Saket Vora

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!