Lepolt.com » UC

Look Back, but Don’t Forget About Moving Forward

Jonathan — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 19:55:13 +0000

Tonight the University of Cincinnati Bearcats will be taking on the Mountaineers of West Virginia in a college basketball game that will no doubt receive a little extra attention on ESPN. You see, West Virginia’s coach Bob Huggins was once the head coach of UC. Surprised? I didn’t think so. It’s clear that as a whole, the City of Cincinnati has not forgotten about the era that once was full of Bob Huggins. What UC fan could forget? He led UC to 14 straight post-season NCAA Tournament appearances (including one Final Four), coached five All-Americans, and really pissed off one University President.

I’m not expecting fans to ignore these feats. I won’t do it myself. I went to a number of UC games as an undergrad and was treated to some of the best basketball games I have ever seen. No, don’t forget about those. What we need to do however, is keep moving forward.

I understand that there is a big game on campus tonight. It’s a big game for both teams. UC and WV are both middle-of-the-road teams in the Big East, both fighting for that first (and second) round bye in the Big East Tournament. What’s not a big deal is the relationship of Huggs and Cincinnati for ANY player on EITHER team. Huggins’ last season with UC was in 2005. It is now 2009. No player on Cincinnati’s roster in 2008-09 was on the roster in 2004-05. Zero. There’s a chance that most of the players on WV’s team don’t even know where Cincinnati is. These players don’t care about the drama; all they want to do is win a basketball game tonight and move up in the Big East standings.

Most current students at UC weren’t around in 2004-05 either. All they want to do is watch the Bearcats win a basketball game tonight and move up in the Big East standings.

The UC athletic department decided that tonight would provide a great opportunity to recognize Bob Huggins for his exceptional efforts from 1989 to 2005. There will be a short video before the game tonight highlighting some of the great years Huggins had at UC. I feel that doing something like that TONIGHT is probably dumber than hiring Nancy Zimpher to begin with! In case you missed the first paragraph, Huggins is the opposing coach! He is coming to the Shoemaker Center tonight with plans on BEATING Cincinnati! We’re not friends tonight! Tonight we’re enemies! Why are Earth would UC take time out of pregame to say, “Huggs, you’re okay! Let’s be friends! Thanks for everything you’ve done for this program even though we suck right now thanks to controversy from your days of coaching!”

I am a Bob Huggins fan. I liked the guy from 2001-2005 when we were both at UC, and I like the guy today at West Virgina. It’s weird for me to see Huggs on the sideline at a different school, but I still want to see him get smoked by the ‘Cats tonight. Today is not the day to praise Bob Huggins and thank him for what he once did for the basketball program. That day will come…like, say, on another day when West Virginia isn’t in town? Or maybe after Huggins retires from coaching college basketball?

Come on, UC. I know ticket sales are down, but it’s a really shady thing to use controversy to sell tickets. Use excitement! Use pride! Use lower prices!

I will be watching the game tonight, cheering for the Bearcats. I am, and forever shall be, a Bearcat.

C—I—N—C—I—N N-A-T-I!!! (N-A-T-IIIIIIII!!!)

Jonathan Lepolt
College of Engineering ‘06
RallyCats ‘02-06

Here’s to the People that got Blowed Up

Jonathan — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 16:08:52 +0000

The year was 2002. It was a September weekend at the University of Cincinnati and Ed, Ben, and I were all moving into our new dorm room located in Sawyer Hall (a quick interruption: Sawyer has since been knocked to the ground, a decision that was a long time coming…that place was a piece). This dorm room was different from last year; it was apartment style with a stove, refrigerator, and a balcony. Balcony…seems like a perfect place for a grill, right? Absolutely!

Wait – they’re going to let college students have open flames in a dorm? Heck no, but that wasn’t going to stop me. I picked up a $20 propane powered mini grill to use at school. It worked out alright…except when Ed bought the cheap meat from Kro-Ghetto and we had three-foot flames in your face…but nonetheless, we never caused any damage. Burgers, hot dogs, chicken, steak, we did it all. That was until that fateful day…

The smoke was thick and pouring over the balcony. We had the windows open in the dorm and some of the smoke started moving inside. Whoops, better shut those windows.

(knock, knock)
Aw, crap. “Beard, get the door!”
And that was the end of that.

