the cereal king

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.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 2nd, 2007 at 3:38 am and is filed under baseball, classes, friends, games, job, thesis. 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.