Saket Vora

Missed circuits class for the 2nd time this week due to waking up late. Going to bed at 3 or 4am isn’t a good idea. I really like the circuits class too. Sigh. I need to watch the taped lecture.

The Big Game of Stanford vs Cal (Berkeley) approaches! It is on Wednesday at around 4pm. In the small circle at the center of the Intersection of Death, a GO STANFORD banner was erected. This paled into comparison to the BEAT CAL banner that went up on the back of Meyer Library, facing Escondido Road. This banner stood 3 to 4 stories tall and about 25-30 feet wide.

Posters were up everywhere advertising the annual Gaieties, a theater performance put on each year that pokes fun at and honors the Stanford-Cal rivalry. This year the theme is “Herbert Hoover and the Order of the Bearclaw”, a reference to the quarter-long controversy regarding the Hoover Institution, a conservative think-tank, separate from the university, but located in the heart of campus, invited Donald Rumsfeld to be a “Distinguished Visiting Fellow.” The faculty senate, along with nearly 4,000 students signed a petition against this move. Most of the faculty involved object to the title ‘Distinguished’, which implies a higher standing or honor. They see none of this in Donald Rumsfeld. In an interview, even the director of the Hoover Institution agreed that most foreign policy analysts, even the conservative ones, would agree that Rumsfeld’s tenure was not ‘distinguished’ at all.

The posters feature wonderful graphic design, right in the mood of Harry Potter. I would take a picture, but….well, you know. I’ll try to bring my webcam out with me tomorrow.  You can see some videos related to the Gaieties at this year’s website: http://www.orderofthebearclaw.com. Cal has a bonfire and pep rally in front of their Greek Theater.

Sapana sent me a link about The Play , and I started to read a bit about the longstanding rivalry between Stanford and Cal. It really occurred to me then about how much NC State lacks in traditions. The rivalry between Stanford-Cal goes all the way back to 1899. Some Stanford students got a lumberman’s Axe and chanted “Give’em the Axe!” and during an 1899 baseball game would cut blue and yellow ribbons at the game. Stanford lost this first ‘Big Game’, and two Cal students stole this Axe. Then in 1930, twenty one Stanford students performed a daring raid to take back the Axe. To do it justice, I’ll quote from the Wikipedia entry:

After the rally, four Stanford students posing as photographers temporarily blinded Norm Horner, the Grand Custodian of the Axe, with camera flashes. In the subsequent scuffle, the Stanford students grabbed the Axe while several others disguised as Cal students tossed a tear gas (or smoke, depending on account) bomb at the Cal students who guarded it. The Axe was taken to one of three cars which sped off in different directions. Several other Stanford students (disguised as Cal students) further delayed attempts to recover the Axe by organizing a search party away from the direction of the getaway cars. Although several of the raiders were caught, the Axe made it back to Stanford where it was paraded around the campus.

How amazing is that?  These students came to be known as the Immortal 21 at Stanford.

The Axe lay in bank vaults while the schools figured out what to do with it. Somewhere along the way it got its handle sawed off. Ultimately, it was decided that it would go each year to winner of the Big Game. So it is mounted on a plaque with all the scores from the Big Games throughout history. Though, for the famous 1982 game, whenever Stanford has the Axe the score is changed to 20-19, because that touchdown should never have counted. Cal changes it back.

I believe I’ve mentioned this before too, but in honor of the famous role the Stanford band played in the 1982 game, the ceremonial transfer of power from the band director to next year’s band director takes place with 4 seconds left in the Big Game, the time that the Band stormed the field.

Need I remind you that this year is the 25th anniversary of The Play? A lot of excitement here.

So I ask: how does NC State not have these kinds of rich traditions? UNC was founded in 1789. NC State came along in 1887. The two are closer in distance than Stanford and Berkeley. Both have large fan bases in town, with generations of families attending these two schools. Seems strange.

