Saket Vora

It’s strange…things are actually not at the intensity they were a week ago. There isn’t a major pressure to demo the transceiver in RF Circuits, but my group will be in the lab this week to get it working. In Embedded Systems class, we’ve had our hardware project and I’ve been working a lot on that. The goal is to complete the schematic and printed circuit board (PCB) layout for a Wii-like game controller. Some of the basic parts (5) were chosen for us, but we had to figure out the rest then try to fit it all on a small board. Too bad these won’t be fabricated, but it’s still useful. I’ll be using these skills this summer at Apple. You can check out what the schematic looks like or the layout.

My sleep schedule lately has been shifted by about 6 hours…going to bed at 6 or 7am and waking up at 1pm. Not good…I missed a class but nothing major.  I think I’ve corrected it now. Last week I went to a talk by Joshua Marshall, creator of the political website TalkingPointsMemo. He was talking about the troubled times facing traditional journalism and how one type of model for Internet journalism might exist. He was careful to point out that he hasn’t figured out THE solution, and I appreciated his reservation of TPM getting into activism, like several audience members expressed a desire to see. He views his organization in the vein of true journalism, just in a different format. Terrell came down for the talk and afterward we got dinner at the Creamery in Palo Alto.

Today the weather has returned to being great. This past week was a little cloudy and chilly. Couldn’t go to sleep until 6:30am, but woke up for the Farmer’s Market. Nader and a fellow resident from Studio 1, Lauren, headed down there and walked up and down the street a few times, getting a coffee in between. She was meeting some friends for lunch at a mediterranean wraps place and invited us to join. Lauren’s an English grad student and her friends are in comparative literature. Interestingly enough, the conversation over lunch touched on theoretical physics, as Lauren was reading up on the idea of ’spooky action at a distance’ or ‘quantum entanglement’, I believe in relation to an earlier topic we were discussing regarding the nuance between “the particular and the universal” in the context of a literary approach a theologian employed to describe (justify?) the Holy Trinity. I tried explaining to Eric what scientists were trying to do with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Other discussions that morning included formation and  of ‘value’ frameworks, morality with regard to war crimes,  propagandizing dangers of nuclear-related calamities, the Kantian approach to judgement and philosophical writing, then later about the imposed restrictions of Iranian scientists to SLAC, the 2004 election, etc. Fun times!

Nader has a group of people gathered to see Indiana Jones tonight. Haven’t been to a movie theater since December! Also planning a weekend trip to Yosemite where the goal is the Half Dome Hike. Gotta get camping gear though…

I was biking back to the apartment with Nader when he suddenly remembered that former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was speaking on campus, at 7:30pm. It was 7:20pm. Fortunately, we were right near Kresge Auditorium so we swung over, waited in line, and slipped in despite having no tickets. Albright was humorous and insightful. The theme of the talk was a “trip around the world” where Albright would offer her views on certain hot issues. The talk opened well, with Albright remarking that she was the proud to serve as the 1st woman Secretary of State and to have Condoleezza Rice be the second, from Stanford. It was clearly a softball applause line, but only one person started applauding. Awkward laughter from the rest of the audience followed. Some her comments below, paraphrased of course.

On North Korea: “Our intelligence was wrong about Kim Jong Ill. They said he was crazy and a pervert. I went to North Korea and had talks with him. And he’s not crazy.” We need to stop talking about regime change; controlling nuclear weapons is more important.

On China: Don’t boycott the Olympic Games, but the POTUS can skip the opening ceremony. We need to understand that we are co-dependent on China. It’s like a drug addict and his pusher, but you don’t know which is which. We should always bring up the issue of human rights and Tibet with them, and know they will always bring up Taiwan.

On Burma: Sanctions or involvement with the military junta? The cyclone has brought more attention to the concept of “responsibility to protect”, in which one raises the idea of invading a country because its government isn’t protecting its citizens. But Albright says sounds nice when idealists bring it up, but it’s a very difficult academic question to consider.

