimization mid-term also just got turned in today, and I need to get a perfect score on it if I want a reasonable chance at making a good score in the class.

Anyways, time to sleep it all off and start a new day.

So, I pretty much got a minimal amount of sleep last nightmorning, and not a whole much more the day before that. So, I’m running pretty close to empty, but at least I don’t have anything big and wildly unfinished due tomorrow. Dumping core right now probably isn’t the best idea, but like drunk people, I’ll think it’s a good idea at the time and just go with it.

Man, I still can’t believe that we got finalist in the MCM; it’s strange, because you hope that you do well, but you have to grid yourself for an almost inevitable disappointment. The more hope, the bigger the disappointment, so you try to make sure you don’t hope for anything. Well, this time around my hopes got vindicated; we’ll see how all these open applications hold up. Also, maybe I’ll outline the models we used in the MCM. Hmm.

On a completely different subject, I’ve been solicited by two different honor societies in the last week: one a general honor society, and a physics society. Now, while I’m of the opinion that recent xkcd comics have been falling in quality, I do invoke a particular comic http://xkcd.com/703/ that I happen to agree with, which I might embellish with a more explicit statement: honor societies are useless. Many of them are based on grades, and fail to actually say anything about their members that aren’t apparent from the other activities they engage in. The membership fees are not a problem: societies obviously have overhead costs, which the fees need to cover. Rather, their mere existence is annoying. Note that I haven’t actually been an active member of any honor society (if I have, then I’ve forgotten about it), so I may be very wrong in my rant.

With that out of the way, I’m gonna muse a bit on some thoughts I had on someone else’s thoughts.

It’s interesting how people tend to assume that the future will be similar to the present; it’s not hard to see why. America hasn’t undergone a societal restructuring since, oh, maybe the 1970’s? I would say that we’re due for some upheaval or at the very least some major evolution in our physical spaces, but I’ve developed a bit of an aversion to the phrase, and it’s true that we have no idea when social changes will happen at any time. Cars have been the main mode of transportation for a few decades, and it seems that consumerism has been the dominant viewpoint for about as long. With this in mind, it isn’t too surprising that people tend to assume that the near future will be similar to how the world is right now. Well, I’ll have to look into changing that.

Well, well, well: guess who’s MCM team got a finalist designation! Meaning that we were in the top 1% of the MCM teams; unfortunately, I think that the lack of graphics in my section might have contributed to our failure to attain outstanding (right, so I’ll stop with the self-blame and try to maintain a better self-view). But at any rate, I’m pretty stoked about the whole high-percentage thing, and we’re gonna have a quick little celebration. Additionally, I spent a fair amount of time in the machine shop, possibly the first time I’ve put in time on a Monday, and I don’t see anything that’s stopping me from doing so the rest of the days of the week. Life is pretty good.

Well, except for homework, an exam, and a big paper. Those are a bit less happy; also, the fact that I’ve made about zero headway into the BAP problem, anim3, and the app app are somewhat depressing. Also, I only have 2 REU’s left to hear back from: cross the fingers and sacrifice the pigs! It’s gonna be a couple nail-biting days/weeks.

tldr: I’m annoyed by how a particular Amway marketing scheme works.

I don’t like it. It’s been a semester (and a year) since it’s happened, and I still don’t like it. It’s not a raise-a-ruckus dislike, nor a taser-toting-demonstration dislike, but just a post-on-a-blog level of dislike, especially since no one else is talking about it.

Okay, so what am I talking about? On my particular campus, I’m been solicited twice to join the Worldwide Dreambuilders (mostly because I have feet in the music and math communities), an organization dedicated to helping young people like myself build a business and make some money. Specifically, using the power of the internet, people can create internet storefronts and empower themselves to break free of the stone-and-mortar stores that we’ve been dependent on for so long, cultivating young businessmen and women in the process.

So that’s the executive summary. The operation must be legit, since it’s apparently worldwide, and someone somewhere would have caught on eventually if it wasn’t. However, it looks a whole lot like a modified pyramid scheme: once you buy into the business, you get newly minted business licences and a web site (among other things: I’m not familiar with the process). Now, you want to generate money, so you tell all your friends about it (I like to call this ‘forced word of mouth’), and point them towards your storefront. Also, you obviously start to rely on your storefront for goods rather than any where else, since you get wholesale prices (I’m not sure how these compare to retail). But, if you tell your friends about it, then they might just set up their own storefronts and stop buying from your store. You need to keep the secret of your success to yourself, right? Wrong; you get a kickback for each referral you pull in, so you’re still winning from advertising yourself fully.

