New Career Counselling

A group of us were discussing the somewhat hilarious list of first date questions from OKCupid. For example, a positive response to "Do you like the taste of beer?" has a 60% correlation with "Will you sleep with someone you just met?" We discovered our own list of questions tied to "Are you an engineer or scientist?" that had almost 100% correlation (albeit over a group of 8 or so). Highlights include:
-Have you ever watched a hard drive defragment? For fun? Are you sad that they defragment too quickly now to see the bits move?
-Have you ever sorted your pocket change by value or year? Did you line the coins up into a histogram? Did you then save your results in a spreadsheet for comparison?

As soon as I gather enough questions, I can totally offer better career counselling!

Grr

Laptop stolen.

Hate hate hate.
Pain pain pain.
Doom doom doom.

Pockets Rock

Especially for school demos. Today's pocket check:
-wallet, cellphone, keys, USB stick
-3 screwdrivers (see DS, Ipod...)
-2 transformers
-1 Nintendo DS (broken, demo unit)
- Ipod (broken, demo unit)
-breadboard
-multimeter

After a certain point I might have confused the children as to whether I was talking about electricity or doing magic tricks.

Can't wait to get on the plane to foreign overseas country for the summer. If I get good enough cargo pants the security check alone could take days.

Burrdd!

Woo, I am officially armed with two bird guides and three types of bird food. My mission is to learn how to tell sparrows apart. They all look the same to me, brown and tiny. Thanks to my biologist roomie, I can tell them apart by sound. But now it's time to squint closely at their tiny little heads and learn how to tell the little feather balls apart. Also - greater variety of birdseed = greater variety of birds? We shall see.

I think I just aged myself several decades buying a bird guide, bird seed, and gardening gloves at the supermarket. With coupons.

D'aww, my little electronic baby :D

I've been having a great time lately working on some electronics projects. It's too bad I can't double-major here or anything or else I'd get an electrical engineering degree too. Fun stuff. Then again, maybe I just like it because I haven't had to take too many courses about circuits and programming and all that, just the basics. In any case, I'm glad that I have the resources and people around to help me turn my crazy ideas into real projects.

This week, I made my very own circuitboard for my clock project so that I can finally move it off the breadboard. I've never made a board before so I was really excited. I used EAGLE, which is a pretty neat program. It has libraries full of parts in their actual size so you can play around with their position on the board and be relatively certain that they'll fit. Plus it mirrors everything so that when you transfer the image to the board everything is in the right place. It also makes sure that lines aren't too close or touching where they shouldn't be. After printing the design with a laser printer, it was out of printer and into the laminator! Then I spent the better part of an hour swishing it around with glee in ammonium etching fluid before it was ready. And ta-dah! My very own special board.