End of Semester Review

So it’s been a while. Sorry about that, I’ve been kind of… busy. And not the making-cool-stuff sort of busy, more of the oh-my-god-finals-are-coming-AHHHH-THEY’RE-ALREADY-HERE sort of busy. But now it’s over, and I’m essentially guaranteed all A’s and A minuses in the reported-to-the-registrar sort of way. That was somewhat surprising because I didn’t always get straight A’s at UPS, where the classes weren’t always trying to kill you; but at the same time it’s not surprising at all, because around 80% of the material was old hat to me.

So now that I have some time to actually think back and reflect on my time in New York, the foremost question is how everything panned out, versus how I thought it would pan out at the beginning of the year. But before that, perhaps a comparison and contrast:

• I went from living in a basement to living 7 stories above the street. There was a bit more light reaching my window (curse you, tall buildings that I am not in!) but the size of the window more than made this move a huge gain in the not-being-gollum sector.
• I went from living in a suburb-ish sort of area to a decidely urban area. UPS being in a suburban area really closes off the school and isolates it into its own sort of ecosystem, whereas Columbia being uptown of a huge urban center really... I'd say it doesn't open up the campus, but boy is the ecosystem definitely more of a niche.
• I went from being a junior to being a junior. This is weird because you're taking lower lever classes, but you're *old*. You end up talking to freshmen, because they're the only ones without established groups, and it's striking how they seem so naive and young. Ahh, youth...
• I went from being on a first-name basis with several professors to "oh hello, do you remember my from that one class? I don't have time to do research with you right now, and I'm going to be gone in a year. Opps, year gone, goodbye!" (I really, really hope this sort of thing doesn't happen)
• I went from being a pasty recluse to being a pasty recluse.

So how was I expecting New York to pan out? I was expecting… I’m not sure, anymore. A geek mecca? (Except that would have been obviously not probable, given the relative placements of MIT and Columbia) Now that I think about it, I just went without an agenda and decided to take whatever life threw at me. I didn’t know what New York was like; I based my 3/2 decision on who gave me more financial aid, not on which school would give me the better opportunities or whatever. I had no idea what I was getting myself into; I only was vaguely expecting something big.

So I wasn’t expecting too much, but I had some ideas about the ‘geek mecca’ that I was looking for, and to an extent Columbia has delivered. I will note that the geeks at Columbia are more inclusive of the business side of things, which kind of threw me off: hell, we didn’t have enough geeks at UPS to even talk about doing startups.

It might be because I got involved with the geekiest-sounding group I could find on campus, and while some of the ADI goals are aligned with my own (CODE CODE CODE) some of the others are somewhat different (encourage entrepreneurship!) and the main goal of the ADI (geek herding!) is a nobel one that has to be done to do great things, but it’s… still grunt work (unlike CODE CODE CODE). So what I was trying to say is that since I’m involved with the ADI, I have no idea if my conclusion that Columbia geeks are more business oriented than geeks elsewhere is true or fallen prey to selection effects or not, which reminds me I need to actually do things with the IEEE group on campus, since I managed to miss almost every single meeting/event thrown by IEEE, and there are probably some hardware hackers lurking with them.

Like always, some professors are cool, and some other professors just don’t give a shit. I suppose this is standard for large research institutions, but it’s a definite paradigm shift from UPS, where most of the professors did give a shit about the students. I suppose that the one class where the professor was less than engaging could be explained by the fact it was held in the early evening, and covered some of the mind-numbing basics of the field [FOURIER TRANSFORMS AGAIN??? I MEAN WHEEE], but that’s no excuse for being inaccessible and having the difficulty of the midterms jump all over the place.

I realized (finally) that classes are somewhat of a waste of time: all the material covered, at least in these lower level courses, can be found in the book. However, I need motivation to do the studying, and there’s nothing like locking me in a room for an hour to raise motivation for studying. Also, I’m paying for something, and by golly I’ll be getting something out of it.

Being relatively far away from campus sucks. I used to be able to roll out of bed and get to class in 2 minutes, and now I have to actually plan out my mornings. Well, having structure isn’t a bad thing, but gosh darn it if convenience isn’t swell.

It’s depressing: I sat down and tried to play some piano on the last day of classes, and it’s all gone. My violin is going, too. Have to do something about that…

Out of steam, I’ll do a end-of-year post on New Years Eve or something.

Merry Newtonmas!