Reading about these things also makes me really admire the things that universities can stand for and represent in society. Perhaps its the bias talking…after all I’ve been in university for the past five years, but what an influence these places have! It’s a chance where young people can have an amazing time, a place to really start learning about the world, to have fun, to remember for a long time. And look at all the amazing universities across this country. So much history and tradition and reputations. And places that are public too! UNC, Virginia, Michigan, Texas, UC system, etc. Despite being a proud and dedicated member of the Wolfpack community, it’s very easy for me to admire the pride and reverence my friends and sisters have for UNC, or the people I’ve met from Berkeley. Such excellent schools! I feel America is unique in the role that public universities have in this country and the far-reaching influence they have. We cannot lose this.

It’s late, I better get to bed.

I actually went to my statistical signal processing class for the first time in a month today. I’ve lately just been watching the lectures online. And I was reminded at how little I understand of the material. Meanwhile, an Indian guy in the 4th row was telling the professor “I’m not convinced by your explanation that this is true.” Jeez.

I spent about two hours re-watching two lectures and looking over the sections in the course reader before spending two hours in the TA office hours. Helped a little bit. The TA spent 30 minutes trying to solve part b of question 5, and wasn’t getting anywhere. You can guess at how that bodes well for me.

Spent about 4 hours on this class’s homework tonight. Didn’t finish a single problem. I just tried to understand two problems, but I just don’t know whether I’m formulating these questions correctly or the mathematical way to finish their solutions. Every week this it feels like an exercise in futility.

Meanwhile, Vista is proving to be the absolute abysmal piece of crap it is. If a program happens to stop responding, Vista decides that the entire OS should lock up. No, you don’t get to open the Task Manager and try to shut the unresponsive program down. You need to hard restart your machine. Oh, all you wanted to do is open a web browser and play a mp3 at the same time? Too bad. And did you hear the news? The new service pack for Windows XP is supposed to make it performance twice as Vista. Even worse? I’m using Vista Ultimate. This is supposed to be the best version! What horrors are the other poor souls who have degraded version of Vista going through? Sigh. The highlight today was having some chevre cheese (goat’s cheese) with Triscuits this evening. That and a bowl of rice was my dinner.

In case you’re wondering, this is the ‘topology’ of the amplifier we’re building. Click on the image for a more readable view.

But this is just for looks. When it comes to entering this into our simulator, you have to define it all by hand. An example would be:

And so on.  Once you can start to visualize a circuit network though, its faster just entering it in by hand rather than drawing it.

So tomorrow school starts up again. Short day cause I woke up really late. It’s going to be a busy two weeks….the waiting before I get reamed on my final exams.

I watched the championship game of the Old Spice classic — NC State vs #19 Villanova. I’m not sure when I’ll get to see NC State play on ESPN2 again. It was a nailbiter. Being an NC State fan is a trial of faith. We gained the lead at the half, but Villanova kept chipping away at it. The last several minutes we were in a drought. Villanova goes up by 1 point with 2.2 seconds left. But then, on the inbound, Gavin Grant is fouled when going for the three! He misses the first, makes the next two for the go-ahead score. Villanova has 0.4 seconds, and despite the ball nearly going in, the Wolfpack came away with the win.

Later, I was watching most of the Eagles vs Patriots game. It was amazing — the Eagles were playing their best game in a while and was even leading going into the end of the 4th quarter. But then the QB gave up a bad interception on an unnecessary pass, and the Patriots scored to ultimately win it.

In other news, we have a much more optimized design for the 214 project! The last post showed a power dissipation of 47.27 mW. By implementing a real bias network and fine-tuning some values (trial and error Spice monkeying!) I was able to get:

The following specs were measured using our scripts.Description:                 Achieved

--------------------------------------------------

Settling Time (ns):     39.31

Static Error (%):     -0.010

Dynamic Range (dB):     90.10

Power (mW):             21.85

--------------------------------------------------

Congtratulations! Your design has met the spec  :) 

21.85 mW now! We are well within the 0.025% static error requirement. I can reduce the settling time (the spec is 40ns) but that will take more power. I am still very unhappy with a parameter known as the phase margin, which is measured in degrees. I was designing for a phase margin of 75 degrees. Many of the resulting parameters my design process calculated were matched in simulation. Yet, my phase margin is only 41 degrees. This is bad: not only do you want your phase margin to ensure stability for your amplifier, but a phase margin of 75 degrees also improves settling time. If I can somehow get my phase margin higher, I might be able to further reduce the power while meeting my specifications. This tells me that I am neglecting to factor in some rather important parameters into my design process. I need to read up on frequency response of two-stage telescopic OTAs.

