the cereal king

It took two years, but MIT finally put my thesis up on DSpace. In case any of you were stressing about the broken link below from two years ago.

The title of this post is misleading. I don’t really hate the Red Sox. At least, not in the same way that I hate that other AL East team. With the Yankees, it’s easy to hate just about everything: the players are old, pricy, underachieving prima donnas; ownership is outspoken, nepotistic, and incompetent; management destroyed a farm system through reckless free agent signings; and a significant chunk of the fans act like entitled jackasses. Not to mention the annoying non-stop coverage by the national and local media, and the pretentious sense of history and accomplishment that the Yankees organization shoves down people’s throats (as evidenced during this year’s All-Star Game and at the closing ceremony of Yankee Stadium). All of these things make hating the Yankees easy; it’s something every non-Yankees fan does, and it’s the natural order.

Good riddance (even though Pedroia's awesome).

The Red Sox, at least for me, are more complicated. I like most of the players and coaches on the Red Sox, especially now that Manny’s gone. Curt Schilling has his own video game company, and listens to many of the video game podcasts that I listen to. Dustin Pedroia and Kevin Youkilis are good, young, home-grown players that are fun to watch. Same with Jon Lester, except with the incredible side-story of beating cancer and coming back to throw a no-hitter. David Ortiz is probably the funniest and most gregarious player in baseball, and all of the stories about him indicate that he’s a genuinely good person. Terry Francona is a smart, eloquent, and level-headed man, and perhaps the best manager in baseball.

I have a great deal of respect for the ownership of the Red Sox, a group that managed to revitalize Fenway Park and install a top-notch baseball operations staff headed by Theo Epstein. The principal owner, John Henry, is a long-time diehard baseball fan and a student of sabermetrics (it’s little wonder then that he tried to lure Billy Beane from the A’s after taking over the Red Sox). Unlike the Yankees, the ownership and management of the Red Sox understood that establishing a stellar farm system was the key to the team’s prolonged success, and their work has paid incredible dividends during the past couple of years.

Even long-time Red Sox fans are generally likable people. Sure, the large amount of obnoxious townies provide a pretty good reason to hate the Red Sox. But every city has its particular group of dumb, annoying fans. The baseball-savvy Red Sox fans are just like hardcore baseball fans in any other city. People who understand the simple elegance of the game. People who understand the cruel paradox of following a team through the ups and downs of a grueling, six-month, 162-game season only to see one’s championship hopes evaporate in the blink of an eye in the postseason. People that remember the life-long, generation-spanning torture of the 86-year championship drought. And these are the people that I felt genuinely ecstatic for after the 2004 championship, because they deserved it.

With all of these feel-good things about the Red Sox, you’d think it would be easy for me to root for them, or at least be indifferent about their success. This might have been true when I moved to Boston for college in 2002. Now, I constantly root for the Red Sox to fail. I was so ecstatic after their loss to the Rays in the ALCS this year that I almost felt like the A’s, my own team, were going to the World Series. This feeling felt right, but I couldn’t justify it to myself in coherent terms. However, after thinking about it for a couple of days, I feel like I now have a decent answer. Read the rest of this entry »

The thesis is done. If you’re interested, you can find it here…

More to come later when I feel like posting…Machine’s acting kind of flaky, so the blog might come and go…

Loyal fans (the few of you that exist): let me apologize for the extremely long delay between posts. I’ve been off doing more important things. Heh, yeah, that’s it…

Actually, I sort of lost the motivation to post on this thing after a while. Last term wasn’t particularly busy or challenging in any real sense, but draining nonetheless. I think it’s the general laziness that’s built up over the past five years here. It does bad things to you.

Anyways, as you might expect, stuff’s happened. Lots of stuff. To recap (using my patented bullet point update system):

