Category: school

So, I got back about a week and a half ago from SIGGRAPH and SCA. They were both fun, it was exciting to give a talk, it hurt to crutch around downtown LA, but I survived. Since I got back Leslie and I have been very lazy… doing nothing all day, reading, playing video games, and generally being worthless. We decided to call it a vacation from activity.

But today, Leslie is a real student again… she left this morning to go her “math camp,” something that’s supposed to help get her prepared for all the statistics and such she’ll encounter in policy school. I, meanwhile, am starting to study in earnest for my prelim.

The only other thing worth mentioning is that when I visited the doctor last week, he refused to give me a walking cast but did take a week off of my cast time. So a week from today I will be off the cursed crutches nursing my wizened leg back to health.

Well, Leslie is off to Thailand and clearly having a grand time. I picked up on packing where Leslie left off. I think we’ve got about 2/3rds of the stuff packed up at this point, mostly stuffed into G5 boxes that I stole from work supplemented with Crate and Barrel boxes from Cameron’s wedding presents. We’ll look like the most well-heeled grad student couple ever when we move in. T-minus two weeks to Berkeley.

The weather here is in full-blown summer mode: perfect every day. Not too hot, nice and cool in the evenings. When, inevitably, we leave California, it’s a virtual guarantee that we’ll bitch about the weather. Because weather is just not supposed to be this good, continuously. Really. You actually start to bitch about how boring the perfect weather is (it reminds me of Blind Melon, sing it with me: “… and I start to complain that there’s no rain…”).

The rest of my spare time has been sunk in to my summer grad student activities. The last week or so I’ve been trying to whip up slides for my SCA presentation, which I’d say are half done now. This is probably the most preparing I’ve ever done for a presentation. It can pay off, though, because talking at conferences seems to be one important way to establish yourself in the incestuous world of academic research. I should be giving some practice talks at Berkeley and Pixar befordhand, which will help.

Well, I’m sitting here in my office at Berkeley waiting to give a presentation of my class project for the only real class I had this semester. This year I’ve managed to show up, weasel my way into being a graphics student, land an advisor, and help write two papers, one of which will be in SIGGRAPH. I also somehow managed to land an NSF fellowship, taking care of money for the next three years. In total I rode BART to and from Berkeley at least 160 times and spent at least $1200 on BART tickets to do so. Will I appreciate the 10-minute walk from our fabulous Berkeley apartment? Oh yes, I will.

This weekend is Bay to Breakers, which I will be taking this year at a more leisurely pace than last in order to better enjoy the chichanery that abounds there. And then, quite suddenly, on Monday I will be back at Apple, working away on some dark and magical task that you will no doubt here about via Apple’s PR team in good time.

In all, life is beautiful.

Friday was the deadline for SCA, so this last week and a half or so has been busy again. Not quite like that time running up to SIGGRAPH, but still busy enough to keep me from doing basically anything with my time other than eating, sleeping, commuting, exercising, and working. I have arrived at this beautiful day and now my free time stretches out in front of me like a vast untapped well of joy.

I’m typing this from Tiger, the new version of OS X, which has even more absurd eye-candy than its predecessors. I don’t see how it will be possible to take other user interfaces seriously at this point.

Speaking of Apple, I just signed my offer letter to go back and work there for the summer. I’m starting frighteningly soon–May 16–and it’s making me realize that this first year of grad school is basically over. It will be good to get the extra money, though I’m not so worried now that I’ve got NSF to lean on. It should be fun too, since Doug will be there and I won’t have to spend a lot of time getting to know new people and processes. Also kind of weird to be in that role again.

Leslie is something like 35 teaching days away from the end of TFA. I guess that’s out of 360 total teaching days… less than 10% left, but it seems like even less than that, really. The little paper chain that I made her has gotten so short. We’re looking around at apartments in Berkeley, and it seems like our budget will be just fine for getting a place right where we want to be. We’ll probably go up next Sunday to see a bunch of places. Even though we don’t actually want to move until mid-July, now seems to be the time to hunt so we’ll probably just have to take the hit of the extra month or two of rent.

Tomorrow: 14 miles. We’ll see.

Sunday was my 12-mile run. It was hard… significantly harder than the 10-mile runs I’d done the two weeks before. I might not have eaten enough the night before, or slept enough, who knows? But my knees are starting to worry me a little bit. It’s not that they hurt, though they do a little right after the runs. It’s that they sort of feel “fragile,” like when I’m sitting down or standing up, I favor them and don’t want to put weight on them. It’s not a good feeling. I also noticed at the climbing gym yesterday that my usual extreme antics of bending my knees to my will didn’t come so easily. I’m not sure exactly what to make of it, whether my knees are adjusting to new demands still (I’ve been seriously training only a little more than a month now) or if they just don’t like it. I’ve decided to skip my run today to see if the sensations subside.

