Appreciate what you have and work hard...

It feels like only yesterday when I was getting ready to go to university. I felt scared and excited all at once. It was going to be my first time staying in a residence and being away from my parents for more then two weeks. Ah the sadness that came over me that day when my parents dropped me off and said good luck and work hard. I couldn't help but feel sad. Tears were dripping from my eyes, I tried fighting it but it didn't help. As soon as my mom saw me she started crying as well. The relationship between my mom and I has always been very strong. She is my best friend, mentor and mother. The love I have for her is infinite.

I am in my third year now and our relationship is still strong, it might even be stronger. Just recently I remembered that I brought along an old watch that my mother had bought me when I was a little boy. Back in those days the coolest digital watches had a led back light. And I was the only one out of all my friends who didn't have this type of watch with the led back light. I was only in grade 4 at the time, about 10 years old. My favorite colour was blue and that was the same colour as the led back lights of the watches my friends had. The desire to get a watch grew stronger everyday when my friends showed of their digital watches with the blue led back lights.

My birthday was coming up and I thought to myself, what if I get a watch for my birthday? So I went to my mother and I asked her if she could buy me a watch for my birthday. My mom always played it of as if she wasn't going to buy me a watch for my birthday. On the day of my 10th birthday my mom gave me a little box wrapped in paper. Back then I didn't know proper watches came in a little box. So without knowing what it was I opened the little metal box and there it was, a Casio Illuminator watch. Oh the joy overflowed inside of me. It felt like nothing I have ever felt in my life.

So obviously the watch had to have a led back light. My whatch game with more futures than those of my friends. Mine was waterproof it has an alarm with a snooze function and it could signal out every hour that went by. After every hour it would beep to tell me that an hour has passed.

Then out of all the positive things came one negative thing, the led back light wasn't blue... it was green!!! Let me just stop the story for a moment, I was still a child, I didn't know what I was thinking and I might have been spoiled a bit. Back to the story. As soon as I saw that the led back light was green, I started to cry and my mother didn't know what was going on. She saw me going from this happy little boy to a tantrum throwing spoiled brat. I told her that I didn't want it and that she could keep if she wanted it. I was so mad at her. As the days went by I started  wearing my "stupid watch". And a few months later I saw that one of my friends had the same watch, this gave me more confidence to wear my watch.

Seeing the watch now just made me feel bad because of the way I treated my mother when she just wanted to do something nice for me. My mother always tried to buy me the nice toys and electronics I wanted, thinking of me and my feelings although I didn't appreciate her efforts back then. I didn't grow up having the richest parents but they still made an effort to ensure that I don't see what we have and don't have. They did it so well that I only noticed in high school that we didn't have all the money in the world.

There is such a big difference between what I had growing up and what my sister had growing up. I am the oldest and I had the most toys and she just had to share what I had. My role as a big brother only showed when I started to notice what was going on around me and that not everything is about me. My sister had to wear my old clothes and because she grew up like that it didn't feel weird to her. I was the guy in our family making fun of her not knowing what our situation was.

I just wish that I could go back and make her childhood more worthwhile and make the life of my parents a bit easier. Luckily I noticed what was going on around me and what my parents and my little sister had to give up in raising me. Even now I am tearing up.

I know that I can't go back in time and undo what I did but what I can do is work hard now and finish my degree so that when my sister goes to university I can help my parents financially so that my sister can study carefree. Hopefully one day I'll be able to repay my parents for everything that they have done for me.

Mommy, Daddy and little Sis I love you and I'll do my best!!!

Taking table tennis to a new level...

I recently received a table tennis robot from one of my friends. I am so excited and I can't wait to use it for the first time. Because of my tight schedule between classes and studying I don't have much time to work on my table tennis. And when I feel the need to practice there is no one around to play against.

In my residence there is not a lot of guys who like to work on their table tennis game, they usually just pitch for a match and play. So I will never be able to work on my technique with a partner because the way it usually works is, a lot of guys show up to play table tennis and than you have to start playing matches otherwise the waiting period is going to be too long for the players in line.

Now I have this wonderful machine that I'm borrowing this week, just for me. I will be able to work on my footwork and a variety of forehand and backhand strokes. The nice thing about the table tennis robot is that you can adjust the shooting frequency, the placement of the ball and the spin on the ball. All of the different settings are sent via remote, so you don't have to walk all the way to the robot to change the settings. You can even program this machine to shoot balls in a sequence making it possible for you to practice different drills.

Check out the website I created for our table tennis team: Huis Marais Table Tennis

Good News!!!

This week has been a very tough week but it ended up being one of my best weeks so far. I had a practical for three of my 5 modules and for each practical I had to do theoretical preparation. By far the hardest part of a practical is the theoretical preparation. If you end up doing your calculation and circuit design on the same day as the practical, then you are done for. I know that this is going to sound bad but that is what I did this week, I pretty much did my practical preparation on the day of practical. All of those days ended up being long and tiring. I had to do it because most of my time went into fixing and doing preparation for my E-Design demo that I had to do on Thursday. This was more important than all of my other practicals.

So for this weeks E-Design we had to create a remote for our previously built gate. The lecturer gave us two buttons, a Renesas G12 and a programmer to program the G12. They also gave us an infrared LED and a receiver which we had to connect to the G14, the main controller of the gate. Each of us were given a hexadecimal address for our specific remotes so that our remotes doesn't open other students gates.

We had to send information from our remote to the gate using Manchester coding. The information had to be sent in binary and had to be decoded at the gate. The three instructions that we had to send was open, close and stop. One button opened the gate and the other button closed the gate and if both buttons were pressed at the same time then the gate had to stop.

Building and coding the remote was quite easy but the most challenging part was to decode the information that was sent. So I sampled the information for decoding using a timer and an edge triggered pin. If the pin was triggered the timer had to start and only read information from the receiver at an interval of 889 micro seconds.

Everything worked fine at the end of the day and I managed to get all of my marks for the demo that day. This was my first successful demo, all the other demos had some sort of problem on the day of the demo.


The good news is that I now have a much better chance of passing this module which had me all negative and sleep deprived.  

Before I forget, I just want to mention that I took part in a table tennis tournament this weekend and I made it all the way to the semi-final. I must say, best week so far.