Innovation @ UWaterloo – 2010 ECE Design Symposium

The annual UWaterloo Electrical and Computer Engineering Design Symposium took place today at the school’s Davis Centre in Waterloo. Having had my turn at the Design Symposium last year, I was really interested to see what students have come up with this time. I had a chance to look around at the projects and talk with these students and I am really impressed with all they’ve done. There was a ton of innovation on display today.
I had a great time talking with all these bright students. I spent so much time talking to them that I only got around to seeing about 50% of all the booths! It was really interesting to find out how to put their systems together and I learned so much from the short exhibition time.
Read on to see some of the projects.
Tài Hǎo Le! – Ruminations on Chinese 101

Today I had my last Integrated Chinese 101 class. It was great! Tài hǎo le! (Great!)
Ken and I took the non-credit course from the Confucius Institute at Renison College (UW). We learned several basic Mandarin phrases and sentence structure. By the end of the course, I could write a page long letter (in Chinese characters) to our instructor. I was really impressed by the amount that I learned! Of course, it’s all very basic, but definitely a great start.
(Yet Another) Apple Logo Mod
A while ago, the folks over at SkinStyler sent me a couple of their Apple logo mod stickers for me to try out. Well today I was sitting around the house with my sister and looking at her ancient iBook G4. Suddenly I remembered these classic Apple stickers and asked if she wanted to try it out. She was pretty reluctant, but they were just stickers so we could peel it off if she didn’t like it. Well, here’s what it looked like:
I have to say that the classic rainbow Apple does look a lot better on the white plastic than it did on my aluminum PowerBook. And unlike the previous mod on my PowerBook, this rainbow logo was just a clear sticker that is applied to the exterior of the iBook case. Easily applied and easy to remove.
My sister was afraid people would think she was “full of pride”, but as far as I know it’s still stuck on her iBook.
