Crossposted from our Japan blog (see also my image gallery):

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Just arrived in Tokyo. We'll be blogging at http://triplehelix.org/japan/. But right now I'm going to take a shower and find something to eat.

Here's some other stuff I did so far this summer that I might have bothered blogging about, presented as a bulleted list in no particular order since there's no way to tie it together with a narrative:

• Visited San Francisco four times and Berkeley three times. Showed my cousins from the east coast around SF and Berkeley.
  
• Saw a bunch of live music:
  • Simon Posford as Shpongle at a fancy SF nightclub. This was a DJ set and I didn't see what was so great about it. He was also going to play live as Hallucinogen later that night, but we all left during the DJ set because we were tired. It was sort of worth experiencing the club because I had never seen anything that stylized and overdone. That's not to say I enjoyed being there.
    
  • Smashing Pumpkins in Santa Cruz (!). I was so glad to see them. All of their shows in SF sold out immediately. When I heard they were going to play in Santa Cruz, I was ready to snag tickets. It was a good show despite the fact that the lineup is very different. They played a lot of stuff off their new album (Zeitgeist), which I think is quite good.
    
  • Daft Punk in Berkeley: Completely AWESOME. It was not what I expected at all, as for some reason I had the impression that they would actually be playing stuff on synthesizers and guitars and speaking through vocoders. In reality, it was two guys sitting in a video pyramid controlling the most amazing light show I've ever seen while playing back really good remixes of their songs. Somehow it worked for me anyway. The lighting and video really made the show.
    
• Camped and rafted on Cache Creek. It was pretty much the same as last year, except that I missed the first day due to the Smashing Pumpkins show. Also, I forgot my shoes by the door and had to tie my sandals to my feet.
  
• Went to Oakland for the first time on the way back from Berkeley and discovered it's not as much of a ghetto as it sounds. I never would have thought that it has a great Chinatown and that one could get a great dim sum meal there for $7.
  
• Long-planned visit to amitv in Davis. Went to his party and of course went to Fuji Chef to stuff ourselves with sushi at a flat rate.
  

Field day deserves a post of its own. In case you don't know, field day is an amateur radio exercise where nerds take lots of radio equipment into a field and do an emergency drill, making gratuitous contacts with other teams for 24 hours. I was at UCSC's field day site last year too. The highlight of this year was going to be testing some of the satellite equipment I helped design with real satellite contacts.

I was concerned that things wouldn't be ready on time. A few days before, Petersen told me he had lent one of his satellite antennas and the computer interface to a radio to another team. He said he would make another antenna before the event, and we could use the embedded system I helped develop during the senior project instead of a computer interface. I wasn't too pleased with the idea of depending on our device - it had never been tested with any realistic use. I was also concerned that he might not finish the antenna on time.

Sure enough, when I showed up on field day, Petersen was not present. Someone told me he was at home working on a satellite antenna. I played around on the HF bands while I waited for him. I managed to make a few contacts, but it was frustratingly hard to get through on 20 meters. Many other stations had superior setups, and they would sound so clear that many people would line up to communicate with them. The best we could do was contact one of these stations once in awhile.

Petersen finally showed up at around 5PM, and he wasn't done with the antenna yet. He wasn't ready to give up, though, and he insisted that there would be plenty of time before the end of the event at 11AM to make some satellite contacts. I offered to go back to his house with him and build a radio/computer interface circuit that could serve as a backup for the embedded system from my senior project. After getting there and eating some dinner, we worked on our respective projects. I finished the circuit at about 11PM, but Petersen still wasn't done with the antenna. It was only at this point that we bothered to check satellite pass predictions. It turned out that there would be no decent passes until after the event was over. We decided that it wasn't worth spending half the night building an antenna when there weren't going to be any good opportunities to use it, and there were still so many more things that could go wrong. We decided to bring up the satellite antenna for the other band, though, and use it to make long-distance contacts on that band which could only be made with an antenna good enough to reach satellites.

It must have been at least midnight by the time we got back to UCSC. Petersen lives up in the Santa Cruz mountains, perhaps 35-40 minutes away from the campus. We got to work mounting the single antenna until we realized that we hadn't brought a horizontal mast to mount the antenna on. Without this piece, there was no way to get it up on the tower. We couldn't find it anywhere on the field, so we realized that we must have left it at Petersen's house. We found another pole that might have worked, but it was stuck inside a larger one, and it looked like it would be difficult to remove. Petersen went back home to find the mast.

