Sterling’s annual conversation on the Well should be required reading.
You could also go back in time and read the 2008 and 2007 editions; they still sparkle.
Credit: Boing Boing reminded me about it this year.
So I have some travel photos that I’ve never gotten around to posting. My New Year’s Resolution is to do that, but in order for it to make any sense at all I’m going to backdate the posts to the time when the trip got made. I’m violating the integrity of the blog timestamp system! Oh noes!
In December 2008, I got to go to the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control in Cancun.
This was my first academic conference, and from a professional point of view it was great. I learned a lot and got many new ideas for research. Unfortunately, for most of the daylight hours I was inside the hotel, listening to speakers.
This is the view from my hotel room. The ocean is on the protected side of the peninsula, so it was fairly calm. I managed to sneak in a 6:30 AM swim a couple of days before breakfast.
I had an extra day after the conference, so I took a guided tour to Chichen Itza. Here’s a sinkhole where we stopped to swim during the 3 hour bus ride. It’s 50 meters deep - don’t drop anything!
Here Hugo, the tour guide, is telling us about the main temple at Chichen Itza.
And here’s the Plaza of One Thousand Columns at Chichen Itza.
Cancun was a bit of a tourist trap - the hotel strip is a long way from the city itself, and so everything is priced for tourists and geared towards the lowest common denominator (nothing spicy on the menu, bars set up to attract the 19 year old college student from Kansas who can’t drink at home, etc). But the scenery was beautiful, and it’s really hard to feel bad about swimming in the warm ocean at 6:30 AM, having a tasty breakfast, then learning about multi-agent control for a few hours.
CDC next year is in Shanghai. Hooray for academia!
Ruckingenur II is a Windows game about reverse engineering small electronics in order to bypass their security features. The story is all about some sort of military conflict (grumble grumble) in the year 2016… but they seem to still be using through-hole components. Maybe there was a surface-mount rebellion in 2013?
OK, I think one joke about electronic packaging is enough for a lifetime. Moving on.
For electrical engineers: You get a serial logic probe, three digital voltmeter probes, a pulse generator, and a simplified JTAG probe, and you have to figure out how to bypass the system’s security by observing and manipulating the traces between ICs. It’s great.
For others: After playing this game, you’ll have a really good idea about what an embedded systems engineer does all day. Except that instead of reverse engineering someone else’s stuff, we usually poke around on our own systems, trying to figure out why they aren’t working properly.
When people ask me why I like engineering, I usually answer “because it’s fun”. This game does a good job of presenting some of the fundamental skills that an engineer uses, and also captures the problem-solving challenge and enjoyment that engineers find in their work. I’m looking forward to whatever else Zach Barth comes up with.
Originally found on hack-a-day.
Yesterday I went down to the South Bay to hang out with Vicky and Matt. We went hiking on the Los Gatos Creek Trail…
… saw some wildlife in the Los Gatos Reservoir…
… stopped for coffee and a photo op…
… walked back, went for dinner, and called it a day. Happy birthday, Matt!
In early June, I was in Vancouver, visiting friends and working with a prof at UBC. On my last day in Vancouver, there was a Car-Free street fair on Commercial Drive. Pauline and I wandered around for a few hours. Here are some of the photos I took.
Click any of the pictures to go to the full album.