Two random ways to finish this post. I’ve been lately listening to Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm, and here is a picture of my Vista’s sidebar….how I’m keeping track of people.

The timezone messed me up today — I thought the Notre Dame vs. Stanford game was 3:30 PST when it was actuallyEST. So I missed out going to the game. Nader came over and while I pecked away at the project, we watched the game on ESPN. What a terrible game. So many turnovers. So many bad penalties. Horrible officiating that is becoming the trademark of the Pac-10 — Notre Dame had a great touchdown pass that was ruled incomplete, even though the replay clearly showed the receiver had a hand under the ball when he hit the ground. Our starting QB, Tavita Pritchard, was once going into a slide when a ND defender led with his helmet and smashed into Pritchard’s helmet. Our QB’s head got torn off and it looked like he lost consciousness for a bit. No flag. The announcers were stunned. So Ostrander comes in, but then later injures his hand. While our third string QB was warming up, Pritchard comes back out. His helmet had been taken away from him earlier..and the announcers were saying “Coach Harbaugh, get him out of the game.” He was hit again, threw some weak passes. Horrible. Our kicker missed 5 field goals. We were on the goal-line at the end of the game, and our QB Ostrander threw two TD passes — except one was bobbled by the receiver and the other went right through the receivers hands. Sad.

After the game ended we got to working on the project. I wish I could have watched the Kansas vs Missouri match, but Mike kept me posted. It’s amazing that Kansas lost…another #2 goes down.

But anyway. After much explaining and teaching, Nader finally got  a bias circuit built for my amplifier topology and he was even able to improve the specs. So we currently have something we can turn in. It’s kinda ugly and not very creative, and takes around 34 mW of power, but it meets the specs. The new amplifier I built is also meeting the specifications too. So I think we’re doing alright.

I also tried a hefeweiss beer by Hopf. That brings the total number of hefeweizens  that I’ve tried to around 13. Weihenstephaner is still the best.

I hung out and had lunch today with Matt Callahan, a friend from high school. He is like Stephen Marks in his expressive enthusiasm — a great guy. He went to Chapel Hill and got his degree in math. An active member in Nourish International, he was the lead organizer for the most impressive charity poker event I’ve ever known (when you’ve got a pro poker player donating hundreds of his DVD, $20 worth of goodies, and prizes like flat panel TVs…all donated…you know you’re doing something right). He is currently teaching sixth grade math at a recently opened school in East Oakland for Teach for America. We talked a lot about that, his experiences and such. It’s really remarkable. He has some incredibly smart students — kids who can score a perfect score on the math portion on the California state exam. But it’s tough because the overall environment makes it hard for these kids to focus. Matt was telling me that you put any one of these kids in a place like Palo Alto High School or Davis Drive and these kids could go to Stanford. Another thing that he said students like us never had to deal with — how to learn. What a learning environment looks like. The idea that you might not understand something the first time, but if you work at it, you can learn it. The fact that you can learn. Some interesting challenges — the students can handle adding and subtracting positive and negative numbers, but only if they are below +-20. If you get big numbers, its hard. The average at-grade level proficiency in sixth grade math for Palo Alto school district is 85% — the local middle school near Stanford has 95%. Oakland’s average is 20%.  Matt’s school? 9%. How do you design a lesson plan to teach a sixth-grade math concept when your class features grade-level proficiency from 2nd grade to 7th grade (most below 5th grade)? I salute people like Matt…wow. He said that one of the tough adjustments he had to make was that for nearly all of our lives, the main focus for students like us was learning. Everything else did was extracurricular. Oh, I signed up for IM basketball but its ok if I suck at it. Ok, so I miss a few meetings of that social activism club. But you always make sure you do well in school, and our group of friends in high school and college were like that. Now, he and fellow TFA first years are finding that they are working 70 hours a week at teaching, and they aren’t good at it. It’s a big adjustment.