While he was gone, I got a chance to operate on the 80 meter band. I was having a lot of trouble at first, but it helped when I plugged the right antenna in. I called CQ to test the setup, and before I knew it, station after station was answering me. I think I talked to about 30 people in a row before I depleted the queue of people who wanted to log a contact with me. It was really cool to claim a frequency like I had heard many other teams do during the day. Apparently since everyone uses omnidirectional wire antennas on 80 meters, our setup is just as good as any other station's. I thought it took a fair amount of operating skill to run a frequency, but I got the hang out it. I wasn't great at copying station information, but I'd ask people to repeat it when necessary and it wasn't really a problem.

Eventually Petersen returned, without the mast. He couldn't find it at home either. We resorted to plan B: extracting the usable mast from inside the larger one. It took about five minutes. It was such a waste of time for Petersen to have gone home and back.

It was getting really late and we made even more stupid mistakes as we put the antenna up. I remember that we forgot to attach a cable to it before we put it up, and there were probably other, stupider incidents. We also couldn't find the adaptor to plug headphones into the radio. By the time we got everything set up, it was about 4AM. To make this whole night anticlimactic, it turned out that nobody was still on 2 meters that late at night. I ended up just going home so I could get a reasonable amount of sleep. Petersen told me had had several conversations on 2 meters the next morning, with stations over the hill and in the Sierras. It's very hard to do this on that band, since mountains almost entirely block the signal, but the satellite antenna had enough gain to make some unusual propagation mode usable. I thought this was cool. I'm glad we gave up on the other satellite antenna when we did, because we would never have got everything set up.

I think I'm going to to field day with Stanford's club next year. Petersen talked to them on 2 meters through the satellite antenna, and apparently they had three transmitters running on solar power. I'm sure they have a much more impressive setup than UCSC and they're better prepared for the event.

For the past six months or so, I've been pretty unhappy with my living situation. I'd rather not go into details, but I was looking forward to moving out at some point during the summer. Our lease extends until September 1st, but my housemates wanted to extend the lease, so it seemed like it wouldn't be a problem to have someone replace me at an arbitrary time. One of my housemates wanted to move into my room, which would only happen once I moved out. It seemed that our interests were aligned. I told him that he could have my room if he found someone to take over my part of the lease (and move into his room).

The first candidate came soon after school ended. I was in San Francisco with a friend, just starting to appreciate the summer, when I got a call from my housemate saying he had found people ready to move in and he needed me to make a decision immediately. These were some guys who had just driven over from Florida in a van. I wasn't expecting to move out so suddenly and urgently, but I thought it over and it seemed like the right thing to do. After all, I wanted to get out of Santa Cruz and I wasn't too happy about paying rent when I had no income. The downside was that I'd have to live with my parents temporarily. I decided to cut short my visit to San Francisco, and stop at my parents' house on the way back to borrow a van in case I had to move out immediately. Of course, it turned out that these guys from Florida decided on another option, and I was inconvenienced and embarrassed.

The next time this happened, it was even more ridiculous. The candidate was yet another person who urgently needed to find housing. I think he showed up on a Tuesday, and needed to move in by Friday. My housemates seemed satisfied with him, and they encouraged me to move out immediately in support of this plan. I was reluctant to agree to such short notice, but I didn't have anything else to do, so moving in that time definitely would have been possible. However, I wanted to wait until everything was made official before I fully moved out - otherwise I'd have to continue to pay rent for an empty room. I did borrow the van again, though, so I would be ready to move.

It turned out to be very difficult to reach our landlord. As I recall, we only managed to at around midnight on Thursday. He had only given us his work number, and when we finally reached him and requested a personal phone number, he refused to give it to us. He wasn't very reasonable about the issue at hand either, claiming we were giving him too short notice. He also said he would be raising the rent by $100 a month, which was actually a major issue. Apparently my housemate got into some sort of unrelated argument with him about parking, and I don't think that helped. It sounded like the plan was definitely off. I asked my housemate to contact the applicant and let him know this. He replied that he had lost the phone number. I was upset about this, but there was nothing I could do. Since we hadn't received any calls from him recently, he had probably lost interest anyway.

I thought this would be the last we'd hear from that particular applicant. But he showed up at our door that Friday, ready to move in. I was the only one home. I had to break the news to him. He asked if he could store his stuff at our house until he found another place to live. I thought that was reasonable given how badly my housemate had mishandled the situation. Before I could let him do this, I had to get permission from my housemates, who took forever to reach. It was a very awkward situation until I got them to agree.

