Outside, it is snowing.
There is not much more for me to say. I have wanted a lot and hoped a lot and wished for many, many things, and in the end they were, once again, not mine to begin with. I have horrible doubts now, and yet I wish for them to stay, because without doubts there will be truth, and I do not know if I can take the truth.
I have, once again, forgotten to heed my own advice. I have gone beyond where I should have gone, and have suffered as a result. There is not much left to say, except that I should have known this, and thus, I have no one to blame but myself. I alone could have prevented this. And yet I failed.
I once said to Tea that I wasn't sure about this. I told Yuma that this, whatever it was, was not to stay because I was incapable of it. Yet I still went along. I lost myself halfway and here I am, trying to piece myself together. It is always easier to lose yourself, because there are two people to do it, but much harder to find yourself again, because there is only one person left for that.
This ending is much like the previous one, and so I know how it will go. I know how I will respond and how everything will evolve because despite all these years I have not learned anything in this aspect. I know each obsessive move I will take, and how much they will hurt me in return, and yet I can't stop them. They are ingrained in my heart.
Perhaps this limbo feeling will last for another year. Perhaps shorter, perhaps longer. And then I will see how foolish I have been all along, and perhaps then it will finally end.
All of this has been a horrible, horrible dream. And yet, at the end, I don't want to wake up from it. I will drag the sleep and snooze as long as I can, I will because I always have, because I hate to be the last one. I hate to be left alone.
There were many things I wish I could have said in person, but alas, this end is much like the previous one, and even my method of saying goodbye is the same, because there is no other way. I am the one left behind, this time and the last, and something in me tells me I should not do this anymore. All of this trust, it hurts more in the end, and when the labyrinth is broken I must build it back up again, stone by stone.
But dwelling on the pain will make it hurt even more. Perhaps it is time again to say goodbye to another world, another place that is no longer mine. At least the memories will be kept pristine. And in a few years I will forget the pain and only remember the good, and I will be happy. I will. For a short time, at least, because happiness and love, they are not mine to have, and like Roscuro with his light, they are things I will never truly have.
The snow is still falling. The first snow of the year. I stare at his gray dot and know he will never come back. It is not in people's natures to do so, not for me, at least. I wish I could have said many, many things, and I wish I could have done so much more, but in the end they have all come back to haunt me.
At least the snow is constant.
One year ago, I should have known better. I should have said no from the very beginning.
But now, I do. And perhaps next time, I will know enough to do so.
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Eckleburg's Eyes
Maybe I have misplaced my dreams.
I, too, am clinging onto a past that will not repeat itself. I, too, remember the precise moment we first looked each other in the eyes and knew. I had reveled in the frivolousness for as long as I could, but the dance always ends. The party always wanes. I am picking up the dirty vodka glasses and staring out my window. Across the water.
The light is still there, it is still beckoning to me.
It hurts me to know the night has ended, but promises of tomorrow dulls the pain. At least I am not deluded in the placement of devotion.
And maybe this is where I have gone wrong. I am hosting these grand, majestic galas every night. Throngs of people come, in their fancy cars and glittering dresses and shrill giggles. He comes too, his eyes lock on mine and I know they are promising a night of laughter and warmth. They are promising to make up for the other nights.
Those nights.
Those nights when I would beg at his door for him to come, and he would slam the door in my face. Those nights when he would say, "I'd love to spend the night with you, but there are a million things I'd rather do." Those nights, when, even though he would begrudgingly accept my invitation, he would yell at me and tug on my arms to make me dance faster.
We all know how this story was supposed to end.
There is a part of me that looks at my reflection and wonder when I will stop keeping up this charade. When I will have found what I am looking for.
I want him to show up uninvited, to offer me his hand sincerely, to hold me in his arms and tell me that I am the apple of his eyes. That there is no one else and nothing else that matters more to him, definitely not the girl who lives with him, the girl he calls his wife, his life, his future.
