I'm sorry that I have neglected this blog for so long. This summer was quite busy, and I simply forgot about it until now. So here is a little post about what I've been doing all this time.
This summer, I worked at an internship at a company called Maxim Integrated. No, it's not the magazine (though it would've been cool to be a photographer for the Maxim magazine). It's actually a company that makes integrated on-chip solutions. My project at Maxim involved doing some work with video processing using the iPad video encoding format, as well as some work involving Maxim's gate drivers and various LCD panels. The work was fun and very interesting, and I learned a lot about LCD technology. I also re-learned a lot of digital design in my quest to coerce the FPGA into processing video data for me. Unfortunately my quest was not completed before I had to leave by the end of the summer, but I hope that all my work wasn't in vain.
I had an eventful summer, with all of my friends nearby, and being in California as well. I climbed the fabled Half Dome at Yosemite with one of my best friends SB, which was super fun. We started the climb at 2am, and reached the top around 9am. I was fully expecting us to have to turn around halfway up, because SB was slightly out-of-shape, sick, and hanging on to his inhaler the entire way up (asthma?). However, he pushed on relentlessly, and I was super proud of him for accomplishing the entire climb. Pictures below!
A week after climbing Half Dome, me and a few friends decided to go summit Mt. Shasta, and take a glacier training class through Shasta Mountain Guides. It was a great experience, and it was the first "real" mountain climb that I did. I did do Mt. Fuji a few years before, but that was more of just walking up a trail, while Mt. Shasta involved a lot of use of crampons and an ice axe. We drove up on a Thursday night, climbed to the base camp on Friday, did glacier and snow training on Saturday, summited to the top on Sunday (leaving base camp at 3am!), and returned from base camp home on Monday. It was extremely tiring, but so rewarding. There were some low points, of course. I experienced pretty bad altitude sickness the first day, so I was glad that we had an extra day to acclimatize to the altitude before summiting. We also ran out of water on the way down the mountain, leaving us all very dehydrated. There were very steep parts on the glacier, on which I thought that I would slip and drag us all to a lot of broken bones. However, the good parts way outweighed the bad parts. We (butt-)glissaded in all sorts of poses (head-first, foot-first, on the back, on the stomach, etc) and learned how to stop ourselves, which was super fun. I also did some boot-glissading on the way down the mountain, more because of sheer exhaustion, but also because our guide Polly encouraged me to give it a shot.
While I was climbing the mountain, I remember looking up at the summit and thinking, "omg that is so tall and so far away...how in the world are we supposed to make it to the top?" Even as we got closer and closer, the same question still lingered in my mind. It wasn't until we made it to the summit and looked about, that I realized how far up we had actually walked. It was such an uplifting moment, to realize that we had successfully summited one of the most technically difficult mountains to summit in California.
That's all for now. More to come later.
FCDH
The Cables at the top of Half Dome
Me and SB at the top of Half Dome!
Me at the top of Mt. Shasta
Posts