I gave him permission to move his stuff in, but I ended up needing to do all the driving for him because he didn't have a car. I was a little shocked he hadn't arranged a way to get his boxes and furniture to our house.

While we were moving things, I encouraged him to try and make a compromise with my housemates so he could actually move in once the paperwork could be done. That way he wouldn't have to find another place or move everything again. The issue was mostly financial, because his income was about what the room would have cost, and the rent increase strained things even further. Before long, he did make an arrangement with my housemates that took the rent increase into account. The landlord was contacted and he said this guy would be able to officially move in within a few days. The plan was back on.

We waited a few days to get the forms, and they came just in time. There was only one problem: they indicated a rent increase of $400, not $100. This completely derailed our plans. When we inquired about why this increase didn't match what our landlord had told us, we were given the good news that the rent would actually go up ANOTHER $200, because of the amount of interest generated by the craigslist post, but my housemates could continue to live there for the special price of only $400 more than what we're currently paying! We were also told that our house would be shown to prospective renters the next day.

This poor guy who was finally going to move in had to move all of his stuff away. At first, he expected me to do all the work for him again, but I wasn't interested. One of my housemates was going to pick up the slack, but his car broke down. I think the person who was going to move in finally dealt with it himself, but he showed up a day late.

Originally my housemates felt they would have to move, but I think they changed their minds and plan to stay even though it will cost so much. They haven't found a person to replace me yet. I don't know how they'll work it out. At least none of this is my problem anymore, since I'm off the hook once the original lease expires on September 1st. It's too bad that I'll have to continue to pay rent for this month, which I'll spend in Japan and Palo Alto, but there's nothing I can do about it.

I think I'm going to move to the Stanford campus. It will mean moving from a HUGE room to a TINY room, but I think I can deal with it. I originally wanted to live off campus with other students, but reading craigslist is incredibly depressing; all shared housing involves living either with a family or with random thirty-something year old "professionals". At least if I live on campus I will theoretically have some avenues for social interaction with students. And I'm going to try to exploit those - looking back on my experiences at UCSC, my biggest mistake was that I didn't invest in enough friendships. For me to be optimistic at all about my time at Stanford, I have to believe that I'll be more social and less lonely than I have been.

I had hoped to do a lot of biking this summer, because let's face it: any other activities I'd end up doing would be indoors and too likely to be computer related. So far, I haven't actually biked that much, but there's some bike-related stuff worth talking about.

By mid-July, I had only done a couple of trips up to campus (which I used to do every day), so I wanted to get more serious. One day, I started on a trip to campus, but ended up going up Empire Grade instead of entering the campus. This was tough - Empire Grade gets steep - but it was a satisfying ride. I came down through the North Campus forest. I realized that it was actually the longest ride I had taken, which was humbling. The next day, I decided to try something more ambitious. Originally, I was going to go to Scotts Valley, but I took a map so I could go as far as I wanted to. Getting to Scotts Valley on Glen Canyon Road was a breeze, and I was eager to get farther. I took Glenwood Drive to Mountain Charlie Road, and made it almost all the way to the summit. I was disappointed that I didn't make it to the summit, but I had long since run out of water and didn't want to be unnecessarily foolish. I think I got within about two miles. My GPS was being useless and wouldn't give me my elevation, but my best guess is that I was within 200 feet of the summit's altitude. Because of my stupid lack of water, I turned back to Scotts Valley, and when I got there, I immediately bought a liter of water and drank most of it immediately. I wanted to take a different route back to Santa Cruz, and I decided on Graham Hill road. There was a relatively direct way to get there off Mount Hermon Road, but I missed a turn and ended up going all the way to Felton! Graham Hill Road intersects with Mount Hermon Road up there, but there's a MAJOR hill that I had been hoping to avoid. I think I had to pull off the road and catch my breath about five times before I made it to the top. The rest of the ride was smooth sailing, and Graham Hill road conveniently ends into Ocean St. When I got home, I plotted a map of my route and found that I had biked about 30 miles.

I think biking between Santa Cruz and San Jose would be about the same level of difficulty, and I've actually been wanting to do it for some time. Unfortunately I haven't got around to it. One reason was the housing saga which I will mention in a later post and how it distracted me from this goal. Then, when I finally had a chance, someone borrowed my bike without my permission while I was away and managed to really mess it up. He snapped the derailleur off and caused some other damage. I don't know how or why it happened, but I needed to deal with it. It was time to check out the Bike Church.

