AHH!!! My Thesis Proposal!!!!!!

AHHHH!!!!!

My thesis proposal is due Thursday.

So, a month ago, I sequestered myself in the house to write my thesis proposal, so I wouldn't end up caught off guard. Then, I gave it to my advisor, like three weeks ago. Maybe two. Last week, he suggests who one of my readers should be. I email the suggested reader and wait, not wanting to be too pushy. It is Thanksgiving week after all. She has probably gone somewhere fun. The other reader, I obtain by shameless solicitation.

So today, I finally track down this first reader person. Good thing too -- she had never gotten to my email, and I would have been really sunk!

She emails me tonight (THANK YOU FOR THE FAST TURN AROUND!!!) to tell me my related work section needs work (ha ha I made a pun). She says I need to include more about "ad-hoc networking" and "decentralized distributed computing". Fine. I had a feeling that this was going to come back to bite me. I included plenty about smart rooms. Advisor-Mike said that I need more about "sensing stuff". I had those references all ready to go, and it was fairly painless to put in. I am not at all familiar with the ad hoc networking literature, except by its tangental relationship to ubiquitous and pervasive computing, where it is often mentioned as a foot note. I am in trouble!

How has it come to be that two days before it is due I am not ready!!!


Ugh.

On top of this, I am trying to find a job. I had my very promising phone interview with BAE three weeks ago now. I know it is three weeks because the message that was left for me after the interview just came up on my voice-mail thingy for deletion. We are still trying to find a good date for this to happen. I would really like it to happen. I have my slides for the talk they wanted me to give already to go!

On top of THIS, we have to move. So, today I spent an hour and a half calling around to see if we could go see any available apartments. The first place I called was 21st Century, whom I had called a month ago, and whom had told me to call back in a month. They tell me they don't have anything, and that our $1400 ceiling is low for apartments in Newton. (AHH!!) I turn to the trusty interweb and I find some promising matches, and email and make phone calls.

The last phone call I make, the guy actually had someone cancel on him, and he showed us an apartment this very evening! I liked the apartment a lot. Mike (boyfriend Mike, not to be confused with advisor-Mike) was lukewarm towards it. We have a tug-of-war going on about location. He would want to move further out, towards work, and I want to move further in, towards MIT. I thought the location of the apartment we saw today was just dandy. It was two blocks from the commuter rail and the gym. There are restaurants (like Blue Ribbon Barbecue!) and even an Irish pub. Mike was not so happy about it. It is beyond the expensive toll (the one that is $1, instead of 35 cents), going out of Boston, and has not entrance onto the Mass Pike.

This weekend was nice. Ally is very, very cute. I think four days of doing nothing might have been the thing to cure what ails me. Of course, I feel some of my progress towards there being less of me to love more was lost to the strategic pie reserves. Although, I do give myself credit for restraint. I was conscious not to go way overboard. Except for pie. I am also now addicted to Civilization IV. This is not good because this game takes an insane amount of time to play. I spent 5 hours on a single game on Sunday.

And Michael, sweet Michael. He brought me breakfast in bed yesterday!

Google, you don't know what you're missing!

I got the call from Google yesterday. They do not want me.

I was being pretty successful, not taking it personally. The recruiter was giving me the whole "we thought you were great, but you're just not a good fit" talk. Which is fine. I understand this is a numbers game. It was when she started talking about their "bar" being high that I took it personally. She said "oh, you know. Our bar is very high..." and I thought to myself "Honey, I can jump over whatever bar you've got up." I didn't say that obviously. Arguably, I can't jump over their bar, because they didn't want me. But, I know I am damn capable, and so they are just missing out. So there.

Yeah, so, the job search. It is making me a little nervous. I know you are supposed to get more rejections than offers, but still. My short short list, and the rejections I've gotten from general software engineering positions ... There is still BAE, Brontes, and Mathworks. Mathworks is kinda my backup plan. Mike's boss's wife really likes me (she is a manager there.) And I am being shuttled into their general entry path. So I feel fully qualified there. At Brontes, I dunno. They were asking really deep questions about machine vision and machine learning. I feel like I would be, shall we saying, stretching it. I would have a lot to learn there. BAE seems like the best fit. So, I am going to go work on my slides for my job talk. I had better knock this one out of the park.

I have banana bread in the oven right now. We are going to Mike's parents' house tomorrow (hence the banana bread). After I started the banana bread, I saw my yeast in the cabinet, and thought it would have been nice to make cinamon rolls instead. But, my banana bread is good. I use a standard recipe, but I swap out half the flour for whole wheat flour, half the sugar for molasses, and the other half of the sugar for brown sugar. This results in a dark soft bread that I like a lot.

