Category: school

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.

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.

The pace of life post-SIGGRAPH has been quite agreeable. I’ve got two classes: Visualization, which has been a lot of fun so far, and if nothing else a great excuse to buy beautiful books from Edward Tufte, as well as another graduate math class that, instead of having 20 hours/week of homework, has exactly zero.

I’ve had time to start work on my master’s report (then I’ll just one more to complete the set!), finish Dragon Quest (I give it rave reviews all the way through), as well as generally get back into all the parts of my life that withered during the madness. I’ve been back at yoga, back to climbing, back to eating sushi, drinking at Triple Rock. Yes. This is what grad school is all about.

I know you know. But I’m going to tell you anyway. The story of my life for the last month and a half (except, of course, the beautiful respite of my 10-day winter break). This is what I’m going to tell you. It won’t take long. You wake up. You shower. You eat breakfast, and make 2 sandwiches. You take these up to “the lab,” which is really just an office but you call it the lab to differentiate it from the place where you got a salary and fringe benefits. See, it’s better! It’s THE LAB. It’s SCIENCE. So you settle in around 9am, knowing that there won’t be any company until early afternoon, because you’re only hardcore if you work in the lab from 2pm until 3am, the 9am to 11pm guys are weaklings.

You settle at your tiny desk (tiny because there are already 7 students in this office, but the alternative is to sit alone in a room with no windows), and you spend roughly the next 12-15 hours rearranging the magnetic fields on a hard drive. Change this one to a zero, this zero to a one, etc. Nothing fancy. Somewhere along the way eat your sandwiches or go out for fast food that isn’t any better for you because it’s Thai rather than Burger King–coconut milk is a bitch. Go home. Pretend you have time to do something before sleep, realize you don’t, sleep.

Now, fundamentally, this bitching is bogus. We both know it is. And yet, no matter how perfect the scenario, there is always something to bitch about. So I’m just going to bitch away here. The last 36 hours or so were excellent. Deadline: 2pm Wednesday. Go in on Monday, work your “normal” hours. Tuesday, after 8 beautiful hours of sleep, head in around 9am. Finish the crucial elements of the submission around 10pm. Decide to do another example. Spend the next 12 hours or so getting that working. Around 5am, decide to only allow changes to the paper text by 3-way consensus of the authors (language faculties slipping). Submit final paper around 7am. Order delirious co-authors to sleep as necessary, sleep none at all yourself until the last frame is rendered, roughly noon. Submit.

SUBMIT! Submit. submit.

And then, it’s over. The last few days have been a beautiful, chemically-induced haze. I think I may almost be ready to face normal life again.

I’ll have spent about 60 hours this week working on my SIGGRAPH paper. Still 1.5 months to go. Ugh.

The semester is almost over. I’ve got two more meetings of my oh-so-painful math class, but I “finished” (or at least turned in) the last two homeworks so I can focus on the SIGGRAPH paper, which will basically be my life until 25 January at 5pm. Which is okay, really, considering how relaxed things are for the rest of the year. I do still have a week or so in late December for Texas and Christmas that I’m not being forced to give up, and I’m sort of mentally separating the remaing time before the deadline into two death marches, one from now until the 22nd, then from the 2nd until the 25th. Seems much more manageable that way.

Almost got to see the Trey Anastasio show on Friday, but after getting patted down we were bounced at the door since it turned out our tickets were for Saturday, not Friday. Oops. Transportation made it hard to get there yesterday so we ended up selling our tickets (or at least one, I gave the other away) on craigslist and staying in for the night, which was fun anyway since Doug and I were starting work on our FFVII reunion tour. Sephiroth, Cloud, the whole gang.

Now, back to work.

Ann Arbor persisted in being entertaining all the way to the end. On the second night, we hit “Conor O’Neils” for some decent hefewiezen and trivia. Although we knocked it out of the park in the science category, we did pretty poorly on music (other than me recognizing a Portishead track) and the rest was a mixed bag. Some scurvy dogs brought laptops to the trivia challege, which if nothing else made us feel a lot less bad about losing.

The next night we played a bit of poker. It was a blast, $10 buy-in, tons of fun games. I was a big fan of Omaha in particular, maybe because the hands are so dynamic with each turn of the cards. More entertaining than non-stop, no-limit Texas hold’em, which people in Berkeley seem to like to play. Overall, I managed to get zero pictures of the trip… pretty pathetic, actually. How will I tell my grand children about that one time I went to Michigan?

And now I’m back in Berkeley, with my prelim behind me, and nothing in front but a vast expanse of semesters stretching nearly to the end of the decade that stand between me and a Ph.D. I guess you could say at this point I’m far enough in to have a clue, but not so far that I have any idea what I’ve gotten myself into. I mean, really, what could take 4-6 more years to finish?

I don’t know what it is about that pun… I just can’t resist it. So, Monday at 5:30 I had my big test, the Ph.D. prelim exam. In truth, it was a bit of an anti-climax. I kind of set it up to be… I had 4 mock prelims with very gracious graphics students who grilled me much more severely than my actual examiners. I scheduled the test to be in the same room that I had been practicing in, so it all felt very natural. Things kicked off with questions about a techinical paper I’d picked (this one if you must know). This was supposed to take about 10 minutes, but actually took more like 40. People had told me things like, “if they have 4 questions, and you only get to 1, you get at most 1/4 of the points,” so I was panicking a bit (on the inside). We moved along for a few questions on light an color, and that was it. This test that I’ve been getting ready for all summer, that, if failed, I would have to wait another semester to take again, that, without passing, I couldn’t move forward toward finish my Ph.D.–done. Well, that’s a relief.

So… the plan for tonight is to take all those folks who made me ready for this thing and buy them beer at a great nearby pub, Triple Rock. I should review that one soon…