It is selfish of me. She is much more prestigious than I could ever be. Her words and her allure beckons thousands of people every year to pay her tribute, while I, in my loneliness, cannot even win over the boy who has sworn he loves me. I am throwing these parties, I am grasping at straws, but the night always ends, and he retreats to her shadows again.
And I cannot wait anymore. It will destroy me. It has destroyed greater people, people who have achieved much more wealth and honor than I ever have. These nights will one day consume me whole and spit out my bones in contempt. And the red ribbon will flutter, and the breath will slowly escape from my lungs, and the sounds of the music will fade.
I will be underwater, in the pool, with my eyes wide open, basking in the lulling silence.
We all know how this story ends.
I, too, am clinging onto a past that will not repeat itself. I, too, remember the precise moment we first looked each other in the eyes and knew. I had reveled in the frivolousness for as long as I could, but the dance always ends. The party always wanes. I am picking up the dirty vodka glasses and staring out my window. Across the water.
The light is still there, it is still beckoning to me.
It hurts me to know the night has ended, but promises of tomorrow dulls the pain. At least I am not deluded in the placement of devotion.
And maybe this is where I have gone wrong. I am hosting these grand, majestic galas every night. Throngs of people come, in their fancy cars and glittering dresses and shrill giggles. He comes too, his eyes lock on mine and I know they are promising a night of laughter and warmth. They are promising to make up for the other nights.
Those nights.
Those nights when I would beg at his door for him to come, and he would slam the door in my face. Those nights when he would say, "I'd love to spend the night with you, but there are a million things I'd rather do." Those nights, when, even though he would begrudgingly accept my invitation, he would yell at me and tug on my arms to make me dance faster.
We all know how this story was supposed to end.
There is a part of me that looks at my reflection and wonder when I will stop keeping up this charade. When I will have found what I am looking for.
I want him to show up uninvited, to offer me his hand sincerely, to hold me in his arms and tell me that I am the apple of his eyes. That there is no one else and nothing else that matters more to him, definitely not the girl who lives with him, the girl he calls his wife, his life, his future.
It is selfish of me. She is much more prestigious than I could ever be. Her words and her allure beckons thousands of people every year to pay her tribute, while I, in my loneliness, cannot even win over the boy who has sworn he loves me. I am throwing these parties, I am grasping at straws, but the night always ends, and he retreats to her shadows again.
And I cannot wait anymore. It will destroy me. It has destroyed greater people, people who have achieved much more wealth and honor than I ever have. These nights will one day consume me whole and spit out my bones in contempt. And the red ribbon will flutter, and the breath will slowly escape from my lungs, and the sounds of the music will fade.
I will be underwater, in the pool, with my eyes wide open, basking in the lulling silence.
We all know how this story ends.
Thursday, November 10, 2011
You Don't Come Here To Work
Or so I have been told, by the computer club people. I spent four hours or so working on two half-written java programs, and although it's not as productive as I normally am, I did learn some new things. Like commenting with /** * */ (and more * if necessary) for java docs and using PrintStream to avoid typing out repetitive, long commands.
I also discovered a bunch of really creepy Windows backgrounds, had the most bizarre conversation on pedophilia that I ever have had (to be fair I have not had many of those to begin with), and watched our club presidents get turned into an arbitrary communist government's head officials.
Well, if you ever wanted to be surrounded by weird things at Fish Wings, you know where to go now.
I also discovered a bunch of really creepy Windows backgrounds, had the most bizarre conversation on pedophilia that I ever have had (to be fair I have not had many of those to begin with), and watched our club presidents get turned into an arbitrary communist government's head officials.
Well, if you ever wanted to be surrounded by weird things at Fish Wings, you know where to go now.
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Stories Of The Past
German, to me, is a true foreign language.
Whereas I can converse perfectly well in English, slightly less so in Chinese, much less so in French, and barely so in Spanish, I know not a phrase of German. I could not go up to someone in Germany and say, "Hello," in their own language, although I am sure if I said it in English there will still be people who understand me.
