I’m going to be honest everyone: I miss USC so much. I miss walking to class. I miss usually getting there on time. I miss Seeds sandwiches. I miss hanging around the RTH Café between class and running into friends and classmates (usually both at the same time). I miss my difficult classes. I miss living with friends. I miss Doheny Library. I miss Mudd Hall of Philosophy. I miss the ubiquitous intellectual stimulation and social chemistry that our university offers. I miss USC.
This summer I’ve been working at Cortina, a semi-conductor manufacturer based in Sunnyvale. I’ve been designing and programming a testing environment that interfaces with a chip they have in development. The chip does high speed SERDES: serial deserialization. The act of taking a single stream of bits and turning it into several, similar to what a decoder does. Of course, the stream of bits coming in are not just in binary form, but are stacked using phase amplitude modulation. It’s fascinating stuff, and I’ve really enjoyed working and learning so much this summer.
TMB! WHAT ARE YOU DOING ON CATALINA? Oh well. Hello, friends.
On a side note, I spent my 4th of July holiday on Catalina (one of the Channel Islands – about an hour drive and an hour boat ride from SC). Hot dog, the place was packed with alumni. One might say it was a almost a literal Trojan Nation. Haven’t seen that much cardinal and gold since football season. Which reminds me, unfinished business this Fall everybody. See you at the Coliseum.
