.:: Previous Week ::: Next Week ::.

Week 5:

~ Monday, June 25 ~

On July 11-12, there will be a GaTech-CMU retreat held in Pittsburgh. It is an annual event during which the students and the faculty get a chance to present and brainstorm their work. Today, I held a short meeting with Jimmy and Takaaki to discuss our wiimote presentation for the retreat.

Wow! We had a fire alert today! The whole building was evacuated :-O Fortunately, it was nothing serious but the fire alarm rang in my ears for at least a minute after it was turned off.

Today's paper to read is by Joseph Laszlo, Michiel van de Panne, and Eugene Fiume. Interactive control for physically-based animation.

~ Tuesday, June 26 ~

Thanks to my housemate's alarm clock that went off this morning at 5:50 a.m. I made it to the thesis proposal presentation today at 8 a.m. David L. Duke, who gave the talk, was suggesting an Intelligent Diabetes Assistant that would be able to predict and optimize blood glucose. It seemed like a very good idea and I was fascinated by how smoothly he synthesized computer science concepts with his medical knowledge to design and develop the necessary software.

I compiled a list of academic papers, which cited the paper I read yesterday. I also talked to Takaaki about the design of my program. Just by discussing it with him I was able to come up with some ideas that I want to try out. Right now I have at least two other approaches to my “window-matching” program. Takaaki helped me by recommending a function-plotting utility called Gnuplot.

First time on stilts
First time on stilts :)

In the near future, once I get all the necessary files and start writing code, I will develop a log where I'll add a detailed description of the program.

I also had some fun today: I attended CMU Dynamic Balance Festival and learned how to walk on stilts! :-D To satisfy my craving for challenge and adventure, I tried out PogoSticks and also rode a unicycle. Hurray for the geek's ways of celebrating “the start of summer”!
Read more about Pogo Sticks, including the extreme Vurtego and Flybar. Also, check out BowGo, CMU's version of extreme pogo stick (www.cs.cmu.edu/~bowgo).

~ Wednesday, June 27 ~ * ~ Thursday, June 28 ~

Coding... more coding... press any key to continue...

~ Friday, June 29 ~

For some crazy, weird reason the Visual Studio freaked out on me today... It gave me the hardest time: I was working on my code and everything was just fine. However, after I re-opened VS it gave me the strangest error message, which nobody in the lab could figure out how to solve. After 30 minutes of trying to get it to work, I gave up and started over with a new project (it was great that I saved various copies of my work as I went along).

It's just one of those days when things just don't go right...

Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable.
~ Einstein

.:: Previous Week ::: Next Week ::.