I tried to make candied lemon peel yesterday. It was a disaster! Last Christmas, my aunt and cousin made candied grapefruit peel and it was lovely. I like lemons better, so I wanted to do lemon peel. I followed the directions in the Joy of Cooking. You take the peel, and then you boil the heck out of it. You scrape out the pith, and then boil it again in sugar water. Everything was going well until the sugar water. Then, my soft tender boiled lemon peel turned into lemon flavored leather! I don't know what happened, but it wasn't like the candied grapefruit peel my cousin made. I think there might have been a coat of wax on the peel. I didn't think to wash them carefully, and I hear that its standard practice to put wax on citrus fruits. I will try again with organic lemons.

Hirshes and Bats

We have returned from Mike's mother's family's Thanksgiving shin-dig. I had been wondering how many people actually read my blog, and now I know how popular I am!! I have learned that there are two things I should clarify. Ben asked about the bats. Mike's grandmother, Mike's mother, and Aunt Tina all asked about my family.

My mother's name is Janet, my father's name is Richard. I have a sister, Clara, who is 3 years and 3 months younger than me. My family is more closely tied with my father's side than my mother's. My family is scattered all over the country -- St. Louis, Salt Lake City, New York, Boston, Chicago, North Carolina. I think that does it. Christmas is the big family gathering. We don't really do Thanksgiving or Easter or anything. My grandmother died in May 2004, which was the first time we had all gotten together in a few years, since the Carolina branch hasn't made it to Christmas since they moved from St. Louis. It is from this occasion that I have the most recent pictures.

Here is me with all of my couisins. It wasn't posed. We were all just sitting on the steps, when my mother said "oh, that is a nice picture." My sister is on the rightmost side, hugging my cousin Rachel. My father is in the background with my uncle Don.


Here is my father with his siblings: Libby, Richard, Don, and Eloise.


Here is my mother and father talking to my aunt Lisa.



And now, onto the bats. Every job interview I have had, after the person has read my resume, they ask about the bats. The bats are called Tadarida brasiliensis (Tah - DARE - i - dah). Every year, they migrate to Texas from Mexico, and they form huge colonies, containing millions of individuals. Maybe tens of millions, we're not sure. These bats are about 12 grams, and they eat about 8 grams of insects a night. So, 8 grams times millions times the six months the bats summer in Texas is an awful lot of bug control. So, we were trying to census the bats. We did this by setting up infrared thermal cameras outside of the cave.



I did this work at Boston University. My advisor was Margrit Betke. On my birthday, we went out to photograph flowers, and we got caught in a rainstorm. We were photographed when we got back to the house:


Bats are cool!

My short list just got shorter

Tessella has taken themselves off my short list of places I want to work. :-(

On the bright side, I had a very good phone interview with BAE on Tuesday, and I will go for an onsite interview, probably, Dec. 1. So that is good.

In other news, I am sick (again). I will be sniffling all through the Kennedy Thanksgiving.

Despite my sniffling, my demo yesterday for Johnson & Johnson went well. They were down with my idea of a model builder using the ball. They said they could imagine their own engineers using such a tool -- where a model was created on the wall using gestures and so on. They also said they could see the tiles in an office, with a smart desk. You could have documents on the desk, and then when you wanted to put them elsewhere, you could just gesture them up to the wall! So, this bolsters my spirits somewhat.

I still haven't found my bug that is tripping me up. I suspect hardware problems, but it could still be a memory problem. I had our UROPer swap the camera out of the tile that has been acting up. I hope that fixes it.

Boycott Amtrak!

I had the worst experience with Amtrak on my way home from New York.

I lost my ticket in my hotel room. I realized this about an hour before my train was to depart. I called the hotel, and they said that they did not find it. Then, I called Amtrak to ask if anything could be done. I had bought my ticket over the internet, and the prevailing opinion among the people I had talked to was that they would just be able to reissue the ticket. The lady on the phone informed me that Amtrak's policy, as of Oct. 31, was that if a ticket was lost, a new ticket had to be purchased. If, after 5 months, the original ticket had not been found, there was possibility of a refund, less a $75 processing fee. These tickets are like $100. I think this policy is ridicules, not to mention unfair, and in bad faith. Anyway, I got to the train station, and I had to wait in a line for like 40 minutes. I only got to a ticket window about 5 minutes before the train was supposed to leave. Luckily for me, the train left late.

I sent a nasty complaint letter to Amtrak, saying that I thought their policy was grossly unfair, and that I felt they had failed as a service provider. Their service was just as much, if not more, than a plane. Their service took longer than a plane (I had thought it might be less, between getting to the airport, needing to arrive and hour early, and taking a taxi from the airport.) Their service was just as much hassle as a plane. And, the thing that made me maddest, was that they did not respond in a way I felt was fair when I had a problem. If I had lost my boarding pass, an airline would simply have reissued it. I have absolutely no intention of ever taking Amtrak again. Which is unfortunate, because I think people should take more trains.

