Saket Vora

Spent yesterday morning/afternoon working on the sandsofarrakis.com website. We actually got a comment from a Dune fan who found the site; I sent him a email assuring him that we’re getting into full swing with it. Mike, Sachi, and I have sketched out several articles we hope to write in an effort to build up a good amount of content. I was also watching the Davidson game, which was a heartbreaker. They hung in there until the end, but the magic was over. :(

Naman called and said he, Matt, Joel, and Kevin were heading to Golden Gate park in the City. Looking at public transportation was pretty grim; the last Caltrain leaving the City was at 9pm, really early. And the next train northbound to the City was at 5:30pm. I pinged up Nader and he graciously offered to take me up. So we hopped in the car and took 280 and met up with the guys in the park’s ‘panhandle’. Really nice day in a fairly large city park, playing 3×3 basketball. It was great. As the sun started to set, we headed over to the Pacific side and parked by the beach. There is a restaurant right on the shore overlooking the ocean where we watched the sun go down and had a nice dinner. Naman, Joel, and Kevin were leaving SFO at 6am the next morning, so they headed back to Matt’s house while Nader and I took a meandering drive through the city. The elevation changes as you traverse the various hills is quite remarkable; at one point we turn a corner and suddenly the entire City…the skyscrapers of the financial district, the Bay Bridge, everything appeared below us all lit up. It was an arresting sight. We ended up near Castro and Market Street, a sort of ‘trendy’ part of town (lots of rainbows…) and had a cappuccino at the Baghdad Cafe before heading back down to Palo Alto.

A nice couple of days before school starts tomorrow. Today I’ll be working more on SOA and WaterPLUS stuff.

Headed up to Oakland for the day. Naman, Joel (both WaterPlus members), and Kevin Henderson were in town visiting Matt Callahan, who is doing Teach for America in Oakland. Kevin (along with Naman and Matt) went to high school with me; he’s also a triplet with two sisters. A wunderkind at chemistry, he finished undergrad in 3 years (even after transferring to UNC after 1 year at NCSU) and is now in a Ph.D program in materials science at Northwestern, working on hydrogels. He won an NSF Fellowship last year. Matt went to Carolina and got his degree in physics. He shares a sweet house with fellow ToA’s in a great part of Oakland. Getting there was simple- just took the Caltrain then hopped over to the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit). We played some knockout and 4×4 basketball with some of Matt’s roommates, then walked down to the Golden Bear sports bar for the UNC vs Louisville game at 6pm. Though a part of me died inside, I wore the closest thing I had to baby blue (a dress shirt) and was a Tar Heel fan for the night. We shared a pitcher and got some pizza from Round Table next door. It was a high octane game, fun to watch. These UNC fans are kind of spoiled though: to them, having their team’s lead cut to under 10 points is like blowing the game. Me? I just hope when I turn on a game that NCSU is down by less than 10 points. :/

A few guys in the bar were also cheering for us, seeing as we all came in wearing blue. Most of them were tuned in to the Golden State Warriors game instead. Also — did you know Barack Obama picked UNC to go all the way? Hehe.

I’ll likely meet up with the guys tomorrow in San Francisco. Try to get some work done in the morning or get groceries with Luke.

I finally upgraded my old cellphone over this spring break, and have chosen a Palm Centro. It’s a smartphone, and I’ve got unlimited email and web browsing. The Centro doesn’t have the slick HTML rendering like the iPhone, but I saw how many websites have ‘mobile versions’ designed for people viewing the site on the poor web browsers found on mobile devices. I did some poking around and found a Wordpress plugin that can automatically detect and deliver a mobile optimized version for mobile devices, and it’s live on this site right now. Just trying to keep up with the trends. Let me know what you think of the mobile version if you try it out.

I’ll be staying out in California this summer, working as an intern at Apple. Gotta give a shout out to Jordan Price who passed along my resume. Yep, the son of an IBM/Lenovo lifer who put in 37 years at IBM and is a diehard Thinkpad fan will be working at Apple. Hehe. I’m truly looking forward to it: the team is a great group of talented people. Won’t be revealing any details about what I do/hear/see though, sorry. That all stays inside the Apple campus.

Also — just heard from a friend of mine here at Stanford: he’ll be interning at Apple too!