In other news, I have an op-amp that meets the specifications.

13:11:35, Fri Nov 23 2007

The following specs were measured using our scripts.

Description:                 Achieved
--------------------------------------------------
Settling Time (ns):     39.60
Static Error (%):      -0.01
Dynamic Range (dB):     90.01
Power (mW):             47.27
--------------------------------------------------

Congtratulations! Your design has met the spec  :) 

BUT. This is using an idealized bias network — need to implement a real one. Instead of 3 idealized current sources, I’m allowed only 1. So a bunch of current mirroring to do. This also uses two ideal voltage sources — need to get rid of those and use transistors. It also is too close to the margins — I need to make it more robust. But still.

So what is this project about? It’s just an amplifier. You send a tiny voltage into it, and it will make it into a bigger one. What are some issues? Well, to help minimize any noise that might get into your signal (which corrupts it), we use something called differential signals. This has the benefit of increasing the dynamic range too, which is a measure of the difference between lowest and highest signal you can handle. Speed is a big issue. How fast does it to take for your device to do what you want? Not only that, but what is the highest frequency signal your amplifier can accept? Human hearing lies between 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz. If the amplifier in your iPod can’t handle signals that are higher than 14,000 Hz, then you’re losing a lot.

Now, in particular, this amplifier is intended to be used in a circuit implementation called switched capacitor. It’s a way of bridging the analog world and the digital world. I haven’t done a lot of work with it, but I might later.

Anyway, tried picking up a webcam at Circuit City but they botched the pickup order. Held the wrong model and then sold out of my model. I’m gonna get back to work. Enjoying the Boise State vs Hawaii game now. Nuts how LSU lost, huh. What an awesome year for college football.

Ok so I’m late a day. Hope you all had a nice time. I watched the NC State vs Rider basketball game in the morning. We were horrible the first half but ended up winning the game. Then got back to work on my 214 circuit project. My spirits started to sink — I started uncovering some systemic errors in my formulation and was getting frustrated with Excel. The program lacks a useful interpolation function, and I was getting confounded by problems that should not happen — certain functions requiring the input cells to be the same worksheet, for example. It’s silly — I’m working with 20 worksheets in my file. I ended up migrating my entire design flow over to MATLAB. I ended up skipping out on the Thanksgiving Day dinner being help by the Graduate Community Center and opted to have some leftover rice pilaf. I continued working straight through the evening and it started to pay off — I was getting results. All my transistors were in the right mode of operation. Jimmy and his partner called and I ended up talking him through part of the project over the phone for over an hour. I’m meeting 2 of the 4 requirements, but I’m having trouble increasing my amplifier’s gain. You see, increasing the gain of an amplifier reduces its static error. The reason is that my dynamic range is only 76 dB, when I need it to be 90 dB. So I have to both increase gain and reduce noise.

I celebrated by warming up some chili and canned corn. I tried some other strategies on improving my gain, but unfortunately nothing really worked. I think I’m going to have to reverse my design…basically swap my n-mos and p-mos transistors. So far I’ve put about 35+ hours into this project…better now than during the upcoming weeks.

Not planning on much at all for Black Friday. Don’t really need anything. Except maybe a webcam for home.