Compounding this, I felt very crummy after this whole ordeal. Michael and I had agreed to meet at a train stop about three quarters of the way up the green line. Because I felt crummy, I didn't want to spend another hour on the train to get all the way home. Michael didn't want to come to get me because he was afraid of getting lost. I pressed him, and he agreed. I didn't know how to give him directions to South Station, so I told him to go to Back Bay, and I gave him directions there. He check the email I had sent and saw that my train was supposed to go to South Station. He tells me he had a very traumatic journey to South Station, which involved being afraid of needing to retreive his car the next day. Starting at like 7, I am calling him like every 15 minutes to tell him when my train is getting in. After an hour, I figure that we had miscommunicated, and he had already gone to the train station. I am just about to get off the train when my phone rings. It is poor Michael and he is very upset after his ordeal. So in conclusion, it was a pretty bad day for transportation yesterday.

Anyway.

The interview at Google went reasonably well. I had three interviews in the morning, and then in the afternoon they gave us lunch and ice cream. In my interviews, I had three things to do, one for each. One of the questions was to write a program to implement the game of life. This was not too bad. Another problem was to find the minimum string in a document that contained all words of a search query. This had to run in time linear with the number of words in the query, and the length of the document. The last problem was to help the user with typing on the phone. If the user wanted to enter 'C', you wouldn't want them to have to press '222'. You want to take in a string on numbers, and then provide a list of all possible words that could be represented by that string of numbers. This had to run in constant time. yikes.

Anyway, I got to the solutions, or near the solutions in all the cases, so I hope I did okay.

Last night, I found that I had gotten an email from Yahoo asking me to finish some things up. I don't think I would accept an offer from Yahoo, but I am very interested to see what the offer would be like.

I got another email from 21st century technologies. I'm not sure what they had done. They said that they were still very interested in me personally. And that made me feel good. They are in Texas, so working for them is all but out. But, I still felt good.

Thesis and Google

On Tuesday, I sequestered myself in my apartment to force myself to do my thesis proposal. It took me the full day. I basically wrote down what I have been planning on doing, with some spin. I gave the draft to my advisor yesterday and I hope he will tell me useful things soon. My related work section needs some help. It is peppered with asterisk'es saying FIXME!

I am going to New York today. I have an interview with Google tomorrow. It will be a long day of interviews, followed by a sort of party afterwards that I'm told will include ice cream. I will meet up with my aunt, Eloise tonight. Tomorrow, Mike has promised me sushi. :-)

Ah! Jim's claw just fell on me!

I have homework due Monday. Didn't I just turn in homework?

*EOF*

Are you going to Scarborough Fair?

Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. And celery, carrots and onions. And potatoes and beef. That is what is in my crockpot at home today. My crockpot is getting its third use since I bought it. I hope it will help solve my not wanting to cook during the week.

Last night, I successfully roasted a whole chicken, which came out well. The first one I tried to do, a couple years ago, turned out quite badly. So I was glad that this one won great praise from my taste tester, Mike. I was going to give my candied lemon peel another go, but while I was peeling potatoes, I took off a piece of my finger, and I didn't want to get lemon juice in it.

Michael and I are going to move. We were going to try to stay in our apartment until June, after I graduate. But, the landlord wanted an extra $200 for the privelege, and so we are going to go elsewhere. I talked to a realtor, and he said that a.) rents are softening, so we should be able to find something nice, for less money than it was last year b.) the prime time for rents to come up is in the spring or fall, so it wasn't very nice of the landlord to try to add this $200, because it would have been to his advantage for the lease to come up in June, to get another tenant. I am not excited about moving, because it will be the end of holiday season, and it will be winter, and I am injured and can't lift anything heavy. Oh well.

I continue to fret over my thesis proposal. I will try to write a preliminary draft today.

Interviews

So yesterday, my interviews. They went well, I think. I didn't blow them away by any means, but I think they went okay.

The first interview was a phone interview with Tessella (TessELLa). The person I was speaking to was the HR manager/recruiter, and she was British. So, I had trouble reading her. She sometimes laughed, but not neccessarily when I was making a joke. I told her about my work at the media lab, and I convinced her that it was relevant and not merely an academic exercise. It seems that Tessella seems to have a bit of a stiff upper lip -- formal dress code, lots of travel, both as daily commuting, and possibly as longer-term assignments, expectation to complete extra training materials in off hours. So, they are still on the short list, but I don't know if they're still at the top.

