Users/TobinFricke

About Me

I am a graduate student in Physics at the University of Rochester. I even have a webpage!

I moved to Rochester from California in August 2004. In California I lived in Berkeley (1998-2004) and San Diego (Summer 2004).

I moved away from Rochester in December 2006. I currently live in Pasadena, California and work at Caltech. I'm moving to Louisiana in December.

• To Do list

Contact Information

Projects

starting a co-op: Returning from a year abroad in Sweden and Israel, I found myself back in Berkeley with nowhere to live. I applied to the co-op system there and was amazed at what I discovered. Thoroughly converted to the co-op dream, I've set about trying to start a co-op in Rochester. The resulting project is Ant Hill Cooperative.

house-to-house wireless: In Berkeley there are about fifteen co-op houses, many of which can see each other from their rooftops. A few weeks before I moved away from Berkeley we set about a project to determine whether we could establish rooftop-to-rooftop wireless network connections using off-the-shelf WiFi equipment and high-gain antennas. It appeared that the necessary lines-of-sight exist. Unfortunately I moved away from Berkeley before we were able to implement this. I still have two high-gain Yagi antennae and a box of Orinoco cards in my closet... Maybe we can do something like this in Rochester.

community wiki: Sometime in the Spring of 2004 I got the idea to start a "GeoWiki," which would be a website with a map of the local area showing dots where notable things were located. Clicking on these dots would take you to a user-edited wiki page about the thing. This idea transmogrified into the simpler idea of just having a Wiki dedicated to a certain locality: Berkeley, California in our case. BerkeleyWiki was born! That summer, Philip Neustrom at UC Davis picked up this idea and ran with it, resulting in the incredibly beautiful, popular, and useful DavisWiki. Now Philip is sharing the resulting Wiki software with us for use in this wiki (ROCwiki).

critical mass: It's been a personal mission of mine to restart Critical Mass in Rochester.

structure and interpretation of classical mechanics: http://groups.google.com/group/sicm

Miscellaneous Distractions

• journal
  

• technical journal
  

• links
  

• pictures
  

• goals

Old Projects

• jpegrescue, a software program to recover images from a formatted/erased memory card
  

• a magstripe reader to find out what data is stored on credit cards, drivers' licenses, BART tickets, etc
  

• micromouse, an autonomous, maze-solving robot (1999)
  

• the "four buck link," an inexpensive computer connection for TI calculators (1997)

Various Lists

Classes I want to take

• Physics 405 — Geometrical methods in Physics

Places I want to visit soon

• Quebec City

• Montréal (again)
  

Movies I want to see

• Brazil

• That movie Amol and I saw the poster for
  

• Hedwig and the Angry Inch
  

• Big Fish
  

Some things to acquire

• twin peaks dvd

• legos
  

• vacuum coffee pot
  

• postcards
  

• the current issue of rolling stone
  

To do list

• Build something like SpokePov

• Write a tidbit of code to invert a matrix, modulo 2.
  

• Implement "Travelling Salesman" for ROC

In the news

blatant self-promotion.

• http://www.coe.berkeley.edu/engnews/spring03/14s/essay.html
  

• http://www.coe.berkeley.edu/engnews/fall02/11f/Sweden.html
  

• http://www.coe.berkeley.edu/forefront/fall2003/fricke.html
  

• http://www.coe.berkeley.edu/forefront/spring2004/fricke.html
  

• http://www.coe.berkeley.edu/forefront/fall2004/fricke.html

Other Web Pages

google pagerank mongering.

• Splorg Collective — http://splorg.org:8080/people/tobin/
  

• University of Rochester — http://web.pas.rochester.edu/~tobin/
  

• Open Computing Facility (Berkeley) — http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~fricke
  

• eXperimental Computing Facility (Berkeley) — http://xcf.berkeley.edu/~tobin
  

• Laser Interferometer Gravity Observatory (LIGO) (Rochester) — http://apex.ligo-wa.caltech.edu/~tobinf
  

• Institute for Electronics and Electrical Engineers (IEEE) — http://www-ieee.eecs.berkeley.edu/~tobin/
  

• EECS Alumni (Berkeley) — http://alumni.eecs.berkeley.edu/~tobin/
  

• Computer Science Undergraduate Association — http://csua.berkeley.edu/~tobin/ and http://rum.csua.berkeley.edu/~tobin/
  

• Roundtable (Rochester) — http://roundtable.cif.rochester.edu/~tobin/
  

• Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (2000) — http://aether.lbl.gov/www/personnel/fricke.html
  

• Planetary Science Institute (1998) — http://www.psi.edu/sji/interns/fricke.html

TobinFricke's Statistics

Edits	Pages Created	Files Contributed	First Edit Date	Last Edit	Last Page Edited
1711	309	29	2005-03-15 08:16:30	2009-01-11 20:17:08	tobinfricke/scratch

Comments:

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2005-08-02 11:39:33   Tobin: Thanks for the welcome. I honestly don't remember how I ran across rocwiki, but I had e-mailed the URL to myself around a month ago as a reminder to drop in and poke around. I stumbled across the reminder over the weekend while I was starting to brainstorm some ideas for adding content to newyorksportswriters.org, a site that I run. Now that I've kicked the tires on rocwiki a little bit I'm also wondering about how the "consensus by committee" approach might fit in at democratandchronicle.com, where I'm the manager in charge of production. Folks there are a bit intrigued by blogging right now, but it typically doesn't spawn the interactivity and chatter that wikis lend themselves to. —JohnMoriello

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2005-08-02 14:08:47   Your edits for today are a blast Tobin! I see you are making the rounds and making introductions. —FarMcKon

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2006-06-15 18:18:15   '"Travelling Salesman" for ROC'? I'm completely tunnel-visioned on this as a CompSci. And oh, thanks for turning me on to SpokePov. I know just the person to buy it for. —ChristineLeo

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2008-09-23 08:12:57   Hi Tobin, you hereby ADOPT TobinFricke/Frustrations, TobinFricke/Groceries, and TobinFricke/Scratch which are otherwise Orphan Pages - Thanks (:>} —BradMandell