283: More Than Just a Dream

I feel a little bit like a broken record here, but I freaking love my girlfriend.

I don't have a ton more to say than that, both because knowing what to follow that with is hard, and because I feel like if I start being specific I don't know if I'll be able to stop, so I'm just going to leave it there. The title is a reference to the album by Fitz and The Tantrums, because Out of My League is a song we like to throw back and forth, it's accurate for apparently both of our feelings on the matter.

Today was super duper busy, but also pretty good, all things considered.

I had a quiz in Italian that I did not study for (see yesterday's post about how little I got done), but it actually went pretty well, and the class was fun, as always.

Wind Power was good; a little chaotic today, but we talked about what needed to be done, and I got to do a little more teaching to the rest of the team on exactly how the electrical systems work, because it's complicated, and most of them have almost no experience with circuits. We talked about the testing (more on that in a sec) that we needed to do, as well as competition specifics and stuff.

After that I went to 329 (microcontrollers), which I'm actually kind of liking. It's a good mesh of hardware and software, and the coding hasn't been anything too complex yet, so I'm still able to do it all, and I daresay do it well. I got the 2nd project working today, which was fantastic, and means that Friday is going to be super easy, because I just need to record the video and export my code.

308, the other EE class, was also great today. I genuinely feel like I'm learning so much in that class, in the last two weeks I've learned more than I learned in the entirety of 307, which is great, I love learning circuits and electronics stuff, but also super lame, because 307 was just a huge slog.

I had a clean hour after that, so I rolled library with like the entirety of squad, which was dope. It's been a while since we were all in the same place at the same time, and it's lovely to see everyone. We also have a new recruit, Rohan, who we all got to meet today, and seems cool. We didn't really get to talk, but I love meeting new people, especially people I know have been vetted as cool or interesting by those around me, so it'll be fun to see him more.

Italian Cinema was awesome today, we talked and wrote quite a bit about the movie we finished on Monday, which was great. I love writing, but I haven't written very long paragraphs or essays in a long while, and it was fun to just go for it, especially with my fountain pen. I also got to play tech support today, because Professoressa Teresiana has been having computer trouble in that class, and I was able to conclusively say that her laptop is the root cause (don't know why, just hates it), because my laptop worked. We'll see what she does about it, because it is a cal-poly supplied laptop, so she can definitely go bug them about it.

I had wind tunnel testing right after that, which went just about as poorly as possible, actually. Our goal today was to test the variable load, because we were pretty sure the hardware worked, and wanted to get it running, but it... didn't. We figured out (through much troubleshooting my mostly myself) that it was a hardware issue, and we had to do a few things. I jumped the end of the string of switched resistors back to the start, because the original design didn't make a full circuit, and then we also had to scrape off and jump a bunch of LEDs and resistors that were somewhere they didn't belong, because they were impeding the flow of current. I had to leave around 8 to get food, and so I didn't go insane, but reports from that endeavor are that it ended up working, which was such a relief. I was worried after I left that I would end up having to re-build the whole thing on short notice, which I really didn't want to be doing.