Saket Vora

I was biking back to the apartment with Nader when he suddenly remembered that former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was speaking on campus, at 7:30pm. It was 7:20pm. Fortunately, we were right near Kresge Auditorium so we swung over, waited in line, and slipped in despite having no tickets. Albright was humorous and insightful. The theme of the talk was a “trip around the world” where Albright would offer her views on certain hot issues. The talk opened well, with Albright remarking that she was the proud to serve as the 1st woman Secretary of State and to have Condoleezza Rice be the second, from Stanford. It was clearly a softball applause line, but only one person started applauding. Awkward laughter from the rest of the audience followed. Some her comments below, paraphrased of course.

On North Korea: “Our intelligence was wrong about Kim Jong Ill. They said he was crazy and a pervert. I went to North Korea and had talks with him. And he’s not crazy.” We need to stop talking about regime change; controlling nuclear weapons is more important.

On China: Don’t boycott the Olympic Games, but the POTUS can skip the opening ceremony. We need to understand that we are co-dependent on China. It’s like a drug addict and his pusher, but you don’t know which is which. We should always bring up the issue of human rights and Tibet with them, and know they will always bring up Taiwan.

On Burma: Sanctions or involvement with the military junta? The cyclone has brought more attention to the concept of “responsibility to protect”, in which one raises the idea of invading a country because its government isn’t protecting its citizens. But Albright says sounds nice when idealists bring it up, but it’s a very difficult academic question to consider.

Oh Delhi & Islamabad: The US-Indian nuclear treaty and how it might undermine the NPT (considering India refused to join it and then tested nuclear weapons). Albright notes that the NPT is broken (promises have been broken on both sides) and the US-India Treaty could be a new model. She sadly noted that the Communists are holding up the treaty. Pakistan has everything that would cause a foreign policy migraine.

As the conversation shifted over to Afghanistan, Albright noted that she wants to teach a class about the “unintended consequences of foreign policy.” Oh…sounds like the idea of blowback, which readers of this website have seen me discuss before.

On Iran: Holding talks isn’t the same as appeasement. (This got an applause from the audience). Albright also noted that most Americans don’t really know how complicated Iran is, specifically how many different levels of power exist. (I’d comment that that mainstream media has done a universally pathetic job on informing the American public about Iran. For such an important country to our national security and involvement in Iraq, it’s simply disgraceful.)

Albright went on to discuss the heavily one-sided education that occurs in the Middle East (in all countries), the issue of the missile defense shield in eastern Europe and the colder role Russia is taking, and finally that it’s confusing to the one to have partisan foreign policy and that whoever is the next President should probably appointment Republicans to the Cabinet (heh).

One thing I liked about Albright was how often she said the words “it’s complicated”, “it’s a difficult issue”, “there is no one good answer”. She seems to take a very pragmatic view towards foreign policy, a field that IS complex and difficult. Too many people want to just try to simplify issues down to black and white stances.

Memorial Day weekend was boring but productive. I’m farther than anyone else on my embedded systems hardware project. This week’s lab report is already done. Today Andy tipped me and Kamal off on free food from a seminar that ended on the 2nd floor of Packard. Scored a vegetable panini sandwich, fancy corn chips, twelve half-and-half packets (just ran out this morning), and a plateful of pasta salad. 15 minutes later, we attended a special talk by Bob Pease, a famous analog designer from National Semiconductor. The LM317 voltage regulator? Yeah, that’s him.

My friend Donny Katz was just featured in a NC State College of Engineering Alumni article, which describes his experience as a Fulbright Scholar in Dhaka, Bangladesh and highlights the remarkable blog he’s been keeping since arriving in Dhaka almost 9 months ago. The article does a good job at conveying just how multi-faceted and talented Donny has shown to be. And I have a feeling we’re just seeing the beginning. :)

Pretty laid back past few days, considering. Luke is busy moving out: his parents arrived in town on Thursday and then his girlfriend Dora flew in Friday. They are moving into the cottage he got in Palo Alto and visiting family in Mendocino. Luke invited me to dinner with his parents on Thursday night and we went to The Counter. Really wonderful people — great sense of humor and easy to have intelligent conversation with. Luke’s father has been a consultant regarding education & youth development. He has recently started going international too — was in Cambodia, Rwanda, and even Kosovo (just a week after their declaration of indepedance!). So yeah.

Woke up kinda late on Friday, took care of some business then went to the lab. Siddharth had repaired the broken VCO and we tested it out — it worked even better than before. He also tried out his power amplifier (this week’s lab assignment) that he fashioned out of an older component and has met all specs except one. We talked about the recent Champions League final game and Siddharth showed me the highlights from it. Kinda crazy it came down to penalty kicks. So it looks like we’re in good shape. Went grocery shopping with Nader at around 12:30am…randomly ran into Simon there who stopped to buy some wine. Nader was very excited about the bison omelet he was planning. Then, in the checkout line, I saw Ed Chiang. He was a high school classmate of Donny’s back in New Jersey. We joked that these days us EE students have the bulk of our normal waking hours in the AM.