I’m headed out to check out Alpha One Labs, a pretty inclusive hackerspace. Nyc resistor is another hackerspace that I want to check out, but they seem notably more exclusive, so I guess I’ll have to just wait until they hold a class to dig into their space.

Only problem with Alpha One Labs is just how far away out is from Columbia: it’s all the way over in the middle of Brooklyn, which in terms of subway time is about an hour, which really doesn’t bode well as an indicator of how much time I’m going to spend around there. I could do homework like I’m writing a blog right now, but the jerking train isn’t really conductive for even plain studying, so really, I can’t just pop over and spend an hour there.

Note that it wouldn’t matter quite as much if Columbia was really open, in terms of machine shops or even tool caches, but for the amount of money I’m paying to attend this school, they should really make making things a whole lot easier, not less transparent. For example, one cool thing about calpoly was the fact they had a craft center, outfitted with a fair complement of tool, which anyone could use. There might be some equivalent here, but I doubt it (calpoly is very much undergrad oriented), and if there is they do a terrible job of advertising themselves.

Man, this humidity is really screwing with my ability to type. We’ll see how alpha one labs is, and work from there.

A COUPLE DAYS LATER

Alpha One Labs seems pretty cool: the space isn’t quite as organized as Metrix, and it doesn’t look like the scene is very strong overall, but I guess it’s one of the stronger hackerspaces around NYC. We’ll see how things continue to pan out.

So my l my life sucks, it's so boring.

HAHAHA.

Right.

I'm posting this from my shiny new Android phone while in the middle of New York, which is about as exciting as something can get without involving large amounts of wonton destruction.

And like any good blogger, I need to give my inexpert opinion and do a review.

So the phone is a Samsung Captivate running Android 2.1, with Swype preinstalled, with a gorgeous screen. Ahh, le amour... Surprise! I haven't rooted it yet, but I certainly plan on it, since it looks like the only way to really dev things is with a rooted phone...

Oh, you wanted to hear about New York? I guess I'll start from the beginning and go from there in chronological order...

Flying here and sleeping weren't interesting, so we'll skip those parts. We started off by checking out my new institute of higher learning, which is, like I've said before, is really tall. My dorm is pretty far away, considering that the rest of the campus is pretty geographically dense. Nice buildings are to be had by all, although I have a bit of a premonition that using the elevator to get to class won't be weird in a week or two.

I've been rambling for a bit too long without a tangent, so I'm going to riff a bit on some engineering thoughts from an unlikely source. While coming back from my summer stint in california, my cab driver commented on the age of New York's infrastructure and how it contributed to the hectic nature of the city. I can see evidence for this thesis; everything seems so old, for better or worse. It gives us the cool greek columns that adorn oodles of buildings in NYC, but the bathrooms behind the facade tell a different story. We'll see what sorts of constraints this tosses on my stay, but I'm fairly sure it'll contribute to capping my stay to a few years.

<\end tangent>

Next place...

Holy. Crap.

I don't think I've ever seen a bigger museum in my life. To get an idea of the scale, we burned off almost an hour to get through 1/18 of the entire Metropolitan Museum of Art. I could've spent a few days really exploring the entire thing. To be honest, I'm not that a big history buff, so I'd rather be doing other stuff, but man does it bring out my inner geek.

Also, central park is freaking huge. Enough said..

And Times Square is... Just as gaudy as I imagined.

Yup.

Okay, I'm not going to write blog posts on here anymore... It's taken me pretty much the entire day to finish this one and I don't relish the thought of doing it again.

Out.

My gosh, so much happens in a week.

So, I got evicted (not my fault, although now I know that I have to keep tabs on the people I rent from, too), started really whaling on my internship (partly why I haven’t been posting lately), and played out in public. Granted, I sucked, and I’ve been out of practice for about a week (and my god, why can’t they leave a grand where I can get to it, and let me at it when I can get to it?), and there wasn’t anyone around to hear it, but it’s the thought that counts! Right? Right…

But since real life is boring (at least until I start finishing projects, which are all in varying states of incompletion, aka don’t expect anything soon), I’ll be talking about something that I’ve slowly come to realize. It’s been a feeling that’s been with me around a year, starting as something innocuous, but I’ve only recently figured out what it actually means (I know, it’s kind of late, so my word-smithing is somewhat off. Do forgive me).

I realize just how cool of a place UPS was, and I wish (in a way) that I could’ve stuck around for a little longer, or maybe gone back and done some things differently.

