Saket Vora

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….