Oh Delhi & Islamabad: The US-Indian nuclear treaty and how it might undermine the NPT (considering India refused to join it and then tested nuclear weapons). Albright notes that the NPT is broken (promises have been broken on both sides) and the US-India Treaty could be a new model. She sadly noted that the Communists are holding up the treaty. Pakistan has everything that would cause a foreign policy migraine.

As the conversation shifted over to Afghanistan, Albright noted that she wants to teach a class about the “unintended consequences of foreign policy.” Oh…sounds like the idea of blowback, which readers of this website have seen me discuss before.

On Iran: Holding talks isn’t the same as appeasement. (This got an applause from the audience). Albright also noted that most Americans don’t really know how complicated Iran is, specifically how many different levels of power exist. (I’d comment that that mainstream media has done a universally pathetic job on informing the American public about Iran. For such an important country to our national security and involvement in Iraq, it’s simply disgraceful.)

Albright went on to discuss the heavily one-sided education that occurs in the Middle East (in all countries), the issue of the missile defense shield in eastern Europe and the colder role Russia is taking, and finally that it’s confusing to the one to have partisan foreign policy and that whoever is the next President should probably appointment Republicans to the Cabinet (heh).

One thing I liked about Albright was how often she said the words “it’s complicated”, “it’s a difficult issue”, “there is no one good answer”. She seems to take a very pragmatic view towards foreign policy, a field that IS complex and difficult. Too many people want to just try to simplify issues down to black and white stances.

Memorial Day weekend was boring but productive. I’m farther than anyone else on my embedded systems hardware project. This week’s lab report is already done. Today Andy tipped me and Kamal off on free food from a seminar that ended on the 2nd floor of Packard. Scored a vegetable panini sandwich, fancy corn chips, twelve half-and-half packets (just ran out this morning), and a plateful of pasta salad. 15 minutes later, we attended a special talk by Bob Pease, a famous analog designer from National Semiconductor. The LM317 voltage regulator? Yeah, that’s him.

My friend Donny Katz was just featured in a NC State College of Engineering Alumni article, which describes his experience as a Fulbright Scholar in Dhaka, Bangladesh and highlights the remarkable blog he’s been keeping since arriving in Dhaka almost 9 months ago. The article does a good job at conveying just how multi-faceted and talented Donny has shown to be. And I have a feeling we’re just seeing the beginning. :)

Pretty laid back past few days, considering. Luke is busy moving out: his parents arrived in town on Thursday and then his girlfriend Dora flew in Friday. They are moving into the cottage he got in Palo Alto and visiting family in Mendocino. Luke invited me to dinner with his parents on Thursday night and we went to The Counter. Really wonderful people — great sense of humor and easy to have intelligent conversation with. Luke’s father has been a consultant regarding education & youth development. He has recently started going international too — was in Cambodia, Rwanda, and even Kosovo (just a week after their declaration of indepedance!). So yeah.

Woke up kinda late on Friday, took care of some business then went to the lab. Siddharth had repaired the broken VCO and we tested it out — it worked even better than before. He also tried out his power amplifier (this week’s lab assignment) that he fashioned out of an older component and has met all specs except one. We talked about the recent Champions League final game and Siddharth showed me the highlights from it. Kinda crazy it came down to penalty kicks. So it looks like we’re in good shape. Went grocery shopping with Nader at around 12:30am…randomly ran into Simon there who stopped to buy some wine. Nader was very excited about the bison omelet he was planning. Then, in the checkout line, I saw Ed Chiang. He was a high school classmate of Donny’s back in New Jersey. We joked that these days us EE students have the bulk of our normal waking hours in the AM.

We’ve had some good chats at the apartment. Luke, Simon, and I sat around the dining table talking for a while; Simon brought a bottle of Oyster Bay pinot noir. I’m taking the opportunity to learn more about Australia, naturally. We’ve discussed Australia’s social welfare system, relationship to China and especially Indonesia, bankruptcy law and how it hurts entrepreneurship, heck even bananas. Considering the news of Cyclone Nargis, I asked if Australia gets hit often. He said not really, but one time a cyclone tore through Queensland where all the banana plantations were. Literally overnight, banana prices in Sydney rose from $1.50/kg to $13/kg! And of course the government put down tariffs regarding foreign banana imports to try to get the local plantations back on their feet, but soon organized crime started breaking into plantations and stealing bushels of bananas, cause literally it was the case of money growing on trees and the whole black market banana trade was in full gear. Kinda wild.

