Whats up.

A ton. Drama continues. Work continues.

Over the past few weeks we've been working on designs and 3D models for mechanical toy hoppers. We have a limited amount of materials to work with and a few different rules that we have to follow, but besides that, the entire thing is pretty much up to us. I had a design, made a prototype out of basic materials, created a 3D model of it, ran simulations on it, and saw how it would jump in 3D. That's a lot of work. Then that night I had a dream and thought of a much better design. So I basically redid it. That put a lot of work on me, but I finished, and I haven't gotten the simulation working or even make a prototype, but I'm hoping to god it works. The picture is showing the final 3D model, which I care not to explain in detail, but basically the yellow tubes are stretchy tubing that pulls on the 3 legs downwards. And then it jumps. Good stuff! So I submitted the part designs and they're hopefully being cut tomorrow morning, and I can make the actual hopper tomorrow afternoon. This is the first real prototype, so I guess the beta stage. We're then evaluating how these hoppers work and then making any necessary changes in the 3D model and remaking them for a final. Pretty cool class I must say! Lots of work though!


So here's something that you wouldn't see often if you know me.



Jeans, lacoste shoes, and a Hello Kitty carpet in the middle of my dorm room floor. Well, the Hello Kitty is for kicks, but yeah. I just thought this was kinda funny. I'm really happy with the shoes though. Got them today at the mall (going to the mall on a tuesday! score!). If you didn't know, I have 4E wide feet and custom orthodics, so it's kind of a pain for me to buy new shoes. But they're wide enough and they're pretty comfortable! Not as comfortable as my running shoes, but they definitely look better.


Oh, and another thing I love about college. Free stuff. I got a really big lamp for my desk from the 1st floor lounge. Shweet. I got the free hello kitty carpet from the 4th floor lounge. And people send out emails saying when they're giving out free stuff, so it's really convenient. Hm, that may be confusing to you.


Because Olin is 300 people, everybody has e-mail access to everybody. Staff, Faculty, Students, President Miller, etc. And there are also things called lists. You can sign up for lists, and whenever somebody sends an e-mail to that list, everybody in the list gets the e-mail. For example, Carpedium is a list for things such as announcing free stuff, announcing events such as "I'm going running in 10 and I want somebody to run with...does somebody want to come?", and other things like that. So yeah, that's how I got the free hello kitty rug.

I guess that's all from me for now. Room still isn't too decorated but oh well. I ordered a mouse for my laptop. I'm excited. It'll make 3D modeling a lot easier, as well as reading through documents (it has one of those almost-frictionless scroll wheels that just keep spinning if you let it go). And it's pretty small so it'll fit easily in my backpack. Hooray!

I guess that's all for now.

Economy = No

Wow, and now the American economy is just as screwed as the things going on in my life. At least we're on equal levels :)

80 people

80 people, 4 years.

Wow, this is already hard.

Life continues

Hiyo. Life continues here at Olin.

