Summary of 99% of the People You’ll Meet in College
I just read this hilarious post over on the AskStudent blog, stereotyping a bunch of the people types you’ll run into at college. Click here to check it out.
Tag Archives: college
Inside your Computer, The Hard Disk Drive
The calculations are approximates and done by me, but most of the rest of this information was shamelessly borrowed from StorageReview.com. The video is from the Colorado State College of Engineering, Dr. David G. Alciatore, PE (“Dr. Dave”) website.
To many people, a hard disk is a “black box” of sorts–it is thought of as just a small device that “somehow” stores data. There is nothing wrong with this approach of course, as long as all you care about is that it stores data. If you use your hard disk as more than just a place to “keep stuff”, then you want to know more about your hard disk. It is hard to really understand the factors that affect performance, reliability and interfacing without knowing how the drive works internally. Fortunately, most hard disks are basically the same on the inside. While the technology evolves, many of the basics are unchanged from the first PC hard disks in the early 1980s.
Every hard disk contains one or more flat disks that are used to actually hold the data in the drive. These disks are called platters (sometimes also “disks” or “discs”). They are composed of two main substances: a substrate material that forms the bulk of the platter and gives it structure and rigidity, and a magnetic media coating which actually holds the magnetic impulses that represent the data. Hard disks get their name from the rigidity of the platters used, as compared to floppy disks and other media which use flexible “platters” (actually, they aren’t usually even called platters when the material is flexible.)
The platters are “where the action is”–this is where the data itself is recorded. For this reason the quality of the platters and particularly, their media coating, is critical. The surfaces of each platter are precision machined and treated to remove any imperfections, and the hard disk itself is assembled in a clean room to reduce the chances of any dirt or contamination getting onto the platters.
The read/write heads of the hard disk are the interface between the magnetic physical media on which the data is stored and the electronic components that make up the rest of the hard disk (and the PC). The heads do the work of converting bits to magnetic pulses and storing them on the platters, and then reversing the process when the data needs to be read back.
Read/write heads are an extremely critical component in determining the overall performance of the hard disk, since they play such an important role in the storage and retrieval of data. They are usually one of the more expensive parts of the hard disk, and to enable areal densities and disk spin speeds to increase, they have had to evolve from rather humble, clumsy beginnings to being extremely advanced and complicated technology. New head technologies are often the triggering point to increasing the speed and size of modern hard disks.
In a typical consumer hard drive like what’s in your computer now, the platter spins at 7,200 RPM (85 MPH on the outside edge), and the head can seek to a track (move from one place on the platter to another) in an average of 9ms ( 9 one thousandths of a second). The SCSI hard drives that are in servers and extremely high performance desktops spin at 15,000 RPM (180 MPH on the outside edge) and can seek in an average of 3.3ms. Take a look at this video clip demonstrating the seek speed of a typical consumer hard drive.
Random…
From “The DaVinci Code”
“Oxford College Theatre Club. They still talk of my Julius Cesar. I’m certain that nobody has performed the first act of sceen III with more dedication.”
“I thought Cesar was dead in that sceen”
“Yes, but my toga tore open as I fel and I had to lay on stage for half an hour with my tallywacker hanging out. Even so, I never moved a muscle. I was brilliant I tell you.”
RIP – Statics
It may even turn out that I won’t need to take this class; I’m applying to Sac State and UC Davis. The Sac State application has Electrical Engineering as the primary major, with Computer Science as a second choice. The Davis application is a Computer Science Major application. So if I become a C.S. major, static would have been a waste of my time.
Otherwise today turned out ok, it started pretty bad. I’ve been playing catch-up in math too, but I finally got caught up last night and this morning before class (I’m actually ahead now), I did about 200 math problems in about 6 hours to get there. Then, I actually left early for class! I keep leaving late and getting there just in time. Park my car (went early, parking was easier, yay). Get out … reach for my backpack containing 6 hours of hard work that’s due in 15 minutes … Damn-it Kyle! You’re a freaking moron! I left my backpack at home … grrrrrr, and its no cakewalk to go home and get it (but I did, 6 hours of homework WILL get turned in damn-it!). I live about 45 minutes, one way, from the school. So I made the trip, got to class and the gorgeous teacher kindly accepted my somewhat late homework.
After that the day got better. There is a girl in my History class who has my attention at the moment, she has the most beautiful smile, anyway, we did some group work together today which a nice opportunity to have a little chat time. Now I just have to suck it up and ask for her phone number or something (should have done it today, you fool). 
I hate this part. Wish me luck.
Creative Outlets
Classes started again last week. I’ve got a pretty easy load this semester (which it should be by now, since I’m in my 5th semester at a junior college grr…) 4 classes in total, Calculus (repeating to bump up my grade), Engineering Statics (fun class 
), US History, and an intro to Accounting class.
