January 30, 2005

So my parents are going to buy the second most ugly car on the road, a Hyunde Element. Not only that, but they plan to fly from Florida to New York (yeah, that bitterly cold place up new Canada) and drive it back next weekened. And it just so happens that they’ll be trying to get through Jacksonville next Sunday – right past all the hordes of people swarming around the Super Bowl game. Good luck! Oh, yeah, and here are some pics: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Oh yeah, I also noticed my Contact page was broken, so I fixed that. I wonder why nobody told me it was broken…hmm, let me thing about that 😀

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January 29, 2005

My family came by today and my Dad fixed my car in about 2 minutes. Apparently, all that had happened was the tube that connected to my spark plug had fallen off, so I was running on 3 cylinders. I felt a bit stupid, but I’m glad it wasn’t anything serious. I then saw my sister graduate from her semester long modeling training (yeah, never thought I’d have a model for a sister). Hopefully she can get some good jobs out of it. I spent the rest of the day and evening at robotics. I’m really liking my GUI for image processing and computer vision, but I was getting a bit limited with FLTK GUI and need to do some re-organizing in order to add some new features, so I decided to swap to the nicer, more professional looking wxWidgets. While I was at it, I decided to try out Visual C++ 2005 Express Beta (what a mouthful!). It was actually really good. It has some quirks and it is a memory hog, but it is miles ahead of Visual C++ 6 in terms of features. Still, it took me a while (all night basically) to get the basics ported over and wxWidgets setup. Now I have to port the GUI, something for next week, I guess.

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January 22, 2005

This past weekend, my grandparents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. Of all the things they wanted to do and all the places they wanted to go, they choose Epcot! Although a bit surprising, it certainly was a nice surprise. So after being in Orlando for a year, I finally went to a theme park. The whole clan gathered Friday afternoon (although I had to turn around a lot because I kept getting lost) and we went to Downtown Disney, which was a real treat. We ate at Captain Jack’s and then went to Geradeli for dessert. Man, they sure pack it in – it was some of the best dessert I’ve ever had. The next day we went to Epcot early. Just as we were leaving on the bus, we realized that not everybody was on….oops, not even at Epcot and we were already separated. Good thing for cell phones! We met up at the gate and went in. Our first stop was Mission Space which was a really cool simulation ride. None of us really had any breakfast, so at least there wasn’t anything to get all over the shiny controls 😉 However, we did feel a bit on the wobbly side when we came out. We at breakfast, did the big Epcot golf ball ride, the aquarium, energy, and some other stuff while we were there. Then we went to the countries. The countries were really cool. We ate at Mexico and had some really good Mexican food. We visited Norway, China, Japan, Morraco, USA, Paris, which was most of the countries. We ate at Morracco and watched the belly dancer do her stuff. Afterwards we watched the fireworks, which were pretty spectacular. By the time we left, we realized what Epcot stood for: Every Person Comes Out Tired, which was certainly the case. The next day some of us went back to Downtown Disney to walk around a bit and eat more Geradeli desserts. Then we all split up and went home. On my way home, I had some car trouble – I was almost home and it started shaking quite badly. Not good at all…at least I could take the shuttle to school and back.

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January 17, 2005

My first business trip went well. I flew up to Washington DC to attend an NSF I/UCRC annual meeting. The NSF building is a whole lot bigger than I had imagined. The Marriott hotel we stayed was also huge (13 stories) and the top story overlooked the Potomac river, Georgetown, and Washington DC. You could see the Washington Monument from the hotel as well. It was a grueling first couple of days trying to get presentations and demos done. Our presentation was squished quite a bit and we had to scrap the demos because the computer we were presenting on was…well…let’s just say very incapable. No internet? How am I supposed to demo my online website?!? Some of it was interesting and some of it was boring, but I took some notes and had fun. I got to ride the metro for the first time too – that contraption must have been built a long time ago, because it was rather rickety. Overall, it was a great learning experience. But now it’s time to crack down on schoolwork <sigh>…

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