Catching up on some unfinished business — I uploaded photos from the Seattle trip I took for WaterPLUS at the end of February. I forgot my camera in Seattle and Naman brought it back to the Triangle with him, so I just now reunited with it. Some photos below:

…with Win’s tumblr-driven website. We’ll convince him to start ‘blogging’ soon enough. :)

But seriously, he’s rocking the twitter, flickr, and del.icio.us tools. Check it out.

I learned today that WaterPLUS is one of the 7 teams out of 35 to be accepted the pilot phase for BASE, the Business Accelerator for Sustainable Entrepreneurship at UNC-Chapel Hill. We also got some good feedback from judges in the Duke Startup Challenge, where we are currently in semi-finalist standing. Our business plan is due this Friday for the Carolina Challenge, and with all these recent developments our first ever ‘all hands meeting’ on Wednesday should prove to be well worth it, both for enjoying how far we’ve come and for charting our course into the future.

Got back in this morning at 8am. I had an outdated version of the CalTrain schedule and coupled with delays with the airport shuttle, I thought I might miss the flight. Didn’t sleep at all on the red-eye to Atlanta. I was playing the in-flight trivia game and the woman next to me joined in and we started chatting. She is a speech pathologist/therapist, recently got her Master’s. Her husband has a PhD in photonics. We talked the whole time, a lot about the kinds of kids she helps and the illnesses they face: cerebral palsy, autism, etc. It’s truly remarkable what those kids have to go through…it’s humbling. I talked a bit about some of the neuroscience/neuroengineering research I learned about this quarter, and we discussed some possible treatments that would be helpful. She and her husband (who is French) did some traveling in Europe so we talked about that too. About 40 minutes from Atlanta the guy next to me (wearing an Obama button) woke up and asked me what residence I lived in. Turns out he is a rising senior in American studies at Stanford who is running for Student Body President. He has chosen an awfully mature topic as one of the key planks to his platform: mental health of graduate students. Nice guy, he has my vote.

So we’ll be heading down to Charleston for a few days, then I’ll have two more days in the Triangle before heading back to California.

the ee314 final that is. three questions. the last question was what i expected – a question about oscillators. i think i did ok on that one.

the second one i was completely unprepared for. this class has been about radio frequency cmos integrated circuits. i spent my time focusing on the concepts we spent a lot of time covering: low noise amplifier (LNA) design, linearity and distortion concepts (IP3, IP5, SFDR, etc), impedance transformation (L-match, inductive source degenerations), mixers, power amplifiers, oscillators, phase noise, mosfet noise. Problem 2 instead was entirely about classical noise theory. we have covered the high level concept in class for about 10 minutes, but hadn’t worked any problems or examples from it. so yeah. totally unprepared.

i’m noticing this trend now: i don’t test well. the same thing happened last quarter in ee214; i could talk pretty fluently about amplifier design and the concepts, but i didn’t do well on the tests. in ee314, there were some classmates actually looking to me to explain things, and the responses to my questions in class generally indicated that my thinking was on track. but i just test so poorly.

sigh. i’m getting on a plane in about 9 hours, spring break has started.

I just wanted to try out one of the Y-Combinator launches: Mixwit. You can create little music player widgets that have a distinctly retro style. Here are two songs from The Shins latest album. The first one, “Australia”, is incredibly catchy and I’ve been playing it a lot these past few days. I love the little “no!” at the beginning when told “it’s time to put the earphones on.”

The attention to detail is pretty nice: if your playlist is long enough, the tape will spool and unspool from side to side.

Variety has confirmed the Dune remake with Peter Berg at the helm. More details are emerging about who will serve as producers. This was reported back in December but now it looks like its becoming more of a done deal. Expect a 2010 release.

Much thanks to Win for the link.

Expect more activity at my www.sandsofarrakis.com site in the upcoming weeks, months…years.

I’m pleased to add another friend to the blogroll: Joy Johnson, who is a first year Ph.D. student at MIT in electrical engineering!

Happy blogging Joy.

My teammate is turning in the Palm strategy report as I write this. Good to have that done; I’ll add it up to the ‘Writings’ section next week. We are sending it to the three people we spoke with. I’ve taken a cubicle in Green Library and vow to sequester myself here until I finish the neuro paper AND presentation. Yes, aiming for a double here.

I’ve got to do it in order to have more time and focus for the circuits exam on Friday. It’s going to be bad.