I figure as long as I can keep up with homework (honestly a challange for me sometimes) I should have no problem getting a 4.0 this semester. Thats my academic goal for this semester, my first post High School 4.0.
On the creative front, I’ve been doodling in a bunch of diffrent mediums. As I briefly noted before I’ve become a deviant and I’ve done a couple things for my portfolio, but nothing of real substance. At work I’ve been working on a marketing campaing that has consumed most my creative time. Basically I’ve created a whole new image for the company so that by the end of this month we can start pushing our name out in front of new clients, mostly in the Sacramento and Bay Area. The first phase of this campain is to send out postcard like mailers that simply show off what we can do with the intent of getting people to give us a call, or visit our website (which is also being re-worked, more in a bit).
The whole image started with this postcard design. The building is a redering of an arena that we helped design being built in Stockton. From there a few concepts came out, like the black background to make the logo pop, and the question/answer tagline. The whole campain is revolving around the “Creative Solutions for Complex Designs” slogan. The word ‘Problems’ was changed to ‘Designs’ after this orignal postcard was created.
After that came another postcard design, one which actually has made it almost all the way to the print shop (was about to send it today, but a couple things caught my eye). I have an early version also in my scraps at deviantArt here As soon as I fix the few things I’ll actually publish the front and back of the card and link to them from here so you can all take a look.
There is also to be a tri-fold brosure done on 8.5×14″ (22×36cm) 100lb glossy paper. This is for a more lasting impact on a prospective or VIP client as it contains more images, more descriptions etc. I dont have any avalible images of what this is going to look like, its still kind of early in its design, but the same kinds of themes apply. The cover is solid black, with nothing but the logo, out website address and the slogan “Creative Solutions for Complex Problems”. The rest is black text on a white background (mostly) to make it easy to read. Its also being designed so if we wanted to mail it out, we could with a blank back.
Lastly, the website is getting a face-lift, as well as some implants. First, I’ve only started on the design so at the moment it does not render well in Internet Explorer (and probably others) so if you want to view it how I intended, you should use FireFox. You can take a look by going to http://www2.electdesign.net. The bigest change is that I’m trying to do it all using a portal system so that later down the road just about anyone can make additions and changes to the site. The Embassy Suites Riverfront page is an example of a complete thought on how project pages should look, as well there are some neat features like the image of Bill in the ‘EDC Expands …‘ news article.
So thats been my visually creative outlet, but I’ve also expanded a little (and probably poorly) into some audio stuff as well. KWOD, the local radio station is doing a competition to see who can do the best remix of the NIN song ‘Only’. So, I downloaded the source files, and a trial of Sony ACID Pro and started mixing. It was WAY easier than I thought it was going to be, and what I ended up with I thought wasn’t half bad for a first attempt. I actually have two, the second was just the addition of another, faster beat track and isn’t polished well but I wanted to know what people thought. Constructive critisizim is very welcomed:
NIN – Only [Indemnity83 MIX]
NIN – Only [Beat Track MIX]
So thats probably going to have to be the end of this post, mostly because its 10PM now, and I haven’t started my homework yet.
To New Beginnings
Well, this particular domain name [dormlife.us] has gone though a lot of things. Originally it started out hosting my very first dynamic website created in ASP. As any programmer likely knows, the easiest way to learn a new language is to have a project and just go. So I did my best to create what I thought was a better alternative to a particular “rate me” site. I dont think I ever quite got it fully functional, and after my lease expired with the ASP host I moved to Linux based hosting, and PHP.
PHP Has since become my favorite language, now I have trouble sometimes at work concentrating on what I’m working on, and thinking about how I would do it in PHP Cool.
Now all that said, I am still a college student, majoring in Electrical Engineering, with a minor in Computer Science. I also am currently (though May 2004) the President of a Boy Scout Venture Crew, comprised of young men and women between 16 and 21 who love to be outdoors, and have a good time. So needless to day, I keep quite busy.
But as the subject states, here’s to new begginings. Starting with the theme setup here at Dormlife. As of this writing its about 4 hours of work (mostly in trying to figure out how to do Flash programming) so it will need some cleaning up. And I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to actualy release it to the public as I need to contact the respective owners of various pieces (or make my own, which isn’t likely to happen). There is a possiblilty of becomming Sole, or lead developer on an already started project, for which I helped develop. That is Mark Hamill’s Email Digests.
There are other MOD’s that I have done, but generally they are too specific for me to put the work into creating official MOD’s out of. The biggest project was my Forummark project, who’s story I’ll leave for another day. The other project is the site for the aformentioned Venture Crew. I may make the Portal looking theme that is on both sites avalible someday.
So many things to do, so little time.