The second interview was my on-site with Brontes. First, I thought I was going to be there for an hour, but I had been scheduled to be there for 3 hours. They all asked about my work at the lab, and my previous work at BU. I brought my laptop with me, so I could demo the bat tracker. But, since I installed OS 10.3, the bat tracker has been ungodly slow, so its not as impressive looking as it once was. They seemed suitably interested in / impressed with this. They asked a combination of technical and "what do you want in life" quiestions. Their technology is pretty cool, but I don't think I can really say much about its operation, because they asked me not to disclose details. :-/

I am still affected by a mysterious affliction. I slept like twelve hours last night, but I didn't manage to get through my class from noon till one. I am up now, watching Star Trek. This is actually an episode I don't recognize. Which is odd, because I usually recognize arbitrary episodes of Star Trek (Next Generation) by any arbitrary 30 second clip from the episode. I will spend this weekend trying to sleep off my affliction.

Stupid Tiles

Today was solidly in the category of not-good days.

So, I get to the lab, and check to see if my demo is still running on any of the tiles. Of course, its not. Most of the tiles, the network connections have just timed out (stupid network), and it has properly crashed on two of them.

***TECH ALERT***
So, for the past week and a half, I have spent all of my research energy trying to track down this damn segmentation fault. (A segmentation fault happens when a program tries to get at memory outside of its little sandbox).

My program crashes in a blaze on 2 out of 6 tiles. And it only crashes in a blaze after about twenty minutes (better than it was ... it used to be two minutes). However, the long crash time is VERY ANNOYING because every time I make a change, I have to wait half an hour to figure out if something broke again.

I have also spent a significant amount of time trying to get the gosh-darn tiles to core dump, when they crash in a blaze. Gdb (debugging program) doesn't run on the tiles (or, we don't have a version for the tiles). So, when the program crashes, that's it. No more information than that. I have been trying to produce core dumps to run through gdb at a later time. First, I put in handlers to catch SIGSEGV and SIGBUS and abort. No core dumps.

This afternoon, I figured out that I needed to change the limit of the size of the coredumps, in order for them to happen. Yay! I got two cores. I try to put it through normal gdb, and it doesn't know what I am talking about. Go figure -- the core was produced on a different architecture. So, I dig around and I try to find a gdb for the tiles, or at least a cross debugger, analagous to our cross-compiler. I do, in fact, find such a program, called arm-linux-gdb. Hurray!

UNFORTUNATELY I did not realize that I had not compiled the stupid program with -g, so there was no debugging information in the core. SO, I recompile the damn thing with the right flags and set it running remotely, from my laptop, during MythBusters / the Celtics game.

Throughout the game, I am tapping my laptop, looking at the terminal to see if the thing crashed. It hasn't. "Oh good" I think to myself. "If I compile it with the debugging flags it won't crash." After MythBusters, I pick up my computer and try to kill the program on the tile. The gosh darn terminal is hung (network problems) and, what's WORSE, I can't get back into the tile to see if I got a core dump! ARRGH!
***END TECH ALERT***

One of the tiles, mysteriously, will not even power on. I open it up to find a crispy, blackened power connector. Good thing it won't power on, it would cause a fire!

Well, to top of my ills for the day, I got a bad grade on my test. :-( Which was all the more disheartening because I walked out of the test thinking I had it in the bag. Almost every point I lost, I could attribute to my own silly mis-reading the problem statement. This was most irritating.

On top of THIS, I have been trying to beat this ... thing. This affliction of mine. Since I had surgery, two months ago now (already two months?) I have been tired tired tired all the time. I can't keep my eyes open before 1 pm. This is above and beyond my normal -- being a night owl. I do not know what is wrong. I'm just tired tired tired.

So, I felt sad because of my test, discouraged because of the tiles, and I felt crummy because I am mysteriously ill or something. So I induced Michael to skip the gym with me, and we ordered Chinese.

I hope today is a better day -- I have interviews with two of the companies on my short list!!

Silly little Tiles

So, I have pictures of my stuff: balls and tiles.
The balls are used as an input device for the tiles. The tiles have cameras on them, and they look at the balls and respond to them (we hope) in a meaningful way.

Here are some of my balls, erm, spheres, sitting in a basket.


These are the balls in various states of preparation: raw styrofoam, gessoed and sanded, and painted with colors.



Here is a paint program running on all of the tiles simultaneously. The tiles are running autonomously in this case.



Here is a drawing that spans many tiles (tile in the upper left corner is tempermental). This is like "the goal".


So, if you can think of any more interesting applications to put on the wall, please let me know! I need to do my thesis! I had thought of something like a bulletin board, or a model viewer (not shown.)
I know it doesn't look like too much, but believe me, it was really hard to get the last photograph! The tiles have very strong personalities and sometimes they are shy, and sometimes they just don't want to do what they are told.