• My last post was about baseball, so I’ll start there (since spring training’s going to get under way in a few weeks). Obviously, the A’s didn’t look nearly as good against the Tigers in the ALCS as they did against the Twins in the ALDS. Whatever, the playoffs are a crapshoot. In the 2006 playoffs, every American League team with home-field advantage lost their series, and only one National League team with home-field advantage (the Mets) won their series. Fluky.
• In better news for the A’s, they’re getting a new stadium in Fremont through a partnership with Cisco. Right on the Alameda County/Santa Clara County line too, which means they’re not infringing on the Giants territorial rights, but for all effective purposes are going to become a Silicon Valley team (how ’bout them apples). The stadium plans look awesome, and if I wind up back in Silicon Valley, it’ll be really tempting to get season tickets. The new name is going to suck though: (Silicon Valley/San Jose/South Bay/who knows what) A’s at Fremont. The 49ers are also looking to move to Santa Clara, which, along with the Sharks, would put my three favorite professional sports franchises in the South Bay. Absolutely sweet.
• Wound up finishing second in our fantasy football league. Also a crapshoot. Ask Riad about that. In real football, the 49ers looked pretty good towards the end of the season, and that’s exciting. Just need to shore up the defense and keep Norv Turner around to provide some continuity with that offense.
• Term came and went. I wound up taking 6.376 (Sarpeshkar’s subthreshold analog CMOS VLSI with extra in-too-shun!) and 6.728 (quantum mechanics for electrical engineers). Both were fun in their own way, although I never really went to 6.728. I guess the textbook was just that good, or something. Taylor and I wound up getting our final project fabbed in 6.376. That’ll be an adventure to test…
• Did lots of interviewing from early November through the middle of January. Interviewed with the standard analog/RF IC culprits (Linear, Maxim, TI, Analog Devices twice, Qualcomm, SiLabs twice), a start-up back home, and a few random companies that contacted me out of the blue. I got a bunch of offers, and thought I had my decision made, but I wound up getting an incredible offer just a couple of days ago, which puts everything back in play. I’ll post more when the dust clears, but contact me if you want more details.
• I’ve turned into something of a video game junkie over the past few months. Being a shiftless layabout (a.k.a. grad student) with a game console tends to do that to you, I suppose. I’ve spent a lot of time playing video games, which in itself is fun, but also spent an equal amount of time (or perhaps more) following the video game industry. All the petty in-fighting and bickering over little pieces of news (like console game exclusives, products shipped vs. sold figures, console specs, and launch dates) makes it seem at times like a sordid high school drama, and a damn interesting one at that. It’s fascinating to watch the industry go through the transition from one generation (PS2, Xbox, Gamecube) to the next (Xbox 360, Wii, PS3). I’ve been meaning to put up a separate post with my thoughts about this for a while, but haven’t really gotten around to it yet. Hopefully I’ll put it up soon.
• The thesis at Draper is…thesis-y. I’ve been looking at off-state breakdown issues in RF power amplifiers using PHEMTs, which required switching faculty advisers. Stuff’s coming along, somewhat slowly, which is a little worrying since I have to finish by the end of April in order to go through the whole clearance thing at Draper. But I seem to have found a reserve supply of motivation this IAP that I didn’t have last term, which is definitely good, and the work seems a lot more interesting and a lot less “grungy” than it used to (also good). I’m planning on cutting back the courseload by taking one (or possibly both) courses this coming term as a listener. Hopefully I’ll be done in time.
• It’s slowly dawning on me that this is going to be my last term at MIT, as well as for lots of other people. Ari’s already left for Austin, and Sam and a bunch of the seniors will probably be taking off after graduation in June. Which will probably lead to the collapse of the Fort as we know it (at least at Random). Oh well.
• I really hate Boston. People here seem to think people in California or Texas are stupid (at least based on the drivel that comes out of their mouths when you tell them you’re considering jobs in either location). Idiots…

And that, folks, is about it. More to come soon. I know I’ve promised that before, but this time I mean it. Really.

I haven’t posted in a while, and there’s a bunch of stuff I should post, but I’ll save that for later. James, Sherv, my brother, and I went to the Coliseum for Game 3 of the A’s-Twins division series today, and it was ridiculously awesome. A raucous Coliseum, people waving cheap white “rally towels” (I’ll post a picture of mine when I can), a tight game where the A’s never trailed until they blew it open in the 7th inning (MAR-CO? SCU-TA-RO!!!), random super-excited people giving complete strangers hugs and high-fives, and then that final clinching out when the entire stadium seemed to release years of frustration and anguish in one pent-up burst of jubilation. They really haven’t won anything spectacular yet, but this team looks good, and I can’t wait for the American League Championship Series…

Anyways, I’m still sort of coming down off of the whole experience, so I’ll leave this as is for now. Perhaps edit it and make it more readable later when I can actually think. Another, more coherent post to follow later with updates (including the ridiculous trip to the Bay Area, and how my roommates and I are all here, but none of us actually traveled here together)…

