My musical renaissance began in earnest at the age of 15 when my parents bought me a Sony mini hi-fi system for my birthday. It had a CD player, reasonably high definition speakers and an FM radio. The radio was my favourite feature of the system, I began a life long habit of listening to music while I worked (or studied, at the time). A few weeks in, I quickly grew bored of listening to Capital FM - the most 'pop' of the popular radio stations - and switched to XFM, a rock radio station. It was then my musical taste started to diversify, and I became well acquainted with popular artists such as Muse, Keane, Athlete and so on.

In sixth form, at age 16, I started a Young Enterprise business with my peers, Paul and Herman. Herman, the visionary of our group (a great talker who sadly doesn't talk much to me nowadays) decided that we'd build a student run record label, 'Renegade Records' and we got to it. Paul handled the finance and legal aspects of our business (he's now a lawyer, so I guess that worked out well for him) and I took care of everything else. I spent hours printing CDs, emailing and calling people, and just generally managing. It was great fun. With a team of 17, we recruited bands, produced CDs and organised two concerts. We did well, raising nearly a thousand pounds for charity and learning some important life lessons about people management, failure and how to sell an idea.

We didn't get far in the end of year competition that Young Enterprise organises, getting knocked out by a team that made a calendar and sold £3000 worth of advertisements on it. (Evidently this was the right decision by the judges - based on the relative strength of adtech companies versus music tech...) We did however get the chance to represent our school in the annual Ogden Trust business competition, eventually coming second in the country. We were amusingly bested by a team we had left in runners up position in the two previous rounds. This culminated in a tour of the HSBC building - the first time I set foot in Canary Wharf and not the last.

One of the websites that my more musically involved Young Enterprise colleagues recommended was a music streaming website called Last.fm. Little did I know at the age of 17 that I'd one day be on the other side of the servers that ran the website, so to speak. Last.fm was my favourite website for a long time. As a growing music lover, my music collection expanded massively from a few gigabytes to tens of gigabytes. I'd spend hours in Fopp, an indie music shop in Cambridge, searching for cheap obscure music - some of which I liked, some of which I returned. Still, this was inefficient. And the recommendations my friends suggested often didn't match my mood. As my taste became more and more refined, I found myself relying more and more on the superb recommendations engine that powers Last.fm.

Fast forward a few years and I'd become a bona fide audiophile with a non-trivial FLAC collection and some decent headphones. The music I'd collected became one of the main motivational forces that took me through my travels and added an extra dimension to the places I'd visited. Hiking through the Himalayas became all the more stunning when coupled with Howard Shore's soundtrack to the Lord of the Rings (at least until it became so cold my Sony Walkman's hard disk platters refused to spin anymore). R.E.M. took me through the rainy race days in Northern Kenya. A constant quest during my time in India was to identify a song I heard at the gym in my first week and could not figure out. Eventually I heard it again when the mobile phone of the taxi driver who was dropping me to the airport rang - on my way out of India. He shared it with me and I'll share it with you:



When I returned to London to start work at Barclays Capital, I found myself with less time to listen to music. Locked down corporate systems and a day filled with meetings meant my headphones were rarely used. My 15 minute commute was occupied with trying to find a pocket of air in the Tube carriage to squeeze into and I never managed to have enough space to put headphones in my ears. Still, music played a big part in my life. my first date with my ex-girlfriend was at a candle lit jazz concert. My friends and I had started exploring the live music scene in central London and I discovered some fantastic artists.

The time came, quicker than expected, for me to find a new employer. At the end of spring my friend Sam linked me to the jobs page on Last.fm. I didn't think they'd hire someone like me but I came back to the site a few months later as I was finding new music to take on holiday with me and saw the same opening. I applied, they had a great interview process which I did well enough in to get an offer. In September 2011, I walked into their office with a stunning sense of surrealism that I was now actually working on a product that I actually used and loved.

