a recent history in image sequence » ECE

Computing the Arts

Dean — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 05:24:15 +0000

Yesterday before class I shot a portrait of Alan Craig, a researcher at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). He showed me his project, which was a way to take a photo in a book and make it interactive. The problem was, a photo of him at his desk demoing with a webcam and a piece of paper didn’t work out too well, and screenshots he provided would have probably filled that void. Instead, I decided to go for more of a portrait and play up the “computing” side of the story. Here is Alan standing in the machine room at the NCSA.

The story for it ran, but Alan’s mention in the article got cut, and logically my photo got bumped too. Blerg. Also, after having read the story I probably needed to play up the Arts/Humanities aspect of the projects, but I’m not sure how I might have incorporated it (him holding a book?). Double blerg.

I was a little late for my biosensors lab after the quick photoshoot, but it didn’t matter since most of that lab is pipetting micro-liter amounts of proteins into plate wells followed by long periods of waiting for the EMS machine to take measurements. During the downtime we watched youtube videos (I was sitting on the floor):

What A Nerd

Dean — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 22:06:15 +0000

Johnny is taking a freshman level ECE course. Why???

Enter Finals Week

Dean — Fri, 02 May 2008 04:44:28 +0000

This is my sixth head-to-head battle against the monster known to students as final exams. I hate school, and am appropriately procrastinating by taking pictures of my Solid State book and writing this post.

N-Type Doping in A Silicon Semi-Conductor

Dean — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 22:06:47 +0000

Instead of studying for my ECE 440 exam, I’m updating my blog. Here’s a picture from last Friday in that class:

… and here are my notes:

As you can see I tend to wander off. But I do take good notes, I swear. The next page has all the equations from the blackboard in the first picture, sometimes I skip a page just so I can draw on it.

The Life of an Engineer

Dean — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 22:35:53 +0000

I’m taking a photography class this semester and so far it’s been fairly enlightening. I’ve been meaning to go out into the world and capture meaningful moments with my artistic eagle eye. But I feel like I haven’t. Today, I sort of realized something…

The life of an engineer is somewhat bleak. I have been meaning to go shoot things around me, but haven’t because everything around me feels so hum-drum. These days, it feels like all I do is study and do homework. Sure, I have the weekends, but sometimes those are busy, too, especially when fulfilling obligations I have to school, my family, friends, fraternity, et cetera. And they’re only 2.5 days long! Everything around me feels somewhat uninspired right now. For this class, I’ve been taking way too many pictures of random, meaningless things (hats, action figures, et cetera) in my room. I take my camera with me to class on some days, but I only have classes in three different buildings this semester, so everything always feels the same Monday thru Friday. And it’s the same in the real world, too. I’ve had a taste of living in a white-collared world where you wake up at 6am every morning, commute for an hour, work, eat lunch, go back to work, and then go back home. You work for the weekends, but the weekends only last for so long.

In any case, hopefully I’ll find something meaningful and inspiring to make me feel less sorry for my major. Until then, I’ll be looking at all the “easy” LAS (Liberal Arts & Science) majors and wishing I was them for a little bit.