Thoughts

This quarter I wanted to get away from having pasta on the weekend. Don't get me wrong, I make a good pasta (in my humble opinion), but I realized at the end of this summer that I have never cooked fish before. I hadn't even eaten any fish that someone else cooked the whole time I've been at Cal Poly. So when I made my weekly menu, I turned regular ol' Friday into Fish Friday. Spicy Breaded & Baked Cod with Garlic & Butter Asparagus Let's get an opinion, shall we? Troy "Jesse, if there was one thing you could change about this meal, what would it be?" Jesse: "Hold on, I haven't tasted the fish yet. I'm still eating my asparagus." * Okay, so Jesse likes to eat things one at a time. We'll let him finish and then come back to him. In the meantime, let me discuss the recipes I worked from. Now, mind you, I don't follow a recipe 100%, especially not if I'm in experimentation mode. In fact, most of the time I coo...

There was a point this summer at which I decided to learn something a bit new. I had seen other people include animated GIFs in their email signatures, so I decided I wanted to animate Cal Poly's Mechanical Engineering Department Logo. Figure 1 shows the original image, taken from  http://me.calpoly.edu/openhouse/ . Figure 1: Original Mechanical Engineering (Cal Poly) Logo A gear in motion is a perfectly simple way to add a little "cool" factor to your email signature. This blog post aims to introduce you to some of the (free/open-source) tools I used to animate the logo. However, if you merely want to use the animated GIF in Figure 2 , skip to the Using The Animated GIF  section.

In my last post,  Capacitive Touch Testing Platform , I experimented with soldering to aluminum. I had read about all kinds of tricks for such soldering: solder under oil, scratch the surface with a wire brush first, etc. I cheated and scratched the surface of the aluminum with the iron under a ball of solder. This post is just about the resistances of those joints, as well as some finishing touches on the CTTP.

I've been working on a project for a while now... about a year or more. Originally, I was going to call it SunJar, but that concept has already been developed and sold, and I intend to incorporate more functionality. And color. So it is going to be called MoodJar. Anyway, the last post I had on it was quite some time back, when I talked about solar cell characteristics . This post is going to be about the capacitve-touch I intend to incorporate.

When I was growing up, I remember wanting to learn how to use spreadsheets. So I asked my dad to show me how to use Excel. He did, and eventually that is how I first started managing my money. Of course, a lot of people will use spreadsheets to make simple lists or just a few small calculations, which is perfectly fine. But there is also so much more to take advantage of with spreadsheets.

All through elementary school, middle school, and high school, I dreaded the infamous research paper . All of the emphasis on plagiarism, paraphrasing, and citing your sources scared the graphite out of me. I used to rely pretty heavily, therefore, on websites such as Citation Machine or EasyBib . After all, let's be honest: who is actually going to read the ever-changing manuals on APA or MLA style (aside from the individuals who wrote it, I mean)? Not to mention, there are now more than a half-dozen other organized ways of citing one's sources thrown into the mix.

Problem The Cal Poly Robotics Club has a slideshow that runs 24/7 on a computer (we call it halftop) in the club window. The half-of-a-laptop is hooked up to a screen so we can bombard any (and all) lucky Bonderson visitors with information about CPRC. Eventually they will join us or at least think we are awesome. The slideshow is actually available on Google Drive , which is really convenient for editing purposes. However, the fullscreen slideshow has to be restarted manually if any edits are made. Sure, that's not that difficult if there is someone in the room all the time, but the more autonomous the better!

I have never in my life had nor heard of a grape pie. Then pie-day (3/14) came along, and I was looking around for an interesting pie to make, and behold, I found the the Concord Grape Pie ! Of course, I couldn't find concord grapes at Food-4-Less, so I used red seedless grapes instead. You can see the results below. Completed red-seedless grape pie, fresh out of the oven A note to the individual who is going to take my path and make this pie with red seedless grapes: you probably don't need to squeeze the innards out of each and every grape because they are already seedless; you can probably just cut them in half and boil them like that. It was worth the work, though.

There are two dishes in this life I cannot go without: potstickers and a bean-burrito-with-green-sauce-and-no-onions from Taco Bell. The story with the pot-stickers is that my mother would go across the street from her work when she was pregnant with me to get them for lunch almost every day. Or something like that. I legitimately think my hemoglobin depends on potstickers these days; I still have them once a week and never tire of them. The problem is that my mother has gluten allergies now. The good 'ol store-bought Ling-Ling chicken potstickers from Costco just won't cut it. I can still have them, but perhaps one day I'll suffer similar food allergies as she does. Anyway, I wanted to eat potstickers with my mom last Winter Break, so I experimented and made nice-noodle potstickers. You can see the finished product below. Rice-noodle potstickers piled high on a white plate Rice-noodle potstickers with a healthy portion of broccoli and brown rice I didn'...

The last time that I worked with Fourier Transformations was in Linear Analysis, nearly 3 years ago. Now I am taking a class in Mechanical Vibrations, and we are returning to this theory. The other week, while learning to use a spectral analyzer, we had to derive the first 3 Fourier coefficients for a sine wave, square wave, and triangle wave. All of that aside, after lab I played around with some fourier theory in Maxima. Maxima Maxima is a symbolic math program (similar to Mathematica) that I ran into last quarter in order to supplement Octave (Matlab equivalent). Like Octave (which does only numerical analysis) Maxima is completely free. I like the version of Maxima called wxMaxima , and I have that installed on Ubuntu. You can define an equation in maxima such as: s: a^2 + 7 = b*4 + a/3 Then you can solve for b in one step: solve(s,b) And it simply returns b = a^2/4 + a/12 + 7/4. You can do other cool things such as summation, integration, ...