I know almost nothing of the German culture as well, and I am sure the bastardization of Oktoberfest that our university pushes out as a feeble excuse to drink (like they ever need one) is not a good representative. There is so much about the land I do not know, cannot ever know because I was not born and raised there. Even if, as a 20-something-year-old, I decide to move to Germany for the rest of my life, I will never know everything that a native German will know.
It is the subtle things. I am not sure I know all of those even in America, in Canada, much less in China. There are so many stories, so many faint traces of the past, that the Chinese value subconsciously, and that I am no longer a part of despite my Chinese heritage.
All I have are the visible things.
. . .
In Vermont, the mountains loom tall.
Not as tall as the Rockies, but mountains have no comparison. They are loners standing their ground. In Vermont, these mountains have seen through a revolution. They have weathered blood and rain. They have stood by as promises were made and vows broken and lives betrayed and dreams born.
As the car drives by, I look out the window. The lush trees of summer belie no hint of what Vermont is to most people, maple syrup and snow. I have told people Vermont is more than that, to many confused looks. I tell them it is a dairy state, perhaps not as famous as Wisconsin but a dairy state just as well. I tell them the history, the Green Mountains and their boys, Ethan Allen, Benedict Arnold.
This is their land. And the land never lies.
Vermont now is a peaceful state, or as peaceful as it can ever be. The green pastures and overarching trees lull people into a sense of nostalgia. It is the old East, and it still retains its dark past and poisonous shadows, but for now it is peaceful.
We stop at the rest area we always stop at. There is something to be said here, about habits, about coincidences, about many things in life that fit into convenient stories.
But we get off, stretch our legs, go inside and look at the map tacked onto the wall as if it were the first time we were seeing it. We take our hands and measure the distance we have traveled, and how much more we still have to go. We, too, are re-enacting history. We are forging our own terra incognita and charting them to fit the terrains of our hearts.
. . .
Our family is a family built upon road trips.
Ever since we got a car, back in 1999, every trip I had made that did not involve going somewhere half a world away were road trips. I have a special attachment to the land, to the roads. They are what I grew up on, like some kids grow up on sunshine and lemonade and backyard gossip circles.
We were living the American Dream, in a silly, distorted way. We would walk the sidewalk paved in gold and drive down every road. We went out west, we tried our hands at the "work hard and strike it rich" model. We walked out with resilient, optimistic spirits and an oddly-formed humor and our own shot at the American middle class, along with red knots hung on our doors and plastic bags stuffed inside our dishwasher for later use.
I built my dreams on the road. Trips were no longer about the destination, but about the journey in its most literal way. I hated it when the car slowed to a stop, because that meant the journey was over and the destination was here.
And once the destination was here, it would be over all too soon.
The first time we traveled to somewhere not half a world away in a plane, we went to Las Vegas. We hopped out of the plane and onto another car and headed straight for Grand Canyon. We were on the road, the only thing I was familiar with. Arizona roads are not anything like Massachusetts roads, but they are still roads. The desert sings its own song too, one of pioneers and settlers and miracles and tragedies and thousands of years of heritage shuffling in the wind.
But the destination.
The destination was different. The Grand Canyon was something beyond my imagination, beyond even my appropriations of its grandeur.
This was the first trip where we wanted to come back immediately, and the first trip where we were not driving all the time, where we had time to sit and watch the snow drift down without shivering in a car.
. . .
We read an interview of Murakami by Spiegel in class a few weeks ago. Peter said that Murakami was arrogant. He cited the two places where Murakami was asked about other people's books, and once he replied, "It's boring," and the other, of J. D. Salinger and his book Catcher in the Rye, "He did not win his fight against his poison," or something like that. He definitely mentioned the poison.
I do not remember the book as much as I would like to, but I do remember the poison part. I remember Holden Caulfield saying everyone was phony and thinking, that is true, that is very true. I have still not forgiven the backs.
I, too, write from my poison. I draw my sources from the darkest tortures of my mind and place them on paper. The pen is my sword, the page my battlefield, and I am waging war, against my past, against my fears, against my madness.
What that says about me, and about the stories I write, I am not sure. I write about death, even though I have never experienced death that hit too close. Is that symbolic of something? What of Katie when she sees Nick's ghost haunting her mind? Is that symbolic of something?