The Bike Church has an utter Santa Cruz vibe. It is a cooperative, staffed by volunteers, where anyone can work on their bike. I thought going there would be cheaper than getting a bike shop to do the repairs, and I was hoping to learn something. I had a very good experience. One of the volunteers showed me a drawer of used derailleurs ($5 each), helped me straighten the frame where it had been bent, and told me how to replace the derailleur. I performed the replacement, getting side-tracked on some things (like replacing the shifter cable when I messed up the original one). Unfortunately, the derailleur I installed turned out not to work very well, so the volunteer found a brand new one which matched the other stuff on my bike better, so I installed that one. I then had to adjust the shifter, and also adjust the brakes since I had been messing with the wheels. These were both things well worth learning how to do. I didn't have time to adjust the brakes, but I came back the next day to do it, and trued my wheels beforehand, which was much needed. My bike is in pretty good shape now, with the main problem being that my third gear slips like crazy. I'm not sure why it does this, so I need to take it back to the Bike Church and get help. What's more important than the current state of my bike is that I now know how to replace derailleurs, bend frames, break and relink chains, replace control cables, adjust shifters, adjust brakes, and true wheels. I also spent very little getting the damage fixed. I think the Bike Church is awesome, and I will miss it when I leave Santa Cruz in a few weeks, even if going there does involve being surrounded by hippies.

Just before my graduation, joshuak happened to be visiting to catch my project presentation. I happened to grumble about how disillusioned I am with Linux, and how I wanted to get a Mac. This had sort of become a habit. My four year old Dell laptop was becoming so unusable that it would be easier to list the parts that aren't broken than the ones that are. I thought about replacing it with another cheap Dell, or even a Thinkpad, but I was really reluctant to deal with another Linux laptop. I used to be such a Linux fanboy, but at some point I realized that it's a pain in the ass to use. Getting stuff like power management, 3D acceleration, and advanced wireless LAN security to work requires a lot of research and work. I used to be excited about learning how everything works and mastering it, but recently I've tired of this and I just want things to work, especially on a laptop. It's true that there are distributions that solve a lot of these problems, but I'm not a fan of them. They still have a lot of problems, and the GUI and user experience they have to offer is pretty poor compared to other operating systems. I suppose I should mention that I despise Windows and wouldn't consider it an option. I'm not going to get started on that. This left Mac OS X. I was an ardent Mac user for my entire childhood, but I completely ignored OS X when it came out because I was so attached to Linux. Now that I'm having second thoughts, it seemed like a good idea to check it out, particularly on a laptop where things need to Just Work.

Anyway, joshuak told me I would probably get large monetary gifts for my graduation that I could use to purchase a MacBook. I originally sort of dismissed the idea, since I wasn't really sure I wanted to get a Mac yet, but the next day my grandmother asked me at dinner what I wanted as a graduation present. I replied sincerely that I didn't want anything because I'm lucky enough to have everything I really need, but my dad, who thinks I'm a masochist because I run Linux, suggested that she get me a Macintosh. Remembering the conversation with joshuak, I gave in. (You know, I think I might have gone with that anyway, but I'm going to blame getting a Mac on joshuak because I think that will annoy him).

I ended up ordering a low-end MacBook. Some people said the MacBook Pro was a better bet, but I didn't see how it could possibly be worth the extra money. I thought the large screen would have been nice, but now that I have the MacBook, I'm very happy with the size. I think a MacBook Pro would have been too large and actually a bit awkward. The MacBook was a surprisingly good deal for an Apple product: Core 2 Duo, 1GB ram, 80GB hard drive, free iPod nano for $1000 after the educational discount.

I told some of my friends that I was getting a Mac and they warned me that I was making a grave mistake. I asked them what they disliked about Mac OS X, and they mostly brought up nerdy technical issues and deficiencies in the UNIX side of things. I retorted that if I tried to use a Mac like a typical Mac user would, none of that would be a problem. I think I was right. Since I've had the machine, I've been very happy with the OS in general and the applications, but whenever I've made the mistake of trying to do something serious in the shell, I soon regret it. It's actually nice to have a UNIX backend even if it has problems, and I use the Terminal a fair amount. However, I try to use Mac-like GUI apps for things other than email and IRC. I've found a lot of great applications - even some of the stock ones are really cool. I'm irrationally obsessed with Safari and I'm excited that its engine is being ported to Linux. I'm also a fan of Adium and LaunchBar, among other apps. VMWare is cool, and I used it to install Linux in a virtual machine so I can have the best of both worlds (but so far I've never had any reason to use the Linux install).

