Arun Has A Blog

Every weekend at BroHaus (the house I live at with other TAMSters and friends) is packed with activities. Last weekend, we spend Saturday and Sunday at Berkeley.

On Saturday morning, we all packed into Jason’s car and made the one hour trip up to Berkeley. We met up with other 2007 TAMSters and Katherine (one of John and Paul’s classmates from Berkeley) at La Note for brunch.

I had ratatouille with a poached egg and cheese on top.

It was delicious. ^^

We then headed over to a board game store called Games of Berkeley, where Katherine purchased Bananagrams.

Afterwards, we drove to another section of Berkeley and browsed various shops.

We then walked to the East Bay Vivarium. A few weeks ago, my father’s student mentioned that he used to come to Berkeley to visit the reptiles at a pet store. I assumed that he just had an unusual interest in reptiles. I only realized what he was talking about when we arrived at the vivarium. It is a a pet store dedicated to selling reptiles. The place was almost a small zoo.

I guess this is the new “As Seen on TV”.

Some random shots from around Berkeley:

Paul wore Katherine’s leather jacket for a while. lol

We then headed to Paul’s apartment to hang out. It was on top of a hill, but the steep walk back and forth must be worth it because the view is amazing.

Paul, Jeffrey, Amelia and I had some fun with Paul’s huge beanbag chair.

Did I mention that the view from Paul’s apartment is amazing?

For dinner, we went to Anh Hong for do-it-yourself vietnamese spring rolls. The food was fun to make and delicious. From left to right: Me, Jason, Chuan, Amelia, Katherine, Paul, John, Dustin, Jeffrey.

Then we were off to Triple Rock Brewery and Ale House for some craft beers.

We then went back to Paul’s place to play Bananagrams. A little after midnight, we enjoying freshly made donuts at King Pin Donuts. I never appreciated how heavenly warm, soft donuts can be. After finishing off our donuts, most of BroHaus (except Jeffrey and me) returned to Palo Alto. The rest of us spent the night at Paul’s place.

In the morning, we woke up and drove to Wat Mongkolratanaram (aka Thai Temple)for Sunday lunch. Apparantly, the temple volunteers aren’t allowed to handle money. So, we had to trade dollars in for tokens, which we exchanged for food. The food was so delicious that I forgot to take pictures >.

The whole weekend Katherine talked about how she liked my storm trooper hoodie. It’s a pity there aren’t any girl sizes available.

At the end of lunch, I did manage to take a picture of the sticky rice with mango dessert.

The next stop was Indian Rock Park. The star feature of this park is a set of huge boulders that can be climbed. The top offers breathtaking views of the bay and San Francisco.

Can you see anyone hiding in the picture?

Paul did what he does best and climbed to the top of an almost vertical boulder.

I tested out the closeup “macro” of the EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6.

The last food stop of the adventure was Ici, an ice cream parlor known for its unique flavors.

I forgot to photograph the ice cream we ate, but it was amazing!! ^^. We bought one scoop each of tangerine creamsicle sorbet, raspberry plum sorbet, coconut curry candied peanut ice cream, tiramisu ice cream, and butter pistachio ice cream. My absolute favorite was the tangerine creamsicle. Before we all parted ways, we made a visit to the Goorin Brothers hat store. I think that this blue hat looks great on Amelia.

See the complete slide show:

I finally in California! Actually, I’ve been in CA for a while now. I just got around to setting up my room and getting comfortable. Here are a few pictures that I took before we set off and on the road (during the road trip to CA from TX).

A cute cardinal outside my window in Plano.

One of the amazing views we saw on along the drive.

Along the way, we stopped at a peculiar landmark, The London Bridge. As funny as it may seem, it is actually the real London Bridge. In the late 1960s, when London was going to demolish the bridge, an American bought it and had it rebuilt on Lake Havasu in Arizon. Read about it here.

The only way to cool off from the sweltering Arizona heat is to enjoy a delicious snow cone. Mine had guava and pineapple syrup with vanilla ice cream inside.

One of the things that most engineers have to do before graduating is complete a capstone senior design project. EE and CS students can choose their capstone from a list of project based classes. Vinny, David, Jason, and I chose embedded systems and made a motion capture game. The game incorporated custom hardware (VHDL) and custom software (C).

Here is a link to our final report. Here is a gameplay video that we shot early in the morning on the last day of classes.

Last night, I reached for my Audio Technica ATH-ES7 headphones And noticed that the cord was frayed near the 3.5mm connector. I plugged it in to check if it still worked. Low and behold, the right channel no longer worked.

I contemplated what to do. I had already had the cords on these headphones replaced before (these headphones have very weak cords). I didn’t want to call and get them replaced under warranty again since that can take up to 3 weeks.

I then thought about replacing the 3.5mm connector. That isn’t the optimal solution because white connectors are hard to come by. I then realized I still had the original iPhone headphones in the box.

I took them out, and cut the earbuds off. Then, I removed the original cord from the Audio Technicas and replaced it with the iPhone cord. After a bit of soldering and screwing everything back together, the mod was complete.

The headphones with the completed mod:

What should I do with these completely new earbuds?