As a music enthusiast, the constant tenet of my passion for music was discovery. My musical taste at age 17 was a subset of my musical taste at age 23. It's why we listen to the radio - to get access to new music. There's a lot of utility in someone more qualified curating your playlist, which is why DJs can acquire such celebrity status. Picking tracks is an artform. But just as Amazon enabled the long tail of books, the long tail of music was growing as more and more content was ripped, seeded and downloaded. Suddenly the same 100 top tracks weren't enough for the above average listener. The marginal cost of acquiring music was close to zero and they wanted it all.

In the breadth of all of this choice though, people needed guidance. Last.fm provided that - it was the radio stream with a catalogue longer than the stock of all of the CD stores in England. This catalogue, coupled with insightful recommendations based on a user's own past listening history made its recommendations almost always hit the spot. Sadly, the product came to languish. New product development has suffered over the last half a decade as its new owners struggled to understand the value their product provided. Without a true understanding of its value, they mispriced it. They tried to cover its pages with adverts and, as advertising prices hurtled downwards, underinvested in their product. What's worse is that Last.fm is still built around the old way . The majority of their content comes from the major labels and there's a lack of interesting indie content on the service. This becomes restrictive - for many many reasons (mostly legal) that I don't have time to cover here.

The idea of an infinite radio stream is an important concept though and something that Soundcloud, my favourite product, has executed on brilliantly. Originally just a site for music creators to post and share their sounds, they flipped the balance of power around and essentially put music consumers and creators on the same level. There is no distinction between a creator and a user. They operate a brilliant social model, similar to Twitter, where users can either post their own content, reshare other users' content and favourite content. This enables a whole hierarchy with consumers at the bottom, curators in the middle and creators at the top. It's a beautiful and disruptive solution to getting music out of the stranglehold of the major labels.

When artists upload music to Soundcloud, they do so willingly. Users can stop and start and skip tracks as they like - something that the labels explicitly forbid on standard radio services. Soundcloud allows users to keep up with their favourite artists' new uploads with absolutely no friction by offering a stream that just continues to plays. In fact, the music never stops on Soundcloud. When it runs out of content, it finds some more. And it somehow always knows what to play next. Most of the content is from upstart artists and so you're almost guaranteed to find something new.

It's this endless stream of good music that makes Soundcloud so valuable to every music lover, creator and curator. My 100+ gigabyte music library is languishing on my hard disk as, each day, I keep Soundcloud open more than Facebook.

Soundcloud is also an exceptional promotional tool for the artist. My friend Siva (who incidentally designed all the artwork for our Young Enterprise bands) and I use it extensively to share music through our reggae blog Millennial Roots. It allows artists to bump their tracks up to the top of search results, to offer freedownloads of samples or demo tracks and to embed their track in as many blogs as they like. Soundcloud's business model hinges on this value that it provides to creators of music. By offering free music to users, a presence on Soundcloud is, more often than not, an easy route to growing a good audience for any new artist. Spending €5 a month for this level of user engagement is a minimal expenditure for the shrewd band manager.

The future is in intelligent discovery - as Netflix, Amazon and Last.fm have shown us. But discovery can't exist without content. By cutting the entrenched incumbents out of the process, Soundcloud have democratised promotion of music while providing an super smooth discovery experience.

The tragedy of studying at Cal is that it's a stunningly beautiful place to study but there's scant time to explore! I've been getting slammed the past couple of weeks - having started the many interviews that are to come, and having struggled on a homework assignment. As soon as that was handed in, another was immediately available and I'm back to square one now with two on my plate.

One of the classes I'm taking, Advanced Robotics, is excellent and is exactly what I was looking for in my Master's degree. That said, I can't help feeling somewhat lost with each class. It's getting better as we've moved away from controls (which is ostensibly part of mechanical engineering, which explains why I had no idea what was happening for the first 6 weeks of class) and moved back towards classic AI. It also wasn't immediately clear to me, particularly without a background in controls, what exactly the relevance of the methods we learnt was. I'm now starting to get an appreciation of how you might be able to use them though, mainly through the homeworks.

