What a hectic week. Hours spent reading a new semiconductors book because I didn’t understand the textbook. 17 hour homework assignments. Meetings. Informal sushi dinner with coworkers. Massive studying for exams. Multiple hard dynamics problems. Work. Robotics programming. Failing exams. Sleep………
Wow, last weekend my parents came up to Orlando since my Dad had to fly to Washington for a business meeting. So we got together and they brought me a blender (mainly because I had asked if they had seen the review of best juicing blenders that was running on t.v and which one would they choose). I had this image of me making some smoothies every now and then. Boy was I wrong. I immediately tried out two smoothies, one with 4 whole oranges and ice and sugar and another with grapes, plums, juice and ice. Yikes they were bad. Then Ian my roomate went out and bought some stuff to make a fruit smoothie. That actually turned out pretty good. Later another roomate went out and bought some stuff to make an ice cream shake. That turned out nearly excellent. I bought more stuff too and before you know it, a week later and we’ve been making smoothies almost everyday. A week later we’ve pretty much perfected it and are branching out to freezes, malts, and floats. Our latest was an orange sherbet with vanilla and sprite. Wow, yummy. All this means the blender has unleashed a smoothie craze. Our other roomate kids us about it and tells us he is waiting for the day when he wakes up to see all 3 of us around the dining room table with cups littered everywhere, all of us with bloodshot eyes and tics, muttering “must turn on blender. must make smoothie. must make smoothie” The sad thing is he isn’t far from the truth. And while he does like some of our smoothies, he claims to have a nica-smoothie patch to help prevent him from becoming addicted. Well, it’s been … <checks time> … an hour since my last smoothie and I’m feeling the cravings come on, gotta go now!
I’ve been debating whether or not to upgrade my TI-86 calculator to a TI-89, which is nearly the top of the line as calculators go. It litterally does just about everything, including symbolic factoring, integration, and all sorts of cool stuff. Unfortunately, it has a $150 price tag. I finally decided I was going to buy it with a $10 BestBuy gift card (well, and my credit card to cover the rest ;-), so I went down to best buy and it was $147.99. But then I saw a package that had been opened, so it was marked down to $127.99. That pretty much swayed me – so I took it up to the register and they knocked another $18 bucks off of it! So I got it for $109 – totally awesome! Now I just have to figure out how to use it.
After saying I could probably walk 15-50 miles without rest in my Engineering class, I decided to test whether I could actually do that or not. So today after church, I headed down the Seminole County Trail, a nice paved trial. The first 3 miles felt good as it was a bright, crisp, cloudless Florida day. At 5 miles, I was feeling a bit of discomfort, but not enough to slow me. At 7 miles, I was definitely developing some blisters. At 11 miles, I was seriously rethinking why I decided to do this. At 13 miles, I had multiple blisters on each foot and could barely walk. At 14 miles, every body part cried out to rest, but I was so close I just kept putting 1 foot in front of the other. That last mile was extremely difficult, but I made it! It took me a little over 4 hours, so that’s about 3.5 mph – not bad. On the flip side, I now walk like a crippled old person. People probably think I need those little walkers!
Halleluja! Yesterday I spent 2 hours in the library with classmate working on Physics homework (due today). We got a lot of it done, so we went home to finish it. However, we had no clue how to do this one problem. So after we submitted everything else online, we phoned each other and tried to work on the problem. 4 hours later at 10 PM, we gave up – not good since the problem was worth 30% of our grade! Just as I was drifting off to sleep, I thought of a way to maybe solve it. This morning I tried it and after an hour or so got it right! Praise be to God!
Today I coded more on the UCF Robotics system. The system is know capturing the data from one camera, displying it, classifying it, and displaying that. Of course, with my poor Celeron 2GHz laptop, I’m only getting 5 frames a second! Now add 3 cameras to the one I already have and well, you get the picture…
Because this weekend was a long weekend (today is Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday), I went home. I had a very nice and relaxing time. Now it is back to the grind. Hopefully I can catch up on all I need to do in terms of homework.
