Trekking the Narrows – Day 2 at Zion National Park
Our first day at Zion National Park was pretty close to perfect, but luckily there is nothing in the book of life that says you can’t have two perfect days in... Read more.
Soldering for DDR Mats
One of the last steps of building the DDR mats is getting a circuit board to connect a mat to a computer. One of the easiest ways is to buy a cheap USB game controller,... Read more.
Audio and Video Editing
Every year for rotation, some houses make a house video to show the prefrosh more about house life and culture (it’s also fun to make a video!). I organized... Read more.
End of SURF
The normal schedule SURF program ended a week ago, so now I’m back at home for a month before fall terms starts. There’s still plenty of people at Caltech... Read more.
Laser tag at Ultrazone and turtle pictures
Because the summer SURF program is almost over, the church I go to (Hill Community Church) decided to go play laser tag at Ultrazone. Each week or two this summer,... Read more.
Dabney boat!
For Caltech’s Prefrosh Weekend last term, some people in my house decided to build a boat to give prefrosh a tour of Caltech. (The slogan was "See Caltech... Read more.
Applesauce oatmeal chocolate chip cookies
Today we made applesauce oatmeal chocolate chip cookies! I had a jar of applesauce that I needed to finish by next week, so we substituted applesauce for all of... Read more.
DDR Mat Diagnostics
Over the summer, we’ve been setting up Dance Dance Revolution every Friday and Sunday night. During the school year, we usually only play on Friday nights,... Read more.
First DDR mat almost done!
We’re almost done building the first DDR mat! (Myprevious post about one arrow panel was actually written a week or two ago but wasn’t published for... Read more.
SURF GUI
Recently I’ve been working on writing a GUI for my SURF project. I’m using Tkinter, the standard GUI for Python. I didn’t program before coming... Read more.
NERF War 2
We had another NERF war yesterday in the South House basement! The basement is shaped roughly like a figure 8, with a courtyard in the middle of one of the loops.... Read more.
NERF War
Some time over the last year several people decided to buy NERF blasters and have NERF wars in the South House basement. Soon after that, the number of people with... Read more.
DDR Mat Construction – One Arrow Panel
Today (Saturday) I spent several hours working on building the DDR mats with some other DDR club members. (You can view my previous posts about building DDR matshere... Read more.
Food and cooking
This summer some of my friends are teaching me how to cook – I can now stir-fry most leafy vegetables without any help or supervision! It’s usually pretty... Read more.
Heisenberg the cat [FINAL]
We have a dorm cat named Heisenberg in the alley I’m living in for the summer. (She’s a female cat though.) Apparently all the kittens in her litter... Read more.
DDR Mat Sensor Testing
We’re almost ready to start building part of the DDR mats! The only non-circuit board materials we still need to get are sheet metal, plastic panels for arrows,... Read more.
Grid diagrams and math papers
For the next part of my SURF project, I’m starting to read about grid diagrams for knots/links. A grid diagram is a way to draw a picture of a knot or link.... Read more.
Griffith Observatory and Mount Hollywood
For the fourth of July, I went to Griffith Observatory and Mount Hollywood with my church (Hill Community Church), a large portion of which is Caltech students.... Read more.
Cookies and Table Saws
Since it’s summer, we don’t have to do any homework sets or work on the weekends, so we have a lot more free time to do things like cook, work on projects,... Read more.
DDR Mat Construction and Stockrooms
These places are especially convenient because the Caltech DDR (Dance Dance Revolution) Club has funding to build two arcade-style DDR pads this summer! Since going... Read more.
The Knotilus Database
Knotilus is a database of all prime alternating links with 23 crossings or less (according to their website there are 98,517,495,461 such links). It’s great... Read more.
Dance Dance Revolution!
There’s a lot of people here that enjoy playing Dance Dance Revolution (DDR). (If you’re new to DDR, here is a nice introduction.) During the school... Read more.
Knots, Programming, and SURF
One input method for my SURF project is to take an alternating link projection, shade regions of the link, and then use the shaded regions and intersections to create... Read more.
Tedx and Big Bear
Last Friday we had TEDx at Caltech (x = independently organized event). TEDx is basically a day long conference with lots of short (under 20 minute) speaker presentations... Read more.
When I choose my specialty, I choose my patient
I recently began reading the book "The Emperor of Maladies: a Biography of Cancer" by Siddhartha Mukherjee. The book is essentially a chronicle of cancer,... Read more.
Rock pools, Boxing, Elections
I was really nervous going into this term because I thought it was the most difficult schedule that I had so far. I’m actually loving it. I am so thrilled... Read more.
Caltech, again.
I’ve been back at school for almost 2 weeks now. I’ll just give a snapshot of what I’ve been up to: Frosh Camp: 3 days, 2 nights at the Marriot... Read more.
Hometown date
The posts that are going up are actually behind my real life. I was actually in Colorado a couple weeks ago and wrote this then but it hasn’t gone up. After... Read more.