In the last homework, we programmed a tetris game AI that uses an approximate linear program to generate a policy for how best to play tetris. We also applied linear quadratic regulators to help stabilise a inverted pendulum (a famous problem, also known as the cartpole problem) and to hover a helicopter. In the first case, we used a convex optimisation library called CVX to solve a linear problem. This approach seems particularly common in courses here at Berkeley.

I helped my teammate Gita out with one his homework assignments to find the shortest path in a graph. Instead of just asking students in his class (CE290i) to implement Dijkstra's, they managed to shoehorn the most horrific Java wrapper of a C linear program solving library into their assignment. Instead of writing a beautiful piece of code that could have solved the shortest path problem in maybe ~ 20 lines of Java code at a stretch, it was necessary to generate a string, pass it via some obfuscated interface to this solver and parse the output (of questionable precision). Yuck.

For the majority of my assignments I've been using MatLab, which presents a nice clear interface for implementing programmatic solutions to mathematical problems. It's not my favourite language though - I like writing clean code and it's easily possible to write unintelligible code in MatLab. Perhaps in the same way that you could in other weakly typed languages like Python or Javascript. MatLab also runs extremely slowly - being an interpreted language. Prof Abbeel mentioned that if you were actually implementing these solutions, you'd use C and see a speedup of ~ 1000 times.

In particular, one of the ideas that came to me during the many bleary eyed hours I spent staring at / trying to do the second homework was to use some of the control policy algorithms from robotics to control thyroid disease. As I've mentioned before - I suffer from Hashimoto's thyroiditis, an autoimmune disorder which effectively means my thyroid gland functions less well over time. The typical approach advocated by mainstream physicians treats it pretty poorly. I feel normally energetic on about 1 in 7 days. The other 6 days of the week I'm sleepy for a good part of the day (hypothyroid). Often I'm unable to focus well (hyperthyroid). It's a difficult condition to live with as a normally productive person. Still, I manage.

Where a control algorithm could come in is by more closely modelling the relationship between the different thyroid 'variables'. The normal treatment assumes that a patient's TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone) level is inversely proportional to their Free T4 (thyroxine) level. i.e., if your TSH is high, you need more synthetic thyroxine. If it is low, you need less. From my reading and shallow understanding of the endocrinological system, that's not an accurate assessment of the situation. There are perhaps five variables, if not more that need to be tracked. A patient's thyroid gland may not adequately convert T4 into T3 (this is the form of thyroxine that is usable by the body). Additionally, this conversion takes its toll on their adrenal system, requiring cortisol to carry out the conversion (I think). Taking supplemental T4 for a significant period of time can deplete these levels.

I'd be interested in trying to work out the actual relationship between these variables and perhaps implementing a control algorithm that could determine the optimal policy for medicating a patient. The only caveat is that collecting this data would be exorbitantly expensive (~ $200 for every data point) and that you'd need a lot of it. This is one of those projects that might have to wait for my one-day startup to go public. Incidentally, this autoimmune disorder is the same that Larry Page suffers from. I'm hoping that having a billionnaire with the same problem means some actual research will be done into it :).

This digression aside, these assignments are tough. I suspect they'd be easier if it hadn't been 4 years since I finished my undergraduate degree (and about 6 years since I last studied any maths). The Advanced Robotics course is tough too because I'm the only Master's student taking the course. I've tried to make friends with PhD students to study with but it's difficult - they have their own offices and are generally smarter than me! Luckily there is a sizeable group of Master's students to work on Computer Vision assignments with and that seems to be going well so far.

The other main activity of the last two weeks has been forming (by way of recruiting MBA students) a team for our application to the Lean Launchpad class at the Haas (business school) run by Steve Blank. This is one of the classes that helped me choose to attend Cal based on the advice of Kevin Yien and a handful of other students. This started with almost getting shot down by Steve Blank after my very first pitch at the information session (thankfully saved by an accurate but witty retort). It continued with a networking session and ended up with us forming a team with three MBA students, myself and my teammate Gita - also an engineering student.

