Saket Vora

I’ve started tentatively planning an epic road trip for this summer…and not some little one like driving down to Florida or up to New York or something. I’m talking about an 8,000 mile cross-country circuit that that hits several major national parks, a dozen major cities, through desert, coastline, mountains, and prairies. It’s ambitious I know, perhaps too much so, but it stems from a longheld desire to explore the west coast of the United States. California, Oregon, Washington with Seattle, up to the beautiful city of Vancouver.

The national parks are: Sequoia Forest, Yosemite, Muir Woods, Crater Lake, Mt. Rainier, Olympic, Yellowstone, Grand Teton, the Badlands, and Blackhills. Here is an idea of it:

I’ve successfully migrated this website (as far as I can tell) to Site5 hosting. Longtime readers of this website might notice a snappier response. I’m feeling that the site is working faster than it *ever* did at GoDaddy. One sticky point was the photo gallery, but I re-ran the installer and it worked out, even the Google map! Sweet.

Now we just have to get the Krispy Kreme Challenge domain pointer fixed.

Some of you might have noticed that this website has been pretty sluggish lately. I think its partially due to hosting the Krispy Kreme Challenge website on the same server, but really, I’ve been disappointed with GoDaddy (the hosting provider I use). It was a good deal when I got it, and I didn’t really have any major issues before, but now I’m getting irritated at the time-outs and slow response.

And they picked a good time for showing poor performance, my renewal is on Jan 27. I think I’m going to switch hosting providers to Site5. At some point in the next month or two this site might be down for a bit as I make the transfer.

Yesterday I walked out of my ECE 511 final exam, finally done. It feels good. At the apartment I watched some episodes of The Office and the indie film Little Miss Sunshine (which is excellent, by the way), and went back home to Cary. In the evening I hung out with Mike and Chris. Tonight we hit the Honda dealership to check out the Pilot, ate lunch at Chipotle, and I think I’m going to meet up with Nader tonight too.

Feels good to be done. I’ll post grades when they get in.

I have added the paper I wrote about Thomas Kuhn & The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (for my Rise of Modern Science history class) and the final report for that dreaded ECE 511 term project. I am pretty disappointed in my performance with that class. I got so swamped this semester that I was unable to devote the time needed to make my operational amplifier work properly. It was a learning experience to be sure.

Check out the Writings section of this website if you’d like to read them and the other papers I’ve written.

Today was a good day. Last night I had dinner with Dale (a high school friend of mine who enlisted in the Navy and is now a corpsman), Nader (back in town from Stanford), and Naman (back in town from Cambodia). It was great catching up, though at times it felt like we were back in 10th grade in the lunchroom.

Greg and I got to the EEP lab and met up with Cameron. We were trying to finish up our final presentations (to be given at 1pm that day). Dr. Walsh came in and we all chatted then he went to go get pizza for the EEP end of the semester party. During the party, Greg and I divided up who was going to go which slide. No other rehearsals, and we were the first people to present. It went great though.

Our final documentation for our virtual company Advanced Rowing Instruments is available here if you’d like to see it. This one is 84 pages…imagine what it will look like in April.

It was so beautiful outside after we finished that Greg said “let’s go golfing.” He picked me up and we headed to RGA, or Raleigh Golf Association, which is located off Tryon Road and is a full course. It has a mixture of Par 5, Par 4, and a few Par 3. It was the first time I had been on a *real* golf course, and the first time I was using the new set of clubs I picked up over Thanksgiving. Heck, I was still taking the wrappers off them in the parking lot before hopping into the golf cart.

I had a great time out on the course. I was actually hitting a lot better than I thought — no real bad slices or hooks. I was hitting my 5-iron pretty well, and discovered the silky nature of the fairway wood 4i. It was truly a compliment when Greg said I should join him and his friend Jamie (from this summer) when they go golfing.

I guess the only downside is that my mom called and told me that UCLA notified us that my information was in the database that got hacked earlier this week. Sweet.

Wow, I’m so beaten down by this. My op-amp isn’t very good at all…just haven’t had the time to work out the kinks. I’m getting all my graphs and figures into Word right now so I can write the final report. Sigh.