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Edumacation & Lizife

February 27, 2003 • school, electronics, life • 999 words • about a 4 minute read

So I haven’t posted in a while. I’ll just try to catch up on everything that’s happened and maybe post some links to some cool stuff I’ve been messing with

School Stuff

  • The first test I took was on Monday for EET 257. I felt pretty good as it was over stuff that I had a good handle on. Topics included:
    • heat sinking equations
    • wire inductance (a carry over from the first test since a lot of people missed(???) that one)
    • A question about a collector feedback common-emitter amplifier (tanked on that one, again(!))
    • transistor switch design, a few questions about voltage levels in a series of different switching transistors
    • a question involving a MOSFET switch and calculations regarding the necessity of a heatsink (and the max temperature of the operating environment)
    • Finally there was a small blurb about an H-Bridge Circuit and the placement of a shotky diode across an inductive load I recieved a 93 on this test due to my failure on the Collector-feedback common emitter question. Apparently I’m not the only one because we were informed there would be a quiz on the topic friday.
  • We took a test for EET 231 last night and I think that I did ok on it. Not stellar by any means but I am sure hoping that I did better than my score of 72 on the previous test in this class.
  • Took a quiz today over Summarization and Aggregation in my CPT 430 class. I don’t think I did very well ;). I got the non-S&A questions right though.
  • Last week we had a network design problem due for CPT 430. We had a week (or more, I can’t remember now) to get this problem in order. We had to create a network and assign subnets in a classful manner as well as in a classless manner. In addition we had to create a summarizaton and aggregation diagram from the classless scenario. Things went well until I actually tried to rally my group together to work on the project. Communication problems as well as schedule conflicts were encountered throughout the week. I finally made the decision on weds or thurs of that week to simply divide the project into four parts, assign them via e-mail, and set a deadline for all submissions to be e-mailed to me. Well I did just that at work. Later me and Doug got together to work on his and my part in his office. I recieved a series of emails from one group member about how he was having difficulties with his part (summarization and aggregation) and how he had gone to see our professor for help. However, that was the last i had heard from him.

    I had set our deadline for 7pm last Friday and I hadn’t recieved anything before that time :o. I got doug’s fully diagramed and laid out stuff around 8pm and got to work on integrating his and my work into the required power-point file. I never did get a response from the third group member so I ended up doing his part. I got it done and emailed out in time but I doubt we got everything 100% correct. Ah well, such is life in CPT ;)
  • I also had a bit of a nightmare in my EET 257 lab last week. I got this week’s lab and that one transposed. Normally that might be such a egregious error if this weeks lab had not required a pre-lab or bringing any lab sheets with us. So I brought nothing but my parts and tools with me expecting the impromptu lab when in reality it was a lab that occured in our lab manuals and required those sheets. Now I totally admit it was my error in mixing up the labs. I can handle that ;). However I held out some hope since there is an area on the class’ website labeled “LABORATORIES” and it has links to PDFs of each lab. This would lead me to believe that these PDFs are printable versions of the labs in our manual in case someone like me were to forget their copy. It turns out that these PDFs are somewhat like our real lab reports except NOT AT ALL. They were totally unusable and out of date. I finally was able to goad my lab instructor to get a photocopy of his copy but that took a good 1.5 hours (he was very busy helping the more responsible lab students :)). In any case I got two of my four circuits built and signed off. Lucky for me this week was especially hard one some groups and we are allowed (this week only) to turn in lab reports late. That means I am going to have to do two lab reports next week (UGH). HOWEVER, it was announced in class yesterday that if, on the next two labs only, we complete a special bonus requirement in lab we do not have to do a write up. I am going to try and do that, but it will probably be hard to do since I have to finish up the last two circuits of the previous weeks lab. :-/

Life

  • I got the cutest green teddy bear from Jacqui with a music box that plays the theme from the movie “Love Story.” This is significant because I’ve told her on many occasions that I really miss a bear that I used to sleep with as a child that was both green and played love story. It was a very thoughful and wonderful gift and it makes me very happy to know that I’m with just a wonderful girl :D :D
  • Being my birthday last week I got some money. Don’t worry, most of it went to good use (food) but the $20 from Will Read and some of my paycheck went towards more TNG box sets!