Somehow this class wasn't widely advertised amongst CS graduate students and most MBA students wanted people who could build software for their teams. It was a little sad to take myself off the market of available team members. This class won't fulfil my core requirements next semester which means I'll be taking it in additional to my normal workload. I'm hopeful that there is some crossover between the work in the class and our capstone project. Still, next semester is going to be extremely busy.

I've made a conscious effort this week not to buy granola. That was my comfort food of choice and being high in both sugar and fat, it probably wasn't doing good things for my health in the quantity that I was consuming it. I've also succumbed to the coffee shop culture here and have been consuming caffeine regularly. Hopefully I'll get a chance to reset soon.

This week marked the beginning of the Fall recruitment cycle on campus where hundreds of employers will try their best to attract Cal students. That's actually a little incorrect - employers don't seem to have try very hard here, certainly not as hard as employers tried during my time at Cambridge. I'll go into more detail about that later.

As you can imagine, engineering jobs are very prevalent here - certainly disproportionately so, compared to most other types of jobs. In particular, software engineers were sought after by nearly every firm, which has made my job easier. This past week we had the university wide careers fair, which showcased a few hundred employers and was spread over three days. On Wednesday this coming week is the EECS (Electronic Engineering and Computer Science) career fair, which I'm very much looking forward to. In a few weeks time is the Startup Fair, which should be equally exciting.

We also had an Employers' Breakfast before the second day of the career fair this last week. This was interesting but it seems as if the employers hadn't been fully briefed on who was attending this breakfast. For instance, one recruiter was looking for software engineers graduating in December to begin work in January. She didn't realise that every single person in the room was on the MEng program which finishes in May. Whoops.

My attitude towards the job hunt here has been somewhat cavalier. I acknowledge that as a software engineer, it's not going to be difficult to get, at the very least, interviews at the firms I want to work at. (Whether I make it through each firm's gauntlet of interviews is another question entirely...) Having had five internships now and three years of experience, it's fair to say that I have an understanding of what kind of work I'd like to do and for what sort of company. A lot of the companies presenting at the fair were the usual big corporates which were not particularly exciting. A lot of the companies also refused to sponsor international students - which is an issue I've never encountered before back home (being a British citizen).

Using all four of these metrics, I was able to make my 'walk' of the fair more efficient. (I also looked up the list of employers online and filtered them down beforehand, so I knew exactly which stalls to go each day.) This seemed less arduous than what many undergrads and many of my less selective MEng colleagues were doing - visiting each stall in turn. Given the extensive queues at each stall, it looked like a painfully slow process. (Tip for future fairs: get there at the beginning. At 11am it was basically empty. At 12pm it was BUSY.)

I've been a little confused by how the process works here, having read that employers receive thousands of online applications and you're best served by putting your resume directly in front of them. Before I came to Berkeley, I made an extensive spreadsheet detailing the exact jobs at employers I'd want to work for but held off applying directly until I could meet the recruiters directly because of this advice. As it turns out, there's no right answer - it depends on how meticulous (or disorganised) the recuiter is.

The process here essentially works as follows (note that I omitted many of these steps):
1) Dress unlike you normally dress. Dress unlike you would normally dress at work. Wear your smartest suit. (Seriously?)
2) Bring a portfolio of resumes. Preferably customised for each employer but if you don't have time, it's fine to bring multiple copies of the same resume, as long as you customise the 'objective' statement on your resume. (I didn't have space for an 'objective' on my 1 page resume. I wrote individual cover letters for my shortlist of firms.)
3) Queue at your stall and prepare to overhead many conversations where students try to sell themselves to the recruiter. (Queueing, ugh.)
4) Introduce yourself to the recruiter. Hand them your resume.
5) Ask them specific questions about their job while they scan your resume. Try to sell yourself through these questions. (I think my questions were possibly a little too efficient.)
6) Try not to appear unnerved while they make marks on your resume. (As long as it's not a big X you're hopefully OK.)
7) Go home and submit another resume online. Turns out the one you gave them was just for them to later more easily retrieve your online application. (Apologies to the trees out there.)