We’ve had some good chats at the apartment. Luke, Simon, and I sat around the dining table talking for a while; Simon brought a bottle of Oyster Bay pinot noir. I’m taking the opportunity to learn more about Australia, naturally. We’ve discussed Australia’s social welfare system, relationship to China and especially Indonesia, bankruptcy law and how it hurts entrepreneurship, heck even bananas. Considering the news of Cyclone Nargis, I asked if Australia gets hit often. He said not really, but one time a cyclone tore through Queensland where all the banana plantations were. Literally overnight, banana prices in Sydney rose from $1.50/kg to $13/kg! And of course the government put down tariffs regarding foreign banana imports to try to get the local plantations back on their feet, but soon organized crime started breaking into plantations and stealing bushels of bananas, cause literally it was the case of money growing on trees and the whole black market banana trade was in full gear. Kinda wild.

We got our final project in embedded systems and entrepreneurial finance: do the schematic and 4-layer PCB layout for a game controller inspired by the Wiimote. I need to catch up on the lectures…i slept through back classes due to the all nighters I’ve had to pull lately. In finance, our task to make a pitch for Series A funding of a company as a group. Then individually, we play a VC partner and write an investment memo on one of the pitched companies on whether to invest or not.

Let’s see how much work I get done Saturday….

It has been an fairly exhausting two weeks. I cannot recall the last time I’ve had to pull so many true all-nighters over such a period. I was chatting with Donny (who is in Bangladesh, as many of you know) this morning and he said he was going to sleep, with me chiming in ‘me too’. That’s not a good sign.

There are some random pictures below and those interested (masochists?) can look at the VCO/PLL lab report here.

YES. WE. CAN.

It’s been a taxing week. The embedded systems project was far more involved than we anticipated largely due to problems not completely within our control. Bikiran and I pulled some serious marathon sessions…we worked from Tuesday at 8pm to 7:30am, then Wednesday from 3pm until the following 1pm, when it was due. Our individual parts worked, but unifying them in the FreeRTOS was beyond reason. We had to turn in what we had. Despite being up for a full 24 hours, I still went to class afterward then had to go to entrepreneurial finance class, which only meets once a week. My group partner commented before class started that I looked tired, and I told her about the midterm project and how I’ve been awake for 26 hours. The professor overheard me and asked “did you say you’ve been up for 26 hours? I think I’ll cold call you today” and sure enough, 5 minutes into class, he starts asking me questions about how I’d manage the money if my startup received a Series A round of $4 million. He then had me go up to the board and show an allocation and do some roleplay. Yeah. It was a fun class though. We later did ‘resource allocation’ and he brought out a stack of 1 thousand $1 bills. After finance class, I visited the circuits lab. I’d been so distracted with the other project I hadn’t devoted enough time. Other groups had been getting theirs to work, but we were still behind. I stayed for an hour but wanted to go home. I ultimately didn’t end up sleeping until 1am. For some reason after a certain point, I enter this minimal energy state in which I can function awake, but just slowly.

Anyway. I spent today (friday) in the lab from 11am, and had the worst luck. Couldn’t get anything to work right. The highlight was when I had dinner with Terrell Russell, an early tech mentor of mine and graduated in one of the first Park Scholarship classes. He is in Palo Alto for the next four months working at PARC. He’s finishing up a PhD in Information Science at UNC. Terrell just launched SPIFFY v3.0, the Park intranet. The new version looks great — the Park Alumni Society and SPIFFY have merged, allowing for greater collaboration and involvement. We talked about the changes to it and the new classes of Parks, then I learned a bit more about what he’s working on in particular. I was quite pleased to find that he is also interested in picking up Processing, and is currently reading through Ben Fry’s book. I’m going to start once school gets out. One thing he said really struck a chord in me: you get to a point where you are thinking of higher order questions that Excel charts just can’t convey. I know I’ve run into that a lot this past year. I had a great chat with him and I’m happy he’s out here for the summer.

I went back to the lab afterward (around 10pm or so) to continue working. Still not much luck. I ended up starting a whole new board and got the basics down before calling it a night. I’ll be in there all tomorrow…gotta actually get results then write the report.

I also must put a shout-out to Donny whose photos of the mangroves in Sundarbans, Bangladesh were featured on the Living on Earth website. Way to go!

Videos from this week’s lab:

EE 414 – VCO/PLL Lab 4

EE 414 – VCO/PLL Lab 2

EE 414 – VCO/PLL Lab 3

EE 414 – VCO/PLL Lab 1

Wow. It’s 4:20am. My apartment (nader was over too) just had a six hour chat…one of those meandering discussions that can go to places you’d never expect. Nader scored two microwaves and he gave one to us (we have one that actually turns). Simon observed the existence of holes in the rear shaped precisely like electrical sockets on the back of the microwave, and naturally we being engineers on a Saturday night spent a good 20 minutes (to Luke’s chagrin, even he was sort of participating!) debating this, even taking a photo of it and enlisting the help of Wikipedians. Gene came in, horrified and amazed that we would be doing this instead of going to a party to meet people, which got us talking about how we hang out, the art and importance of meeting strangers and talking with them, nice ‘lounge’ places in the City, girls, the nature of the Russian front in World War II (via a mention of an indian girl here in russian studies), to the Holocaust, the persistence of Eastern bloc and Russian grudges, the motivations behind the Bolshevik revolution, the cyclical nature of war and peace, ‘peace’ under occupation, speculation of a third World War and where it would be, the status of China’s military might, the relationship between China and Australian, the tense relationship between Indonesia and Australia, East Timor, international law and justice, the turning away of chinese immigrants at the northern Australian border, the encouraging of Cuban boats here, the broken immigration policy for skilled and talented workers, labor, educational attainment in the US, societal justice, and economic drivers for welfare in Australia and the United States.