I’ve been planning on putting up this set of updates for a while, but I’ve managed to get delayed by…stuff. Like killing zombies (more on that later). Anyways, here’s some updates:

• This summer’s been the summer of bar trivia so far. Well, at least on Monday nights. We’ve (where we is James, Ariel, Jim, me, and whoever else feels like showing up) been heading to John Harvard’s for bar trivia on a fairly regular basis for the past nine weeks or so, and have managed to win four times and come in second another time. We also had a winning streak of three weeks, which was pretty sweet. Good times, and maybe we can continue doing it during term, what with all the grad students around and their “free time”…
• Work’s been a bit dull lately, even though the stuff I’ve been looking at is fairly interesting. I’ve been doing a lot more work in lab, and have basically turned myself into a human load-pull system while trying to get a bunch of data for one of the amplifiers that we’re trying to ship out to a customer. Haven’t nailed down an exact thesis topic yet, but it looks like my work with the current amplifier might lead to a nice thesis dealing with large-signal stability analysis issues (which in turn means dealing with some crazy chaos/non-linear dynamics stuff). There’s also some stuff floating around that has to do with analyzing some breakdown issues we’re having at RF drive (i.e. not traditional DC off-state breakdown analysis type stuff), but I’m not really a big fan of dealing with grungy device physics and obscure terms like “thermionic field emission”…
• Got Dead Rising for the Xbox 360 last week on the day it came out because of the ridiculous reviews it received. It’s the first time that I’ve ever bought a video game on its release date, and it was well worth it. Lots of old-fashioned zombie-killing action (everything’s a weapon!), and the plot isn’t half-bad so far. It’s impossible to finish all of the side missions on the first run-through, and it seems like a lot of the game’s value comes from replaying it in “infinite mode”…
• Sam (female one, not my roommate), James, Riad, and I had our fantasy football draft this past Monday, and since there were only six teams in our league, we wound up drafting 25 roster spots each. Which was complete chaos. With the last pick, of course, I had to take the Niners defense. Although I’ll probably never use them in any matchup this season, I simply had to take them for the entertainment factor. You probably don’t care, but I’ll put down my first ten picks here anyways: Tiki Barber, Edgerrin James, Carnell Williams, Hines Ward, Carson Palmer (oh yeah, bum knee and all), Reggie Wayne, Donovan McNabb, Tony Gonzalez, Andre Johnson, and Nate Burleson.
• I’ve had a lot more time to watch A’s games lately, and it’s been fun. The A’s have been raking, having won 15 of their last 17 games, and 17 of their last 20. They’ve also managed to win 15 straight games against the Mariners, which is absolutely ridiculous for any divisional rival, and they’ve got a 6½ game lead in the division over the Angels and Rangers. Guys like Milton Bradley, Joe Kennedy, Jay Witasick, and Bobby Crosby are finally coming off the disabled list, and Eric Chavez, Nick Swisher, and Esteban Loaiza look their old selves again. Regardless of all of this, the A’s still seem to be getting short shrift from most of the national media, which is perfectly fine by me. It just means that they’ll be under the radar going into October, which is a pleasant change from playoff years of past when the spotlight’s been on them for most of the second half of the season…

That’s all that I can think of for now. I might add some more stuff later if I can think of anything else…

EDIT: Managed to find this article by Ann Killion in the San Jose Mercury News which states the exact same thing about the A’s being under the radar. The surprising part is that apparently they’re not even being noticed in the Bay Area, where most people are still obsessed with Barry Bonds…

So after Cleveland last Saturday, James and I headed to Pittsburgh Sunday morning, and took in a Giants-Pirates game at PNC Park. At a capacity of 38,500, PNC Park is the smallest park built in the latest wave of stadium building. ESPN.com’s “Page 2″ rated it as the best ballpark in the majors when they conducted a tour of all major league stadiums a couple of seasons ago, and after visiting, I can see why they did so. Due to its small size, all of the seats in the stadium have great views. The food is pretty good too, if a bit expensive, and most of the stadium vendors are local restaurants (something more stadiums should do). The barbecue vendor in the stadium happens to be run by Manny Sanguillen, a retired Pirates catcher, who sits and signs autographs for fans who are waiting in line. The view at PNC Park can’t be beat either: the low stands in the outfield mean that almost all of the fans in the stadium get a great view of the Pittsburgh skyline across the Allegheny River.