This whole process seems so completely over the top to me, especially coming from a university like Cambridge where the balance of power between employers and students was the other way. Firstly, wearing a suit to a careers fair? If any employer is so crass as to judge candidates by their appearance even BEFORE their interview, then I'd have serious questions about their work culture! As for queueing up to be pre-screened at the careers fair, it all seems rather backwards to me. The reason we have online applications is that it's all the more efficient. To fall back to paper because of the volume of applicants is just crazy but seemingly necessary.

The only justification I can come up with is that Cal is a BIG university with a lot of students. Getting any sort of job here is a tougher process than back at Cambridge. There are applicants from all over the US from many other equivalently good universities and employers can be as selective as they like. In England, Oxford and Cambridge are, for some reason, in a league of their own above other universities. There are also just 70-90 computer science undergraduates coming out of Cambridge each year. It's easy to see why they're so much more in demand. Here on the other hand, several thousand undergraduates roll out of Cal and other similarly prestigious universities every year. Every competitive advantage helps.

The two weeks of 'bootcamp' really flew by, perhaps quicker than expected. Whilst our scheduled classes only occupied half of each day, other activities and assignments took up much of the free time we had. We've had several 'business' classes, taught by lecturers either from the Haas business school or poached from other business schools. These have been very different to the traditional lecture format I'm used to but, perhaps because of this, all the more engaging. These typically involve case discussions, as an MBA program might, where we discuss the background and issues surrounding a business decision and eventually try to reason out (as a class) what the correct choice is. We've also had a fair amount of marketing work which was interesting but disproportionately time consuming.

One of the interesting events was a mixer with the other new 'professional program' graduate students, namely the MBA, LLM (Master of Law), JD (Doctorate of Law) and MPP (Master of Public Policy) students. These students were, as every class, varied - some interesting, some less so. One of the most colourful characters was a Brazilian student who was former a mergers and acqusitions banker at an investment bank in Brazil. Our conversation reminded me a lot of my interview with an MD at BarCap called Omar Selim - who was possibly the most unpleasant person I have ever met in my career. I have a naturally rounded posture from spending many hours of my life on a bicycle and the rest of my life in front of a computer screen. It's not a slouch so much as the way my back muscles naturally develop. Still, the Brazilian student decided to take it upon himself to teach me how to speak to people in person, including: standing up straight, squaring off my shoulders so that I was parallel to his frame and looking at the other person in the eyes. All this for the purpose of appearing engaged in our conversation. What he failed to understand was the reason I was actively looking for a way to escape from our conversation and were he a genuinely interesting and pleasant person, I would have naturally looked engaged in our conversation!

Another highlight included a team bridge and campanile (tower) building competition where we were fortunate to have a civil engineering student on our team. (Side story: he was from Botswana - how awesome.) Our popsicle (or lollypop) bridge did really well, hitting the max load their 'load testing' machine (a bicycle pump with a plate attached) was able to provide.

That weekend during the bootcamp, I hitched a ride with my cousin Sawan as he drove back from UC Davis to his home in Saratoga. Sawan's dad (my father's cousin) has lived in Silicon Valley for decades and his stories of the area are fascinating. It was Sawan's sister's (Risha's) birthday that evening and we went straight to an upmarket restaurant and shopping area called Santana Row where we spent about 45 minutes circling the various parking lots looking for parking. I found this rather entertaining - all the rich technologists with their luxury German cars must find it less so. Eventually we parked at a cinema complex across the street and ate at a restaurant called Maggiano's where, as a permanent promotion, they give each diner the exact same main course again for free to take home at the end of your meal. Strange, right?

