Saket Vora

It’s strange…things are actually not at the intensity they were a week ago. There isn’t a major pressure to demo the transceiver in RF Circuits, but my group will be in the lab this week to get it working. In Embedded Systems class, we’ve had our hardware project and I’ve been working a lot on that. The goal is to complete the schematic and printed circuit board (PCB) layout for a Wii-like game controller. Some of the basic parts (5) were chosen for us, but we had to figure out the rest then try to fit it all on a small board. Too bad these won’t be fabricated, but it’s still useful. I’ll be using these skills this summer at Apple. You can check out what the schematic looks like or the layout.

My sleep schedule lately has been shifted by about 6 hours…going to bed at 6 or 7am and waking up at 1pm. Not good…I missed a class but nothing major.  I think I’ve corrected it now. Last week I went to a talk by Joshua Marshall, creator of the political website TalkingPointsMemo. He was talking about the troubled times facing traditional journalism and how one type of model for Internet journalism might exist. He was careful to point out that he hasn’t figured out THE solution, and I appreciated his reservation of TPM getting into activism, like several audience members expressed a desire to see. He views his organization in the vein of true journalism, just in a different format. Terrell came down for the talk and afterward we got dinner at the Creamery in Palo Alto.

Today the weather has returned to being great. This past week was a little cloudy and chilly. Couldn’t go to sleep until 6:30am, but woke up for the Farmer’s Market. Nader and a fellow resident from Studio 1, Lauren, headed down there and walked up and down the street a few times, getting a coffee in between. She was meeting some friends for lunch at a mediterranean wraps place and invited us to join. Lauren’s an English grad student and her friends are in comparative literature. Interestingly enough, the conversation over lunch touched on theoretical physics, as Lauren was reading up on the idea of ’spooky action at a distance’ or ‘quantum entanglement’, I believe in relation to an earlier topic we were discussing regarding the nuance between “the particular and the universal” in the context of a literary approach a theologian employed to describe (justify?) the Holy Trinity. I tried explaining to Eric what scientists were trying to do with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Other discussions that morning included formation and  of ‘value’ frameworks, morality with regard to war crimes,  propagandizing dangers of nuclear-related calamities, the Kantian approach to judgement and philosophical writing, then later about the imposed restrictions of Iranian scientists to SLAC, the 2004 election, etc. Fun times!

Nader has a group of people gathered to see Indiana Jones tonight. Haven’t been to a movie theater since December! Also planning a weekend trip to Yosemite where the goal is the Half Dome Hike. Gotta get camping gear though…