Huzzah it's Friday! I was going to have a pleasant break from school, but ended up getting 40 hours of grounds work - shoveling bark, weeding, raking leaves, edging, sweeping, etc. It was nice to get some exercise, sunshine, and extra money.

Last quarter was a wild sprint to the finish line - late nights of finishing projects and scrambling to study for finals. Oddly enough my grades turned out better than I expected... Here you can see one of my projects for Embedded System Design. Michael and I made an RLC meter including a cool case with the university's rapid prototyping machine (big thanks to Josh for helping us design it in ProE)!

The brand name spawned as an amusing parody of Fluke which makes high quality electrical measuring devices.


Electronics proved to be the hardest class. Here you can see my lab partner, Chuck, working with me on an audio power amplifier. On the oscilloscope, you can see the waveform for Jack Johnson playing through my MP3 player. It actually works! It's a small part of next quarter's project - to design and build a radio.

Aside from school, I had a fantastic time with Michelle and David! Michelle came to investigate nearby hospitals and apartments with her dad. Fingers crossed, she'll be able to move out this way around July.

She showed up just in time to distract me from finals and we had a great time watching movies, celebrating Pi day (3/14/08), going Contra dancing, and visiting the park. David was kind enough to make great food during a stressful finals week - cheers!

This is one of the few pictures we actually took while she visited. Somehow we keep reminding ourselves to take lots of pictures and it doesn't seem to actually happen...

In other random news China is planning on controlling the weather during the Beijing Olympics with artillery and supercomputers! Pretty cool techniques in my opinion.

In a second piece of random news, Moby will be releasing Last Night in a few days. From what I've heard, it's quite an enjoyable chill/dance album...

This quarter has been rather challenging, but I'm still alive... Michelle is coming to visit in a matter of days, finals are next week, Sharona is engaged, and my sister is having another kid! Quite a bit since my last post I suppose.

Of course, I only have pictures of the cool, fun, exciting stuff. Not the hours of studying and struggling through lab write-ups. That would only be interesting to a small handful of you.Finally made it out rockclimbing on REAL rock for the first time in ages! You can see Kirk modeling while a friend does all the hard work of climbing :PHere is me out snowboarding again. I went two days over the long weekend and had a blast! The board I rented was brand new (pulled straight out of the plastic while I watched) and I'm still recovering from a few crashes :D
Here is just an artsy photo to polish this short update off. Enjoy!