. . .
Pain is always close to me. So is separation.
Jessica asked me the other day how I dealt with it. The whole long-distance relationship thing. She was missing her ex-boyfriend. I told her we set aside time for each other. And as I was saying those words I felt the hypocrisy inside me.
Over the weekend, I went on a trip with our university's queer group to a cabin in a rural part of the area. One of the nights, we had a talent show, and one guy sat in front of the keyboard while another sang Coldplay's "The Scientist." I heard the words, "Nobody said it would be easy," and I could not stop the tears.
I had not spoke of the late night calls, when we would both be so exhausted and yet so mad at the other and so frustrated with ourselves. I had not spoke of the boxes of tissues lying in my garbage bin, the tear stains still on my laptop, the ribbon tied precariously on the ladder, the coins strewn on a grassy field near the river. Some nights I think I must be psychotic, to know how much this hurts me and yet still hang on.
I still wear the half of the ring, even though I know he does not wear the other half anymore. The other day someone in my English class saw it and asked, "Are you married? Are you engaged?"
I wish I knew the answer, but I am not so sure it is all that I need anymore. Yuma once said he was living through things day by day. I am not that kind of person. If I let things fall day by day, I will eventually lose it. It is what I do with everything.
Here, yet again, it is the journey, not the destination. I must remind myself that, and yet the destination blurs with each day.
. . .
I do not actually know much about my past.
For the past sixteen or so years, I have gone around piecing together my identity. Where do I belong? There is that generic statement of my heritage, what am I in terms of Chinese or American or Canadian or some mix of the three. But for me, this question is personal. It is tied with my longing for the road, my sense of safety among the land.
It is a question of where I belong, physically, not in terms of ethnicity or some arbitrary, culturally-entrenched definition.
If there is a past for me, it is a constant search for a place I can call home. Somewhere along the way, I have lost it, and I am now on the trek to rediscover it. Everything else is blurry. What places I have been to, what people I have talked with, they are constantly replaced with the new places I go to and the new people I talk with. I remember snippets, like Polaroids pasted in a scrapbook.
But this time, I do not want to let go. I do not want to forget. There is something here that is worth hanging onto, something that vaguely reminds me of what I never had.
Something not visible.
Whereas I can converse perfectly well in English, slightly less so in Chinese, much less so in French, and barely so in Spanish, I know not a phrase of German. I could not go up to someone in Germany and say, "Hello," in their own language, although I am sure if I said it in English there will still be people who understand me.
I know almost nothing of the German culture as well, and I am sure the bastardization of Oktoberfest that our university pushes out as a feeble excuse to drink (like they ever need one) is not a good representative. There is so much about the land I do not know, cannot ever know because I was not born and raised there. Even if, as a 20-something-year-old, I decide to move to Germany for the rest of my life, I will never know everything that a native German will know.
It is the subtle things. I am not sure I know all of those even in America, in Canada, much less in China. There are so many stories, so many faint traces of the past, that the Chinese value subconsciously, and that I am no longer a part of despite my Chinese heritage.
All I have are the visible things.
. . .
In Vermont, the mountains loom tall.
Not as tall as the Rockies, but mountains have no comparison. They are loners standing their ground. In Vermont, these mountains have seen through a revolution. They have weathered blood and rain. They have stood by as promises were made and vows broken and lives betrayed and dreams born.
As the car drives by, I look out the window. The lush trees of summer belie no hint of what Vermont is to most people, maple syrup and snow. I have told people Vermont is more than that, to many confused looks. I tell them it is a dairy state, perhaps not as famous as Wisconsin but a dairy state just as well. I tell them the history, the Green Mountains and their boys, Ethan Allen, Benedict Arnold.
This is their land. And the land never lies.
Vermont now is a peaceful state, or as peaceful as it can ever be. The green pastures and overarching trees lull people into a sense of nostalgia. It is the old East, and it still retains its dark past and poisonous shadows, but for now it is peaceful.