So what brings up this story? Well, earlier in the week I received a notice from the managers at the lovely Pinnacle Pointe Apartments complex bringing our attention to the fact that the Green Township Fire Department had noticed that a number of people in the complex had grills out on their balconies. In 2005 the Ohio Fire Code was modified to add sections 308.3.1 and 308.3.1.1. To save you the trouble of looking this stuff up yourself, here’s the general idea: open flames are not allowed within ten feet of combustible construction in dwellings that consist of more than two families, ie, apartment complex balconies made of wood. In addition, liquid petroleum fuel tanks with a water capacity greater than 2.5 pounds are also banned from the same ten feet of combustible building material. To put that in perspective, your standard propane tank is 20 gallons.

My guess is that this law was created to help people from blowing themselves up and causing damage to other people’s personal property. Thanks morons, for ruining it for everyone else.

This obviously means that I have to do something with my propane tanks to avoid getting a citation from the Green Township Fire Department. Fine. Done. Propane tanks gone. Stupid State of Ohio looking out for the dumb people.

Since the law says nothing specifically about storing a grill, but only talks about operating it with big liquid petroleum fuel tanks, do you think the Green Township Fire Department will write me a citation? I’m not getting rid of the grill, are you kidding me? I live in an apartment…what am I supposed to do with it? It will remain covered, on my balcony until we move out. The propane tanks are gone, satisfying 308.3.1.1. Since I have no propane I can’t operate the grill and create an open flame, that satisfies 308.3.1. So how long until they write me a citation?

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Trevor: Watts up, Jerry?

NIT + CBI = LAME

Jonathan — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 02:00:21 +0000

At first when I heard there was going to be another post-season college basketball tournament this year, I thought it was a stupid idea. The NCAA Tournament is obviously the only one that matters, so why bother with the NIT? It’s just a tournament held for those that didn’t make it into the NCAA, and I never saw the point. Then I heard there was going to be an additional tournament for teams that didn’t make it into the NIT, and I really thought that was a stupid idea. As if being in the ‘Not in the Tournament’ tournament (NIT) was rubbing it in for sucking, we’re going to offer an alternative for the NIT…perfect for those teams that really, really suck, and may never have a chance to play in the NCAA.

It only figures that UC would play in this alternative to the alternative, also known as the College Basketball Invitational (CBI). With about five games left in the regular season, UC had a fighting chance of making it to the NCAA. It probably wasn’t going to happen, but if they would have won a few of those games and made a respectable run in the Big East tournament, it wouldn’t have been unbelievable to see UC play on Thursday/Friday this week. However, they decided to lose those last five games as well as the first round game in the Big East tourney, so even the NIT didn’t want them, especially with their losing record.

UC was not a good team this year. They won some great games against Loserville, Syracuse, Villanova, Pitt, and West Virgina, however, they made few mistakes in those games. The games that they lost (UCONN, Seton Hall, I don’t want to continue) they made plenty of mistakes to lose the games. Again, UC was not a good team. There’s no point in making excuses, they WERE NOT GOOD.

At one point Mick Cronin was talking about UC’s chance at any post-season appearances. He talked about the new CBI, and mentioned how college football has been playing tons of bowl games for years. It’s a fair comparison, and at that point I didn’t care which tournament UC played in as long as I got to see them play a couple more games. I agreed with Cronin, “If football can do it, why can’t basketball?!”

Tonight UC lost to Bradley. Bradley is a 17-15 team with a 9-9 record in the Missouri Valley Conference. On any given day, there’s no chance that UC should ever lose to these guys. UC was 13-18 overall, with an 8-10 record in the Big East. Let’s just compare the conference records…UC should have walked all over these guys. That being said, UC lost. They lost because they are not a good team. I’m embarrassed that UC lost to Bradley, not matter how bad of a season UC had this year.

Do “not good” teams deserve any post-season games? NO! HECK NO! Post-season is reserved for good teams that play good strong schedules and have a good record against all of the teams they play! That’s why we have the NCAA Tournament! 65 teams (not all are “good” but I can’t help teams like Mount St. Mary’s) that all have an equal shot at winning. The NIT is a joke. The CBI is a joke. The 30+ college football bowl games are a joke.

What happened to the days when making it to the post-season was a feat in itself, let alone winning that game? With the 30+ football bowl games offerend and only 110+ football teams, not making a bowl game means your team is really, really bad. I don’t think that’s right.

