What's in a Name

I was born in China with the name Jiaying. I’d say, It’s pretty normal for a Chinese kid born in China to get a Chinese name. But when I was 4, I moved to the U.S. and from then on I had name problems.

Most people I know who moved to the U.S. from China had their names changed by their parents on arrival. For some reason my parents didn’t do that for me so I started pre-school as Jiaying.

I remember watching a decent amount of Jackie Chan Adventures on channel 7, and I really wanted to change my name to either Jackie or Jade. My parents however, were less excited about that, “you know if you change your name to Jackie, people are going to think of Jackie Chan, how about Jessica?” Back then names like Jessica, Jennifer, and Kevin were really popular for asian kids.

I’m pretty sure my childhood consisted of me coming up with names that were ultimately rejected. At the end of freshman year highschool, I was slated to move to Kansas. Keep in mind I lived in New York back then, this was an opportunity to start brand new. That was the first time I remember my parents actively encouraging me to pick a new name. By that time I had pretty much already established an identity as Jiaying, and wasn’t superduper eager about changing names, but I considered it.

Ultimately I kept it because my best friend at the time (NYSSSA 2010, I think) told me that it was a beautiful name. She also told me to not get braces cause gap teeth are unique.

When I started college my parents gave me the option again. They gave reasons like “people are going to discriminate against you when they see your name isn’t English!” But I was like “It’s too late now! Why didnt’ you let me change my name to Jackie when I was 7??” And of course the response was “Because Jackie Chan!”

So I used to hate the first day of school. Mainly cause it was a spectacle each period when each new teacher would try to learn names. They would read down their attendance list and when they get to my name they would go “Jay-ling? Jay-jing?” I don’t know why but for some reason most people really want that Y to be a L or a J. These teachers would make a huge deal about saying my name a million times because they wanted to get it “right.” And every time they’d pronounce it they would look at me, and I would say “it’s close enough.” It didn’t matter because every time they asked “No, no, say it in your mother tongue,” I said my name in Chinese, “Jia1-ying3” they would be sure to butcher it.

Up until college I would offer two different options for how people said my name. Sometimes I would say “Jay-ing” and sometimes I would go with “Jie (rhymes with die)-ing.” People would get really confused when I would say one then the other. “Which one is the correct one?!”, “none of them but at least you can say them with enough practice?” I didn’t really get my shit together until college, I go by “Jay-ing” now. I figured that I might as well be consistent with the way people mispronounce my name.

People also really like calling me Jay. “Can I call you Jay?,” “Umm, well it’s not really my style...sure, whatever.” It’s easier to just give in sometimes. Besides, the alternative is people sometimes flat out avoid saying it, like it was on their taboo card or something.

I have so many conversations where people skirt around saying my name, and as a result I’ve become hypersensitive to it. Honestly, I would rather have you fuck up my name and let me correct you than to feel like you’re avoiding me cause you want to save yourself the embarrassment of being wrong.

So besides being really hard for people to pronounce, my name also seems really hard for people to spell. The most common spelling mistake people make is spelling Jiaying as Jaiying. Which is understandable, jai does happen to look more like jay than jia does.

I hate it when trendy drink places (Starbucks?) are like “can I get a name with that?” and then I go through one of three scenarios:

1. I tell them the truth and they care enough to spend time awkwardly playing the guessing game while customers behind me get impatient
2. I tell them the truth and the cup comes back as “Jane”
3. I tell them my name is Jane

I’ve even had my name misspelled on my social security card. Isn’t that the one place you can’t fuck up?

Besides that, other little things will crop up. Letters will arrive to my house addressed to Mr. Jiaying Wei. My name will auto correct to Jailing. I let people get away with calling me the most ridiculous things because I didn’t want to spend the time correcting them. But honestly, I’m happy that I didn’t change my name to Jackie. But maybe Jade. Jade sounds cool.

Standing Desk and Shadow Arts

So this is a part II to this blog post. Remember how the weather thing I posted last time was in the triple digits? Well this week’s weather for Tucson looks like:

I’m still biking, and it’s still bearable, but I hear it gets to 115°F later in the summer. Now that I’ve worn long sleeves here, I think I can wear long sleeves anywhere.