Of course, I only realize that UPS was a delightful place to be when I’m leaving it, as such things are apt to happen. In this case, the relationship is not entirely coincidental: getting to know how other schools do bureaucratic work gives me an appreciation for the close knit-edness of us around UPS. For instance, I just need maybe 2 days to a week in a machine shop to finish the mechanical bits of my Mendel. The fact it’s not finished doesn’t mean that I’m lazy, just that it’s nearly impossible to get permission to wrangle around in a machine shop here at Calpoly. I can see why (not a student, summer quarter, safety up the wazzoo (although I think that everyone should adopt metrix:createspace’s liability release, hehe)), but it’s frustrating to be right in the middle of an engineering school and not be able to engineer something. So, I’ll have to use up part of my week back home to hack at it, or figure out how to navigate Columbia quickly and get access to a machine shop there.

But so what? No one cares about how Universities handle machine shop access. Rather, it is indicative of the larger ways and methods of how things are done, and it is with regret that I now know I haven’t been using my professors as much as I should have been. Now that I actually know that, I fear that Columbia is going to be a much different sort of place. Maybe not quite so different: professors that are enthusiastic about teaching are everywhere (the converse is also true, unfortunately). However, Columbia is big enough to have TAs teaching classes, rather than having professors teaching every single class, all the time. Time lost getting to know the actual prof.

Then, there’s the geekiness factor. But Nathan! you may be thinking, Isn’t that one of the reasons you didn’t like UPS? Because geeks that you could engage with were few and far between? True, but not being surrounded by geeks means that I’m not completely cut off from the larger world, that I can have a direct impact on the world of those around me just by being geeky, especially being enthusiastic about being geeky. Of course, I missed this sort of chance to really engage people, although I really wasn’t quite geeky enough most of the time back then… so I guess I’m only partially off the hook. Cause, you know, a real geek would have already been geeky enough.

And there’s some of the usual suspects: leaving behind friends, a familiar place, a familiar admin system, and a campus small enough to sprint across in less than 5 minutes. That last one was still causing me trouble up until last week; this last week of work has been me coming in and working until I get too hungry for dinner, so I haven’t been strictly keeping tabs on getting to work on time. Gonna have to fix that before I get to Columbia.

So, didn’t know what I had until it’s gone.

Mind you, I’m really anticipating a different flow in New York, a new chapter in life, and a whole lot more learning, so I’m not going to change my mind about moving. These are just some thoughts about what insights hindsight has given me concerning the past few years.

Enough rambling. Guy is still playing with his flash editor on the couchahemmy bed, so I guess I’ll get him to move.

So, it turns out that I didn’t get into Columbia’s Comp Eng program, but the EE program. I must have chickened out at the very at minute when applying and changed my major. When I look at what EE’s do for a living, though, I’m more and more convinced that it’s not what I want to do, and that while I could just do EE and take the cards life hands me after graduation, I would rather do Comp Eng. I think some emails to the Comp Eng department at Columbia are in order, although it might take some more finger crossing and pig sacrifices to get myself into the program.

When I lay awake at night, I (sometimes) think about the reprap. Again, I don’t think I’m going to finish it, and I’m getting more certain every day. I have 2.5 weeks of school left, and almost exactly 4 weeks until break really starts. Will my professors be around after then? Who knows? Can I finish an extruder, or even two? Who knows? Can my partner finish this on his own? Can I even finish soldering all the electronics together? Can I recoup the costs of putting a double order of electronics in (the school needs some results by next week, or they can’t reimburse me for this year)? Where can I find a tooling ball, and find someone that knows how to use one? If I started cutting, really cutting, at the very beginning of the semester, would I be done by now? I’m worrying about these things, and I can’t seem to forget them. I really want this to get into a working state, as kind of a validation of the force of my own will. At least, I’m guessing that ’s why I’m so concerned about this.

So, I better find out how to cut those corner brackets with or without tooling balls, and get myself a hotplate so I can start soldering smd components once the digikey parts come in.

And then, there’s everything else. I was reminded of all of it when my friend asked me, first, how to program: after trying to figure out why a microbiologist wanted to program, he told me he wanted to animate something. He has a ways to go, but so do I: god, everything that I want to do is on hold, and it’s bothering me. It’s making life harder than it needs to be…

Anyways, time to stop complaining and time to do homework.

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.