tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-56896042169263976012011-07-30T17:58:44.449-05:00UNT, Double-E, MusicallyNoah Mazehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00057895922583920730noreply@blogger.comBlogger291100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5689604216926397601.post-2209359449052838552010-04-28T01:32:00.005-05:002010-04-28T09:12:31.138-05:00

I found my camera in my underwear drawer the other day. It had been missing for kinda a while, so I couldn't really remember what the last thing I photographed was. I fired it up, and was greeted with the gleaming, smiling face of this guy:As you can probably imagine, this is not a face that is easy to forget… I knew I had seen it before, but I couldn't quite place it. So I skipped to the

Noah Mazehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00057895922583920730noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5689604216926397601.post-62243532312277386452010-04-25T22:57:00.008-05:002010-04-27T09:10:28.620-05:00

As many of you know, I am a member of all sorts of environmentally friendly, earth-conscious groups: Slow Food, Engineers Without Borders, and The North Texas Energy and Environment Club are the most active of the bunch. And they are all pretty big fans of the same planet. Ours. Earth.So for Earth Week I was a busy, busy boy. I was routinely triple-booked, and everything I was invited to was

Noah Mazehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00057895922583920730noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5689604216926397601.post-2626404182959782282010-04-19T09:38:00.007-05:002010-04-19T16:11:10.203-05:00

Denton is a city with a lot of unusual sights. From the day-glo orange messenger trucks of Frenchy's Lawn & Tree Services to the immaculately-restored Denton County Courthouse:But when I first moved up here, I was always the most struck by the façade of Recycled. On paper, a pink building with lavender trim sounds like something a Disney princess would live in, but in real life it really works

Noah Mazehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00057895922583920730noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5689604216926397601.post-57406543700087199692010-04-17T14:15:00.002-05:002010-04-19T11:07:23.721-05:00

In my last article I mentioned Denton’s uncanny ability to have all of that small-town flavor without that bitter small-town aftertaste. Today I’d like to upgrade all the adjectives in that sentence and talk about the metropolis-sized charms of modern-day Denton. When I was living in the suburbs, north of Dallas, there was never anything nearby to do. If a band came to the metroplex, it was

Noah Mazehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00057895922583920730noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5689604216926397601.post-35535990727405362162010-04-12T15:12:00.013-05:002010-04-19T08:57:08.250-05:00

My favorite thing about Denton is its ability to be a small town and nothing like a small town at the same time. This Saturday the planets aligned just so and the best parts of both worlds shined through simultaneously. Today I'll cover the small town bit, because it's my favorite.I've always been stuck in either a big gross city or a totally unimpressive suburbia, so the small townish bits of

Noah Mazehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00057895922583920730noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5689604216926397601.post-10212787274972997852010-04-05T16:12:00.004-05:002010-04-06T11:46:46.515-05:00

At this point I think we can all agree that yesterday's amplifier was pretty much terrible. It had way too much signal distortion and not enough common sense. Now that I've learned what I did wrong, I can apply this knowledge to future projects. Or current projects, as the case may be.In Analog Systems Design last week I built a PROPER amplifier. As it turns out, a real amplifier has multiple

Noah Mazehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00057895922583920730noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5689604216926397601.post-46476283175617875912010-04-01T20:23:00.006-05:002010-04-02T09:02:59.393-05:00

I apologize for the slow updates lately. This week was basically the perfect storm of exams and major projects. On the plus side, the exams all went great and I can add "Building a complete amplifier" (including pre-amp, audio filters, equalization, panning and power amplification) to my resume. And list of bragging rights.As it turns out, amplifiers are a lot more complicated than I ever

Noah Mazehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00057895922583920730noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5689604216926397601.post-80152624544257104542010-03-30T22:22:00.003-05:002010-03-31T14:33:14.688-05:00

I really thought it wasn't going to work out. It seemed too good to be true, but the Flaming Lips show actually, really happened, and it was actually totally awesome. For Stardeath and The White Dwarfs, and Midlake, I mostly wandered the fairgrounds taking in the sights and sounds. I also helped myself to an enormous barbequed turkey leg. I haven't had one of those since I last visited

Noah Mazehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00057895922583920730noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5689604216926397601.post-30334859210227883492010-03-22T11:36:00.003-05:002010-03-22T12:38:20.195-05:00

This spring break was one for the record books. As many of you may know, last weekend was Denton's own Music Conference, NX35. From Thursday, March 11th, to Sunday, March 15th, musicians celebrated and demonstrated the staggering amount of musical talent and know-how Denton has to offer.The Schedule is already impressive enough to boast about, but that is only just the beginning! The plethora

Noah Mazehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00057895922583920730noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5689604216926397601.post-82084586873198436112010-03-10T11:38:00.004-06:002010-03-10T12:07:25.698-06:00