On Saturday I met up with Anish, my long term travel buddy who moved out to Silicon Valley in January. After a scenic hike up the Panoramic Hill, we visited the ISKON Hare Krishna temple in Berkeley to attend their Saturday aarti. I've never been to a Hare Krishna aarti before but the combination of music and chanting was quite relaxing. I can understand why people enjoy it. We later had dinner in the infamous 'Gourmet Ghetto' district in Berkeley at an eccentric vegan cafe called Cafe Gratitude. This place apparently shut down over summer because it previously operated a not-for-profit business model where visitors could pay what they like. Presumably people liked to pay less than the food cost.

All the dishes at the cafe had names beginning with 'I am', followed by a adjective. The waitress' reply after you ordered would be 'you are '. It was interesting. After we ordered, she asked if we'd like to hear the question of the day. This was an open question to think about while we ate - and she didn't ask for an answer. The question that day was, 'What do you have faith in?'. We found that quite amusing, having just come from the temple.

The next day I went for a ride in the hills with Alberto - a Spanish student on the same program as me - who was impressively quick on a $120 Walmart bike. Being a Sunday morning, we encountered many local riders. Most of these were surprisingly slow, despite having all the kit.

On Monday I joined a group of new international students to go find dinner in Berkeley. We went to a restaurant called Sliver - a quirky pizzeria that is apparently a clone of the original 'one-flavour' pizza restaurant, a place called Cheeseboard which is a little further from campus. Both places serve just one flavour of (vegetarian) pizza each day and you can order it by the slice. Sadly it was more expensive than all the pizza we ate in Italian but thankfully, just as tasty. One of the freshman (first year undergraduate) students in the group amused me greatly when, after learning I did my undergraduate at Cambridge, he commented that I'd 'really picked up a British accent'!

Gita, one of my project teammates, and I were also able to drive down to the 3D Robotics Berkeley office to meet Brandon, our industrial sponsor. Their office was an exciting place with quadcopters and aircraft hung off most walls and 3D printers taking a central position. One of the highlights for me was meeting Chris Anderson, the founder of 3D Robotics and the former editor of Wired - who is one of my tech idols and favourite authors.

Other than numerous meetings for my capstone project, the rest of the week was filled with preparing for our marketing presentation. While it wasn't as slick as some of our peers, ours was humourous. We had to run market tests for our product, an energy drink which claimed to be easy on the gut. We tested this claim specifically. I found that it was easy on my gut but sadly my teammate did not have the same experience. (Incidentally, that same teammate happens to be one of the worlds' quickest Rubiks cube solvers. Berkeley is pretty awesome, eh?)

At the end of the week, I had been expecting a delivery from Amazon, which never arrived. After calling UPS to check on the package, it looks like they had made an error when transcribing the address and instead of delivering my package to me, they had misread the D as an 0 and had delivered it several hundred houses further up the street. We live on a hill, so that was about 2 miles uphill. The package that I was expecting contained a large kitchen trashcan and I made it clear to Amazon that it wasn't feasible to go collect it, especially not without a car. They promptly sent another and apologised for the inconvenience.

That weekend, I set about realising my dream of having a monitor at eye-level, which I accomplished at Last.fm using an Ikea hack. Whilst I had previously vowed never to return to Ikea, the promise of having enough spare space to host actual speakers was tempting enough. I had planned to pick up the shelf and take the bus back (with my bicycle) but, predictably, I spent longer in the store than was healthy. There were many different shelf options and, not having a tape measure, I had no idea how large my desk was. This was resolved by taking several sized shelves down to the 'desk' showroom and physically comparing them - a test flawed by the fact that my desk is no longer sold by Ikea. Eventually, I settled on a shelf that was about the right size and queued behind all the undergraduates who had just moved in for the semester and were buying furniture.