There are some things I *don't* like. The first that comes to mind is iTunes. This is the de-facto standard music player for Mac OS X, and everyone seems to take it for granted. I can't stand it though - the interface is awful, it's bloated, and it doesn't handle FLAC and OGG formats correctly, even with the right QuickTime plugins. I searched extensively and found two other real music players. Even Linux has dozens. The alternatives I found aren't really any better than iTunes! I think I might end up switching to cmus, a non-graphical music player I use on Linux, and using more non-GUI apps would be a shame. I also wish the OS infastructure on OS X was better. Its kernel is poor in many ways compared to Linux, and by using it I'm giving up some performance and perks like a robust filesystem. This doesn't matter so much on my laptop, but if I ever switch on my desktop it might be a bigger deal.

And I would like to switch on my desktop! This laptop thing was partially an experiment to find out how well I got along with OS X. I don't end up using it a lot because I spend so much time at home and I'd rather use my desktop with two 20" monitors and a real mouse (but I'm using it to write this, of course, in Xjournal). I seem to prefer running OS X, so it's too bad that I only end up using it when I leave home. The problem is that I'd be forced to use Apple hardware (well, if I want something that's stable enough to use), and Apple's product line has severe gaps. The three desktop models are the Mac Mini, iMac, and Mac Pro. The first two are basically toys that don't meet my needs - they wouldn't even support my dual monitor setup. The Mac Pro is a monster that starts at $2500. I feel neglected by Apple's marketing department. :(

By the way, I should note that some of this is pretty irrational. I'm putting up with a lot of stuff on OS X that I wouldn't tolerate on Linux because it's a new system and I'm being more open-minded. For example, I almost immediately upgraded my RAM to 2GB. Stuff on OS X uses a hell of a lot of RAM, and if I encountered Linux this bloated I would more than likely complain about it until my friends tell me to shut up, and revert back to a less resource-intensive caveman's setup. I also care about software freedom on Linux, and rarely use applications that aren't open source. On Mac OS X, it would be bizarre to care. Possibly most significantly of all, I'm using all the GUI stuff the Mac has to offer, but on Linux I prefer the shell over file managers or desktop environments. It's partially because they all suck on Linux, but also because that's how I'm used to doing things. Irrational as it may be, if I need a new OS to break my bad habits and challenge my preconceived notions, then so be it.

I'm feeling much better. I had so much to do this weekend, but against my better judgement I spent a lot of it on recreational/social activities. That helped me relax, and I didn't fall behind in my work. I'm feeling a lot more detached from school now. It's true that I'm under a lot of time pressure to finish the senior project, but on the other hand, it's pretty darn close to done and it no longer seems worth stressing out about whether everything will work exactly as planned. This project is primarily an (ambitious) exercise, and there are no consequences for imperfections. As for EE221, my graduate circuits class, it seems silly that I made such a big deal about it earlier in the quarter. Now that I finished the first design problem today, I feel confident that I can handle whatever the professor throws at me in the final two weeks.

I want to learn how to cook this summer. And bike to San Jose.

I guess I haven't updated in awhile. College is almost over. At least every day I oscillate between longing for the quarter to be over and feeling generally content. Just when I'm really feeling the crunch from the senior design project, the graduate class I'm taking is starting to take even more of my time. I've definitely never worked this hard in my life. I'm usually in the lab from soon after waking up to 10PM, and when I get home I struggle to make some progress on homework.

For what it's worth, the senior project is going very well. Over the past few weeks, we got all of our core functionality working. I discovered a big problem on Tuesday that's frustrating me right now. Hopefully we'll manage to fix it; but if not, I'll still be happy we got everything else to work. Even without that, there's plenty to keep me busy for the next three weeks, such as mechanical work, antenna tuning, preparing presentations and reports, and helping the software guys. If I wasn't so busy, I'd go up to Davis with some friends this weekend, but sadly I'm going to miss out on that. I am not, however, going to miss out on SOMA's outrageously irresponsible 99 Bottles trip. There aren't many things I would miss that for.

I'll be visiting Japan in August with friends. We have tickets, but probably won't do much planning until I finish school. Tentatively, we'll visit Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka. I'm incredibly excited.

I don't have anything planned for the rest of the summer. I think I'll be stuck in Santa Cruz because my lease expires in September. I'm not really happy about this. I'd like to get out already, and there's nothing for me to do here. I know I could theoretically sublet my room, but I don't have anywhere else to move at this point anyway. I hope I'm able to find decent housing in Palo Alto for next year. Living on campus sounds like the simplest and cheapest option, but it would mean a significant decrease in my standard of living.