The game we wound up catching last Sunday was pretty damn good too. The game was scoreless through six and a half innings before a ridiculously strong thunderstorm moved through the Pittsburgh area and delayed the game for two hours. The rain delay proved to be a real spectacle, as ridiculously strong wind whipped rain around the park and lightning struck buildings that were easily visible in downtown Pittsburgh. Given that James and I had just moved to seats underneath the upper deck, we found the entire thing thoroughly entertaining, unlike a bunch of other people who got drenched. Surprisingly, given the number of baseball games I’ve attended, it was the first rain delay I’d ever experienced. Probably because most of the games I’ve been to have been during the summer in the Bay Area. After the rain delay, the Giants got a quick run on a home run, at which point the game slowed to a crawl as both managers did their best to try to out-think each other and make ridiculous substitutions, which is apparently the norm now for most National League games. The Pirates tied the game on a home run of their own, and after an excruciating couple of innings, the Pirates won on an RBI single in the bottom of the 10th. Barry Bonds pinch hit for the Giants in the top of the 10th (to an extremely loud chorus of boos from the Pittsburgh fans), and promptly got intentionally walked because first base was open. Stupid managing by Felipe Alou ensured that Bonds would get walked because of the way he pinch hit for his batters…

The trek back home to Boston from Pittsburgh wound up being an incredibly large pain. Due to the lack of major interstates running northeast from Pittsburgh, James and I were forced to wander around western Pennsylvania on rural highways before finally hitting I-80, after which we promptly managed to get stuck behind a bunch of trucks near central Pennsylvania. This eliminated any chance of getting to visit Muth, and it was 8 a.m. before we wound up getting back to Cambridge (after getting ridiculously tired on the way back home and stopping for food in Connecticut). The combination of the rain delay, extra innings, and driving delays caused us to arrive sixteen hours after we originally planned on leaving Pittsburgh. All in all an interesting experience…

Since the San Francisco Giants moved into their new ballpark, it’s been no big secret that a large portion of their fans have tended to look down on Oakland A’s fans as unsophisticated and aggressive morons. All of this said, of course, as the Giants fans sip their $7 espressos while eating their $10 sushi at “AT&T Park” (and trying to get one of their more baseball-savvy friends to explain this new-fangled “infield fly rule” to them). Incidents like this and this certainly don’t help the reputation of A’s fans. Given the generally “family-friendly” (and heavily corporate) atmosphere of their own ballpark, Giants fans might have been justified in looking down on A’s fans. Until tonight that is, when they went crazy because some umpire had the guts to throw out Barry Bonds (oh no!) after Bonds had the stupidity to act like a spoiled child and argue balls and strikes in the middle of a crucial at-bat in the bottom of the ninth inning.

I might be biased against Giants fans simply because I can’t understand why they continue to support Barry Bonds, who has consistently demonstrated himself to be the most egomaniacal, self-absorbed, and petulant player in all of professional sports (with the possible exception of Terrell Owens). It seems almost beyond all comprehension that Giants fans would go so far in their blind loyalty to him as to throw garbage on the field when he was ejected for acting like a complete fool. As the umpire explained, he gave Bonds “a lot of rope in that situation” and ejected Bonds only after he felt that he had given him every opportunity to stay in the game. And as bad as things might seem in Oakland to Giants fans, I can’t remember a single incident at the Coliseum where an opposing team was pulled off the field for their own safety as a direct result of fan behavior. There may be a few bad apples in Oakland, but nothing resembling the mass lunacy/personality cult that surrounds Bonds in San Francisco.

With my subscription to MLB.TV, I managed to watch an archived version of the Giants broadcast of the game. The funniest/most pathetic part of the entire incident occurred when Mike Krukow and Duane Kuiper (the Giants broadcasting team) were describing how fans in the upper deck were trying to chuck stuff on the field, but were failing and instead hitting people right below them. Perhaps the Giants should hold on-field arm strengthening sessions for their fans before future games. Fans could throw empty beer bottles at cardboard cutouts of umpires before the start of all future home games. The Giants could probably turn it into some sort of contest, perhaps sponsored by BALCO…

Umm, sorry for the lack of updates. I have a draft of a post with a bunch of updates that I haven’t completed yet. I’ll post it when I get back into Cambridge.