So Monday night I went to bed at 4 am, and I woke up at 8:30 for a 9:15 meeting with a woman in the financial office (I'm the Manager of Finance and Records for SERV, the service organization here, so I needed to learn some stuff about the SERV credit card). I knew I'd be dead tired, and I also knew that I didn't want to be yawning during the meeting. So, being smart, I crawled out of bed, munched on a bagel, and drank a red bull. Then, as I walked over to the meeting, I popped a Japanese soda candy into my mouth (the best candy in the world. And hey, it wakes me up). So the meeting was fine, and I had a few minutes to go down to the dining hall before my only class of the day at 10 am. I ended up just drinking an orange juice to wake me up a bit more, and headed over to class. We were critiquing our panorama photos that were due for homework, and as we moved down the pictures towards mine, I was starting to feel a bit queesy. I was thinking "Wow Chris, if you're actually scared to talk to the class about your photo, that's just sad. Way to go." At that point I hadn't registered the fact that I consumed an explosion for breakfast. I talked about my photo, and we moved on to the next one. Well turns out it wasn't that I was scared or anything, I was just really feeling sick now. So I left the classroom to go chill on the couch outside and hopefully feel a bit better. Well I sat out there for a few minutes and I started to feel a bit better, so I took my chances and went back in. They were still talking about the last photograph, and I took a seat rather than stood with the class because I knew standing wasn't a smart thing to do. Nope, still didn't work, I went back outside for about 30 minutes. In that time, I fell asleep, woke up, and I SWEAR I saw a professor I have peek out from behind a roller white board in a creepy way and throw something in my direction (hey, I was OUT of it). After that I went back in the classroom, now my professor was showing a slideshow of self portraits of famous photographers, and when I looked at one of them where the photographer photoshopped out her eyes and nose and mouth, I just about had it. I went back outside, luckily I felt a bit better, and I decided to go back to my dorm to sleep it off. Slept for a few hours, woke up, felt alllll better. And in the end, I'm glad I did this. I had a rediculously horribly terrible day on Monday, and because I didn't really go to class, it felt like a second weekend for me, which I needed. But for all of you who actually want to go to class, here is a concoction that you should never brew:

• 1 Bagel
• 1 Red Bull
• 3 Japanese Ramune Soda Candies
• 1 Glass of Orange Juice

To be honest I'm a bit tempted to mix them together and watch the explosion. Maybe YouTube it.

So what else. I realized just how rich our school is. For Engineering of Compartment Systems (or better known as Mod Con (Modeling and Control)), we use these pretty crappy and low cost instruments called oscilloscopes. As well as signal generators. An oscilliscope basically reads anything relating to electricity, and displays it on a graph on the screen. Well, I did a bit of research, and each oscilloscope in the room costs about 5 grand (shown to the right). And at about 15 of them in the room, that's a grand total of $45,000 dollars. Now the signal generators are $400 dollars each, but still. That means another $6,000 added to the room. Yeah, I know, that's nothing compared to the half a billion dollars in endowment at Olin, but still. I mean come on, in high school physics, I don't think we used anything over 200 dollars. So not bad.
Oh, and as Manager of Finance and Records for SERV, I'm handling, oh, about 8,000 dollars. Just a bit of a step up from NHS, where I handled...I don't even know. 50? 100?

So yes. Besides that, I'm excited for Season 5 of The Office to start tonight. I learned a bit of improv soloing on a guitar last night from a junior. And oh! Another thing I can write about. So I don't know why, but once every few weeks, theres a few people that cook two rice cookers full of rice, and give it out. And, coincidentally, I love rice. Yay asians. So getting free rice with hurike at 10 pm last night was pretty fun. And cake for my friend Chris' birthday. I have a 1600 word essay due tomorrow, but if I get that done relatively early, I'm definitely going to go for a run and work out. I met a guy on the Babson baseball team and he said I should find out if I can play with them. So I'm giving it a shot, but I need to get in shape first.

Tomorrow night I think I'm going to go to a pub on the Babson campus with a friend. Now you ask, Chris, you're 17. How can you do this? Legally, you can't enter, and you certainly can not drink.

Now here's where I must give credit where credit is due. Needham and Wellesely are both DRY towns. Selling alcohol is illegal. Babson College knew this would suck, so they decided that they'll become their own town and make it legal. So Babson College is legally its own town. And they have a pub which will let anybody in and sell alcohol to anybody. Ok, selling alcohol to everybody is still against the law, but its not like they care. Don't worry, I'm still not drinking. I'm considering having a drink on my birthday, but meh. We'll see.

So there you have it.

Wow, I'm impressed that I actually wrote on this blog again. Not bad...

Life at Olin so far

Helloooo everybody! And when I say everybody, I mean the two, three, or five people that are going to ever read this.

So I've been getting all sorts of questions about life at Olin. And here are your answers.

