Created 07/07/2017 at 2017:03PM

A short but packed week after the 4th of July - quite crazy to come back to work for 3 days after the four-day long weekend. The 5th of July fireworks in Annapolis, were beautiful, you could see them from the water or on top of the circles, and lots of festivities around the town. There’s a arts and crafts market once a month here too, and delicious carmel, and local artists who have a love for the ocean, wildlife, and red bricks of Annapolis.

This week we finished up the methodology, protocols, questionnaires, to prepare for our first test run for data collection. I also worked on finding the bugs that were making the Kinect gesture capture program crash in our Microsoft .NET framework app. Most likely this is another case of exceptions that were not completely caught, and I have a hunch that it was not checking for edge cases such as NaN or Infinities when calibrating the sizes of the annotations.

Learning about the .NET framework and the capabilities of using this code to translate real, off-line movement into on-screen actions like drawing a line across a computer screen has been quite cool and challenging too. For example, importing camera data into the Kinect requires padding of the bits, as not all data is transferred in a straightforward manner, and sometimes there are not pre-written APIs to easily use.

Transitions are hard in all places, whether from the theoretical to the practical, different stages of a summer project, or even from the nice air-conditioned atmosphere of Trader Joes to the hot outdoors - future tip to runners who come from arid areas to the humid east coast: not a great idea to run back with a few pounds of tofu, vegetables, peanut butter, etc under the hot summer heat - adjust slowly to the outdoors to avoid heat exhaustion!!