My EE 414 labmates have been doing a fantastic job shouldering the load while I’ve gone AWOL to tackle this embedded project. I fixed the problem with the GPS today and felt pretty good about that. Tomorrow I’ll split between the 414 lab and the project.

I’ve been in the library coding for 10 hours…will be continuing at home through the night. Definitely getting schooled. Some people were asking so I thought I’d post the lab report that me and my EE 414 lab mates (Andy Chen and Siddharth Panwar) wrote for the last lab exercise. This is the most ‘complete’ lab report we’ve written so far. We underestimated how long it would take us and ended up turning it a day late. The TAs are great though, they understand.

Check out here: EE 414 Lab 3 Report: The LNA

I know I haven’t posted any new videos…will do so next week.

Need I say more? Barack Obama flashing the Wolfpack sign. I’m in heaven.

On Tuesday Obama scored a decisive victory in North Carolina, speaking from Reynolds Coliseum for his election night address. Meanwhile, the race in Indiana drew tighter and tighter as the night wore on, ultimately resulting in a very narrow victory for Clinton. It’s over for her: she doesn’t have the momentum or the money to continue any further.

Barack Obama will be the Democratic Party Nominee for the President of the United States.

(sizable update on general stuff coming later this week..full disclosure that picture came from Fox News homepage)

Update: My household figures might be off a bit. Will look at it later.

The latest story regarding the Democratic primaries concern the gas tax, an 18.4 cent tax placed on gasoline which helps fund work on highway infrastructure. In face of rising fuel prices, McCain proposed an elimination of this tax from Memorial Day to Labor Day (May 26 to September 1). Hillary Clinton quickly agreed, stating that oil companies would pay for it. Obama dismissed this, claiming it was political pandering and that eliminating the gas tax doesn’t help.

I saw the following two ads by Clinton and Obama:

Clinton says it would save $8 billion for families. Obama says it will ’save Hoosiers about 30 cents per day.” I was curious about where these numbers were coming from, so I took 20 minutes with Google and Excel to do a quick exploration. I found that the “30 cents per day” total for Hoosiers is certainly within a reasonable order of magnitude. Since Hillary’s “$8 billion” statement was vague, I don’t know how she is driving that number. If I take the estimated savings amount by Hoosiers and scale it up using the ratio of Indiana’s population to the US population, I get about $6 billion. But I’m not sure. You can see my math below and download the Excel sheet if you wish.

As some of you know, Stanford operates on a quarter system, not a semester one like NC State did. Fall quarter is late September to mid December, Winter quarter is January to late March, and Spring quarter is April to mid June. As a result, classes move faster and there is what I like to call the step function, that time where it feels that everything kicks into high gear and stays that way until the end of the quarter.

In EE 414, we are starting the hardest lab, which will last two weeks. How hard? Written in the lab guide: “Section 11.3: It doesn’t work; now what do I do (after weeping uncontrollably)”. Our goal is to construct a “frequency synthesizer-based local oscillator”, which is a voltage controlled oscillator and a phased locked loop.

In EE 192C, we are doing our midterm software design project, due May 15th. I’ll be writing code that interfaces with a GPS receiver and Bikiran is handling interfacing with a memory card.

So yeah. Busy two weeks, but it’ll all good.

Tomorrow I’m gonna try to get tickets for the Salman Rushdie talk in the evening. In finance class we’re doing term sheet negotiations — my study group is playing the management team and another group is the VC. Should be fun.

Jordan’s parents and sister were in town and they kindly took me out to dinner on Friday. I had a wonderful time and it was nice to finally meet them. Maybe Jordan will stay out here for the summer too, not too sure. The law students have finished and there is a concentration of them in Studio 1, where Nader is a RA. Like the fat cats they like to think they are (sorry Win, hehe) , they were leaving a lot of things behind and I was able to nab an Ikea rolling cabinet thing, a plant, a vase, and some other things. Suckers.

Naman introduced me to Andrew McKee and I had coffee with him Saturday morning. Really cool guy — B.S. in biomedical engineering from Duke, started Duke Medical School, took a leave of absence to be a saxophonist and composer, then finished his degree, worked at McKinsey for a while and is now in the business ops & strategy group at Google. We talked about his time at McKinsey, how we both know of Naman (Andrew is meeting him in a couple of weeks), and about the field of energy. He and his wife just got an apartment up in the City.

I renewed my housing for next year — will be in the same room. I like living here. The NC primaries are Tuesday and you all know who I’ll be rooting for.

This makes me smile.