the cereal king

Damn, it’s been a long time between posts…again. Stuff has been hectic since I got back from India. Where to begin…

India, as usual, was crazy. Far too many things going on with family, too little time, and a bunch of surreal experiences. Like a birthday party for a one-year old that was put on like an extravagant wedding, with over a thousand invited guests and a ridiculous rock garden setting. Or like when I realized that Engrish is now suddenly widespread in India, and found on seemingly everything (from t-shirts to restaurant menus to even advertising billboards). One particularly fine example was the t-shirt I saw with random tidbits from an Adaptec SCSI CD-ROM drive manual. While Engrish seems like it might almost be an acceptable trend in Japan given the general lack of English comprehension, it seems baffling that it could have spread so quickly in India given that English is the mandated language of instruction in almost all schools. Maybe nobody actually bothers reading any of the crap that these people print. “Oooh, look, shiny English words…”

Coming back from India meant moving out of Random and into the new apartment. The apartment is awesome, and living with Sam and James is proving to be a blast. The only real downside of moving in was the endless hours spent assembling IKEA furniture (the reason why it’s so cheap). It was almost like a sick game from a reality television show (Survivor, perhaps?) the first night when we were absolutely exhausted but had to assemble our beds and haul our mattresses up the stairs before we could fall asleep. At least we have trendy Swedish furniture now though. Living in a new neighborhood is nice, and being a few hundred feet from the Galleria means that we finally have reasonable access to a Taco Bell and a Burger King again (always a high priority). Anybody have a good idea for an apartment name though? We’re stumped, although we kind of like the idea of just constantly changing it to something random…

The beginning of the month also brought about a new job working at Draper Laboratory on my thesis. It’s gone well so far, besides the realization that I’ll need to get a new cell phone since my old one has a camera (thanks, paranoid bureaucrats). Anybody have any good recommendations for a camera-less, GSM phone with GPRS or EDGE (and maybe Bluetooth)?

I’ve been reading tons of papers so far on Class E and Class F high-efficiency power amplifiers, and trying to figure out how to create a lumped-element version of the transmission-line amplifier that we currently have fabricated. The circuit needs to get smaller and denser, and hence no more fun transmission-line tricks. For Wahby: it turns out that based on the harmonic terminations in our load network, it’s hard to characterize the current amplifier as either Class E or Class F. There’s a long explanation for it, but basically it turns out it’s the best way to maximize the fundamental component of the output voltage waveform while staying within device limits.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 16th, 2006 at 2:55 am and is filed under MIT, thesis, travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.