RIT Crew Fall Season

We've started classes for the Fall quarter here at RIT and I have started my first year as a Varsity rower for RIT Crew. Early morning practices (before dawn) work a lot better with schedules and its great to have so much competition between all the boats. Being on the shorter side, it's daunting to be competing for a seat in the varsity boats but I feel that it's a goal that I can reach. If this year continues on its path, RIT is going to have some fast boats!

Beginning of Spring Quarter, Sprint Season, RIT Solar

Last week was spring break for RIT and I went to Cocoa Beach, FL with RIT Crew to train. It was amazing! I had never been more south than Pennsylvania, making the trip that much better! We did a lot of rowing and land practice. I never knew that I could get up at 6am and be tired enough to practically fall unconscious at 9pm.

I was rowing in a "four" which was a nice change from the eight. We rowed in the ocean and had many new experiences from that. On the first day of practice, the novice eight I was rowing in (didn't practice in the four until Tuesday or Wednesday) was going down a channel we used because it was nice and straight for about 3 Km. During this morning practice, we got to row alongside a dolphin! Some people might not find that cool but it was only 15 or so feet away and was really cool to me.

I got to try surfing, go to a Ron Jon's surf shop, see palm tree's (only saw them in movies before that!), and other fun activities. We were not the only crew down their either, alongside us was WPI, Fairfield University, Holy Cross, and Northeastern University. We left Cocoa beach Friday morning to head to Aiken South Carolina for SERCS (South East Rowing Collegiats) which took 10 hours! We got lost in the middle of Georgia for about four hours.

We didn't get to row in Aiken, SC because we got their too late on Friday and the race was canceled due to high winds on Saturday March 8, 2008. I did get to see family that lives in Georgia that I have not seen in a few years so it was very worthwhile and fun even though I was really bummed that we didn't get to race.

Spring Quarter

Spring quarter is definitely going to be tough, I am already very busy and it's only week one. We are having more demanding practices due to Spring season being the sprint racing season for RIT Crew. With the demanding EE curriculum, RIT Crew, clubs like K2GXT, and Imagine RIT, this quarter is going to fly by and I'm holding on so far. I managed to do pretty well Winter quarter and really surprised myself with my grades on final! Those were some well earned grades, no matter what they were!

RIT Solar

We are working on our Imagine RIT project now. I found out that even though I will be helping with designing, finding funds, and building the project, I will most likely not be able to go present at Imagine RIT. This is due to the NYS Championships in Whitney Point, NY on the same day of May 3, 2008. As enthusiastic and devoted to the project as I am, I will NOT let RIT Crew and myself down by skipping the race for the show. The team and I have trained hard enough, gone through our share of pain with winter training on the ergs, and will be going through much more in the coming months to back down.

We are currently designing a prototype "proof-of-concept" open loop solar hot water system. We will build it and display it with other materials. We are almost done determining our costs and will be actively searching for some sort of funding. This project is not just a science fair exhibit, we want to raise awareness of this technology and influence the institute to implement solar hot water on campus. Keep watching this blog for the link to our website that will document the progress and updates to the solar hot water project!

That is about as much time as I want to devote to the blog, unfortunately I would love to add more but must get more work done. Thanks for reading my blog, I hope it is interesting and informative about what is happening at RIT!

Survived Week 10

Wow, I survived week 10. This week was the most insane week I have ever been through here at RIT. I studied like crazy for my physics and calculus tests, I also had an evironmental studies finals and a crew 2k test. From Sunday morning through Thursday morning (3am?) I slept about 7 hours, watched the sun rise twice from the college of science! Onto finals week, lots of studying this weekend after some well needed sleep. After that, spring break in Florida with RIT Crew! Tons of rowing and maybe I will get a chance to visit the Kennedy Space Center... my tech side showing on that comment. I'll post about the solar project when I get a chance to write up a story, I'm still writing up physics labs at the moment!

School Club Roundup 2008 - Day 1

School Club Roundup is an annual contest that is aimed for school amateur radio clubs. I started participating in it when my brother Brent and I founded the Chelmsford High School Amateur Radio Club KB1NAY in 2005. Click on the name of this post to find out more info about the contest.