So how’s that like a pyramid scheme? You buy into the process, and have an incentive to keep it going; one easy, quick way to get a fix is to get someone else into the process, too. The fact that they incentivise drawing other people in is the key point. A secondary point is that the process utilizes your personal connections and acquaintances to try and make a profit: if you remember that BK marketing ploy, which exchanged burgers for dropping friends on Facebook, it’s similar (in a way. It has a tendency to twist your world view so you view people as potential profit streams, although I guess it isn’t any different for any other business, other than the fact that no one outside of your circle of friends would care about your business).

So I don’t like how they operate, especially with their pitches. You can tell that pitch is packaged: when someone tells me they want to pitch a business proposal to me, I want them to get to the point. If my understanding of the industry is hamstrung to the point that I can’t figure out what your business does in a 30 second pitch, then I shouldn’t be even considered as a business partner (and if you can’t do a 30 second pitch, especially with preparation, then you probably shouldn’t be in business).

For such a grass-roots marketing campaign (which is the essence of the process), it’s surprising to find out that Amway is behind it. The whole deal with selling shell businesses must be working for them, though, since they wouldn’t continually run a profit drain.

Also, they seem to be targeting impressionable college students. A talking point I remember is that since we’re young and understand the internet, we’d be the best at running these sorts of businesses (tangent: I brought my work on EZLO to one meeting, since I thought that he wanted to see some actual web-programming work that I had done, since he was pretty vague about what the business would actually do). It’s not because we’re young and understand the internet, but because the old formula (choose your target demographic (preferably gullible), and tailor your message to it) still works on the internet. We need money, and they promise some if you put in some work. However, there’s no value added by the shell business, so the only value comes from the personal connections made by the business owner.

What’s also creepy about this is that there’s next to no information on the web on these guys anywhere, except for the disgruntled former member that shows up everywhere. No one is willing to tell us what goes on in these seminars or business meetings that these guys attend, which raises red flags for me; does one need to pay to enter these seminars? If so, then the matter is much more serious: heck, if you have to pay for anything to essentially work for Amway, then it is still a much more serious matter than I’ve made it out to be above.

It’s been a while since these things have happened (at least a semester ago), but I’m going to post this anyways with hopes that someone does their homework before joining up, and perhaps gets to the bottom of this, or gets a ‘real job’ or runs a real business that adds value to society.

So why haven’t I been updating? I like to think that the MCM has irrevocably killed my schedule, but it really ain’t that: life’s just catching up to me over and over again. It’s really annoying. I’ve had viral gastroenteritis (using the power of google, you too can self-diagnose when things go horribly wrong with yourself!), otherwise known as stomach flu, for the last few days, and that just killed my productivity on Wednesday. Shoopdoowap, so that just means I stay up for a night or two. I’m over it now, thought, so that’s one good thing.

Another good thing is the fact that we’ve finally cut our first aluminum reprap part. I finally found an extended period of time when one of the profs and I were both relatively free, and whacked out a z-axis bracket.  It is very rewarding, since I’ve been trying very hard to get to this moment for more than 2 weeks (maybe more like 4). First tutorial in the metal shop was enlightening. If I can help it, we’ll whack out parts at a faster rate. I might have to wake up earlier to do so consistently, which might be an very difficult thing to do. But nonetheless, an exciting moment in the history of UPS’s reprap project.

And one bad thing to wrap up the first half of my Friday: well, I’ve gotten my first D on a math test in a very long time, dare I say ever? Really, if I can’t do math, then I might as well get myself a lobotomy or something. The cloud cover is made of mile-thick lead while the sun is going supernova, I think is a very apt description of these things.

The MCM went alright. We better do well, or we’re gonna have a disowned team mate.

More later tonight.

So, quick status report before I sleep. I haven’t been getting enough sleep, so I’m kind of wiped out right now.  My day went like this: school, talk to professor, eat, school, work on next iteration of coilgun, break an ott light, eat greasy food, go to a concert, made a smoothie, and tried to hack a quickie robot before realizing that I am an idiot and have no place on this earth. So.

School was fine: day on which nothing is due, which is good. Talking to a professor, I now have a smaller chance of being rejected outright by USC. Next iteration of the coilgun will have multiple stages, and we almost have it all set up, but the charging system we’re using seems to have broken over winter break. However, we got the arduino-controlled firing system working, and have a separate 328 chip on a breadboard acting as our arduino, since we fried our last one. Great fun. There were more than a few instances in which I had an LED plugged in the wrong way, so I had no idea it was working.

After we found out that we were hungry as heck and needed to eat, my fellow hacker left, and since I couldn’t figure out how the ott stand was screwing with wall power, I just plugged the bulb directly into the wall. Of course that was a bad idea, and now everyone should know that while the stand doesn’t screw with the voltage, it almost definitely tamps down the current available, probably through the inductor-looking thing. Fortunately, it did not blow up, which was my realistic worst-case scenario fear. It does have a crack in it, and who knows what’s in the lamp, so I might wake up tomorrow morning as some horribly mutated thing. If that happens, I recommend ceasing all attempts to hack such lamps; don’t worry about me, I’ll have done it FOR SCIENCE. Right.

