learning how to make a website

so over break I decided I didn't want to work on the french that I wanted to get done over break, so instead, during the last 6 days of my semester break I decided to make a website.

I accidentally opened Adobe Dreamweaver, a program which facilitates the creation of websites, and decided I would learn how to use it. I felt like I should make a personal website as an online project portfolio, so this was a great excuse to do so. The problem was that I didn't know how to use Photoshop either, and in order to do what I wanted to do with the website's design, I needed to know how to use Photoshop. So, I learned how to use dreamweaver and photoshop while i learned how to code up a website using HTML, CSS, and Javascript. (I also used some XML stuff but whatever.)

In any case, I have a final product!!! Check it out at http://students.olin.edu/2010/mmorales


hurray!

My fourth semester: overloading again?!

So, I'm back at Olin for my fourth semester. This semester, as during my second semester, I am taking more courses than a "normal workload" of four courses. Oops! :) This time should be a lot easier than my second semester, however, when I basically never slept.

This semester I'm taking Intro Biology, a Foundations of Business Class, and Intensive French 203, (the second year of french compressed into one semester). All of these courses are easy enough, and won't actually account for 12 credits of work, as they should. For French I spent hours over semester break watching videos for the course, since the class if video based. Now I won't have to do that much work during the semester! I'm also taking a Linear Algebra and Probabilities and Statistics course which I sort of took last semester but didn't get credit for.

I'm also taking UOCD which stands for User Oriented Collaborative Design. The class is great :) I'll write more about it later, but in short its a design class where project groups take on a user group, like bartenders, bike messengers, tattoo artists, and try to design for this user group by immersing themselves in the lives of the users.

I'm also taking a 1 credit student led course, a 1 credit of engineering pedagogy research, and I'm involved in three businesses this semester: Olin Services, Olin Tutoring Squad, and IdeaTree Design.

this past semester: Principles of Engineering

So, I said in my last post that I would talk a bit more about this past semester. Overall the semester was hectic, even though I took less of a course workload than ever before. This past semester I tried to, as usual, bite off more than I could chew. It was a lot less work than my second semester at Olin, but unforeseeable events this semester took up a lot of time and energy and resulted in this 12 credit semester.

In any case, one of the best courses I have taken so far at Olin was this semester. (It still does not top both Paul Revere: Tough as Nails or my MetaOlin course though) Principles of Engineering!!

The course website gives an overview for the course, which I have included below.

Through a significant project experience, students will integrate analysis, qualitative design, quantitative optimization, experiments, and simulations to improve their abilities to engineer real systems. The course will focus on electronic systems through the design of a low-speed universal serial bus (USB) peripheral.

My project was an autonomous four rotor lifting body platform thing we named the "Tetracopter" just because. :) A more formal description would mention how during this project we (there were four of us) designed a custom-built fully autonomous four rotor lift body. The final deliverable for the course is a website (Tetracopter.com)!

Anyways, I had a whole lot of fun working on this project! (If nothing else, check out the video on the electrical page which shows one of the times the tetracopter tore itself apart during testing!)

Looking back on multiple semesters

Well, I am in the middle of winter session, (also: I'm on break) . I will be back at Olin sometime around the 20th of January, but for now I am home. Next semester I will be once again taking more courses than I should. My second semester at Olin I took 5 courses instead of 4, mostly on accident. That semester one of my courses was double the workload of a normal course, and I didn't want to drop the independent study I took called MetaOlin, which I have written about before.

This past semester I wound up not adding a course I intended to, which left me with 12 credits instead of the normal 16. Last semester I took a French course, a course called Principles of Engineering, (which I will describe later), and an upper level material science course called Thin Films and the Design of Experiments.

Next semester I will be taking the foundations of business course at Olin which everyone must take to graduate, the second year of French condensed down into "Intensive French 203", Linear Algebra, Probabilities and Statistics, a design course that teaches user-oriented design (User Oriented Collaborative Design), and Biology, which everyone must also take to graduate.

In any case, I could talk more about the courses I'm taking/took last semester, since I haven't addressed them at all yet, but I'll wait for another time.