RIT Amateur Radio Club K2GXT Daily Dispatch:

SCHOOL CLUB ROUNDUP DAILY DISPATCH
11:46 PM, Monday, February 11, 2008

Operating Hours: 4.34
Voice Contacts: 1
Digital Contacts: 1
Current Score: 9

1 State Contacted:
FLORIDA

1 Radio Club Contacted:
W4LX

So we didn't have much luck. We are pretty sure that our G5RV is "dead" we are in the process of building an Off Center Fed Dipole to replace it (I will post my power point presentation on a later post). Our beam is only made for 20 meters (14 MHz) and higher, it will tune on 40 but we haven't had much luck with that.

The best option we have might be to get on 20 meters during the day and operate, we will see how that works out! Good luck to all those who are participating!

RIT: Orange, Brown, and Green?

With President Destler running campus this year, he is apparently pushing to make RIT a "greener" campus. From the President's website, he is trying to initiate a movement to produce "...the nation's first "Innovation University"..." by hosting the "Imagine RIT" creativity festival that aims to attract about 30,000 people from the Rochester area.

RIT recently launched the Golisano Institute for Sustainability which from what I can reason would be a stepping stone to "greening" RIT. So with the buzz on campus for a more sustainable outlook to life and industry practices, what better time than now to help out?

I am part of a First Year Enrichment group that is designing a renewable energy alternative for RIT. Our project simply started with an idea for the class project and has grown into an interest to see if our idea is feasible to be implemented on campus.

Our group is researching the idea of providing some of the hot water used in a couple dorms with solar hot water. Hot water is one of the most energy demanding commodities used during the day. According to Solar Roofs, the average electric home water heater can use more energy than the average car per year; only by a little bit, but never-the-less a surprising reality.

Solar hot water is used to pre-heat the water before it enters the water boilers. This reduces the temperature difference that the water heater needs to use energy to heat the water. Groundwater is typically 45 F and the average hot water temperature is roughly 110 F, a difference of 65 F. Even with a solar hot water system that brings the temperature of the water to 50 F during the winter on a cold day, is still saving the energy used to heat the water by 5 F. During the summer, a system could bring the water up to 110 F and provide a relatively large percentage of the hot water during peak usage.

We are working on our final presentation for class and will then, time permitting, push this further and try to gain some support from campus. As I said before, this is a personal interest among the group members. We are only required to provide an outline for class, and we are already computing statistics and other data such as cost. Being Electrical Engineering majors, we are running off of our enthusiasm and hope to learn more from this project while being able to at least stir some interest among the community here on campus.

If there are any comments on this, please feel free to share them!

I am finally on winter break, what a crazy three weeks... it does not feel like Christmas at all! I've been worked up until now and had no time to get in that xmass mood! The third week was absolutely insane... I had testing in classes as well as Crew. A test in microeconomics, physics, and calculus plus all the homework due for those classes. For RIT crew we had our four day test series consisting of a ten second piece and 6000 Meter test (6k race) on Monday, 2000M (2K race) on Tuesday, 60-second test Wednesday, and the lovely "Hour of Power" 60 minute race on Thursday. Fitting that in with all the other work was comparable if not surpassing the stress of Finals week first quarter.

The ride home was pretty good. Drove two friends back so we had great conversations as well as it helped with the gas money haha. It normally takes me about 6-7 hours to get home from RIT but just before Albany on a Thruway service station we had a McDonald's "Incident". Somehow McDonald's forgot my friends Chicken Fillet order and it took about 45 minutes to make a simple sandwich...we were there for an hour and a half!... so in the end it was about an 8 hour trip!

Being home is great, but I'm slowly trying to relax because I am still stressed out! I decided to play around with Ubuntu a little, get GNOME to be a little more personalized. I am not a Linux geek but I enjoy the open-source idea and the challenge.

