Saturday March 17th

Puzzles, Maker Faire and Space

Today I went to my school’s Maker Faire. I actually attended because I wanted to make contact with a professor whose class I’ll be taking in Fall. It’s a year-long research class.

Yesterday I found out that Women Who Code had chosen me as a winner to receive Cloud training for a year! :D

Pretty darn cool! I spent my time yesterday in-between learning COBOL for class and learning some intro to cloud stuff. I know a bit of the Google Cloud stuff already. I don’t know as much AWS or Azure, so this is a great opportunity. They even walk you through building a site via Cloud and transcribing your notes into mp3s as projects that train you. Sounds great! :D
I fell asleep last night looking at videos I found online about PhD life and what to expect. Dreaming about doing my PhD. Wanting it badly. To be a better programmer and to spend my time in a community discovering new things about the field.

I took the regular bus to school..and the other one….didn’t show up. Fortunately, I just sucked it up and walked to another nearby bus. This ended up being in my favour, because apparently the timing was perfect for the raffle ticket I got today, which won me my first tablet!

Having suffered through the green card process for so long, I don’t have much. I have a flip-phone, and have tried to keep my life as simple as possible (I do have five computers tho, and lots of books, but not much else), because I was not sure how long I’d be in the country. So this is sort of a big deal for me. To have this tablet..the first real thing like this I’ve had. It feels good. Everyone says I’m really lucky :D

We had a series of puzzles to solve. A group of four of us was the first to solve them, in the Escape Space room!
The first Clue was a Caesar Cipher puzzle!
It read

 N fr ymj kfymjw tk rtijws umdxnhx.
 N fr rtxy pstbs ktw ymj ymjtwd tk wjqfynanyd.
 Bmt fr N?

 I am the father of modern physics.
 I am most known for the theory of relativity.
 Who am I?

Then we had to take a flash light and look at clues that could only be seen with the blacklight flashlight.
I found the numbers 6, 92, 88, 53, 8, 16, 77, 22, 39.
On the Periodic table, this spells Curiosity.
The third clue, which we solved together (but as soon as I saw it I realized it was ASCII!) were the numbers 65, 115, 116, 114, 111, 110, 97, 117, 116. Translated, they spelled Astronaut.
Finally, we had a puzzle, which took us the longest to solve, because it was a constellation. One of my friends, Patrick, who is a Physics major, figured out it was The Big Dipper. And so, we high-fived and ran to the Alien, who gave us a stamp and an extra raffle ticket for figuring out the final clue! :D

I went to a Mars Rover one by my professor. He is working on the Mars 2020 rover.

He pointed out new parts of the Rover that weren’t in MSL. New cameras, how the parachute worked, pointed out the thrusters and three places currently that are in the running for the landing of the 2020 Rover.
He asked “Anyone know how the Rover is powered?” and I said “radio-isotopes” and he said “that’s right!” and my friend almost had a heart attack in shock that I knew this LOL. Those JPL lectures paid off haha.

I made a friend and we took a photo in a photo-booth together! He’s a Computer Science major, too!
He said he wanted an In-n-Out Wedding, and he said he loved it so much he wanted the trucks for his wedding, and the menu would be In-N-Out. We asked about the vegetarians, and he said they weren’t invited. I couldn’t stop laughing. Ingenious!

A friend of mine is interning there this summer! She’s working on Ballistic Missiles!
Oh, and they gave out stickers and other swag!

Yes, it’s true, and it’s exciting! I want to rope in some of my other friends to come maybe give a workshop there or something. It’s really exciting

Written on March 17, 2018