Template:Main Page:About

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My name is Michael Plasmeier, but almost everyone calls me Plaz. I am a junior at MIT in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Management. I am halfway between the tech and the business world, doing both web development and product development. My interst in doing both started while I was working on GridView, an app I built after 10th Grade that reached 1.3 million users on Facebook.

This past summer I worked at NextJump, an online ad firm in New York, doing web development. The previous summer I was an extern in the Office of the Chief Scientist at State Street. My freshman summer I worked at Deutsche Bahn, the German national railroad, where I designed the smartphone version Touch&Travel, an app that lets you pay for the train on your phone. In addition, I also built multi-layer map prototype for them, and participated in meeting to push NFC.

MIT

At MIT I am focusing on learning as much as I can. I took 8 classes last term, double the normal amount. My first year at MIT was focused on getting up to speed and completing core classes. My second year focused on management classes. My third year will concentrate on EECS classes. I am also involved in student government. I am the Vice President for Facilities and Services in my dorm Baker House. In addition, I have served on the Athena and Printing Committee and House Dining committees.

While at MIT, I was a regular on The Weekly Spin, a weekly take on tech stories and tech policy.

Other Accounts

I also tag a lot of stories on Delicious. I also have over 70,000 photos on Flickr. I Tweet kinda regularly. I also post things to YouTube. And of course I have a Facebook. It all comes together on my FriendFeed.

Websites

I built a lot of web projects in high school. My most popular project, was GridView [1], an app for Facebook which lets you add the profile pics of all of you're friends to your Facebook profile. GridView had over 1.3 million users and made me some money.

I hosted and produced the video podcast Tecker 911 [2] along with some of my friends. Tecker 911 was a series of 100 5-15 minute shows each which covers a technology topic in a way which is relevant for ordinary people, with a focus towards students and our community. Tecker 911 was also shown on our local public access channel Channel 11.

I started SeniorQuoter, [3] an open-source web application for senior quotes collections for high school yearbooks. In 11th Grade, I lead a Dynamic Website Building Instruction and Practical Experience Group Study at my high school. I helped 4 other students learn PHP and MySQL and then I project managed version 2 of SeniorQuoter, the administration interface.

Tecker and Conflicter were question and answer services I built in 10th Grade. They never really caught on, but they were the perfect way to learn PHP. Dictionary Robot is something I tarted last year, but abandoned later. In 10th Grade, I was a member of Team 484 and in 11th Grade I was their webmaster.

In 8th and 9th Grades I wrote bunch of programs for the TI-83+. You can see them below. My favorite is FERRIS, which helps solve the unit problem in IAG/IMP 4. A few years ago I was a mid-level contributor on Wikipedia . I also made some improvements for MediaWiki, the software that runs ThePlaz.com and Wikipedia. I made a new skin for MediaWiki and a few

Website Content

On my site you will find:

Updates on what I am involved in
Links to my other projects
My comments on the world
Photos and videos I have taken
School work and notes I have made

School Work

I hope that this knowledge will help people less-fortunate than me persevere and succeed. All of my work is under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 license, meaning that you may use it and re-post it anywhere as long as you post my name/nickname, provide a link back to my site, and don't make money off my work. Many people visit my site from overseas where the school system is not as good. See Site Mission Statement for more

- For 9th Grade I have posted projects I did on the computer
- For 10th Grade I have posted not only my work I made on a computer but laboriously scanned all of my handwritten notes and worksheets
- For 11th Grade I am only posting my own notes (no worksheets) from very structured classes; I am scaling back
- For 12th Grade I used a tablet PC, so I have posted my OneNote notebooks from the class
- For MIT Freshman year, I used a tablet PC for the first semester; realized this was a bad idea; so I used paper which I scanned and released as large PDFs the second semester. Note MIT actually does the same thing I do with MIT OCW.
- For MIT Sophomore I will continue to post large, comprehensive PDFs.
- See also my Notes Key