It’s not as glorious as my smoke videos of old perhaps, but I’ve finally got some decent video of my current research work. What’ you’re seeing is a tetrahedral mesh of a cube with the tetrahedra (pyramids) colored according to their quality. As the quality improves, their colors shift toward green, and when they’re good enough, they disappear. At the bottom right is a histogram of qualities for the entire mesh. Should be a fun little clip to show when I give the talk at the International Meshing Roundtable in Seattle in a couple of weeks.

Yep, we’re still here. We went to Amesterdam last weekend, and posted the few pics we took there on the ol’ gallery. We just happened to be there the same weekend that Ali was meeting up with Karen to head on to their awesome-sounding trip to Italy, so we grabbed some dinner with them. Ali had his nice new camera with him, and got some great shots of what is really a beautiful and perfectly functioning little city.

We’ve been catching our breath back here a bit, and I’ve been working on the camera-ready version the mesh-improvement paper I wrote with Jonathan, which was finally accepted to the International Meshing Roundtable. So I guess I’ve got a trip to Seattle coming in October.

Next week we’re heading to Prague, and then we’ll have just a couple more left before we pack up. It’s amazing, the slowness and quickness of the way time passes over here.

Another big sigh of relief: on Thursday I gave my qualifying exam talk–and passed. The qual at Berkeley is a bit different from most places; it’s basically a proposal of your thesis topic in the form of a two-hour talk given to a committee of four professors, who pepper you with questions throughout, ostensibly to test your knowledge of the area and to confirm that your thesis topic is “good enough.” I’ve spent most of the last two weeks making the slides and otherwise preparing for the talk. Although in theory you can fail your qual (and be kicked out of the Ph.D. program), I’ve never heard of it happening. This is because your advisor really shouldn’t let you take your qual until he knows you’re ready to pass. In reality, the hardest part of the qual is getting four professors to all agree to be in the same place for two hours on your behalf.

Anyway, it went fine, which means my thesis topic (TETS!) has the stamp of approval and I’m officially ABD (all but dissertation). I wish I could say that’s the last loose end for the semester, but I’m currently working on the take-home final for my graduate theory class and optimistically polishing up the SGP paper for it’s final “camera ready” version. We don’t yet know whether it will be accepted (and hence whether a camera ready version will even be necessary), but because the deadline for submitting the camera ready version is right in the middle of my honeymoon, I think I’d rather hedge and do the work now.

Oh yeah… we got an apartment in Germany. It’s smack in the middle of everything, about 15 minutes on foot from WIAS where I’ll be working, and 500 feet from a major transportation hub. Literally the ‘B’ in Berlin:

Yesterday afternoon Jonathan and I submitted our paper for the Symposium on Geometry Processing, marking the first big sigh of relief for the spring. I promised pictures, so here’s one, for what it’s worth:

On the left is a tetrahedral mesh of… uh… a tire incinerator! Exciting. But it’s a sad tire incinerator because of all its bad, skinny, flat, tets shown in green, yellow, and red (increasing badness). But then I save the day by swooping in and lovingly molding all the sad tets in to plump round ones. And that has been my life for the last three weeks (and to a lesser extent, the last nine months). Oh yeah.

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Comments

Anonymous — 2007-05-09 14:26:51

It’s Indiana!

bryan — 2007-05-13 14:01:25

Man, you’re right! The founders should have thought more before shaping their state like a tire incinerator…

Okay, so I’m a bit early. I’ve only waited two weeks where I was supposed two wait four. But damn, it’s actually beer. When I popped off the top, it made that little hiss noise just like it was supposed to. It smelled like hefewiessen. The taste was good… a bit too hoppy, and not as clove-y or fruity as I had hoped, but it was beer! Leslie agreed. It’s thrill for sure that for $25 I can make five gallons of good beer… actual beer. What fun. We’ll see how it tastes when it’s been through it’s full bottle-sitting time.

I’ve settled into my classes for the semester… I’m taking three, which is one more than even I expected. I thought at first I’d stick to one, but Jonathan persuaded me to stick with my theory class by reminding me that it’s actually not necessary to ace every class you take. So I’m planning on a nice B+ and by the end of the semester, I’ll only have one more class to take for the Ph.D.

In other news, three distinct Wii modchips have been announced. Those of you who know of my video gaming proclivities are no doubt aware that all the other consoles in my life (PS2, Xbox, DS) have been mercilessly soldered into submission to deliver me free games, emulators, media centers and whatnot. The potential to do the same to my Wii brings me joy… I can go back and take a look at some of those Gamecube games I never had a chance to buy (the Gamecube avoided my onslaught by such simple physical measures as having mini-DVDs burned backwards), as well as trying out the new Wii gimmicks without throwing down $50/pop. I’ll be sure to document the debasement of my little white beauty.