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 a row. While we spent yesterday climbing to the top of a summit, we spent today trekking through the…

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, solder wires to the contact points on the circuit board, and then connect the wires…

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 a few short clips for my house video and ended up doing the video editing for them. I hadn't done much…

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 though; preseason sports just started and there's a few people that started SURF late or took a vacation in the middle…

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, we've had some kind of fun fellowship activity, like going out for dinner or having a picnic at Griffith Park.…

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 the way it was meant to be seen...from a boat!") The best place to sail the boat is in Millikan pond, which…

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 the oil in the recipe. For some reason, the recipe had lots of oil but not very much butter, and it's…

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, but since no one has any homework or sets over the weekend in the summer, we've added Sunday nights as well. Last Sunday was…

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 a while; we've made a lot of progress on the DDR mats since then.) It works well enough that we can play some songs…

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 to Caltech, so I took CS 1, the intro programming course, during first term. During the course, we covered a little bit of Tkinter; mainly…

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. It's where the South House laundry room, DDR room, Physics 8 lab, music rooms, group study rooms, and various…

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 NERF blasters and the frequency of games began to increase until some subset of people with NERF blasters was playing…

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 and here.) We finished coating nearly all the non-arrow panels with sheet metal so it's smoother and doesn't have splinters, and got…

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 easy to get fresh produce since Safeway (Pavilions/Vons), Trader Joes, and Fresh & Easy are all within walking distance of Caltech, but…

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 were named after famous scientists. Her namesake, Werner Heisenberg, is possibly best known for the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics. Chemistry…

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, and some screws. Recently I decided to test the sensor idea to make sure it would work. Based on previous DDR mat…

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. You start with a square n by n grid, and then place O's and X's (at most one…

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. During the evening of July 4th, we had a picnic potluck dinner on the grass outside Griffith Observatory, then started on a short…