You're Asian, you must be smart, right?

Or maybe it's four.

Actually, it is about half past four in the morning and I am wide awake. I ended up sleeping around six this morning because we were working on getting the microcontrollers for the steering control and brake/throttle control board working as well as making sure the boards were doing alright. Woke up again at eleven to start working again, and finally finished all our crap at three fifty. Presented shortly after, and it seems like the prof was more or less satisfied. That concludes the projects I had to finish off in this past week, which included a sixteen page paper on the ethics of the US patent system, a presentation on the same, verifying the equivalence of a microprocessor and the same microprocessor with a scan-chain, a presentation on Catch 22 and the significance of cultural barriers in Catch 22, The Joy Luck Club, and The DaVinci Code.

After presenting, I got some pizza, randomly ran into Joanna, hung out with her for a bit, went to Sean's, got mauled by Rocky, went home, and fell asleep around half past eight. I woke up around midnight, and have been dicking around on the computer and playing games since. I have my first final at one thirty, and I have yet to really start studying.
I suppose I should start now.


Anyway, I saw some ducklings today! I was hoping to see them smaller and fluffier, but it seems I was too late. This bothers me primarily because I went to the arboretum last week with the primary intention of seeing the itty, bitty ducklings and saw nothing. I wonder whether I overlooked them, but I was keeping very aware of the open water at the least, so for sure there weren't any out there. I guess it could be the case that the ducklings were at that time too small, and so were still in nests and hiding from plain sight, though I know absolutely nothing about the growth of baby ducks and so have no clue when they're born, how they grow, or when they leave the nest. All the same, I'm glad I got the chance to see the little ones.
which is kinda funny in some sense, since I typically despise the ducks on campus with a vengeance. But really, the ducklings are just so itty, bitty and awkward and such that they're just too cute to dislike. Look at them!





After that was the hours upon hours of working on the project thinger. That chip there is one of a couple I burned out -_-;. It's not as though it's a huge problem or anything, but I still feel like a total newb for doing it. Luckily though, we did indeed finish everything, as stated above. Altogether, it was something like twenty hours of work spread out over a couple of days or something. Lots of pie, soda, and food was consumed, code was written, boards were soldered, and brains were fried.

The prof SEEMED pleased with the progress we had made, but he's not exactly the most congenial guy. We figure he's not going to fail us at the least, so as long as we keep up the work, we won't be having to stay behind a quarter.

As for the project, word on the street is that the next incarnation of the Challenge is going to be an urban one. DARPA has been sending out e-mails asking questions about the preferred format of the next competition and asking about what teams would like to see. Given that info, we're sorta steering our vehicle's design in that direction, though really the basic framework of the vehicle systems is going to be the same no matter the environment. The fun thing about an urban competition is that it might give us an option to explore ultrasonic sensors instead of just LiDAR, as well as try some other interesting things with the code. I dunno.

For now, I think I am going back to sleep. I've done a bit of tallying, and even with the long-ish nap I just finished I'm still way short on sleep for the past three days. Given that, and that I have a four hour block of finals, I should sleep now so that I don't crash out in the middle of testing.