We stop at the rest area we always stop at. There is something to be said here, about habits, about coincidences, about many things in life that fit into convenient stories.
But we get off, stretch our legs, go inside and look at the map tacked onto the wall as if it were the first time we were seeing it. We take our hands and measure the distance we have traveled, and how much more we still have to go. We, too, are re-enacting history. We are forging our own terra incognita and charting them to fit the terrains of our hearts.
. . .
Our family is a family built upon road trips.
Ever since we got a car, back in 1999, every trip I had made that did not involve going somewhere half a world away were road trips. I have a special attachment to the land, to the roads. They are what I grew up on, like some kids grow up on sunshine and lemonade and backyard gossip circles.
We were living the American Dream, in a silly, distorted way. We would walk the sidewalk paved in gold and drive down every road. We went out west, we tried our hands at the "work hard and strike it rich" model. We walked out with resilient, optimistic spirits and an oddly-formed humor and our own shot at the American middle class, along with red knots hung on our doors and plastic bags stuffed inside our dishwasher for later use.
I built my dreams on the road. Trips were no longer about the destination, but about the journey in its most literal way. I hated it when the car slowed to a stop, because that meant the journey was over and the destination was here.
And once the destination was here, it would be over all too soon.
The first time we traveled to somewhere not half a world away in a plane, we went to Las Vegas. We hopped out of the plane and onto another car and headed straight for Grand Canyon. We were on the road, the only thing I was familiar with. Arizona roads are not anything like Massachusetts roads, but they are still roads. The desert sings its own song too, one of pioneers and settlers and miracles and tragedies and thousands of years of heritage shuffling in the wind.
But the destination.
The destination was different. The Grand Canyon was something beyond my imagination, beyond even my appropriations of its grandeur.
This was the first trip where we wanted to come back immediately, and the first trip where we were not driving all the time, where we had time to sit and watch the snow drift down without shivering in a car.
. . .
We read an interview of Murakami by Spiegel in class a few weeks ago. Peter said that Murakami was arrogant. He cited the two places where Murakami was asked about other people's books, and once he replied, "It's boring," and the other, of J. D. Salinger and his book Catcher in the Rye, "He did not win his fight against his poison," or something like that. He definitely mentioned the poison.
I do not remember the book as much as I would like to, but I do remember the poison part. I remember Holden Caulfield saying everyone was phony and thinking, that is true, that is very true. I have still not forgiven the backs.
I, too, write from my poison. I draw my sources from the darkest tortures of my mind and place them on paper. The pen is my sword, the page my battlefield, and I am waging war, against my past, against my fears, against my madness.
What that says about me, and about the stories I write, I am not sure. I write about death, even though I have never experienced death that hit too close. Is that symbolic of something? What of Katie when she sees Nick's ghost haunting her mind? Is that symbolic of something?
. . .
Pain is always close to me. So is separation.
Jessica asked me the other day how I dealt with it. The whole long-distance relationship thing. She was missing her ex-boyfriend. I told her we set aside time for each other. And as I was saying those words I felt the hypocrisy inside me.
Over the weekend, I went on a trip with our university's queer group to a cabin in a rural part of the area. One of the nights, we had a talent show, and one guy sat in front of the keyboard while another sang Coldplay's "The Scientist." I heard the words, "Nobody said it would be easy," and I could not stop the tears.
I had not spoke of the late night calls, when we would both be so exhausted and yet so mad at the other and so frustrated with ourselves. I had not spoke of the boxes of tissues lying in my garbage bin, the tear stains still on my laptop, the ribbon tied precariously on the ladder, the coins strewn on a grassy field near the river. Some nights I think I must be psychotic, to know how much this hurts me and yet still hang on.
I still wear the half of the ring, even though I know he does not wear the other half anymore. The other day someone in my English class saw it and asked, "Are you married? Are you engaged?"
I wish I knew the answer, but I am not so sure it is all that I need anymore. Yuma once said he was living through things day by day. I am not that kind of person. If I let things fall day by day, I will eventually lose it. It is what I do with everything.