Despite getting only 4 hours of sleep, I woke up at 6am today and got ready. I met up with Lei (equally tired) and we took a drive around the bay. We drove 280 north to San Francisco, far more scenic than 101. As we drove up, we saw a dense river of fog hug the bottom of the valley, a rather startling sight for those unaccustomed to it. Crossing the bridge, we ended up getting lost among small neighborhoods and towns, ultimately driving north towards Mt. Tamalpais and Muir Woods. Our tiredness combined with the uneasy contract we have with Mornings made the twisty turns less than enjoyable. Still, the view from Mt. Tamalpais was spectacular, seeing the entire Bay and the San Francisco peninsula with its mass of skyscrapers. On our right was the expanse of the Pacific. Continuing our drive, we arrived at Muir Woods. I had visited here on the road trip, but Lei wanted to see a real forest and it is a nice hike. We took a 3 mile trail and looked at a redwood that fell on October 7th. Muir Woods feels ancient, yet change occurs daily.

After a snack we headed towards San Rafael and then the 580 bridge towards Berkeley. I noticed quite a number of Indian restaurants and stores while driving down their University Avenue towards campus. We parked outside and walked through the central and northern parts of campus. Most of Berkeley is at the foot of the hills, but some buildings and are definitely up on the mountain. The campus is much smaller than Stanford, in the shape of a trapezoid. Walking at a casual pace, we went from the west end to east end in 10-15 minutes. In total area, it’s about 40-50% smaller than NC State’s central campus. The buildings are not uniform, in either style (ie, Univ of Maryland) or materials (ie, NCSU). Many buildings feature (and forgive my lack of architectural terms) what I call ‘California style neo-classicism’. There are neo-classical elements I would not be surprised to see on buildings in Washington D.C., but with a spanish-style terra cotta tiled roof. Other buildings are very distinct, like the emerald green tilework of the CS building. The library is white marble lined with high ceilinged gorgeous reading rooms flooded with natural light. You know, some people say Berkeley’s campus can look pretty ghetto, but I didn’t see any areas like that. I did not visit the southern part though. The town of Berkeley is what you’d expect of a undergrad-heavy state college. The two main streets are full of restaurants (heavy leaning towards Asian and south Asian), cafes, and stores. It certainly has a more low-key aura than the tree-lined University Avenue by Stanford. All the university buses looked unnecessarily old, and Lei and I poked fun at the hippie implications all around us. A whole store dedicated to indoor agriculture lighting? Why would anyone, near Berkeley, want to grow plants inside? I did grab some coffee at a small coffee shop and later Lei and I grabbed a slice of pizza from a hole-in-the-wall pizza place. Both turned out to be good.

After Berkeley we headed home. The early start and lack of sleep took a heavier toll than we thought it would.

So where are the pictures you might ask? Sad news: my Canon S2 IS is dead. I bought this camera in July 2005, before going to Europe. The camera produced approximately 50 GB of content since then. I turned it on this morning with a fresh charge of batteries to find the screen black. The menu is shown but no images appear on the screen. I can view old pcitures without a problem, but I’m not getting any pictures from the sensor. I’ve looked at some forums and this has happened to others. I can pay Canon around $125 to fix it. I wish I could have lasted another year, but it did have a good run. Oh well.

Any suggestions for a replacement? Thanks.

Thanksgiving break started at 5pm on Friday for me. I’m staying here at Stanford seeing as none of my family is at home in Raleigh. It’s ok though. I took Friday night and most of Saturday off. Took Nader to the airport, finished some errands, and have been working primarily on my EE 214 term project. It’s going to take a lot of work.

I re-read one of my favorite works of literature yesterday — Copenhagen, by Michael Frayn.  Some of you know that this one of the works assigned in Honors 201 class, freshman year. Some of the more humanities-focused classmates didn’t appreciate it, but I thought it was absolutely brilliant. In my sophomore year, UNC Playmakers put on a production of Copenhagen at Chapel Hill, and I was fortunate to see it live. While I was studying abroad, I visited the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and took a stroll around Faelled Park, where Bohr and Heisenberg would often walk and talk.

 So yeah. I’m a major fan. In high school I read through Brian Greene’s very accessible The Elegant Universe and was enjoying physics as my favorite class. I read about physicists like Richard Feynman and learned about all the science being done during the first third of our century. So when I came upon Copenhagen, I already had a familiarity with the (laymans) physics and the characters.