I meet with Dr. Gonzalez for my ISL project on Cased Based Reasoning. I got the impression that he thinks I should be moving a bit faster, so I’m going to have to finish up that 628 book…and I’m only on 398. Read, Brian, read! Homework, Brian, homework!
Today I worked more on my part of the UCF Robotics Team Vision System. In fact, I was up until 10:30 PM working on it. Of course, Microsoft in their infinite wisdom decided that the pictures comming in from the DirectX camera camera should be upside down and in the format BRG (not the standard RGB). Took me while to figure that one out! After I succeeded in hooking up the camera input to the system, I decided to turn in.
Today I was going to go to a Bible Study, but totally lost the directions. After driving around for a while trying to remember them, I finally gave up. I was not happy! On the bright side, I was able to work more on Simply KoolB. I’m getting closer to an alpha release.
I am getting over most of my cold, although I still have a nagging cough. Hopefully I’ll be 100% well by the end of the week. Anyhow, my first week at school went pretty well. I’m taking Physics, Chemistry, Calc II, and Engineering. Physics seems like it will be the hardest.
Happy New Year’s everybody! I wish everybody a much better year than last year (which for some of us in Florida wasn’t that good). Today I started school. I’m taking Intro to Computer Engineering, Semiconducting Devices, Networks and Systems, and Dynamics. Lots of fun, let me tell you. As one of my friends says: I’m ready for summer! On another note, I’m leaving Wednesday for Washington, D.C. for a conference. I actually have to present for 4 minutes – I think I’d much rather be in class!
Happy New Years everybody! A few days ago I got a bad cold, so I hope everybody is doing better than I am! I hope this new year will be productive for everybody!
Well, today I started to read my 628 page book entitled Case Based Reasoning. I have to read it by the beginning of January. Nothing quite like procrastinating, is there?
I also downloaded ObjectDock, a really cool taskbar replacement. Its just like the MacOS X dock, only cooler! You can add ‘docklets’, custom little programs that run in the dock, like weather updates and battery status. You can even download the SDK and program your own! Check it out at www.objectdock.com
It has been nice to just relax at home doing almost nothing. I’ve been playing more with KoolB & the IDE. I had to cut back on the IDE because it went over 1,000 lines, but everything is all in nice shape. Now for some documentation and an installer…
I hope everybody had a Merry Christmas and are going to have a Happy New Year!
I’m finally home from UCF. I’ve spent 8-12 hour days working on our UCF Robotics BlackKnight vision system. You can see what I’ve done at http://robotics.ucf.edu/projects.html. I wrote the app you see on the bottom, with the picture of the cone and grass. Lots of work! Anyhow, I’ll probably be wroking more on KoolB this Christmas.
Whew! Been a while since I’ve updated this site…been busy with end of the semster activities..AKA finals. I hope everybody has had a good Thanksgiving and are getting into the Christmas spirit! Just because I haven’t been doing much publicly doesn’t mean I haven’t been working. Expect some code to be released soon!
Finished my Ukraine Agriculture paper & gave the presentation. Glad to have that finished!
Whew! I got a last minute plea to give a presentation on “Exploring Your Future” to a bunch of middle schoolers. I had basically a day to write a 30 minute PowerPoint presentation describing how to prepare to be an engineering student. It went reasonably well, actually. Now I’m exahusted…bed…zzzzz.
Today I received a lovely letter from somebody who will remain anonymous that told me how great my Resources section is. Of course, at the time Resources was a blank page. However, the someobdy who will remain anonymous got his/her wish and there are some web development resources up now.
Today I completely bombed my Calc I test. I am NOT looking forward to getting the grade on that!
Arg! I dislike long, drawn out math problems. I spent 2.5 hours solving a grand total of 3 problems. I hope I can do better than that tomorrow on the test!
At the suggestion of Jared, I made the navigation menu a little shorter to accomodate visitors with small screens. Let me know if you like/dislike it.
I finally broke down and got a hair-cut. It feels much better – now I can go for another couple of months.
My family came to town and we went to see Luther in theaters. Surprisingly, it was quite good! I would recommend it to most anybody. It does an excellent job of showing how the Protestand Reformation sparked off not only religous freedom, but the beginning of modern history.