Having wasted more time than I had imagined - I just missed the hourly bus that runs from San Francisco to the UC Berkeley campus. Initially, I misread the bus times on the 'Transit' app and thought it'd be just 12 minutes but soon realised this was the bus to San Francisco. Oops. The other bus was about 40 minutes away at this point and I was convinced I could walk to its next stop in less time than that and thus avoid waiting around at the crowded bus stop. This didn't really happen though because I walked in the wrong direction. Eventually I loosed my backpack strap, slid the shelf in under my armpit and put the other end to rest on my handlebars. After an awkward and wobbly push off, I was away - cycling with a 6 kilogram shelf and steering with my right arm. The intersections proved to be slightly tricky but I made it through without any major incident. Eventually I made it to the road up to our apartment where I actually managed to catch up with two girls wearing Cal triathlete gear. They were not amused when I said hello to them.

My shelf built, I succumbed to Amazon's will and ordered the Andrew Philips speakers I had been lusting after. Somehow, in the couple of weeks since I first searched for them, their price had been gradually lowering itself. When it got to $75, I had to admit defeat and haven't regretted placing the order since! Just before the speakers arrived however, two large packages arrived. It turns out that the original trashcan we had ordered had made it down correctly. So had the replacement trashcan that Amazon sent. We'd gone from having no trashcans to having two! Amazon requested that I send back the second trashcan but being carless, I asked if they could pick it up. They said it wouldn't be economical to do so and that I may as well just keep it. Winning. This is Anish's birthday present for next year sorted.

The next day my flatmates and I got some nice bonding time when we ran numerous errands and went to brunch (really just lunch IMO) at a Thai temple in Berkeley. This is a very Berkeley establishment - a temple that hosts brunch on Sundays in order to raise funds. The food was tasty, authentic and the atmosphere jovial. I particularly liked the coconut pancakes that were dessert. Nom.

Time in California is short. Yes, a day here is the same as a day in Europe. It's just that more seems to happen in a day here than in a day back in London. I put that down to the volume of 'things' that happen here.

There's a recurring entry in my 'Weekend' Wunderlist list that says 'Blog Post'. It's been taunting me for the last few weeks as the due date of 'Sun 18 Aug' turned from black to red and stayed that way, glaring angrily at me everytime I practiced David Allen's GTD weekly list review.

I'll go back in time to the two weeks of bootcamp in the next post but for now I'm going to concentrate on the time after that.

Semester started on Thursday the 29th of August. I had previously thought this was just an artefact of the strange way Cambridge schedules its terms but it seems that this habit was carried over the Atlantic too. The beginning of that week was ostensibly empty for returning grad students but spent in hours of orientation for us newly enrolled students.

EECS orientation was moderately interesting, although clearly geared more towards the research focussed PhD and Master's students. Still, some interesting facts were revealed - including that the EECS MEng students (i.e. people like me) in years past often used to spend most of their weekends working (unlike other engineering disciplines). I was also able to find out more detailed selectivity numbers - while our program was less selective than the MS/PhD program (which has an acceptance rate of 6%), it still had a respectable 15% acceptance rate, and about a 5% enrolment rate (i.e. 20 enrolled out of 420 applicants).

EECS is a big discipline here at Berkeley, no doubt due to Cal's heritage in the area. Notable alumni include Steve Wozniak, Bill Joy (one of the founders of Sun Microsystems) and Eric Schmidt. The introductory computer science class supposedly has 1100 undergraduates enrolled in it this year. Astonishing. We also have a lounge lovingly named 'The Woz' and a sponsored 'Vodafone' lab.

After orientation, Gita, Yong and I set to work putting the finishing touches on two drones - an EasyStar foam fixed wing aircraft and a 3D Robotics hexacopter. After spending a day getting them up and running, we took them down to the Berkeley Marina on Wednesday evening. I quickly managed to crash the EasyStar resulting in a clean shear in the foam body that went over the wing. Under Yong's control, the Hex had one clean, slightly wobbly flight and made it down again. The second flight however caused it to lose control - and it quickly was picked up by the wind. Despite cutting the throttle, it refused to return to the ground and the wind took it off into the distance over a small hill. After it passed over the hill, it dropped out of the sky and we ran over to where it came down.