Olin's great. The atmosphere is really great, everybody knows each other and really cares about each other. At parties, the hosts go around and hand out water and cut people off at the bar if they're too drunk, stuff like that. People also help each other with work the best they can, which is really helpful in such a hard school like this. At the same time, this small size is a down side. There's 300 people in the entire college and 80 people in my class. This creates a really different environment than what you'll get at any other college. If you do something, 297 people will know about it. And this has lead to an enormous enormous amount of drama (yeah, I know, what the hell) in the first few weeks of Olin.

Speaking of drama, who are my friends? To be honest, not a lot of people. Let me just put it out there, that everybody's extremely nice. But I find quite a lot of people to be...very weird. Some...hmm...have a younger mentality than me? Yeah, that's right, I did just avoid saying they're immature, but that word carries too much of a negative connotation than I think this situation deserves. So you know, they're all very nice, and they get along, it's just that I can't imagine having them as a good friend.

Of course, I do have some friends who are more like me. Unfortunately, they're mostly girls. I've found really only one or two guys who I can imagine being great friends with later in life. I'm sure this will change as the weeks go on, but life is life for now.

Here at Olin, there's something called a Sibb. It's like a sibling, but not. Every freshman gets paired up with another person in the school who isn't a freshman, and basically this program can help establish connections with upperclassmen, and help freshman get acquainted with this new life. My sibb is Kevin McGraths' old best friend from Moscow, so we both know the honorable McGrath family, which is kind of cool. He's also a partier like me, and I must say, he sure can down a few. And when I say a few, I mean a ton. He's a really fun person to have. To know that somebody in Olin is the complete opposite of a nerd is kind of nice. 

General life is excellent. Everything's open 24/7 (with the exception of the machine shop and the cafeteria). Food is excellent, dorms are very nice. Roommate is great. Parties are a lot of fun. Man Hall (East hall, 2nd floor, north wing hallway) is a really fun place to be. They're kind of like the frat in the school, but they're not. Anytime I go over there though it's always fun. Last night was a classy themed party, so everybody dressed up in suits and all that. Good stuff.

Academics. Work is pretty tough, I must say. Not killing, but it's tough.

• Design Nature - A class which students learn to relate designs in nature to designs in mechanical products. Right now we're working on a hopper project, where we must create a bio-inspired toy that jumps. We did a short study of how click-beetles and frog-hoppers jump, and now we are in the protoyping stage. We prototyped 2 or 3 models out of basic materials after we did sketches, and now we're modeling one of our prototype SolidWorks (3D CAD program), and doing a computer simulation of these to see how well they will jump. No math required, pretty much no physics knowledge required.
• Modeling and Simulation - Using MatLab (programming software) to create models (not physical) of different things. We just finished our first case study, and I chose to create a model which predicts how many new freshman Olin should admit for the next year based on dorm availability and many other factors. 75. This class doesn't deal with any physics or math, just programming and a bit of logic on how to program.
• Modeling and Control - A class in which we use a program called SimuLink to model physical systems. For example, take two graduated cylinders, cut a hole on the side of each at the bottom, and put a tube between them. Now fill up one of them to the top. The tube will drain into the other tube, but then the draining will stop when the two heights are equal. We modeled this and created a graph of the height vs. time for each for one of the first labs. This class requires a good amount of physics and math knowledge, especially calculus based physics, which isn't something we did at all in high school. It takes a bit to get used to, but it all makes sense in the end. I've learned a few new concepts in this class already.
• Seeing and Hearing - Exploring communication through the media of photography, video, and audio. Currently, we are doing our photography unit, which is very nice considering I love photography. However, we have also watched 3 documentaries about various things (Murderball was the best one by far. Watch it. It's great.), and wrote a bit about each. We've done one essay so far, but we have a 6 page one due on Friday. Of course, it's on the worst documentary of the three.

So there you have it. Until next time, I'll be repeatedly throwing my computer out the window because of SolidWorks, and going to IT and telling them that I'm covered under warranty so fix it.