Here, yet again, it is the journey, not the destination. I must remind myself that, and yet the destination blurs with each day.
. . .
I do not actually know much about my past.
For the past sixteen or so years, I have gone around piecing together my identity. Where do I belong? There is that generic statement of my heritage, what am I in terms of Chinese or American or Canadian or some mix of the three. But for me, this question is personal. It is tied with my longing for the road, my sense of safety among the land.
It is a question of where I belong, physically, not in terms of ethnicity or some arbitrary, culturally-entrenched definition.
If there is a past for me, it is a constant search for a place I can call home. Somewhere along the way, I have lost it, and I am now on the trek to rediscover it. Everything else is blurry. What places I have been to, what people I have talked with, they are constantly replaced with the new places I go to and the new people I talk with. I remember snippets, like Polaroids pasted in a scrapbook.
But this time, I do not want to let go. I do not want to forget. There is something here that is worth hanging onto, something that vaguely reminds me of what I never had.
Something not visible.
Sleep Deprived
I am surprised this is not a previous-blog-post-title.
To be fair I have stayed up later than this for more consecutive nights, most of them involving Yuma coincidentally also staying up very, very late and even more coincidentally we would be talking with each other. Those were the days I fell asleep in my afternoon classes (hello, econ) and generally felt like my head was exploding.
Well, hello, college.
In what could possibly be either a really good decision or a really stupid decision (or both, they're not mutually exclusive), I joined Fish Wings' computer club. I have not had a good track record with computer clubs, and I definitely have not had any track records with a computer club that requires weekly office hour commitments. So this could turn out to be a major time-sink (three hours a week is a lot of time, and although I could always program or whatever during that time, the nerdy people + constant availability of various games I refuse to download onto my lappy because it will suck all remaining spare time from me = not a lot of work done).
My weekends are also paaaacked. And not even with partying like Jessica is doing every Friday (along with the rest of her very, very busy schedule). I'm doing things like learning self-defense and planting trees.
And debugging Eclipse. Because this thing will always find some way to tell me, "Hey, I know you've been using me the same way 100 times now and I haven't given you any trouble, but guess what?"
Ubuntu does that to me sometimes too with the header style.
Maybe all this technology is realizing that I am an aspiring electrical engineer and has decided to repeat my FSAE subteam leader's favorite phrase, "Electronics always fail."
At least blogger is semi-functional and only does weird cursor jumps.
To be fair I have stayed up later than this for more consecutive nights, most of them involving Yuma coincidentally also staying up very, very late and even more coincidentally we would be talking with each other. Those were the days I fell asleep in my afternoon classes (hello, econ) and generally felt like my head was exploding.
Well, hello, college.
In what could possibly be either a really good decision or a really stupid decision (or both, they're not mutually exclusive), I joined Fish Wings' computer club. I have not had a good track record with computer clubs, and I definitely have not had any track records with a computer club that requires weekly office hour commitments. So this could turn out to be a major time-sink (three hours a week is a lot of time, and although I could always program or whatever during that time, the nerdy people + constant availability of various games I refuse to download onto my lappy because it will suck all remaining spare time from me = not a lot of work done).
My weekends are also paaaacked. And not even with partying like Jessica is doing every Friday (along with the rest of her very, very busy schedule). I'm doing things like learning self-defense and planting trees.
And debugging Eclipse. Because this thing will always find some way to tell me, "Hey, I know you've been using me the same way 100 times now and I haven't given you any trouble, but guess what?"
Ubuntu does that to me sometimes too with the header style.
Maybe all this technology is realizing that I am an aspiring electrical engineer and has decided to repeat my FSAE subteam leader's favorite phrase, "Electronics always fail."
At least blogger is semi-functional and only does weird cursor jumps.
Thursday, November 3, 2011
Circuits And Math
Both of which are very, very interesting, although I may be in the minority for believing so (in my house, at least). I woke up today at 10:30, agonized over what to wear and what to bring and what I should do for the rest of the day, then headed over to the computer science building, which I know I called something at the beginning of my Fish Wings posts, but I can't recall anymore. I went up to the third floor and found the lab for my programming class, and two TAs.