Copenhagen is a play that I love to pick up and truly read; if just to mouth the words and roll the dialog around my head. Copenhagen is about famous meeting between Niels Bohr (a half-Jewish Danish physicist) and his former apprentice Werner Heisenberg, a German. The year is 1941, and Denmark is occupied. These two worked together in the early 1920s and through their collaboration emerged two pillars of quantum mechanics — the complimentarity principle and the uncertainty principle. After this fateful meeting this one night in 1941, their relationship forever ended. What was said? What transpired? Frayn draws upon historical sources and indeed, the afterword of the play is nearly as many pages as the play itself and is where Frayn outlines the various historians and interpretations of the events.

I love this play because of the questions it evokes and makes me wonder. About the interminableness of our memories. About ethics. About decision making. About what it means to be a scientist. As the play unfolds, the mind races with the possibilities that are presented — what if Bohr hadn’t stormed off when Heisenberg asked him that critical question? Would Heisenberg then realized his earlier miscalculation? The tantalizing coincidences and happenstances that occurred regarding the competing atom bomb projects…the Allies estimating the required amount of U-235 to be hundred times less than what Hiroshima needed, thus making them more eager, while the Germans estimating it to be hundreds of times more than needed, thus making them reluctant. The ethics — how scientists who helped build the bomb at Los Alamos refused to shake Heisenberg’s hand when he visited after the war. The unending questions — was Heisenberg trying to subtly intentionally sabotage the Nazi atom bomb project? Or was his physics wrong?

As you might guess, I could go on like this for many more pages. I would love to transcribe some wonderful passages from the play. Absolutely delightful. Note to interested readers: you don’t have to know anything about physics to appreciate it. This play won the Tony Award in 2002.

I went into the City today to see a film, called Heima, about Sigur Ros‘ Icelandic concert tour. Despite getting there half an hour early, the line was so long they had run out of capacity. Note: don’t go to a film screening when the venue is a club that is being converted into a screening room.

My buddy Lei forwarded me a note from a friend of his in the GSB about Carlos Ghosn coming to speak at a weekly GSB lunch-time speaker event. I had never heard of Ghosn before, but I’m glad I went. Ghosn was named Business Man of the Year  in 2003 by Fortune magazine, and is widely lauded for turning around Nissan. Ghosn has the distinction of being the CEO of both the French automobile giant Renault and Japan’s Nissan at the same time. When Renault and Nissan formed an alliance back in 1999, Nissan had $20 billion in debt and compared to all of its peers, was in astoundingly bad shape. Now, Nissan is in the green. He is so highly regarded in Japan that his nickname is Samurai and manga (comic book) has been written with him as a character.

Ghosn appears to be the perfect man to lead  two global companies. Born in Brazil to Lebanese parents, he studied in France and is fluent in 5 different languages, with a sixth coming along. Ghosn spoke about the state of the automotive industry and the challenges of bring a very French company and a very Japanese company together towards success. He is an excellent speaker.

He spoke about the cultural problems in Nissan that made it plunge so low (not profit driven, not customer driven, and no cross functional teams). He said that leadership is about getting a group of people to work towards a goal they are uncertain of. When it came to the idea of failure, Nissan and Renault posed two different problems. In Japan, people feel shame when they fail. But failure is part of innovation — Ghosn says that shame comes with repetitive failure. In France, is it the opposite. If a person is doing a 95% great job, the French is likely to point at the 5% and complain.

He spoke at length about the new developing markets in China, India, Brazil, Russia, and sub-Saharan Africa.  In order to open up the possibility of owning a car to more people, they have to drive the price lower. In America, the cheapest car is $9,000. But people can’t afford that. He described a partnership that Renault-Nissan has with Bhajaj Motors in Mumbai where Bhajaj is designing the car while using the resources and technology of Renault-Nissan. Ghosn noted that India is designing cars with the Indian consumer very much in mind. He also gave an interesting statistic for China — the domestic car manufacturers only have 12% market share in China. This is the lowest for any other country. In Japan, that stat is 80%. In America, 40%. In European countries, closer to 50%. So Ghosn thinks there is still some time before Chinese cars flood the international markets — they have a lot to catch up with at home.

