Printer Recommendations

Yesterday, we replaced our much maligned printer. When we bought it, I liked it and I thought it was cool - it looked like a spaceship and I thought it was cute. I thought its problems with paper-feeding were just one of its quirks. Time went on, and the paper feed issues got to be damn annoying. When you would tell it to print, it would make a noise, and you could see the paper in the tray wiggle a little bit, but after rolling its rollers for a little while, the orange light would come on saying check the paper. So, you press the button, because clearly there is paper in the tray. Sometimes I would shove the paper in to make sure it hit the sensor and the rollers could grab it. Problem was, they would grab ten sheets and print on the first milimeter of each. ARGH! The only way to get it to print nicely on a piece of paper was to lay in wait, and when the rollers started trying to grab a piece, jam it in there. Then everything was fine. Come to think of it, every HP printer I have ever owned has had paper feed problems. This piece of junk was an HP PSC 1510 All-in-one. As a scanner, it worked very well. The copy function, when you actually could get it to feed the paper, was also quite good.

Anyway, yesterday we replaced it with a Canon PIXMA MP600, which is another all-in-one thingy. It has had zero paper feed problems, after printing both of our tax returns twice (once for the IRS and once for us). It also did envelopes for our taxes without a hitch, and I was able to get it to print on one of the test sheets for our invitations (an odd size -- 4.5 x 7.5) inside of 15 minutes. So, I am quite pleased.

The only problem is the form factor. It is probably half again as big as the HP in each dimension, and sufficiently tall so that it won't fit on the shelf where the HP has been living. I put it on my great-grandmother's desk in the office, where it fits nicely. But I missed having the desk, when I went to try to get all the tax return crap into the right envelopes and write all the checks and sign everything. We have two desks in the office: my great-grandmother's desk (hereafter the wooden desk), and this industrial looking thing that Mike got in college. For a while we had my computer on the wooden desk, but we have a tall office chair, and my legs would get squished and it wasn't a good setup for sitting there for hours, playing games, which is pretty much all I use my desktop for. The industrial desk is a good computer desk because it is tall, and it doesn't impede the electrical cords. However, it is not a good writing desk. As I was trying to address envelopes and sign stuff, it was squeaking and wiggling back and forth. I think the printer might not get to live on the wooden desk, since I sometimes do use it for writing. I guess it can live on the floor, against the wall. It is big enough that we are not going to mistakenly step on it.

So anyway, if anyone wants a pretty good scanner that can sometimes print stuff if you want it bad enough, let me know!

My paper was accepted to CVPR

My paper, with Margrit at BU was accepted to CVPR, which is an IEEE conference. CVPR stands for Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. So, this is really cool. I was telling one of the people at work about this, and she asked if I was going to go or not. And I said probably not, because it would probably be really expensive to get a flight and a hotel and take the time off work, etc. She said, that if the conference was related to tracking, I might be able to get BAE to pay for it. So, I talked to my manager, and he said that he thought it was possible, and he would ask his boss! Score!

I have been working really hard in the past couple of weeks, going to the gym. I have gone to the gym like 14 of the past 17 days. It has been hard work! Since Jason and Barbie's wedding last April, I am down a little over twenty pounds. I managed not to gain any weight (okay, maybe half a pound) over the holidays, but since January, I have been going nowhere fast. It has been very frustrating. But now, I think my gym-going might be having the desired effect. My fitting for my dress is at the end of May, so let's hope so!

Holy crumbcake!

Wow, I knew I hadn't posted in a while, but this is ridicules! Sorry everybody! I will try to do better!

There have been a lot of things going on with me lately.

There has been some drama about my job. I got a call from Google (out of the blue!) in January, offering an interview. And I was like "Do you guys remember you tunred me down once before?" And they said "well, sometimes we find people are a better fit after a year." It was Google! How could I resist! This set off a whole month of drama about whether or not I wanted to stay at BAE, and for how long, and under what circumstances, blah blah. Ultimately, Google turned me down. I had a conversation with my manager about how radar tracking wasn't thrilling me, and I have decided I am going to stay at BAE certainly for the medium term, while we try to get me over to the people doing the video tracking. This really riled me up for a while there.

There was also some drama about a PhD. I had this life plan all laid out -- work for a few years, have some kids. Then, when the kids were preschool aged, decide about whether the PhD was for me. In the midst of all of this job drama, I started thinking about / talking about this. All of the people around me thought I was crazy for wanted to go back to school AFTER I had kids. I want to have kids before I am thirty-five, after all, so doing a PhD before kids means I would need to get cracking, PRONTO! So, I met with Margrit (my advisor from BU) and we had this conversation about my career, and so on. I started thinking it would be nice if I could take classes for a couple years, to stay sharp, while still working so we could buy a house or something. And BAE will pay for classes if you enrolled in a degree granting program. Score! Problem is that BU is kinda evil about who they let take classes. You have to be in the program to take classes in CAS, and, as it turns out, once you enroll in the program you must take 2 classes per semester. Which is a bit of a tall order if you are working full time (and expensive! BAE won't pay for THAT much!), so that option is out.

After a month and a half of drama about this, I have decided that I really want to work on this particular idea of mine a whole lot more than I want to be a professor. To be a professor, you need a PhD. To work on an idea, you certainly don't. People have been building things in their garages as long as there have been garages, and in equivalent places before then. When you do a PhD, you also have all these issues of funding, so there's no guarantee I could work on my idea, even if I was in the program. I would probably have to spin it something fierce. So, I have decided I am going to work on my idea(s) in my garage. I am going to fund myself and my own research. When my ideas have matured, maybe there is some entrepreneurship in my future -- then I wouldn't have to develop a huge amount of robotics expertise; I could just hire someone who already has it!

Phew.

There has also been some drama about the wedding. You remember that Christine was in that terrible car accident. Well, that was when she came down to Boston to help me with invitations. We had been working on this very formal looking invitation, with an embossed hummingbird, and lots of layers on a folded card. I was just kinda hung up on the colors. Christine had this idea that we could save ourself a whole lot of fuss and bother if we bought invitation kits, rather than ordering all the paper and making them ourselves. I was skeptical at first, but read on my friends. Whenever we would got to A.C. Moore, I would always pick up the hand-made paper with the rose petals in it, and so Christine took me over to the invitation kits, and lo and behold. There were invitations with rose petals in them! And there were MATCHING programs! This weekend, I was working on the invitation text. It is getting to be about time that I start thinking about putting them together.

These are the invitations from the kit

This was the old design with lots of layers of paper.

Alright everyone, I need your help. If you DIDN'T get a Christmas card from me, its because I don't have your address. So please send me your addresses (and where applicable, your children's addresses!).

Last weekend, one of my bridesmaids brought it to my attention that my dress was about to be DISCONTINUED and we had to order them THAT WEEK. And I was like "oh, my poor brain." So, I created some drama for about half a day about that, but by Wednesday, everyone had ordered their dress, and everything was fine.

Friday, I bought shoes for the wedding. You are going to laugh! I went in there and I was like "I want a flat, with a closed toe" Look what I came out with!