Week 7: 7/16 - 7/22
This was a rather productive week, I'm proud to say. I completely rewrote the scripts for increased modularity and better organized, cleaner code, and found a solution to the slow movie playback--play each movie without any visual output, thus effectively loading the whole movie into the cache, and then playing it back. Caching on the fly wouldn't work, because it produced rather jaggy, stuttering output. I think the slowness comes from having to load stuff from the NFS mount. Anyway, that's taken care of for now, although Jessica told me she thought it would be a good idea to have the movies 'load' while asking the user questions. Also, it turns out that I won't have to do the IRB forms! That's both a relief and kind of a downer, because I was looking forward to going through all the motions and writing up an abstract. Also, I don't know if I can have the cool posters I wanted now... I made three rough drafts (and am thinking of a fourth), but Jessica said we didn't need anything too fancy--just the facts and all. :( Worse yet, I might have to use Eakta's old fliers! There's nothing wrong with that, but I'm hoping we can't find them... I contacted Eakta about it and still haven't received a response, so maybe I will get to do something creative. :) But until I get an answer, it'd be sort of a waste showing Jessica, because everything is tentative. It bothers me having to wait around a lot and having my schedule being so intertwined with others', but, uh... "no man is an island," right? I really want to start testing next week, but Jessica's been talking to the woman who started this study, and we've been getting some input from her that makes it seem like it won't be so for a little while longer, at least.
Jessica has also asked me to help Sophie out with her hand modification stuff, so I should be starting that next Monday.
April and I had made big plans for Saturday, but neither of us can get up before 3 PM on the weekends, so we ended up going to the waterfront and catching Knocked Up. It was entertaining, but Hollywood really bothers me with its pushing the idea that any slobby, unsuccessful, immature, unattractive guy can land a really successful, intelligent, beautiful woman as long as he's affable and dopey enough. "Fat guy-hot wife" syndrome, I call it. You can see it on nearly every sitcom out there. Anyway, we ate at TGIF's afterward. Now that I've finally experienced the flavor-orgasm that is Jack Daniel's sesame chicken strips, I can tell you that they are, in fact, REALLY GOOD. I had more pasta this time: garlic chicken primavera. It was okay. I'm so doing a bacon cheeseburger next time; I can't tell you how often I've been having insatiable cravings for those since I got to Pittsburgh. Or maybe it was after I had one at TGIF's. Ahh...
On Sunday, we ordered from Pacific Ring, a pan-Asian restaurant in Squirrel Hill. April got her awesome BBQ pork buns (dim sum on weekends from 11-4, and yes, they WILL deliver if you ask!), and I had spicy tuna rolls and seaweed salad. The seaweed salad was generous, and the rolls were okay. Tasty, but they were more of a mashed up tuna than the nice, thick cuts I like. Their nigiri is too expensive, though. :( Then I did laundry and cleaned my room. I do this every Sunday.