I know I spend too much time raving about infographics. I promise that is not what this update is about… but I am going to lead off with this one. It's an interactive graph that plots companies based on their reputation and performance with regards to their environmental impact. There are a lot of surprises—particularly Whole Foods being worse for the environment than Ebay (what!?)—but I was

Noah Mazehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00057895922583920730noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5689604216926397601.post-53640778612110091412010-03-05T18:33:00.006-06:002010-03-08T09:10:51.328-06:00

I may or may not have mentioned this before, but I write all of my updates on a little, tiny netbook. Its screen is about ten inches across, and its resolution is a teensy 1024 by 600. It's small. Very small. Earlier today I read an article on this very screen that suddenly made it feel a whole lot smaller…The article was about the UNT Research and Visualization Environment (RAVE). RAVE

Noah Mazehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00057895922583920730noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5689604216926397601.post-89074768908898927092010-03-02T21:05:00.003-06:002010-03-03T08:56:44.497-06:00

The other day I mentioned watching a thought-provoking documentary in the media library on campus. The movie was called Flow, and it was (mostly) about the water supply in developing areas. The gist is, healthy people require healthy water. There are a lot of ways to provide this, but my personal favorite was Ashok Gadgil's ultraviolet water-sterilizing contraption. Bacteria is extremely

Noah Mazehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00057895922583920730noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5689604216926397601.post-14100015525812978462010-02-25T00:27:00.015-06:002010-02-25T12:45:30.629-06:00

A couple posts ago I talked about "clipping". More specifically I talked about how cool it sounded, and how hard it was to find an audio representation of it. Well guess what? I had some free time this evening and I put together a couple of mp3s for your education and benefit:Sine WavesI'll be honest with you: Sine waves are boring as heck to listen to. They don't have any harmonics at all,

Noah Mazehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00057895922583920730noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5689604216926397601.post-80245111787613269502010-02-22T10:56:00.006-06:002010-03-02T20:19:09.642-06:00

I've been seeing a lot of movies lately. I'm not doing it on purpose, but sometimes every single person I know wants me to go see a movie with them, and I never turn down a trip to the movies. Last week I saw a movie almost every single weekday. Fortunately we had a lot of theaters to choose from, so I didn't have to go to the same one over and over again.Tuesday Night: The Wolfman @ Denton

Noah Mazehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00057895922583920730noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5689604216926397601.post-11640479973897405482010-02-16T18:01:00.006-06:002010-02-25T00:06:27.572-06:00

Electronics I is a very mysterious title for a class. When I enrolled in it last semester I didn't have any idea what to expect. I could have looked up the course summary in the online course catalog, but I like surprises. I also completely forgot about the course summaries in the catalog until just now. Yeah.Anyway, I'm taking Electronics I this semester, and the second unit is all about

Noah Mazehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00057895922583920730noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5689604216926397601.post-18503776578510404462010-02-09T02:28:00.007-06:002010-02-25T00:06:21.340-06:00

I love a good infographic. They look cool, they're educational, and they're huge time savers. A well designed infographic can illustrate a huge wealth of information at a glance. I've always felt that infographics were pretty neat, but I haven't had a good reason to mention them. Until now.This semester, I'm taking Professional Presentations. The first chapter of the book has a lot of information

Noah Mazehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00057895922583920730noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5689604216926397601.post-58000991271945495692010-02-03T11:40:00.008-06:002010-02-25T00:06:53.110-06:00

The University of North Texas has a TON of computer labs. The General Access Computer Labs (GACL) system has 14 labs peppered throughout the campus, and that's not even including the myriad of labs tailored to less-than-general access. Every lab comes with Microsoft Office 2007, Photoshop, and a selection of web browsers.But most labs also come with a little extra. The Technical Communication

Noah Mazehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00057895922583920730noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5689604216926397601.post-31911547422704180712010-01-28T12:51:00.008-06:002010-01-28T17:17:46.906-06:00

My favorite living band, The Fiery Furnaces, came to Dallas last night! Although it was a Wednesday, I still found time to make the drive down. It was an AWESOME show, of course (And they're playing in Austin tonight, and Houston tomorrow, if you'd like to see for yourself!) and it was definitely worth the half-hour drive. The odd thing was, even though I spent most of the evening in Dallas,

Noah Mazehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00057895922583920730noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5689604216926397601.post-72414841462600649302010-01-26T01:32:00.004-06:002010-01-28T17:17:52.615-06:00

I just read an article about one of UNT's latest advancements in the field of super computing. As per usual when I read about super computing, my mind immediately wanders off to a small island off the coast of Costa Rica and I start to imagine commingling frog and dinosaur DNA.I read Jurassic Park cover-to-cover a lot when I was a kid. Like most kids, I was fascinated by pretty much every

Noah Mazehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00057895922583920730noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5689604216926397601.post-68003610142065150882010-01-21T01:39:00.007-06:002010-01-22T03:18:20.558-06:00

