Design notes! Wow. It's great to see these things again.

  • Coffee cups and how people carry out their orders (trays, from a distributed design class with the wonderful Chandra Little and Phil and Hiroo from Scotland. All sorts of sketches about the hand positions people hold their cups with, how they juggle bags and purses and vessels of hot caffeinated liquid while going through doors with small children... we later filmed reenactments of most of these - that was a fun, fun morning. Then again, working with Chandra is just never not-fun.
  • Portable microwave designs from another Bootstrap round with Eric Munsing. That didn't get quite as far as menus or the Echo, but we got to do some sketch prototyping in the dining hall, and that was entertaining. ("Pretend this tupperware is a microwave... and, ah, stick on the buttons that you'd like to have?")
  • Very, very detailed notes on opportunistic beamforming. The notes were very detailed because I didn't understand what was going on, and when I don't understand things, I become verbose.
  • Drafts of ideas that eventually became the Echo - tiny anthropomorphic PDAs, a cell phone app that worked on public transit, a list of things that each teammate valued in our final design concept (mine: accessible by illiterate and untrained users - others were things like low cost, environmentally friendly, etc).
  • Flowchart of "the Olin subsystem," from MetaOlin. Well, different versions of it, anyway. That was an interesting - if messy - paper, and one definite example of the journey being more important than the destination, because the paper that we turned in... wow. We were a prime example of the burnout/tiredness cycle we were trying to model as we wrote it. I'm not sure if I want to read it again. Maybe in a decade. I had a great time writing that paper and learned a mind-bending amount of everything, but the paper itself is kind of enh, as I remember it.
  • Some notes on noisy channel coding. It also took me a moment to remember that "PDF" could stand for things other than "Portable document format." (power density function, I believe.)
  • "Pumpkin concepts" from the Halloween advising family party at Gill and Janey Pratt's house. These include "Mix n' match 3-pumpkin man" (three pumpkins speared vertically on a rod; heads carved on the top, bodies in the middle, feet on bottom, so you can revolve the pumpkins to make different creatures," a "pumpkin slide rule" (which I still want to build someday), and the two we ended up actually carving, a pumpkin snake and Pumpkin Gill. There are pictures somewhere of Gui and myself covered in orange pumpkin dust from attacking both pieces with a Dremel, and photos of sawzall-assisted pumpkin lobotomies (which are VERY fun).
  • On the page after this is a sign reading "It's Saturday. We have Gill's head." This sign was posted on Ben Linder's office window when we got back from pumpkin carving at Gill's on Saturday night (we were carrying the Gill-head pumpkin) and Ben was still working. We managed to get him to stop for about 40 seconds to look at the pumpkin.
  • Did I mention I love our professors?
  • Some notes on tracking pianist movement - which eventually conclude with a resolution to study piano again seriously at some point in time, paying attention to the muscle mechanics, in the hopes that it will be relevant to ergonomic keyboarding (as well as being able to make more beautiful music; I miss music)
  • From art class: "How do you do a habitat drawing when your definition of habitat is 'something I don't have [a stable one of]'?" (Back from when Gui was even more nomadic than he is now, and when I was notorious for being impossible to find in any consistent set of locations - I still am.)
  • Our matsci project on bike frames; drawings of the oven with vials of saltwater we hung rings of bike tubing inside to make them rust
  • Notes from our matsci project on taking apart a CD case, and the Indestructible Diode of Doom. "Duc dissolved the diode casing in Hf (a powerful acid)... alas, the Hf had not dissolved the plastic... [after multiple attempts at trying higher molarities of Hf] ...dremel won't remove casing... razor won't remove casing... dental picks won't remove casing. We gave up." (We eventually used a grinder. That did the job.)
  • Drawings of... Ferrite! Austentite! Maltensite! (Cementite!) and mounting samples in phenolic.
  • Did these words ever once make sense to me? "Baseband time-slotted block-fading channel model." Hm. After a few seconds of thought, they snap back into focus again, so I suppose I'm not all that far gone.
  • Pages and pages of tight, precisely handwritten, highly mathematical notes, and then a HUGE scrawl across the bottom of a page rejoicing. "AHAHAHA! The paper makes sense!" with a large arrow pointing to it with black text annotating it as "The Moment."
  • Modus ponens, modus tollens, hypothetical and disjunctive syllogisms, and resolutions. Terms that, to this day, I can never quite keep straight. My "cheat sheet" notebook page for when I had to use one of the terms in a proof.
  • Sketches from the first Game Jam, for posters for the different teams' games.
  • Caricatures of m_stone, coderanger, and cscott.
  • A drawing of the world, my family, the United States - a conversation I had with an elderly lady, an immigrant from China, who spoke about as much English as I did Chinese before I'd actually studied the language over this past winter. We were both waiting for the bus. With pictures, we talked about our families, where we'd come from, where her son went to school (Harvard)... eventually her husband arrived, and then the bus, and she gave me a bag of plums from the haymarket before going on her way.