Month: February 2007

The crunch is on! My thesis must be finished by March 5th. I’ve got a new title now: “Automatically Determining Consequences of Unexpected Events.” Not exactly related to what I want to do, robotics, but hey, it was a paid topic so I took it. Now that my first three chapters are being reviewed, I finally started the code…let’s see…Thursday I think it was. I have the model pretty much completely designed, but I decided against writing it in case it changes while I code. I now have 800 lines of C++ code so far, thanks to forcing myself to write comments as I code and the marvels of modern IDEs and tools like Visual Assist X. I must admit, the coding is quite a bit more fun than writing the thesis. Oh, on a slightly unrelated note, Cameron and I came up with a thesis roadmap to a Lord of the Rings analogy. For a quick sample:

• Thesis topic decided: Inherit the One Ring
• Successfully defended: Dropping the One Ring
• Graduation: Boarding the boat

Yes, that does make me an official dork. On a completely unrelated note, I am saddened to hear that Jackson will not be directing the Hobbit. I hope the director who climbs on board will do as well a job as he did with Lord of the Rings. OK, enough procrastinating, back to coding my thesis.

Wow! Today my adviser Dr. Gonzalez let me know that I had been awarded the UCF Presidential Fellowship! I emailed him back and said UCF was looking more and more attractive. We’ll see if I get accepted to any of my other universities and if they can give me any financial aid (or if I get a national fellowship). But at least the “safety net” of UCF is looking pretty solid at the moment. Yesterday I handed in the first three chapters of my thesis to Dr. Gonzalez again to review. Unfortunately, those PhD and Master’s students he has all want to graduate or propose their topics, putting me in the back of the line. Actually, now that I think about it, that may be a good thing – maybe he’ll just pass my thesis off without looking at it too hard. Of course, that’s just wishful thinking…sigh…