here comes the summer

Well, yesterday I ticked off the last thing I had to do to get my SIGGRAPH paper all submitted. I’m sure you all are crazy about the idea of reading the freshly posted preprint which you can get here.

I’m not sort of heading in to the end of the semester, working hard on a couple of class projects, but mostly just living the beautiful life of a grad student. Les and I went last weekend to check out a couple of possible spots for the wedding in the area, nothing concrete nailed down, but I think the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden is high in the running. There’s serveral other random beautiful places in the Berkeley hills we’ve been looking at.

Plans for the summer are vague but are sure to include me forking over huge sums of money to learn how to paraglide (no, it’s not actually the thing at the resort where they drag you behind a motorboat), a years-delayed roadtrip with Leslie up to Canada, and who knows, maybe even a jaunt to Africa if finances allow. What it won’t involve is any sort of job, save research, which I’m quite excited about.

spring marches on

Let’s see… there’s been a bit going on recently other than getting engaged. I found out a few days after I got back from belize that our SIGGRAPH paper submission was accepted at the conference, which was a bit of a surprise but definitely welcome news. This paper is a lot like the one we did last year except we have stuff moving around and interacting with the smoke. You can check out our videos, including a more playful one that will be showing in the SIGGRAPH animation theatre here.

It’s finally stopped raining in the last few days here. I know it’s a tad absurd to ever complain about the weather in northern california, but for the last month I think we have surpassed Seattle both in total amount of rain and number of rainy days. I feel kind of ripped off by this but it’s taken only a couple days of gorgeous sunshine and weather in the 60’s to make me satisfied again. I know that by the middle of the perfect summer I’ll be yearning for a cloud or two.

These days I’ve been mostly working on getting the final version of our SIGGRAPH paper ready and working on semester projects, and my master’s thesis, which I’ll hopefully file before the end of this semester. The summer is a great yawning emptiness ahead of me as I have no scheduled job for the summer, which I think is a first since I was of legal age to work.