October 02, 2022
Link to Part 1.
After working for another week, I traveled with my family to Boston during the last week of June. We stayed in Boston (south of the Charles) and spent most of our time walking or biking around Cambridge. I was working during this trip, but the three-hour time difference enabled me to spend time with my family during the day and then work in the evening (starting at 16:00 EDT or later). We stayed within walking distance of the BPL Central Library in Copley Square, which turned out to be a convenient place to work and take meetings.
We arrived in Boston late Monday night, so we spent Tuesday walking around the city. We ate brunch at The Friendly Toast before visiting several landmarks such as Faneuil Hall and the Boston Common. I then went to the library for a couple hours before we all headed to one of the suburbs to visit our very close family friends (from when my parents lived in Boston [until I was one]) for dinner. Lots of fun and a great way to start the trip.
Everyone else woke up early on the 29th to go to Cambridge, so after waking up late (pre-planned since I was working late too) I took the green line to Park Street, transferred to the red line, and arrived at the Kendall/MIT station, where I regrouped with my family. (This was a minor accomplishment for me because it was the first time outside of air travel that I transferred on public transportation on my own.) Soon after, my sister and mom went home, so my dad and I ate lunch at a local Cambridge restaurant called Veggie Galaxy before biking back across the river. I worked a bit more and then ate dinner (alone) at Dig, a "build-a-bowl" restaurant, while my parents and sister went out to see a show.
I spent most of Thursday working at the library. My uncle and cousin joined us in the evening (my uncle ambushed me in the library while I was on a call with my manager), and all six of us went to dinner at an Italian restaurant called Double Zero. I'll paste my Google review here:
We forgot to make a reservation but we went early enough that there was space for our party of six. Several excellent vegan options that we shared. I had the eggplant calzone and parts of the truffle and margherita pizzas.
Be aware that portions might be bigger than advertised. Our waiter said the entrees were personal-sized, but then the entrees turned out to be more like 1.5x-person-sized and we had to take the whole cauliflower dish togo.
On the fourth day, all six of us biked to and around Cambridge before stopping to get lunch at flour bakery + cafe. We all biked back and then I worked for several hours at the library before regrouping with everyone else for dinner at Red White Ramen, a local vegan ramen restaurant.
Finally, on Saturday, our last day in Boston, my sister and I ate brunch together before the four of us headed to Western Massachusetts to drop my sister off at Tanglewood. We stopped for dinner in Springfield at an Italian restaurant called bNapoli, where I ate a lemon ricotta gnocchi, continuing a streak of tasty dinner meals. The next day, while my sister settled into her dorm, my parents and I walked around Lenox and explored the town. That evening (zeroth day dinner), Tanglewood hosted a family burger cookout where we ate (veggie) burgers and met some of the other students in the camp. My parents and I wished my sister good luck and went back to the hotel, but my dad and I were a bit bored so we drove to nearby Lee to get ice cream.
On Monday, we woke up "early" (07:00 - about halfway through my daily summer sleep schedule), drove back to Boston (without my sister), and flew back to DFW (I don't remember the airports being too chaotic despite it being the fourth of July). I enjoyed the whole trip and would love to return soon.
We spent a couple days in Dallas (Richardson/Plano) with my grandparents before taking them back with us to San Antonio. On the way back, we stopped in the Zilker neighborhood (formally, for my grandmother's birthday lunch) at a Thai restaurant called Super Thai Cuisine.
The food was great, here and in Massachusetts, and I'd love to return to each restaurant, but I did conclude that when I'm not on vacation, it's much easier and economically sound for me to cook for myself in my own kitchen -- on a related note, expect a future blog post titled "What I'm Cooking" or something similar.
Starting on the fourth of July in Dallas and then over the next couple of weekends, I also started teaching myself Haskell. I'm a casual user of Python's itertools and functools and enjoy reading code that uses these libraries, so it's been my goal for a long time to learn a purely functional programming language. I'm also a big fan of a book called To Mock a Mockingbird by Raymond Smullyan which explores combinatory logic by weaving it into a narrative, so expect a blog post about all of these topics at some point.
Near the beginning of August, my PhD mentor was getting ready to mount his microwave electronics setup onto the equipment rack. To reduce the number of lab power supplies he would need, he asked me to finish assembling my power PCB so we could use it instead. Since I was flying to Folsom the next Monday, I decided to drive up to Austin that Friday to try to knock out all of the soldering. I still had to do Friday's Intel work, so I arrived at the lab early in the morning, took a couple meetings, and worked for a few hours. After lunch, my PhD mentor demonstrated how to solder surface-mount ICs and supervised me as I practiced.
I soldered few more components onto my board before switching to the through-hole components. After successfully soldering a few of the 0.050" pitch 30-pin connectors, I misaligned the last one, and this caused a bit of chaos. While using the hot air gun to melt the solder on the 30-pin so I could rotate it correctly, one of the other header receptacles also desoldered, fell off the board, and had its solder re-solidify in the through-holes. I spent the rest of Friday trying to either get the solder out or shove the header back in. (I didn't want to use the hot air gun again because I was afraid yet another header would fall out.) I also had some more Intel work to finish up in the evening, so I ended up heading home around 21:45, taking Burnet to 183 to I-35 South for about a ninety-minute drive.
The next morning, I drove back up to the lab and arrived just past noon. I spent most of the afternoon continuing to remove the solder from the through-holes. I finally fixed all of my problems. After taking a medium-length dinner break, I soldered the last of my components, checking for any short circuits after each chunk of pins. By this time, it was 21:30 and my parents were texting me to not stay too much later. So, I plugged the power supply into my power PCB, measured voltages between various test points, and celebrated that everything was working as planned. Around 22:30, I closed up the lab and began the drive home.
Between two full-day commutes to Austin and back, I saw some crazy things, like a car in the left lane passing another car by going into the emergency lane. I conclude that driving on I-35 late at night is probably a bad idea. Apparently there are people who make the SATX to Austin commute every day. I understand there are reasons why they might do that, but I am glad this was merely a two-time occurrence for me.
After taking Sunday to recover from my intense two-day solder/desolder/solder/desolder operation, I flew to Folsom, California for the final week of my internship at Intel. My group at Intel wanted to host me for some end-of-internship activities, including two dinners and a trip to a local gelato place. The whole experience was fantastic. In particular, it was nice to have free-form interactions with people I had been messaging and video-calling all summer, and I felt fortunate to make these connections despite the internship nominally being "fully remote."
Upon returning to San Antonio, I quickly prepared to move into my apartment later that week. Although my summer was very dense, I was never stressed and I always felt relaxed. The upside of the internship being remote was that I got to spend a ton of time with my family, between running errands with them, lying on the couch while they were trying to work, and talking their heads off. I'll probably be out of town doing research next summer, so I was happy with how this summer went.