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October 27, 2005
UGH
Woke up with my cold worse than it was last night.... stupid congestion! Have to get my coughing under control then get dressed and finish packing up.... Hopefully this gets better somehow through my 8 hours of travelling in confined spaces... yeah right!
Posted by Plocmstart at 9:45 AM | Comments (0)
Crazy random day stuffs
So tonight in my class one of my team members asked me if I had a blog, which then reminded me that yes I did and I should probably put something new in it.
This past couple weeks I've been loaded down with tons of extra work and interviews and the last 2 days I've had a sore throat which makes things suck more. The past week I was subbing for Freuler while he was off in CA getting his daughter married. Today he was back in town, but one of the students from his 3:30 class died last night apparently from an aneurism. I guess it's good he was back or else I would have had to go through that today with the class. But Monday was picture day for the FEH website and I had a picture of him, which was probably the last picture taken of him. I forwarded that on to Freuler to give to his family.
So tomorrow I'm flying out to Folsom, CA to interview with Intel. It's sort of at the end of my big interview tour, or at least that's what it seems like at the moment. I'll be interviewing Friday 1-5pm and then Craft and Kristen are supposed to come visit and we'll find something to do maybe. I'm taking my camera with me so hopefully I'll get some good pictures and stuff.
I guess I'll compile a list of all my interviews, just for the fun of it, then go to sleep.
National Instruments: Hardware interview - maybe went ok, not really sure
ELP program - went well, had 2nd interview which i think went well
Dynetics - Said he would want to interview me again if they have hardware positions open
Raytheon - Talked to someone very familiar with FEH, so I think that also went well.
Intel - kind of nervous, hope it goes well Friday....
OK SLEEP!
Posted by Plocmstart at 1:05 AM | Comments (0)
October 11, 2005
Yay a new post!
Yeah it's been awhile. Of course that's because I've been busy. I only seem to get around to writing in this thing after reading someone else's blog. I guess I feel bad for my blog, because it is so empty, then I write something in it then forget about it for another month or so.
Anyways I'm back in class again. Pretty much the same old thing except I'm not teaching a lab this quarter. Instead I'm supposed to be doing lab development which involves learning a bunch of National Instruments equipment and software and figuring out how to incorporate it in the labs FEH already has and trying to design some new labs on top of that.
But I haven't really had much time to work on this lately. I've mainly been working on website stuff. I updated the picture database so students can now upload their own pictures. This may be scary, but hey we'll give it a try I guess. Then last week I created a little anonymous file uploading script for Liza so all the TAs can submit anonymous feedback to her and get credit for it.
This week I'm working on a campus-wide software ordering system for Mike. It should be fairly simple in theory, but there'll probably end up being a lot of error checking code just so no one can do anything stupid like order 1000 copies of MATLAB or sign up their roommate for 10 more copies. I wish I would have taken a database class of some sort so I knew best how to set databases up. I pretty much set them up right now by whatever I think will work best. They're probably pretty good, but not necessarily optimal. Oh well, as long as it works I guess.
As for classes I'm in this business entrepreneurship class. I think that's how it's spelled, or at least that's close. Anyways we have these patents for technologies we're supposed to come up with product ideas for, then come up with ways to market the products we think up. Well so far we've only been able to contact two people for two of the eight patents, and the information we got is that the patents have been pretty much given up for some reason or another. Not the best news since we're supposed to come up with some viable company of some sort from this. Of course some of the best technologies given to us are already being sold in one form or another so it's becoming more of just another class than something exciting. And I had so many high hopes for it.
Plus the meetings seem to go on forever and we don't always get much done. For example I spent maybe an hour Sunday afternoon trying to fill out some of the paperwork on my own, and I got two sheets nearly done. We spent about two hours tonight meeting and only got portions of some sheets done. I don't know, it just doesn't seem very optimal.
At least I didn't have to buy any books this quarter. Yay for no books!
Let's see what else am I supposed to be doing... well there's the robot controller, which absolutely nothing is getting done with this quarter. I'm kind of stuck at the components selection stage because the new CPU I want to use apparently isn't going to be manufactured after this year. So much for that idea! Plus all the people interested in this project sort of disappeared while I was gone at Lexmark. So now it's just me stuck with a nearly dead project and no support. I'm still interested in getting this thing working, but it'll be hard to do all by myself, especially with so many other things to do.
And then there's my thesis that I need to write. DeGroat still hasn't met with me to help me decide what to write about, and I'm at the point where I think I'll just start writing something and hopefully that will be good enough. I can write all about the product design process, but that really isn't anything new. The robot board in detail could be fairly interesting, but since it isn't done it's not really that exciting yet. And I could do something with board layout, but that'll end up being mainly a big tutorial.
So yeah, guess I'm kind of stuck on that one now.
Last week was the job fair. I handed out my resume to tons of places and talked to lots of people, but I think my objective on my resume had "To obtain an internship position as an Electrical Engineer...." Oops! Well guess I'll see how many people are really interested even though I screwed that up. I did go to some extra Intel thing last Thursday and waited around for 2 hours for what was supposed to be an informal interview. It turned out being a full technical interview and the lady I talked to said she would recommend me for an on-site interview and supposedly will be calling me sometime this week. Guess I'll see if that really happens.
Need to get my car oil changed and tires rotated. Haven't had time to do that yet. Yeah....
OK, shower and sleep time. My stupid halogen lamp burnt out, so I went and got new lamps only to find out that one of the contacts is also halfway gone apparently from a bad contact or just getting so hot. So I guess I need to replace that too. At this rate I might as well had gotten a brand new lamp. Sheesh!
OK, shower and sleep for real now. Peaceout!
Posted by Plocmstart at 12:07 AM | Comments (1)