So last time we left off with standing desk, none of the frame was made, most of the wood was semi cut out. Next up on the agenda was to make the frame.

This was all of the square tubing after cutting really long stock on the horizontal band saw. When I was done cutting all the mitres I thought the scrap pieces looked kinda artistic, so I staged a photo op.

After getting all the pieces cut, the next step was to get the thing welded up. Up until this point I think I thought that welding was difficult. But I was wrong. Welding was probably the easier thing to do. What was the hardest was getting everything squared up, making sure everything was level. So many hours of clamping, tacking, holding up a square, hammering, cutting tacks, more hammering, holding up a level, all before I could start running weld beads along the seams. This was all done using MIG, for those who are curious.

Luckily I had so much help from Mat, my co-worker, welder extraordinaire.

I don’t think you know the meaning of hot, until you're in your welding garb -  thick leather jacket, thick leather gloves (which my fingers maybe filled up half of the availiable finger length), safety glasses, welding helmet - in 100 degree weather and 70% humidity. It was pretty gross, not to mention annoying, when I couldn’t see cause my safety glasses fogged up every minute.

Another thing I didn’t realize was how much angle grinding went into welding. All those shiny spots you see (and don’t see) up there was done using an angle grinder with a flap disk, I think I easily went through about 15 of those. After grinding for a long time (which by the way is super exhausting), I could feel a tingly vibration when I tapped my fingers together. Really weird feeling.

Then after getting the frame all welded together, I needed to put the cabinet together. Good thing the entire thing was cut using a CNC router so I didn’t have to table saw anything. Since it was all done by a machine, it meant I could get those fancy circles cut out (complexity) without any additional work. Thank you Dave Barrett.

Gluing in process…

Attaching drawer slides… (which by the way is a huge pain the in ass, especially because these ones didn’t come apart).

Assembled! I think it looks pretty close to the render.

If you think the frame looks different, your right, all the rusty tubes were sandblasted and then sent off to be professionally powder coated.

Phew, so that’s all done. My next project was to prototype a light-shadow art display thing. It’s kind of hard to explain in words. Below is an example of what the place I work at does.

That is made out of hammered sheet metal. My prototypes were made out of lasercut card stock.

I also made a shadow art box thing!

The initial drawing was done in photoshop using a tablet. Then I took it into illustrator and used image trace (I swear it is one of the best things that’s happened in UOCD). Then it was laser cut and taped together.

Classy under the desk photo.

Weirdly grainy in the photo studio photo. I didn’t think my phone camera sucked this much, but I guess it does. Also that photo studio was basically a sauna. It was upstairs in the attic, enclosed by old T-mobile advertisement tarps. The entire time I was taking pictures, sweat be rolling.

FIRST robotics sucked.

So in highschool I was part of 2410 Metal Mustangs, a FIRST robotics competition (FRC) team. For those who don’t know about FRC, it’s a robotics competition centered around a sport like competition. Usually 6 different teams from 6 different high schools  duke it out on two alliances (teams) per match. Each team would have 6 weeks to build their robot according to competition rules.

When I left highschool I’m pretty sure that I was in love with FIRST (or at least liked it) like all the other graduating seniors on my team. It had opened my eyes to a whole new career path. Before FIRST I’m not even sure if I could tell you what engineers did, now I’m going to a school that only offers engineering degrees. It did good things for me, but looking back, the experience actually sucked.

I was on a team of about 40~50 members (which would be considered huge) and maybe about a dozen on and off mentors. I’m pretty sure most people on my team would agree that the bulk of the work was done by maybe 10 people. And it’s not like the rest of the team were slackers or incompetent, it’s just the elite echelon of “geniuses” would take it upon themselves to “lead” the team. After two years of actually working on teams in college, I’ve learned that being a leader did not mean “I’m going to come up with the concept, design it, build it by myself, and you guys will just do the boring stuff I don’t want to do” like it did during most of my FIRST experience.

Back then I was in awe of their supreme programing capabilities, their lengthy fabrication experience, knowledge of black magic circuitry, etc, and came to the conclusion that I was just not capable of building a robot like they could. Now when I think about what it takes to build a robot, sure it’s still difficult, but it’s nothing that you couldn’t teach to high school freshmen.

