Thoughts

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, ...

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.