Wednesday, December 30, 2009



Woot! Passion Pit are playing a block from my apartment next week

Tuesday, December 29, 2009



Knicks game earlier this month. Seats up front are wicked!

Monday, December 28, 2009

Peggy 2.0



Been looking into building an audio equalizer with one of these... sigh, LEDs are expensive!

Friday, December 25, 2009

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Haven't written lyrics in a long time

Our world spins on two planes
The kingdom gates open so slightly
Its a smiling state
We believe its going to come around

I waited, I waited, the stars are angles out
The strings come in view
Our clouds weather pastures of gray
Half phases slowly molding memories

So I waited, I waited, its a lover's ride
If I hold you, I will keep you
But maybe we will invert minds
Fate has shown how we are in the dark

I've never felt so at ease
The constellations sync like synths
We've all lived our doldrums
Let your love grow in meadows

Someday we'll see, I know serene
Between shadows I have no worries
It will be the same
Just a thought
We will see
We will see
We will see

Saturday, December 19, 2009

Sexuality - Sebastien Tellier


Sexuality is the third studio album by French artist Sébastien Tellier, released on February 25, 2008. The album was produced by Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, who is best known as one of the members of Daft Punk.

- wikipedia

I swear the upcoming google phone stems from android engineers troubled with HTC making their OS look silly. People don't think about the G1, G2 like its a HTC phone running the Android. They call it the google phone period.

Google probably has the last laugh on this one. They got free developers working on the open source Android and they got phone manufacturers to test their OS before they get into phone hardware themselves.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

RGB Multicolor Monome


A RGB Multicolor Monome was originally my 'make anything' final project.

Sparkfun.com, an electronics vendor, is giving away $100 worth of goods per customer on Jan 7th 2010. I'm going to take advantage and buy everything I need to make one.

Side Note: Sparkfun.com is giving away $100,000 free stuff -how ballsy of a marketing move. I'm happy to help them spread the word.

Commonsense Reasoning: Fall 09 Final Project


Abstract
EmpTwit gauges market sentiment via Twitter streams. With the aid of the common sense knowledge base, Open Mind, and affect extension of Wordnet, EmpTwit sets out to abstract variation in public mood and investor sentiment via Twitter updates. By using natural language parsing techniques to extract significant concepts in tweets, EmpTwit sets out to capture more accurate sentiment beyond simple keyword matching techniques employed in the field.

The goal of EmpTwit is to correlate the variation in public mood with stock market behavior. The idea is that EmpTwit will measure investor sentiment before the market fully adjusts to it. The motivation of this project stems from various psychological evidences of a strong link between weather and sports outcomes with investor sentiment and market behavior.


Can't say more, its still WIP.

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

How to make (almost) anything - Assignment 11 & 12

Assignment 11 was about networking and communications. I honestly don't know how it all works, but its basically an internet zero board that acts as a server and communicates with another internet zero board to update a webpage.





Assignment 12 is my final project. I outfitted drumsticks with an accelerometer and RGB leds. The LEDs change color based on which direction you swing the sticks. I also added an overdrive button that makes the LED rotate through all the colors.



Maybe I'll do a postmortem on this course someday. But I don't want to hear about it anymore right now.

My course page
Class page

Sunday, December 13, 2009

Thesis Schedule

I've been thinking about doing a thesis crunch course. The goal is to write 8 pages of my thesis for 10 straight days. Its going to be work (which is pretty much inevitable), but I'll be a very happy person at the end of course.

I think I'll start on the 21st of this month.

Friday, December 11, 2009

Nothing to look forward to. I only see work, work, and more work.

I need to get some traction.

Thursday, December 10, 2009


I don't have anything to say. Just procrastinating from work (or maybe my brain just needs rest). Both mind and body are exhausted- I've been at it on my final projects and assignments around the clock lately.

Next semester will be about business school. No more lab. No more engineering. No more sleepless nights.

Sunday, December 06, 2009

Dilbert

xx by xx


I just discovered these guys the day after they toured Boston :(

Saturday, December 05, 2009

Paste Inc.

Been working on a new personal fabricator venture lately. For those who are interested in what it is all about, the executive summary I submitted to the MIT 100K Executive Summary competition is below:

Download Paste Inc. Exec Summary

Some initial logo mockups:



Thursday, December 03, 2009

Wearing Out

As expected, finals time is wearing me out very very quickly.


It makes me question my purpose here, and which particular projects/assignments actually matter.

I can't wait until the next 2 weeks past.

One Republic - Waking Up

Monday, November 30, 2009

Arcade Expressionism

Wow! I'm going to paint one of my own too!



Thursday, November 26, 2009

Choices choices choices...