Sadly, just beyond the hill was an inland body of water that was an extension of the Bay itself. The drone had actually made it 10 feet over the water before the power cut. By the time we arrived, little was visible of the drone except for bubbles that were escaping to the surface. We thought this was the batteries exploding but it later turns out this was the capacitors on the six ESCs blowing. I found this rather amusing but the gravitas of the situation was clear - we'd just sunk a $1200 drone. I later realised that the autopilot driving the drone was mine, so I was (at least, partially) invested in its death.

Gita, being the absolute hero that he is, later went back at low tide (1 am) with a wet suit and combed the floor of the Bay looking for the drone. Sure enough, he found it. Yong and I woke up in the morning and were concerned that we hadn't heard from Gita - but he eventually resurfaced (online, I mean) and we acquired a new sense of respect for him!

Classes started on Thursday afternoon and were generally extremely crowded. There is no penalty at Berkeley for signing up to multiple classes for the first two weeks. This allows people to sample various classes before deciding what they'd actually like to take for credit. I was part of this group - being undecided between which two of Computer Vision, Introduction to Robotics and Advanced Robotics I'd like to take. In the end I settled on Computer Vision and Advanced Robotics - both of which are fascinating courses and the latter of which is likely to result in an early mathematics-induced retirement to my cremation chamber.

American classes generally tend to have 3 hours a week of lectures - spread over two sessions. In addition, instructors (usually professors and their teaching assistants) hold 'office hours' where you can go and ask them questions about their course content. Finally, each class has homework - considerable exercises or problem sets which typically take two full days of work to finish.

I'm coming to the end of my first batch of homeworks - and they are time consuming and exhausting. Given my generally poor and now rusty knowledge of maths, I'm struggling to remember facts that were once at the front of my mind seven years ago! This has been a stressful experience that I hope will get easier. Additionally, the office hours frustrate me, generally because you have to contend with many other students for the instructor's time. This can be painful, especially when they're asking questions about a part of the homework that you have yet to get to.

On the other hand, the homework for the 'engineering leadership' class I'm taking (which is a mandatory part of my MEng program) has been surprisingly easy. I guess I've always been a glutton for reading and writing though and most of it has been reading and writing based. It is my escape from maths.

The homework situation was compounded by our decision to visit the UAS West conference in San Diego - a industry focussed UAS (unmanned aerial systems) conference to which we gained free admittance. We left Berkeley at about 6pm on Thursday evening, reaching San Diego at sometime after 2am - on the whole a rapid drive down. After sleeping for a few hours at the waterfront flat of an acquaintance's friends in La Jolla (hot tip: it's not pronounced how it sounds, at all), we woke up to attend a morning of talks. The talks were mainly centred around the military and military uses of UAS technology - which were interesting but perhaps not directly relevant to our project to bring drone technology to the civilian market.

That afternoon, we visited the 3D Robotics head office, which was the drone hacker's equivalent of visiting Santa's Workshop. There were large screens, soldering stations and quadcopters everywhere. We chatted to our contacts there for a bit and started the long drive back to Berkeley - trying our best to avoid the Los Angeles rush hour.

Sadly, in a misguided attempt to beat the rush hour traffic, we ended up a long way off track. After we recovered back onto the I5 interstate, we ended up back off track when we sleepily took a wrong turn. These detours added a good two hours to our trip - arriving back to Berkeley at 2:30am, a full 11.5 hours later. On the plus side, we stopped at an excellent sushi restaurant in Bakersfield called Sushiko. Paraphrasing Gita, 'it's surprising to find good sushi in Bakersfield, out of all places'.

Despite all the driving, we made it back to Berkeley with a full Saturday to spare. The fatigue had hit us both though and it took the weekend to recover. The homework wasn't waiting though and I spent the rest of the weekend (and most of the week) diving headfirst into the wonderful world of MatLab.