This was for ROM, because our lovely captains wanted to see if FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays) were suitable for our cause, and if so, how complicated would they be to learn. The first time I had ever heard of FPGA was two weeks ago, when one of the captains sent my research partner and I an email. And my research partner, who fortunately is at least in computer engineering, but unfortunately is in his first year taking all the basic math and science classes, know nothing about it as well.
So I asked my TAs (I think they were for my class? Although on the board several other classes were written) who I should talk with, and they directed me to this mobile robotics lab in the electrical engineering building (of course it would be in a building I go to almost every day and yet still have no idea what's inside). I got to talk with one of the grad students who was (and maybe still is) a TA for a class that I am supposed to take in the far far future that is exactly on FPGAs. Well, and a bunch of other things.
Before this, I already knew the basics of FPGAs, like how they're programmable on the machine-code level and they process in parallel, which reduces their processing speeds greatly. But the grad student gave me a lot of interesting information on FPGAs (like they take a long time to learn to program, in the ballpark of 3-4 months for what we want to use it for, which is positioning with advanced sensors), along with other things that I have always heard of but never actually understood, like Arduinos and BeagleBoards. The latter is really fascinating, as it's just like a computer with similar processing chips and ports and circuits, but on a much smaller scale and only on one board, and it runs linux by default.
Or, well, I think that's what it all is. I might have gotten a few concepts mixed up here and there, because so much of it was completely new to me.
I guess this means that we won't be using FPGA for our main processor in the robot, because our competition is coming up within a year and I don't think it's exactly a good use of time to spend a couple months just figuring out how to use something and then programming the algorithms that go on top of it. But it's definitely something that would be nice to explore for the future.
(On a slightly related note, every other Tuesday a guy is in the all-things-electrical lounge offering sessions on building electronics and selling kits, and I know he was talking about Arduinos. Maybe I should get one myself and play around with it.)
And now this post is getting rather long, so I'll save the math (Brahmagupta! Archimedes!) for next time.
This was for ROM, because our lovely captains wanted to see if FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays) were suitable for our cause, and if so, how complicated would they be to learn. The first time I had ever heard of FPGA was two weeks ago, when one of the captains sent my research partner and I an email. And my research partner, who fortunately is at least in computer engineering, but unfortunately is in his first year taking all the basic math and science classes, know nothing about it as well.
So I asked my TAs (I think they were for my class? Although on the board several other classes were written) who I should talk with, and they directed me to this mobile robotics lab in the electrical engineering building (of course it would be in a building I go to almost every day and yet still have no idea what's inside). I got to talk with one of the grad students who was (and maybe still is) a TA for a class that I am supposed to take in the far far future that is exactly on FPGAs. Well, and a bunch of other things.
Before this, I already knew the basics of FPGAs, like how they're programmable on the machine-code level and they process in parallel, which reduces their processing speeds greatly. But the grad student gave me a lot of interesting information on FPGAs (like they take a long time to learn to program, in the ballpark of 3-4 months for what we want to use it for, which is positioning with advanced sensors), along with other things that I have always heard of but never actually understood, like Arduinos and BeagleBoards. The latter is really fascinating, as it's just like a computer with similar processing chips and ports and circuits, but on a much smaller scale and only on one board, and it runs linux by default.
Or, well, I think that's what it all is. I might have gotten a few concepts mixed up here and there, because so much of it was completely new to me.
I guess this means that we won't be using FPGA for our main processor in the robot, because our competition is coming up within a year and I don't think it's exactly a good use of time to spend a couple months just figuring out how to use something and then programming the algorithms that go on top of it. But it's definitely something that would be nice to explore for the future.
(On a slightly related note, every other Tuesday a guy is in the all-things-electrical lounge offering sessions on building electronics and selling kits, and I know he was talking about Arduinos. Maybe I should get one myself and play around with it.)
And now this post is getting rather long, so I'll save the math (Brahmagupta! Archimedes!) for next time.
