5AM Ramblings » class

6.091

Jason — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 09:51:21 +0000

Crossing Mass Ave, passing the Wright Brothers Wind Tunnel, entering building 34, and entering my class on the third level, I take a seat next to Yuzhi for the first class. I listen to the professor begin to talk about what we will be doing in the class and do a quick explanation of resistors and circuits. We finish the first class and some of us head to lab. We learn how to use multimeters, scopes, signal generators, and soldering irons. Each of us even was allowed to keep a multimeter for ourselves. The next time we have class we learn about BJTs and op amps. The LA had fun making fun of the girl next to me because she was a bio major from Wellesley. She also happened to blow an op amp, which apparently does not happen very often. The op amps let us do fun things like integrate signals and amplify signals.

The third class we play with timers to do things like turn off an LED after a calculated time. The professor also plugged in a capacitor the wrong way into a breadboard. Although we were prepared for it, the sound was still surprisingly loud from such a small object. Charging a polarized capacitor the wrong way will quickly make it explode. The fourth class we learned about digital circuits and how to use gates to do boolean algebra. We also moved from the small lab we were in to the 6.111 lab with their larger, better equipment.

For the last class, we only made one final circuit. It was a digital lock where depending on the sequence the switches were depressed, the LED would turn on. We used a combination of NAND gates, AND gates, and shift registers to make the circuit. It took me almost the full four hours to make the circuit because first, I wanted to make the wires look nice, and second, because the LAs would refuse to help if the wires were not multiple colours. We got to take this circuit home to be able to show off. I’m quite glad I made it pretty.

Be anal about the appearance of things you can bring home to show off. Pretty things are more fun to present.

Just a normal Tuesday

Jason — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 06:11:03 +0000

I wake up at 10:30 this morning eager to get to class. It’s not only because today is the last day of Tuesday/Thursday class schedule, but because I get to rip tags off. On Saturday, Chao and Vivian dragged me to the Cambridgeside Galleria and picked me out some clothes to buy. Today was going to be the first day I wear them. I hop out of bed and get ready for class, complete with new outfit. Tim compliments me as I leave (I can still never tell if he’s being sarcastic or not).

I make it to class. During my lunch break, I find Vivian in the green lounge and we go to math together. It’s review so the both of us are bored and just on our computers. By the end, Vivian was so dead she was falling asleep on her computer. Aww, Vivian, I know you’re tired, but you can work through the tiredness. I make it to my pistol class where we actually score our targets. Of 20 shots, I got a score of 174. Pretty good! Good enough to get me second place in the class. Yay!

At home, a good number of wings found their way down my throat at the dorm-wide study break. After that, Vivian and I watched (a show that shall not be named in such a public forum)(one of my least well kept secrets) and all I have to say is WAHH! I got bored and wanted to play on the Xbox, but it has been Red Ring of Deathing, so games have been a vailure recently. The Wii also needs an update to be able to play Wii Music, which I don’t want to do. I should stop writing before my writing keeps going further down the drain.

Looking nice because a girl made you is quite nice. Everyone give in to the wishes of the women in your lives. Wait… I didn’t just say that!

Sleep

Jason — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 05:06:26 +0000

It’s 11:05PM and I just woke up from a nice two hour nap. Sleep, such a mysterious thing. Most people spend about a third of their lives sleeping and for what purpose? They just lay there unconscious where nothing bothers them. That’s what happened this morning. I barely woke at 8:50 for my 9:00AM class and noticed that both my roommates were still asleep. I quickly yell at them to also wake up to get to their classes, especially Tim. He has probably made it to his 9 AM chemistry class half of the time and on time even less. I keep yelling at him to go to class because he doesn’t stop complaining about chemistry. I head out the door at 9:03 for my own two hour class. Classes start five minutes late and end five minutes early. Two minutes to class? I’m not going to make it. Oh well. I walk casually to my 8.01TEAL classroom where I find the professor spinning a bicycle wheel and letting it roll on the ground. We go through the concepts of torque again and luckily I partly understand him now thanks to Kate and Caroline. That is… until he started on gyroscopes. I get continually more and more lost and class is over. We get let out at 10:55 and I walk back home after grabbing myself a pizza and chicken finger breakfast. (Healthy, yes, I know.) I make it home and what do I find? Kevin STILL sleeping. I yell at him to wake up, and he barely rolls out of bed to go on his computer until his next class.

How is it that the person who went to sleep latest woke up earliest? When your roommate is kind and yells at you to wake up, you should wake and at least try to make it to your next class. Don’t just go back to sleep until he comes back to yell at you to wake again.