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 …
September 15, 2022
I just added a page on my research to this website!
In accordance with this theme, I just wrote a little bit about my first project in the Quantum Circuits Group -- keep reading!
I designed a voltage divider and low-pass filter circuit which delivers constant current to a magnetic coil while also dissipating any noise. I was simultaneously taking the circuit theory course, so it was a great learning experience to actually be modeling/simulating/building my own (more complicated) RC filter while we were learning about (less complicated) RC filters in class.
The first part of …
September 06, 2022
As the fall semester ramps up, I wanted to make a post about what I did this summer. Without too much more of a preamble, here we go (part 1 -- I forgot that my writing tends to go long, so breaking it up seems logical).
After finishing my electromagnetic engineering final (on a Wednesday), my mom picked me up, I loaded the car, and we drove home from Austin to San Antonio. I spent the rest of that week relaxing, driving my sister to her activities, and running miscellaneous errands (this is the best way to …
July 02, 2022
I'm a pretty big Star Trek fan. I've seen every movie (many of them several times) and almost every episode (I skipped some from Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: Voyager that looked uninteresting or received bad reviews, and I'm still watching Star Trek: The Animated Series). And whenever I'm watching, I repeatedly pause to reference Memory: Alpha (the online Star Trek wiki/encyclopedia) for details on characters, locations, and other important information.
June 19, 2022
It's been three years since I first started this blog, and a few weeks ago I finally got around to implementing a simple blog platform using Django. Moving the blog from Blogger to a Django app means it is now nicely integrated into the rest of my website, which I upgraded from static HTML files to a Django project a year ago. In celebration of this redesign (of both the website and now the blog), I'm going to provide some updates and reboot the blog (hence the title of this post).
In my first post three years ago, I had …
August 06, 2019
One TV show I finished watching recently is Sherlock, starring Benedict Cumberbatch in BBC's modern take on the famous detective. The music is fun to listen to, and the producers do a great job of developing Sherlock as a character, integrating him into the present-day (2010), and breaking down his thought process when he arrives at the most seemingly-ridiculous conclusions.
I also just finished House MD on Amazon Prime a couple of days ago. House MD stars Hugh Laurie as Gregory House, MD (House being a play on Holmes), a genius diagnostician and infectious disease specialist. I would …
July 28, 2019
Everyone knows you can get college credit from taking AP exams. What not everyone knows is that in Texas, you can also get high school credit from taking AP exams, according to an obscure provision in the Texas Administrative Code (the published set of rules and regulations from all of the state agencies in Texas).
According to Title 19 (Education) Part 2 (Texas Education Agency) Chapter 74 (Curriculum Requirements) Subchapter C (Other Provisions) Rule 74.24 (Credit by Examination) section (c) (Assessment for course credit in Grades 6-12) (link)
(8) A student in any of Grades 6-12 must be given …
July 23, 2019
We just came back from a fun vacation in Seattle, Vancouver, and Whistler this past week. It was a fun, relaxing trip and we were able to visit some scenic spots both in the cities and out.
We spent the first two days at the Whistler/Blackcomb ski resort about an hour north of Vancouver. It is customary for ski resorts to offer mountain biking and hiking in the non-skiing (summer) season, so the typical thing for non-mountain-bikers like us to do is to take a gondola (apparently not pronounced gun-Daa-laa) up to the top of the mountain. Interestingly, the ski …
July 16, 2019
This past weekend, I had the privilege of attending the 2019 Bruhan Maharashtra Mandal (BMM) at the Kay Bailey Hutchinson Convention Center in Downtown Dallas. This biennial conference is a chance for the North American Marathi population to congregate every so often and share Marathi culture.
I see my relatives relatively often, so for me this was less of a family reunion and more of a chance to practice my Marathi speaking abilities with a crowd that spoke majority Marathi. Obviously, my speaking abilities aren't near how much I speak English good, but I felt comfortable communicating with the various …
July 09, 2019
I finally recycled my old HP Pavilion dm4 (model 3055dx I think) that I've had for seven years. The computer was first my mom's for our India summer trip, and then I used it for much of middle school. I opened the computer to test it out recently and the fan kept making a funny noise, so this was the right time to say goodbye.
This was my first Windows machine, the infamous computer that temporarily broke our iMac and where I learned most of the hardware-related things I know. It was a powerful machine when we …