A screenshot of the Arduino IDE This post requires a bit of background before I jump in. I'm in a club here at Penn State called the Student Space Program Laboratory (SSPL for short). It's pretty much what it sounds like: a space program for students at Penn State. It's most heavily targeted at aerospace engineering students, but students from other disciplines like mechanical or electrical engineering are more than welcome. Now, I should make it clear that the club isn't launching Penn State students, or cars, or anything terribly exciting into space; it's mostly just small satellites. But, still, it's pretty darn cool to have anything in space. But I digress. I'm not actually working on anything this semester that will be shot into space, or even attached to a rocket of an appreciable size. Instead, I'm doing the Student Training Program, or STP. New members of the club are split into groups, and each group designs a payload for a small mod

Source: pixabay This Sunday, I decided that I needed to do something more active, more engaging, more creative than what I'd been doing in previous weeks. I needed to create something. So, I decided that I was going to write all day. Of course, I'd already written all day at many points in my life. Research papers, application essays, you name it, I procrastinated and then crammed the writing. So I needed to do something different this past Sunday. Something more creative. I'm not amazing at creative writing, but hey, this is stuff that probably under 20 people will see, so might as well throw care into the wind. I decided to write a screenplay. That's right. I'm one of those assholes who thinks they can write a screenplay. It's nowhere near done, of course. A day isn't enough time for something like this. But it might be finished, someday. Maybe I'll even post it on this blog, as an addendum to a future post. This is actually something I

Image Source: meg_nicol This week was tricky. I couldn't do anything all day on Sunday because I had to pack and take the bus back to Penn State from my hometown. I couldn't do anything all day on Monday because I had to work. I couldn't do anything all day on Wednesday because I had class until 3:30. So that left Tuesday; I had a solid 10 hours free on Tuesday. But I also had a whole bunch of homework to do, and I already did that for an entire day in the first week of the semester. And I wanted to at least start this semester with a reasonable sleep schedule. So, I cheated. Sorry. I decided that, this week, instead of doing one thing for an entire day, I would do one thing for simply a large portion of the day. But this would have to be something interesting, not just reading or watching TV like I'd done previously. And it would have to be something that I'm not used to doing for a few hours, so things like writing or shopping are out (though they ma

There's nothing quite like cozying up with a good book and a mug of coffee, turning on a reading lamp, and disappearing into a story. That's what I did the Sunday before last, for eight hours. It was decidedly uncozy. It should be said that there were a few circumstances that conspired to make the day a miserable experience. I was rather sleep-deprived; I'd had trouble sleeping the previous night, and I hadn't really slept well for the whole week before that, either. On top of that, I was in the middle of a nasty cold. But these things aren't usually huge problems if I'm doing what I like. And the book I chose was Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov, the second book in the Foundation series. I enjoyed the first one quite a bit, so I anticipated that I would like this one, as well. And, at least from the parts I can remember, it was even more enjoyable than the first book (more on that pesky "remembering" thing later). For the first few hou