Since that lamp is gone, I’ll probably have to mash up a system of LEDs to aleviate my current lighting situation. Maybe. LEDs can be not so great for lighting, so I guess I’ll try it and see how it turns out.

Friday cafeteria food has a theme of greasiness, which is unfortunate. I’m already pretty unhealthy, which I will have to rectify. Talked to fellow humans, and saw a pianist play some pieces I have not heard before. He was pretty good, but not quick kick-ass.

After the concert, I tried to stick together a very simple robot. It’s a differential drive, that derives obstacle avoidance through 2 dpst switches that switch the polarity of the motor when switched. It’s pretty simple in theory, and should’ve been simple in practice, but I have no working robot that can scuttle around and keep me happy. After 1.5 hours of working on that, I decided to switch to my pre-amp, but I looked at the schematics, the bottom of my perf-board, and now I’m here to tell you all that I need more solder. I’ll have to find if there’s a radioshack nearby.

Basically, nothing got done. Some groundwork got laid, but I have nothing to show. Yet. I’m not sure what I’m going to do next week. Yet.

For posterity, I will now record my actions that resulted in the installation of Windows 7 to my hard drive. Listen closely, for it is a sad, sad tale.

Maybe not so sad: the XP install I had was showing it’s age as boots took minutes and things were just generally slow. And since Windows 7 was discounted to 30-ish dollars for students, I figured I might as well get a modern OS and refresh everything in one kick (I figured trying to wrangle a copy of Windows from MSNDNAA through my university would be a pain, and more trouble than it was worth. Probably should’ve found out).

So, here’s the first hurdle: it was quite unclear what I was buying. There is an option to ship some disks out to you in addition to the access to download the update, and the site was not making it clear whether or not I was getting an iso, and upgrade executable, or both. If there was no iso, then having the disks would be extremely handy. If there was an iso, then the disks would be a redundant waste of money. To be safe, I got the disks, and discovered a few seconds later that they did give you an iso. It’s not that big a deal, but it still irks me that they need to assume their users are idiots so that you ultimately don’t know what you’re getting (probably should’ve googled it, but… yeah, probably should have. Feel free to heap shame on me for failing to do so).

So, anyways, I shuffle some data off the windows partition (although not all of it, so I lost some music. I think), wipe, and try installing. Hangs on expanding files (0%). Hmm… One night down, burn it slower, and install it successfully. Then I find out I shouldn’t have wiped my windows partition, since it’s only an upgrade key, and it needs to install over an old windows. Bust out the xp disc, reinstall, then install windows 7, key works, and the birds are singing. Now it’s time to stick grub back into the MBR (master boot record) so I can dual boot Windows and Ubuntu again.

Ominous drum roll…

So I boot up my Ubuntu live disc, and fire up gparted. And it appears that my Ubuntu partition has disappeared. Strange. Since I burned the second Windows disc from Ubuntu, the XP or Windows 7 installation must have done something to the partition scheme. Looking up how to recover damaged partition tables, I installed testdisk, learned how to use it, and took a look around. Apparently, the partition was there in the partition table, but it had somehow become a primary partition (when it was originally a logical) and hence dropped off the face of the earth as far as gparted was concerned.

Since I was using a full complement of partitions, I knocked off my swap (having 4Gb is good for something other than huge fluid sims) and put the lost partition on as a primary. Then I cp -R’d all the contents to my /home partition, and then rebuilt the extended partition. Since I also had to shuffle my data around, it took a while, until I finally got my partition scheme back the way I liked it. So, I cp -R’d the contents of the Ubuntu partition back, installed grub to the MBR, and rebooted.

Since grub didn’t have a menu.lst to go off of, I learned very quickly how to boot from grub with

set root=(hdX,0)

linux /vmlinuz root=/dev/sdaY

initrd /initrd.img

boot

It gets old after doing it 2 times.

The boot failed: it turned out that sudo was owned by someone else. Fixed that with a livecd, tried to boot again. After the 3rd or 4th boot, it dawned on me that everything was owned by root. That happens when you do sudo cp -R /media/ubuntu-partition /media/somewhere-else. So, I gave up, figured I’d screwed myself, and reinstalled Ubuntu. Verily, I tell thee that having a separate /home was a very good idea. You should do it too.

So, I learned somethings, and I’m much less restrained with partition editors than I used to be. Now it’s time to actually finish something so that I have other stuff to write about.