I was browsing the (actual, physical) message board for the school of Electrical Engineering a couple of weeks ago, and I spotted a flyer for a totally awesome class: Applied Numerical and Probabilistic Methods for Pattern Analysis and Recognition. I'm pretty sure you need at least 3 years of math to decipher that title, so don't be sad if it just looks like gibberish. The fact of the matter is

Noah Mazehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00057895922583920730noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5689604216926397601.post-44891040456457072882010-01-13T03:06:00.003-06:002010-01-13T12:39:35.229-06:00

Happy New Year everybody! I hope you all made it through that ARCTIC BLAST safely. I spent most of December in Austin, so I missed out on all of the awesome winter weather we got up here. A "White Christmas" in Texas is a rare thing indeed.I'm back in town now, and the weather is back to the normal winter range in Texas: 50-60 degrees. This works out really wellfor me, because I'm planning on

Noah Mazehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00057895922583920730noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5689604216926397601.post-81119803279800177322009-12-08T02:59:00.008-06:002010-01-13T12:17:23.836-06:00

It's finally time for finals here at UNT, and I am SO EXCITED! I've got a lot to do, but the library stays open 24 hours a day during dead week and exam week, so time is definitely on my side. Today I'm finishing up an extremely professional-looking comparison report for technical writing while I sip a delicious red eye from the library's cyber café. As per usual, I'm trying my best to find

Noah Mazehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00057895922583920730noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5689604216926397601.post-23140929774144552402009-12-04T14:32:00.003-06:002010-01-13T12:17:11.077-06:00

Student organizations: They're everywhere. At UNT there are literally hundreds of them. Finding the right organization is not always easy, but it is definitely worth the effort. Student organizations like the Badminton Club and the Campus Cat Coalition are a great way to meet like-minded (and probably awesome) people, but many organizations offer unique benefits to students wishing to pursue

Noah Mazehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00057895922583920730noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5689604216926397601.post-60207891233876044322009-11-20T11:26:00.011-06:002009-12-02T23:46:50.299-06:00

I drove all-the-way-home for the first time today! As many of you may know, I grew up mostly in Austin, and my family still lives down there. I haven't been able to pay them a visit in ages. This weekend one of my favorite bands was in town, and my family and I all bought tickets.I took I-35W this time. I-35W is the Fort Worth side of I-35, and it is sensational. Dallas's side is a bit of a

Noah Mazehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00057895922583920730noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5689604216926397601.post-68984486647608006432009-11-14T14:13:00.006-06:002009-12-02T23:46:35.676-06:00

A long time ago someone told me that UNT had a fleet of vehicles that ran on vegetable oil. Time passed, exams happened, and my memory of the conversation eroded away. The other day it popped into my head again, but I couldn't remember who told me. I looked around a little, and couldn't seem to find any evidence of it. I was starting to think I might have made the whole thing up. Or it was

Noah Mazehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00057895922583920730noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5689604216926397601.post-31204040156535947652009-11-11T10:39:00.008-06:002009-11-11T14:13:22.528-06:00

Prize-driven technological advancement is not a new concept; the $25,000 "Orteig Prize" was first proposed in 1919. It is widely held as the first example of such "incentivized competition", but the prize itself is basically unheard of. The strange thing is, it was single-handedly responsible for Charles Lindbergh's legendary solo-flight across the Atlantic Ocean, AND commercial aviation as we

Noah Mazehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00057895922583920730noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5689604216926397601.post-9111534221827621162009-11-02T01:01:00.004-06:002009-11-11T12:56:59.550-06:00

I have lived in Dallas for almost two years. Before that, I lived in nearby Richardson for three more. But until Friday the 16th, I had never seen the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. I've always wanted to go, but every performance I've ever inquired about was REALLY expensive. Triple-digits expensive. Grocery-money-for-an-entire-month expensive.Two weeks ago, I finally found a performance in my price

Noah Mazehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00057895922583920730noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5689604216926397601.post-30944320528968746702009-10-19T16:10:00.005-05:002009-10-23T14:02:42.182-05:00

I'm going to be updating this blog like crazy with all sorts of posts, and soon it's going to be a pretty overwhelming list. To help make it easier to swallow, I'll be labeling everything. Here is a brief explanation of all of the labels I'm planning on using:Art- Art is everywhere. This is doubly true for Denton. There are galleries and brilliant artists all over the place, and in the "Art"

Noah Mazehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00057895922583920730noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5689604216926397601.post-13164119792845384722009-10-16T15:16:00.000-05:002009-11-02T00:41:54.446-06:00

I'm Noah. I'm a musician, an artist, and an engineer. I'm working on a B.S. in Electrical Engineering, and with a handful of summer classes, I'll graduate in May of 2011. This fall marks my first semester at UNT, and I adore it so far. I transferred from a much smaller school that had a good Engineering and Computer Science program, but nothing else, and I have never looked back. I'm much

Noah Mazehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00057895922583920730noreply@blogger.com