Someone asked about hybrid vehicles and Ghosn made a point saying that technological innovation is very different from commercial marketization — a point that I agree too many engineers fail to understand. There are 65 million cars sold every year. How many of those are hybrid/electric vehicles? 0.1%. Yes, it is growing but there is still time before it becomes a big commercial market.

Ghosn showed a quick mind, offered more detailed answers (with figures, percentages, time estimates) than what I would have expected from a CEO, and felt comfortable with the crowd. Someone described the Renault-Nissan alliance as a marriage, and Ghosn said that you don’t judge a marriage by the first sixth months…you have to look where it is after 5 or 10 years. A while ago GM was rumored to perhaps join the alliance, and Ghosn described it as “what happens if you like the father-in-law but think the bride is ugly.” He also noted that when it comes to management, people only care when things are going bad. When things are good, great companies can run themselves. When you’re flying on a plane, you don’t care who is flying until you notice the engines are flaming out and you want to make sure the pilot isn’t some rookie.

As I was watching Ghosn, it really impressed upon me of the notable difference between leadership and management. I know I’ve been taught these topics before, but still. A leader’s fundamental role is to provide a vision for people to believe in and want to work towards. As Ghosn says, you cannot simply command or order people to be motivated. You have to inspire it. A manager is concerned about implementation and execution, and making sure you have total awareness of what is going on within your organization. I reflect back to the projects I’ve been a part of, and I wonder: have I been more of a leader, or a manager? As a major advisor to this year’s Krispy Kreme Challenge organizers, I realize that I failed to spend the time to truly communicate the vision of what Krispy Kreme Challenge was about and to inspire our group last year. My thoughts would first jump to ‘total awareness’ mode and start analyzing all the things that had to be done and how to execute. I think I did a better job with ARI, the senior design project, because in my role I was able to stay above the gritty implementation part and really make myself available to our undergraduates.

I need to be mindful of this differentiation between leadership and management, and wear their respective hats accordingly.

I’ve been using Vista Ultimate or over 3 weeks as my primary OS, as it preloaded with this new laptop. And after giving it that much time, I plan on switching back to good old Windows XP. My questions for Vista:

•  Why did you have to change my directory browsing behavior? The ‘up directory’ arrow, which I could use in XP to easily traverse my entire harddrive from wherever I was, is gone. If I open the ‘My Documents’ folder, I’ve got to carefully click the tiny ‘>’ breadcrumb divider, then move the cursor down to select ‘Computer’. Not intuitive.
• Why does Adobe Acrobat crash 5+ times a day? Note this holds true whether I’m viewing Acrobat files in Firefox, in IE, or just by themselves.
• Why have I had to a hard power-down three times today because Windows Explorer chose to completely freeze (no task manager and Ctrl+Alt+Delete unresponsive)? If I had 30+ windows open and trying to defragment my harddrive at the same time while encoding a DVD and burning a CD I might understand…but when I’m just trying to open iTunes? When I’m just trying to open my mail client? Unacceptable.
• I like the option of your Sidebar, but is it so restrictive?

Yeah, the visual facelift is a nice touch. The searchable start menu is good, the volume adjustments are more specific, and there is a nice media center mode too. But instability and frequent program/OS crashes is something I cannot tolerate. I’ve had more of these problems in these past 3 weeks than I had with my Windows XP in a year.

Unacceptable. Nice try though.

Yeah, I did very, very little work this weekend. On Friday, Nader and I met up briefly to talk about our circuits project, but really watched some TV and played Super Smash Brothers. Gene’s happy hour was in full swing and I joined in. There was a nice mix of people, some humanities and engineers. Veronica is a grad student in structural engineering and we talked a lot about how that applies to NGO work. She spent three months in India advising rural villages in northeast India about seismically sound structures. She’s graduating in March and will work with a locally based NGO on an eight month project in Guatemala. Simon, Luke, and I were finally able to convince Darcy (a french literature grad student) to try some Vegemite. She’s actually from the Triangle area too, so she picked up on NC State pretty fast.