I say we get back to the days when post-season was hard to get to. Enough of this extra junk (International Bowl, Meineke Care Care Bowl, PapaJohns.com Bowl, NIT, CBI), and only let the teams deserving of post-season play in post-season!

Education Goes Full Circle

Jonathan — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 03:52:26 +0000

In the fall of 2001 during my first ever college lab at UC, we played with LEGOS. That’s right, LEGOS. The lab was Introduction to Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the LEGOS were actually robots…sort of. In 1998 LEGO introduced a programmable LEGO brick known as the LEGO MINDSTORMS RCX (or something close to that). Using a relatively simple GUI, we were able to create somewhat complex programs that controlled motors and read sensors connected to the RCX. As freshmen our mission was to build a robot with the RCX that would perform specific tasks on a course, such as following lines or picking up a ball and depositing it in another location. This of course taught us good design principles, good implementation methods, and – well, never mind.

Who would have thought that 6.5 years later [as I perform research for my Master’s Thesis] I would be playing with LEGOS again? I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.

So before you think I’m just going to build a robot and get it to drive around in circles and then write a paper about the whole deal, just relax for a minute. The latest version of the LEGO MINDSTORMS robot was introduced in 2006, and the brick is now called the NXT. There have been some significant improvements over the RCX including better motors, better sensors, a better programming environment, and wireless communication via Bluetooth technology.

The Bluetooth communication is really what I’m after. I’ve had a difficult time trying to explain to people what exactly I’m doing my thesis research on, so I’ll just summarize it with this: let’s say that you have a personal handheld device with a lot of sensitive information on it…I dunno, let’s take Steve Job’s iPhone for example. It has private emails, telephone numbers, contacts, business plans, and I’m sure a whole slew of other stuff that he wouldn’t want to be compromised. It may be possible to password protect this data, but let’s be honest here, passwords always get cracked.

The solution that I am proposing (and this is where I’ll skip a lot of technical detail) is that before any of this sensitive data can be accessed it should be required that the handheld device verifies the validity of the access by contacting an external device. Phew, that’s a mouthful of jumbled crap, but bear with me for just another minute. I’m utilizing the Bluetooth in the NXT to act as my verification device, ie, the handheld will send some data to the NXT, the NXT will translate it and then send it back to the handheld. The handheld will then determine whether or not the access is acceptable. It’s a little more complicated than that because I’ll be watermarking some memory addresses and checking for sequential data access, but you can read about that in the final paper.

The Big Idea that I’m trying to portray is that without the external Bluetooth device, the handheld is basically worthless if it is lost or stolen. Okay, okay, I understand the NXT is pretty big, won’t fit in your pocket, and requires 6 AA batteries, but this is a proof of concept that I’m after. The end result will demonstrate the grand idea of a disconnected key. For more reading on key-based encryption, I point you to Google.

In observance of me fooling around with LEGOS during my thesis research, Abi insisted that we buy some LEGO Fruit Flavored Snacks from Sam’s Club. No, I can’t build robots with them, but they are fun to eat.

Anyways, can I really come up with a better storybook ending than this? I’m leaving school in 2008 the same way I entered in 2001: playing with LEGOS.

The First Post

Jonathan — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 03:12:02 +0000

For this post, I’m going to complain. I’m sorry, this is the way it’s going to be today. There’s no other way around it. I’ve tried to avoid this, but alas, I cannot.

The University of Cincinnati football team was recently hosed by the Bowl Selection Committee(s).

Setting the stage:
BCS Rankings:
20) South Florida
23) Cincinnati
n/a) UConn

Big East Rankings:
1) West Virginia
2) UConn
3) Cincinnati
4) South Florida

The order (from best to worst) of bowl games that UC is eligible for:
Brut Sun Bowl
Meineke Car Care Bowl
PapaJohns.com Bowl

The Sun Bowl said they were going to take USF because they had a better ranking in the BCS polls, and also because [at the time] Oregon State was the team from the PAC-10 that was most likely going to play in the Sun Bowl. UC already beat the crap out of O.State, so I can understand this story.

The Meineke Bowl decided to take UConn because they were ranked higher in the Big East.

11/03 -> UC beat #18 South Florida 38-33

11/10 -> UC beat #13 UConn 27-3

UConn isn’t ranked in a single poll.

UC got shafted. That’s all there is to it.