We got our final project in embedded systems and entrepreneurial finance: do the schematic and 4-layer PCB layout for a game controller inspired by the Wiimote. I need to catch up on the lectures…i slept through back classes due to the all nighters I’ve had to pull lately. In finance, our task to make a pitch for Series A funding of a company as a group. Then individually, we play a VC partner and write an investment memo on one of the pitched companies on whether to invest or not.

Let’s see how much work I get done Saturday….

It has been an fairly exhausting two weeks. I cannot recall the last time I’ve had to pull so many true all-nighters over such a period. I was chatting with Donny (who is in Bangladesh, as many of you know) this morning and he said he was going to sleep, with me chiming in ‘me too’. That’s not a good sign.

There are some random pictures below and those interested (masochists?) can look at the VCO/PLL lab report here.

YES. WE. CAN.

It’s been a taxing week. The embedded systems project was far more involved than we anticipated largely due to problems not completely within our control. Bikiran and I pulled some serious marathon sessions…we worked from Tuesday at 8pm to 7:30am, then Wednesday from 3pm until the following 1pm, when it was due. Our individual parts worked, but unifying them in the FreeRTOS was beyond reason. We had to turn in what we had. Despite being up for a full 24 hours, I still went to class afterward then had to go to entrepreneurial finance class, which only meets once a week. My group partner commented before class started that I looked tired, and I told her about the midterm project and how I’ve been awake for 26 hours. The professor overheard me and asked “did you say you’ve been up for 26 hours? I think I’ll cold call you today” and sure enough, 5 minutes into class, he starts asking me questions about how I’d manage the money if my startup received a Series A round of $4 million. He then had me go up to the board and show an allocation and do some roleplay. Yeah. It was a fun class though. We later did ‘resource allocation’ and he brought out a stack of 1 thousand $1 bills. After finance class, I visited the circuits lab. I’d been so distracted with the other project I hadn’t devoted enough time. Other groups had been getting theirs to work, but we were still behind. I stayed for an hour but wanted to go home. I ultimately didn’t end up sleeping until 1am. For some reason after a certain point, I enter this minimal energy state in which I can function awake, but just slowly.

Anyway. I spent today (friday) in the lab from 11am, and had the worst luck. Couldn’t get anything to work right. The highlight was when I had dinner with Terrell Russell, an early tech mentor of mine and graduated in one of the first Park Scholarship classes. He is in Palo Alto for the next four months working at PARC. He’s finishing up a PhD in Information Science at UNC. Terrell just launched SPIFFY v3.0, the Park intranet. The new version looks great — the Park Alumni Society and SPIFFY have merged, allowing for greater collaboration and involvement. We talked about the changes to it and the new classes of Parks, then I learned a bit more about what he’s working on in particular. I was quite pleased to find that he is also interested in picking up Processing, and is currently reading through Ben Fry’s book. I’m going to start once school gets out. One thing he said really struck a chord in me: you get to a point where you are thinking of higher order questions that Excel charts just can’t convey. I know I’ve run into that a lot this past year. I had a great chat with him and I’m happy he’s out here for the summer.

I went back to the lab afterward (around 10pm or so) to continue working. Still not much luck. I ended up starting a whole new board and got the basics down before calling it a night. I’ll be in there all tomorrow…gotta actually get results then write the report.

I also must put a shout-out to Donny whose photos of the mangroves in Sundarbans, Bangladesh were featured on the Living on Earth website. Way to go!

Videos from this week’s lab:

EE 414 - VCO/PLL Lab 4

EE 414 - VCO/PLL Lab 2

EE 414 - VCO/PLL Lab 3

EE 414 - VCO/PLL Lab 1