I tweaked GNOME to have some Mac OS X features like the App Dock (I used Avant Window Navigator) and the themes for OS X. However, I did not use all the OS X changes and kept it with the original Ubuntu feeling versus a total OS X feeling to the computer.

So during Thanksgiving Break I've been playing around....

During Thanksgiving Break (two weeks, THANKS RIT! lol) I've decided in true RIT spirit to install Linux onto my laptop. I'm not a big computer person, I don't play video games... the best program I ever wrote said "Hello World"... etc. I enjoy the freedom assiociated with it, i just came too close to throwing my laptop out the 8th floor window of my dorm way too many times when Vista crashed. So I started with Fedora 8, dual booting it with Windows Vista (fresh install).

Fedora was a little tricky for me, I guess the Linux learning curve was a little to steep for me. So I switched to Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon". After spending hours with Fedora and Ubuntu getting my NVIDIA GeForce 8400GS graphics card drivers installed. I could enable desktop effects in Fedora 8 and Compiz in Ubunto. I set up compiz to true RIT fashion! Supporting RIT Crew (I'm an RIT Crew member), and Engineering House, the special interest house I live in.

Learning to install programs and such has been a huge issue but finally getting more familiar with terminal commands and things like that... again I'm not a geek about computers, this was really really really hard for me to learn!

So throughout the duration of my break, I will be learning to use Ubunto, setting it up to my likes, and most importantly... having fun doing things that don't involve computers!

K2GXT Repeater Antenna Installation and Echolink

On Saturday November 10,2007 the RIT Amateur Radio Club K2GXT installed a new 2 meter band (144-148MHz) antenna on top of Ellingson Hall. We did this in conjunction with WITR 89.7 who had to shut down their 1000 watt transmitter while we were up there. We are installing this antenna for eventual use in the 2 meter repeater we are currently building. The antenna, coax, and duplexer were installed during this event. The repeater is being built by RIT students and members of K2GXT as a club project. This repeater will be open for use to all licensed amateur radio operators, visit the ARRL (Amateur Radio Relay League) for more information of obtaining an amateur radio license. The 70 cm repeater that is currently in operation on Ellingson Hall was connected to Echolink after the installation.

RIT: End of the First Quarter

Well RIT a.k.a "Brick City" is an amazing place to be, I have never had a chance to be bored. The first quarter alone has been fast paced and ultimately challenging. Finals week is next week, It's 4am on Wednesday morning on the last week of classes, and I've been working on an essay of Winston Churchill for hours.

The academics have been great. My College Chemistry class is challenging but also taught very well by Professor Collison. Writing Seminar as been a laid back learn to write in college, lets have great conversations type coarse. Calculus A has been my biggest struggle, I love math, well to a degree... but have always struggled at it. The past weekend I spent about 12 hours studying for a test the following Monday. It payed off! The course instructor Olles is a great math teacher with skill in showing every possible way to solve a problem, tons of examples. Modern European History is well history, its somewhat interesting, but there is a reason I'm studying engineering! Finally, Freshman Practicum for Electrical Engineering has been a great class, haven't learned all that much, I've already done a lot of my own building above the scope of the class, but its fun to play around with circuits none-the-less.

Engineering House has been a great adventure and has provided a community to live in. It really helps the social experience of college when we have a unified floor to live on. Our doors are always open when we are on floor, constantly hanging out with each other. Gracie's and Commons runs as we call them, get a large number of us to eat together. RIT would not be as much of an adventure without the experience.

RIT Crew, one of the best decisions I made when I got here. I am proud to have earned a seat in the Mens novice boat, seat 2. I row port and have raced once in the Wiley Coyote Chase Regatta on the Genesee River. We won 3rd overall but 1st in our division! Crew is a physically as well as challenging sport, the type of sport I love. The friendships and bonds from being a part of the crew team are irreplacable. Crew is simply amazing!

Overall, I have come to a conclusion that RIT is NOT a dead campus. It's been reiterated to me countless times. Rochester Institute of Technology offers students activities and opportunities to partake in. RIT students need to take advantage of them! As a student who is almost done with the first quarter, I am glad I decided to attend RIT!