Thoughts

This is quite a late post, but I wanted to finally post my videos that I took over the summer at my Internship. I was working at Alta Devices the entire summer on a project which I called the Wafer Analysis Station (WAS). The company uses GaAs wafers to make their solar cells, and these wafers are used over and over again, as many times as possible. Therefore, the surface must be inspected regularly to make sure it does not need to be resurfaced and is still suitable for the necessary processes.

I've begun to learn a little bit of python because I'd like to make a script (that works in Windows or Linux) for finding duplicate files (whether the filenames are the same or not). This will mostly be useful in cleaning up my music library, for I'm suspicious that playing around with different programs has created more duplicates of my music files than I have already found. Yes, I realize that someone out there has probably already written a script for such a task, but where would be the fun in using that? This is how I practice my love for programming.

So, a certain unnamed project that I am working on requires the use of a solar cell to charge some batteries. I got these solar cells from an "over-supply" store in Santa Clara for $4 a piece. As seen in Figure 1, its one of those typical solar cells from a garden lamp that charges batteries during the day and turns some LEDs on at night.

I'm currently working on an unnamed  project which requires the integration of tri-color LEDs (RGB). These are merely four-pin LEDs with a common anode or cathode and an input pin for red, green, and blue. With varying currents, a multitude of colors can be produced. So I created a C++ (arduino) library for handling such LEDs. Since most of my knowledge of programming is in C, learning about classes in C++ is a significant accomplishment for me.

Indeed. My 21st birthday is coming up. This year, I've decided I am going to ask for birthday presents in a slightly different fashion, though. I'm going to compile a bill of materials on this blog-post that I would need to make my own little robot. I'll split it up into two categories: parts I need (because I don't have an alternative), and parts I want (but for which I already have an alternative if I don't get them).

It was a while ago that I made these, but they turned out decently. I wanted pizza, but I didn't want a whole lot of bread, so I decided (I owe credit to my mother for this) to make the pizza on tortillas. I made some pepperoni and margarita pizza-dillas. The fresh ingredients The uncooked, not-yet-finished product I'll admit my original influence for the meal was to make something quick and easy. It would probably have been so if I could have cooked more than one at a time. Also, were I to make this again, I would probably trying making it open-faced, rather than like a quesadilla. Ingredients: pizza sauce shredded mozzarella cheese pepperoni log, thinly sliced 1 tomato, thinly sliced fresh basil leaves tortillas

It's little bit of a late post, but I wanted to share one of my cooking ventures. I like experimenting with foods (occasionally), so this won't be the last post about food. However, Monday of finals week (6/4), Lorice and I cooked pancakes for breakfast. They were banana cinnamon buttermilk pancakes, and they were pretty good with a little maple syrup, butter, and coconut shavings on them. I may have gone a little overboard with my first pancake. The T-Pancake, with egg and kiwi Lorice, showing the proper way to eat one's pancakes.

For a while now, my Zune HD has been broken. I'll be working to fix it this summer. However, I'm beginning to question if my Zune HD FM Transmitter might have some usefulness in the meantime. I was driving to campus and I noticed that my Zune transmitter, even without a Zune plugged in, will transmit silence on whatever station it is set. Now, personally, I've never been a fan of either Zune or Mac products that only work with said branded mp3 players. It occurred to me that maybe I could "hack" my Zune transmitter to be able to play with any device. All I would need to do is hook up a 3.5 mm jack to whatever lines the transmitter uses for audio. Then I could have that protruding form the back with a wire or something so either head can still be used.

As you can see in my previous blog post, I recently had an interview with Alta Devices in Santa Clara, CA. I took the bus up to San Jose where my dad picked me up in my car and drove me to Alta Devices. I signed in, was welcomed, and then proceeded to meet with five different people at Alta, each for a half hour.

I'm on my way for my first internship interview. The interview its with Alta Devices for their Metrology Intern position. I'm exited to meet the employees, to be home this weekend, and to finally have my car to drive back to San Luis Obispo. Wish me luck!

I ran into a problem today: when trying to select my Windows 7 from the grub list, I accidentally selected the one right above it: "Windows Recovery Environment..." Unfortunately, this opens up a the Samsung Recovery 4 Solution software which overwrites something on the MBR, so that the next time you boot up, grub no longer loads. Luckily, I was able to solve the problem by installing Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (which I had downloaded recently and was needing to install anyway). Putting GRUB on a thumbdrive While it was installing, though, I did some research because it got me thinking: I should either remove that option from the list altogether, or have a quicker way to boot into one of my existing linux distros to quickly rewrite grub2 to the MBR. I liked the idea of the latter, so I attempted writing grub2 to a flash drive which will then be used to load an OS already on my hard drive.