I feel like people’s motivations were misplaced. There was not enough of a teaching atmosphere, where you wouldn’t be treated like moron for not knowing what nuts and bolts were. People seemed to always have a need to prove to others that they were competent. There was a  long list of technobabble that people frequently used, “CIMs”, “mecanum wheels”, “the wireless”, “jaguars,”  to name a few. Maybe if the team had actually spent 30 minutes going over vocabulary before building, then more people could have actually participated in helping design and fabricate. Instead it was like “bla bla bla wireless bla bla bla malfunction bla bla” and the average team member would have no idea what that means, so a “leader” would have to fix the problem.

I’m not entirely guiltless. I spent most of those two year on the team trying to catch up to the “elite”. In that time I’m sure I’ve scoffed at many a newbies who didn’t know how to use a socket wrench. In fact going to college, I was definitely motivated by “I’m going to show those people! I’m gonna get so much knowledge gainz, and be better at building things than they ever could!”

And I’d be lying if I said that isn’t still motivating. But it also makes me a little bit sad. This mentality is what chases young people out of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). People who think: “that stuff isn’t for me, I’m not smart enough,” all because someone further along the path needed the ego trip.

Even though I’m pointing fingers, I don’t think those kids were actually to blame, (some of them were snobs, but some of them were actually really nice). This weird power hierarchy has probably been going on since the formation of our team.

I don’t think this is something that can be fixed by student members. I think that in order to make actual lasting change, mentors must make an effort to level the playing field. Even a simple powerpoint before build season starts, outlining what it actually takes to build a robot (ie. this is a robot, it has a frame, motors, sensors, code, wireless communication) so that the new kids don’t feel like they’re tossed into a labyrinth without a map. That and the mentors need to stop picking favorites. I found that I didn’t get to know most of the mentors because they were always crowded around the kid who was actually doing things (why? Because no one else were given the tools to do it).

And I guess for you kids stuck in the same shitty situation right now, the best thing you can do is to be shameless in asking questions. It feels awful admitting to not knowing something that seems simple but honestly how else are you going to learn what it is (I’m getting lots of practice with this right now during this internship)? And when you do become a badass pool of knowledge, return the favor and give judgment-free advice.

Another summer, another standing desk

So I’ve finally been in Tucson (which I consistently spell Tuscon) for about 5 days, I’ve been in work for about 3, and now I’m going to share a few first impressions.

The first thing I thought when I was flying over the area right before I landed was “holy crap, the entire place is brown.” I’ve flown over green places like Kansas, white places like Boston, but this was the first time I’ve actually flown over a desert. This brings me to…

“OMG it’s going to be so hot, you’re going to die.” You know who you are. The weather forcast for this week does look something like:

But! I’ve been successfully biking to and from work in 100° (that’s 37.777° repeating for you celcius people) weather. It’s actually not that bad. It doesn’t really feel that hot and biking is like running a fan, but the wind is stationary and you have to ram into it.

This is the first internship I’ve had that has a commute of > 5 minutes (*cough* Chris Lee’s lab *cough*), and holy crud how do adults have time to do anything fun? It’s like you get back home, get barked at by a few dogs, cook yourself dinner, take a shower, and get a grand total of 2 hours before you have to go to sleep to get up at 6 the next morning.

Not only that but the super hot temperatures that Tucson offers to its locals means that no one really goes out before the sun sets. Guess what? It’s summer and the sun sets at like 8pm.

My first job here in Tucson working for these guys was to build a standing desk for a coworker. The first thing I thought was: “another summer, another standing desk”

But this time I was going to really pimp it out in an effort to be “THE BEST INTERN EVER.” So that meant that I spent the next 16~ hours CADing and I think it’s safe to say that that’s not really healthy for your eyes or wrists.

See that frame on that table? I learned this thing in Solidworks called weldments, and that frame with all it’s mitered corners and 3Dness was made from a simple 3D sketch with just lines. Magic.

And then of course comes the actual building part. I’ve only started, so here are a few in progress pictures. You could play “match the part to the render” if you want.