James and I decided to take a weekend trip to visit a couple of baseball parks, and settled on a two-day trip to Cleveland and Pittsburgh. We left Cambridge today (Saturday) morning, and after a long drive along I-90 through Massachusetts, New York, a tiny part of Pennsylvania, and northeastern Ohio, we arrived at Jacobs Field in Cleveland at around 6:15 p.m., about an hour before the Indians’ game against the Mariners. Our first pleasant surprise was discovering that there was metered parking available on the street about a block from the stadium. Our second pleasant surprise was finding out (from a Yankees fan, no less) that metered parking is free on Saturdays. After buying tickets from one weird-ass scalper (he paid $2 for a bottle of water I was carrying, which it turns out was good since I couldn’t carry it in to the stadium anyways), we headed in and proceeded to explore a little bit of the stadium. The game itself was a fairly decent pitchers’ duel, which the Indians lost 3-1.

Like any major-league stadium, Jacobs Field has its fair share of pros and cons, but it happens to mostly be pros in this case. The “Jake”, along with Camden Yards in Baltimore, was one of the first parks to be built in the modern wave of baseball stadium construction. Unlike just about all the other parks built during this period though, Jacobs Field is not really a “retro” park. The stadium has a very clean, simple, and thoroughly modern design, and it fits well in the rest of downtown Cleveland without going out of its way to include chintzy little details from the surrounding neighborhood (like the warehouse wall in San Diego) or ridiculous playing field quirks. Seating is comfortable, and just about all the sight lines are great (even in the nose bleed seats that we had). Combined with the great weather, it seemed like the perfect atmosphere for watching baseball. After the game, downtown Cleveland seemed to be full of people hanging out at local restaurants and bars, but not packed into the places shoulder-to-shoulder and with a line out the door (as would happen near Fenway). Apparently Jacobs Field has played a major part in revitalizing downtown Cleveland, which is really nice. And it turns out our convenient and free parking spot was also about 200 feet from the interstate on-ramp, which meant no real after-game traffic, the last (and perhaps most pleasant) surprise…

The Jake does have some drawbacks though. The ushers were downright dictatorial about keeping people out of empty sections for some reason, even though the ticket price for the sections was equivalent to that for the ticket we bought (James theorized that they were trying to avoid having cameras capture a pathetic image with just a couple of people in one of the more desolate sections). Food, as with all other parks, is stupid expensive. The video scoreboard, although ridiculously huge (supposedly the largest video screen at any sporting venue in the world), was rather poor at displaying pertinent information, with a little bit too much space devoted to useless crap like team ads and a line score that’s repeated all around the park. I’m sure we could probably write some better software to run the damn thing, because it definitely has potential…

Other than that though, the park was pretty damn good. It also felt really, really nice to get out of Boston for a while. I’m not sure what it is about the place now, but I kind of feel suffocated there…

Spending the night in Akron, Ohio before heading to Pittsburgh tomorrow for an afternoon Pirates game against the Giants. Then probably off to see Muth in Jersey. Will update when I get back home.

I love how old school RF/microwave engineering can be. Doug, my advisor at Draper, gave me a slide rule a few days ago as a gift. I initially dismissed the thing as an antique, and pushed it off into a corner of my desk. To my surprise, I’ve suddenly found the thing indispensable for performing quick and dirty transmission line calculations with the trombone lines that I’ve been messing around with. Since the alternative to using a slide rule is to plug away at some fairly annoying equations with a calculator (which isn’t terribly convenient when all you want is a rough estimate in lab), using a slide rule really is the most convenient way to do a lot of transmission line equations quickly (like figuring out the magnitude of reflection coefficient you need to get a VSWR of 10 while accounting for a line return loss of 0.5 dB).

The MegaRule!

On the front, the “MegaRule”, as it’s called, features ten correlated scales for various transmission line functions. The back has nifty formulas for each of these functions in terms of the value of the standing-wave ratio (SWR). The slide rule was apparently manufactured back in the day by the Analog Instruments Company, which was founded by none other than Phillip Smith himself. According to the manual, you can mail in to the company and order them for $3.75 a piece, but the manual was published in 1964, and somehow I don’t think the company’s in business any more.

And a million points to whoever can figure out the source for the title. I can’t seem to remember myself, although the quote keeps going through my head for some reason…