DMP@UCSD 2007

Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 | Week 5 | Week 6 | Week 7 | Week 8 | Week 9 | Week 10

Sunday, June 24, 2007

I'm mostly moved into my New Room, in an apartment with two grad students, Elizabeth and Mona. Work starts tomorrow morning -- or at least, I go in to UCSD tomorrow morning. Beth and Krista have apparently worked out all of the accounts and keys and passwords that I'll need, so I think tomorrow will be mostly doing that and figuring out exactly what I'm going to be doing with UP. I'm a little nervous, especially since I'm not yet completely sure how I'm getting to campus, but I'll figure it out.

Also to do tomorrow: trip to Von's for foods, see if I can get a ride to Linens & Things for an air mattress. Adventures in apartment living, this is.

Saturday, June 30, 2007

It's been quite a week. I'm still not completely moved into my room, but the roommate who was here before me has now returned from whereever she was visiting before, so I should finally be able to unpack this weekend. Crossing my fingers. Living with Elizabeth and Mona seems to be working out really well so far. Liz and I have gone to the workout room in the apartment complex a couple of times, and we've been talking a lot. It's nice to feel like I have a friend here.

The office I'm currently inhabiting at UCSD is also very friendly. The grad student whose desk I'm using is off at Google for the summer. Also in this office are Liz, Krista, and another grad student. Apparently I landed in the "party office" without meaning to. There are enough people gone for the summer that it's not too bad in terms of activity, though, and I feel like I've managed to be reasonably productive. A guy who graduated from Mudd about three years ago is also a grad student, in the Sysnet group, and has been really good about showing me around and inviting me to things like the departmental Ultimate Frisbee game, and the Half-Baked Half Hour. Regarding the latter: a reasonably good argument can be made that making cars safer actually costs money. True statement

This week I went to meetings for UP (of course), the Campus of the Future group (hereafter known as CoF), the Half-Baked Half Hour, and the CCIED group. Also this morning I had "coffee" (I'm not much of a coffee drinker) with Krista for menting, since my official mentor is still in Scotland. I'm still amazed at how friendly everyone is, although I guess I shouldn't be. I have a feeling it'll be pretty easy to settle into a routine. My Google Calendar will help significantly with keeping track of all of this.

Even with all these meetings and people and stuff, I feel like I've actually managed to get things done. Monday and Tuesday were primarily getting settled in, and a very little bit of getting a feel for the project. Tuesday night I was a little unhappy, since I was feeling a bit in over my head, but I was reminded that no one actually expects me to be able to do anything for the first few days anyway, except myself. That made Wednesday much more productive. I ended up making pages and pages of notes on Journal about the structure of Classroom Presenter (hereafter CP) and NoteBlogger (hereafter NB), and starting on my current project. The issue is that the default layout of NoteBlogger is three columns. From left to right, they're a narrow column to view slides, the main workspace with the current active slide, and an IRC chat window. When the window is resized to be narrower, however, as when a student is using a tablet PC in slate mode (new phrase -- very exciting), the workspace becomes much smaller than is useful. The challenge is to make NoteBlogger's layout automatically rearrange itself when the workspace is sufficiently narrow.

I'm almost there. After two and a half days, I've figured out the code to make the main workspace and IRC chat window shift to being vertically stacked when the window is narrower than tall, and almost gotten the code to make the slide strip switch between tiling vertically and horizontally. My problem right now is that it starts out vertical, as is proper, but stays vertical when the window switches to portrait mode, and switches to horizontal when the window switches back to landscape. I'm not sure where the bug is right now, but I plan to look at it later in the weekend to see if I can figure out what the issue is. After that, finishing the rearrange of the layout will be trivial.

I'm not sure yet what my next project will be. I guess there are plenty of options for bug fixes. I'll just have to see what happens. I'm a little more confident about this whole job thing than I was before, especially since I've never done C# before, and not worked much with programs this large, and not done almost anything with GUIS, and I feel like I'm doing all right.

Tomorrow: a trip to Costco and Bed, Bath & Beyond, so I can get an air mattress. And a rice cooker. I'm excited, especially about the rice cooker. They make life so easy!