A difficult Day

After we got back from Maine last night, I felt yucky and I had a hard time sleeping. This morning, I felt like hell, but I trooped off to school anyway. Jim (my office mate) had asked me to give a lunchtime talk about my bat tracker, and I had forgotten about it until about ten minutes before bedtime. When I got to my office, Jim was sleeping on the couch, so I couldn't nap. So, bleary-eyed, I sat upright and worked on the presentation for the talk. The talk went okay. I forgot my VGA dongle (to make the picture from my screen go on the projector) and so we had to do some interesting maneuvering to make a picture happen.

During class, I was totally falling asleep. The past two weeks, I've felt like I've pretty much understood what was going on. At least, I understood all of the individual words. Something about information and entropy and communication channels and radio and television. You know, for such a "simple" device, telephones, radios and TVs are damn complicated. Well anyway, I roughly understood what was going on. I think.

After class, I was going to work in the conference room, but my advisor was in there with his freshmen. I tried to nap on the couch, but didn't get far. Jim and I are being kicked out of our lovely, spacious, 3-person office, and into a much smaller, 2-person office. I do not think the couch is going to fit in the new office, but Jim said that the couch is more important to him than his desk. Anyway, Jacky came by to give me a key.

We talked about what I should try to do, with respect to job-getting. She thinks that I should go for the start-up. She says that now is the best time in my life to do it, when I am young, the salary differential is low, I don't have too many committments. Mike gave me the green light to roll the dice with the start-up -- make less money and be less reliably employed than him, but take a risk that the company booms. At BAE , I'd be working for a unit that was just bought. She thinks this is a bad power structure to be involved with, and she is skeptical about consulting companies. We'll see.

Anyway, after I was done talking to Jacky, I tried to rest for a little bit, but I was restless. I went back to the conference room, and advisor-Mike and his freshmen were gone so I settled down for some bug-hunting. I have a good idea about the class of the problem, but I cannot find the site of the problem for my life. This silly bug has de-railed me something fierce. But, my demo is crashing, and it needs to be reliable. Jim's old demo would run for days on end. Mine won't run for more than a couple of hours. It was running at the lab when I left. If it is still running now, I would be quite happy.

I felt crummy, so I skipped the gym. I still don't feel great. I just feel wiped out. Mike has had some difficulty with his registration, and was quite flustered. So he was upset and I feel crummy. I will probably play hookey from school tomorrow. Clean the house, find my cell phone. Work on my thesis proposal.

*EOF*

Hello World! (2)

So now, I feel like I need to introduce myself.
Most pressing on my mind at the moment is finding a job and doing my thesis.

What will your thesis be about, Diane? you ask.

This is what I have been telling sponsors about my work for the past two weeks:
This is the Smart Architectural Surfaces Project. We are working on creating responsive, context-aware spaces using modular units. We are trying to find ways for users to address the system as a whole, without cognizance of the individual pieces of the system. Here, we have created a system where the units respond to a brightly colored object, like this ball *shows red ball to sponsor* to either create a drawing *demo # 1* or to control the view of a model *demo # 2* (Will post pictures of demos later).

"We" is the Object-Based Media group at the Media Lab, of which I am a part. So, basically, what I am trying to do is put cool applications on the wall. The wall being composed of a bunch of computers, which all have sensors, so that they can respond to you. And they all have wireless cards so they can talk to each other about what they see.

Making these guys play nice together will be the subject of my thesis.

Now, about this finding a job business. My job search began at the MIT Job Fair on Sept 22. I think it is safe to say that I have been quite successful. I have had all KINDS of interviews. Many at the MIT career office. I flew out to California for an interview with Yahoo!. I had an invitation to an onsite interview from Google (pending). My hit ratio (on the MIT job site) of resumes submitted / interviews received is something lik 80%.

Right now, I have three companies on the short list: Tessella, BAE Systems, and Brontes 3D. Tessella is a scientific and engineering consulting company based in England. BAE is a military contractor. Brontes3D is a startup with a 3D imaging technology for medical use. I had preliminary interviews with Brontes and BAE systems last week, which went well. I have a preliminary interview with Tessella and an onsite interview with Brontes3D next week. (Excited! I'm so popular!)

Right now, I am at Mike's parents' house. His sister has a blog with cute pictures of his neice, and I was jealous and I wanted to join the party. I have been tip-tapping away for the past couple hours, and now *I* have a blog!

Hello World!

I am a techno-phile at the head of the computing revolution. And yet, this, in the year 2005, almost 2006, is my very first blog post.