I can only choose 4-5 of the Spring courses below:

Computer Games and Simulations for Investigation and Education
Design and Marketing of New Products
Designing and Leading the Entrepreneurial Organization
Entrepreneurial Finance
Evolution Towards Web 3.0 and the Emergence of Management 3.0
Generating Business Value from IT
How to Develop Breakthrough Products and Services
Innovation Teams
Managing Innovation and Entrepreneurship
Media Lab Enterprises: Digital Innovations
New Enterprises
Organizational Leadership and Change
Product Design & Development
Sensor Technologies for Interactive Environments
Strategic Organizational Design
The Business of Software and Digital Platforms
Thanksgiving is here, in academica it reminds everyone we are coming to the end of another semester. Gulp!

I've got two final project presentations due on the Dec 14th and 15th. And to be incredibly honest, I'm shitting my pants over them. It indirectly means I will be working and trying to get a head start throughout this thanksgiving week.

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

How to make (almost) anything - Assignment 10

Last week's assignment was about experimentation with composites. Composites are the layering of fibers and resins. Fibers give the material longitudinal strength and resins (the matrix) give the material compressional strength.

I find the idea of composites very cool, but I am not a fan of the un-structured form most of them take.

For the most part, I played with a natural fiber, banana skins, this week.



The first image above is a banana filled with polyeurathane. The second image are strips of cotton soaked in a mixture of smoothcast 310 and gypsum cement.

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Watch it again and notice Varejao

Some recent MBA quotes:

"My focus is in mobile, clean tech, consulting, and venture capital."

"I spent the summer designing the web page. It should be good to go." (the design is a MS Word doc of the web page layout -2hrs of work MAX!)

Friday, November 13, 2009

How to make (almost) anything - Assignment 9

This week was about output devices. I decided to make a speaker, color changing LED, LED array, and LCD screen.



The assignment, however, is not complete yet as I still need to add input devices to them.

If I have time some day, I really want to make a video output device to the television. I want to make my own 8-bit game + controller!!

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Pre-Music Hack Day Boston

Did some quick mockups for my friend Wu-Hsi's Music Painter Android application.


Music Hack day is going to be awesome.

How to make (almost) anything - Assignment 8

This week we were taught how to do molding and casting. I decided to design my own chess set and failed miserably.



The idea is to feed height maps to the milling machine to mill 3D molds in wax. Then cast the polyurethane to make the actual mold for the pieces to be casted in gypsum cement. I decided to design my mold in illustrator and set myself up for failure from the great beginning.

If I have free time later in the year, I want to make shot-glass shaped freezer molds.

Sunday, November 08, 2009

Business Management classes are boring. You could theoretically learn most of what they teach you in b-school from a textbook. It seems to me b-school can only be interesting if your professors are superb or classmates are sharp and/or diverse.

I've been considering concentrating on technical know-how for the remainder of school. That way I can own my business, no more dependencies on engineers. Aaron Patzer spent 8-9months locked in an apartment coding his prototype before he raised seed funding. I will do that too if I must.

Friday, November 06, 2009

Apple

It's been 6 months since I've got my first Macbook Pro.

Am I convert? Yes.
Do I love Apple? No.

I spend more time in front of the computer than in front of people. My verdict is simple: I pay a premium for an Apple product, and I get a premium experience. Its not a value gift from god, the Macbook is exactly what you pay for.

I will definitely buy a Mac again for my next laptop. I hope I can say I am "open-minded" now. I tried. (the HTC Magic is something I tried and will not go back to).

Wednesday, November 04, 2009

A word about my weekly Media Lab projects

I may have worked on cool projects for my 'How to make (almost) anything' class this semester, but I want to note that my assignments are only "okay".

In fact, my projects are probably below average because everybody in class is a rockstar. They somehow find the time/strength and genius to go above and beyond. Sometimes I don't even understand what they made (too technical for me).

Being smart is overrated, but a lot of the stuff at the lab can make you feel mute.

Julian Casablancas - Phrazes For The Young


I did say I was a fan of the Strokes.

Monday, November 02, 2009

Social Gaming

Think Equity LLC recently revised their estimate of the current market size for social gaming at about $60 million per month (run market of $720 million per year). They expect it to grow at approximately 45% CAGR over the next three years to reach $2 billion by 2012, driven by a combination of strong growth in usage and improving monetization.

A recent leader in this market, San Francisco-based Zynga, has increased employee count from 200 to 600 since April of this year. Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga, confirmed that generating more than $100 million in revenues this year are “conservative.”

How to make (almost) anything - Assignment 7

The assignment this week was to play with input sensors. I made two chips: one has a microphone and the other is a step response sensor (proximity sensor).


I also programmed the microphone code to play a sound file, and blowing into the mic will turn the sound off.

Sunday, November 01, 2009

Was looking through random band recordings on my computer and came across this hit from 2-3 years ago.

Drums - Gary Tong
Guitar - Adi Farooqi
Guitar - Erik Chan

Click to Listen

Celtics!!