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So Anne was right. I spent more of my time with Cory this semester than with anyone or anything else, and it was by choice. Damn this American individualist work ethic mindset! All told, countless hours were spent in the confines of either 204B or 353, the consequence of being ambitious and tackling CS150 and EE141 simultaneously. The end result: two completed term projects, many many hours of sleep lost, a seemingly-chronic neglect of my girlfriend, and permanently damaged eyesight. Was it worth it? You be the judge...
From the outset, CS150 was supposed to be painful. Students from all walks of EECS and CS have notoriuosly become "brown box bitches" or in other words, slaves to the brown box and the Xilinx board inside. This was a well-documented fact, and I knew that. What I didn't expect was the peril that EE141 would cause. We, in effect, became "crappy-CAD-tool bitches," slaves to the gurus who knew how to use the tools but wouldn't tell us. With such a bleak outlook, it's no wonder we spent much of our time looking for simple pleasures.
It all started with the first official checkpoint for the 150 project - the MIDI parser. To hack the timing to make the thing work, ericlui and I made extensive use of the positive edge detector. Coming from a software background, we both decided it would make life easier to just turn that into its own symbol and make it more modular. Heeding the advice of Master (TA) Norm, we discovered the infamous Symbol Editor, and created our first unique symbol - the happy face!
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...and that was only the beginning. Along the way, those of us in EE141 encountered the malicious entity known as "the engling" - a lab TA who was in charge of the project who is some sort of insanely smart genius type who can't realize that we lowly undergraduates taking EE141 just can't catch on to his standards that quickly. That said, most of us spent more time than humanly sane in the confines of 353 Cory in front of those spiffy 21-inch monitors, subjected to the music of Andy and Muffy, which included such atrocities as the Backstreet Boys and 'N Sync. The horror, the horror!
And so on this one fateful day, the 22nd of April, it all finally came to a head. This was the day that Crazy Jim and I figured out that a little wire connecting the output of an inverter was missing...a small change that had monumental effects on our 141 project. It was also the infamous 12-hour 150 lab session with the oscilloscope where Eric and I hacked out the finishing touches on the 150 project. It was quite a catharsis, then to see this clean happy happy sine wave on the 'scope:
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Much euphoria and joy (and sleep) followed this final breakthrough, as we had finally done away with a little "hack" for timing and gotten it right. And just for kicks, here's what we did with a Parallel-to-serial bit shifter:
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So I wasn't ambitious enough to get any pictures of my frazzled self or any other of the frazzled lab rats. They would've killed me. Well, you know, right after killing the annoying people in lab...like those CS162 fools who invaded our 141 lab...