According to student health services, I’m sick. 2 more weeks of class, then 1 week of finals; this is a terrible time to be sleeping. Hopefully I’ll be back up and running by the end of this weekend. Codeine should help.
My server decided to die on me. Two of my hard drives failed at the same time (luckily on different raid arrays) and since they were on the same raid controller, I reached the logical conclusion that the raid controller was dead. I bought another one at a local computer store for way too much money, and it didn’t work. The Linux kernel would hang during boot; not a kernel panic, but a hang. At this point I started to think that it was a software problem because both raid cards used the same chipset (VT6421). I downgraded 2 kernels and tried to boot again. This time the computer would boot and see all the hard drives, but after a couple of minutes, the computer would become unresponsive. After a couple of days of testing in my limited amount of spare time, I decided that at least 1 PCI slot on my motherboard is dead. Now it’s back up and running, hopefully for a long time.
I have been really busy the last couple of weeks. As soon as I got back from Spring Break, all my teachers decided to rob me of sleep.
My engineering design class really sucks. The idea of it is good, but the execution is off. The entire class revolves around a group project made up of students from different engineering backgrounds. My group consists of an industrial engineer, a chemical engineer, an electrical engineer and me. The point of the class is for us to pick a project that we can all contribute to, and then learn about how to be a part of an effective multidisciplinary team. The project that we picked is making a hand-held wind-powered generator for small electronic devices. It has been fun working on the project even though I highly doubt it will actually work. The problem with the class is the lectures. The professor talks at us about how to do things like “List and define the main elements of a complete problem definition, and describe the key activities to develop a good problem definition.” I mean, come on. Who cares?
My real time microcontroller applications class is a lot of fun, but still a lot of work. Every week we have 4 hours of scheduled lab, and about 4 additional hours of unscheduled lab. The last project that we did involved inputting the current time from a keypad, writing it to a real time clock over I2C, and updating an LCD with the time from the real time clock. I really like the class because the assignments we do are not at all pointless. Every thing I have done in that class has been both fun and educational!
Circuits II is a lot of work and not very easy. Every week we have to cram 3 hours of lab work into a 2 hour lab session. Then spend 4-5 hours writing the lab report. That’s not including homework which is due 3 times a week. I decided that I hate analog electronics. I prefer digital, as my digital logic professor says “the only answers are 0, 1, or 2^n.”
Digital logic is pretty easy. We are programming FPGAs using VHDL. VHDL is a hardware description language that is fairly intuitive once you get the hang of it. We implement simple state machines that make LEDs blink and such.
Social dance is always the highlight of my day (2 days a week). There is never any homework, and I don’t have to think. Also I get to interact with lots of girls, some of whom are pretty cute.
I am about ready to get out of here. I have been looking at robotics companies, some of them look like a lot of fun to work at.
1 more year.