On Saturday I woke up very early and went over to the SAP campus at 8:30am for the Cyber|West conference. This is the west-coast event for Harvard Business School’s Cyberposium event. Some of the discussions there were on the future of the mobile web platform, an interview with Rich Redelfs, a video from Ray Kurzweil’s keynote that was given at Harvard just a few hours before, and a panel on clean tech with cities. Some pretty neat guests and speakers were there: VP of PayPal Mobile, venture partner from Menlo Ventures, Product Manager for Google Mobile (maps and gmail), VP of AdMob, solar power consultant, VP of SAP, head of corporate environmental at Intel, and even the Mayor of San Jose. It was really interesting to hear how SAP is starting to look at ways of integrating green/clean tracking and monitoring into their venerable ERP platform, for including externalities into executive dashboard as well as compliance monitoring. These are the kinds of things that my friend Lei and I have been discussing a lot too. Tobias Dosche, of SAP, said that in the 1980s the focus was all about cutting costs, and in the 1990s it was about competitive advantage. Going ‘green’ is no longer in the realm of feel-good treehuggers. Going green for many corporate clients is now about both improving the bottom line and gaining a competitive advantage. The Mayor of San Jose explained the ‘green vision’ for his city. Very ambitious. Consider though that there are 8 known solar power companies in the Bay area — we’re talking technology firms creating new solar technology. And more are in stealth mode. Tesla Motors is here, and there is also Better Place, the electric car promoting venture by Shai Agassi, of SAP fame. His vision is to make Silicon Valley the ‘Detroit’ of the next generation of [electric] automobiles. When it comes to IT, Silicon Valley is still king. For biotech and medical devices, Boston/Cambridge is the leader. But in this emerging green/clean tech, Silicon Valley appears to be rapidly securing its leader position. The discussion on mobile web was nice, with all of the panelists criticizing the cell phone carriers for not being progressive. Their inability to work together and their over-protective mentality has resulted in an absolute nightmare of regulatory and technical redtape which is slowly the spread of a great mobile web. Verizon was deemed the worst of the major carriers. In the future, we’re going to be paying for things using cell phones. It’s commonly said that downloadable ringtones/wallpapers for your cellphone is a $2 billion business, but if you start opening transactions to things over $5, $10, or $20, you start talking about market sizes in the couple of trillion of dollars. The future is the mobile web.

I got a Harvard Business School branded laptop sleeve as my swag. This conference was free to Stanford students (instead of $50) and its a shame I didn’t see more students there.  At around 6pm Lei came over and we just sat back and watched college football for a few hours. USC-Cal game was really sloppy, and Stanford lost. Lei’s Buckeyes (he’s an OSU grad) lost too. But talk about the Wolfpack’s win over Carolina! Later we talked at length about what classes to take and looked at Rise of Nations a bit.

Woke up late Sunday, looked at EE 278 homework (oh the horror it is so long), watched a bit of Chargers vs Colts, cooked some pulao, in the evening went over to Packard with Nader, Morris (almost-finished PhD in the VLF group), and a few of Morris’s friends and we watched two episodes of Planet Earth on a projector. Deserts and the Ocean Deep. One day I gotta watch that entire series on Hi-Definition.

So yeah. Didn’t really do a whole lot this weekend. This week I gotta finish that awful 278 homework. Nader and I will get a first working draft of our circuit by Friday. I’ll be staying here over Thanksgiving break and working on the 214 project full time. I am extremely motivated in making my project very good for that class. I’ve got something to prove after my less-than-stellar ECE 511 project.  It’s getting more chilly here too.

This place might seem like a country club, but it can have a sense of humor. You know those inspirational college promotion ads we see during college sporting events? This is what Stanford came up with for this year:

Hail, Stanford, Hail.