On Friday I got some surprising good news: I won an NSF graduate research fellowship. This is a pretty fancy fellowship, and one that I’ve applied for three times now. The first time, I worked my ass off preparing. I went to an NSF application workshop, I had my essays read by former NSF reviewers, I polished them over and over, I warned my letter writers months in advace, etc. The net result the first year was an honorable mention, which is respectable but doesn’t come with any money. When I was doing my second round of grad school apps in Fall ’04, I figured I should apply again. I revised the essays, but didn’t change much, and had all the same letters. Not even a mention that year. They say that it gets harder each year because you are held to a different standard–first you’re an undergrad, then you’ve graduated so another year of experience is considered–so it was mostly out of futility that I applied last Fall. Carlo wrote me a new letter, and after looking at my comment sheets from last year I totally scrapped my essays and started over again. This time no one read them but Leslie, and they were very short–all less than a page–and written with the singular goal that they would be interesting enough to entice the reviewer to finish them. I guess either the system rewards persistence or short essays or new letters did the trick because I got it this time.

This will really make things easier for the next few years. I won’t have to hunt each semester for a new source of funding, whether that’s as a TA or a research stipend or whatever, and by the time it’s over I should only have a year or two left (man, this degree takes a while). My one concern is that I’d like to get experience TA’ing multiple times, and I know that Jeff has had some difficulty becoming a TA with his fellowship (which is running out this spring), since you can’t work as a TA for free. Hopefully I’ll be able to “turn off” the fellowship for a semester here and there when I want to TA.

Anyway. Life is good.

Well, it seems like the paper I helped out on for this year’s SIGGRAPH has officially been accepted. It was one of only two papers from Berkeley, which is kind of disappointing, since there were so many other great papers submitted. But this is the problem with having just one conference.

Work continues on our SCA paper that’s a follow-up on the paper we sent to SIGGRAPH. We were also invited to send a clip from our SIGGRAPH paper to be included in the electronic theater there this summer, which is flattering but will be a bit more work since we’ll need to render it all in HD (1920×1080).

Hence I think I’m going to be pretty busy the next couple of weeks, and then there are only a couple of more left before finals and the end of my first year as a grad student. Damn.

This week was spring break, although it only sort of went down as such. Leslie didn’t have the week off, which sort of put a damper on travel or recreation, and on Monday the initial reviews of our SIGGRAPH paper came back, which we had about 48 hours to rebut. At most conferences it’s just an accept/reject right out, but for some reason at SIGGRAPH they give you the chance to answer the criticisms of the reviewers before they make the final decision. We got pretty good reviews–I think we have a good shot at getting in. We sent off the rebuttal on Tuesday without too much fanfare. I spent most of the rest of my productive time during the week working on the paper for SCA, trying to put together cool examples. I’ll be sure to share when we’ve got something neat.

Marathon training continues apace. Last Sunday I did a mildly punishing 9 miles, and this week I’ve been keeping up with the shorter training runs, and also climbing and doing yoga. My food intake has increased accordingly… I feel like a large portion of my waking hours are now spent preparing and consuming food, or burning into oblivion all the resultant calories with Sisyphean trips to nowhere on treadmills, yoga mats, up and down walls. Tomorrow is 10 miles. I hope there’s a good movie on cable that will carry me through the hour and a half or so, and I should remember to bring something to eat this time.

This last week I had my (only) midterm for my (only) class, graduate networking. It was a reasonable test and I did reasonably well on it, I think. Otherwise I’ve been working on that new paper for SCA, fighting various pieces of software to simulate what’s basically an intestine. I’ll be sure to post the movie once I get it done.

We got initial reviews back from our SIGGRAPH paper, which were very good on the whole. Most of the reviewers seemed to think we should be accepted, and the problems they found I think we can find resonable responses for (which we send in the form of “rebuttals”). If the paper actually does get in, I’ll be very stoked. At the least I’ll have a good reason to go to LA this summer.

I’ve started training for the San Francisco Marathon. I know it sounds insane, but when I started college, I made a resolution that before I turn 25, I will run a marathon. As it turns out, I turn 25 this November, so this seemed like the last viable opportunity. My brother is training with me. Let me be clear about something: I am not a hardcore runner. I am not even really a runner, except in the sense that I have “run” and own a pair of “running shoes.” I don’t pine for long, lonley stretches of track to jog down. I’m actually kind of lazy. So, when I say I’m going to run a marathon, I want to assure you that I’m doing it in the laziest possible way. So, our fundamental goal is to get our selves to the physical state where we could complete a marathon without permanently damaging ourselves while doing as little as possible “running” to prepare for it.

Specifically, we’ll probably be doing 11-ish minutes per mile for the actual race, and train by running just three times a week until the actual marathon (July). I have my first long-ish run scheduled tomorrow (9 miles). The schedule is set up so that every week I have one long run and two short runs. Eventually the long run gets up to 24 miles, but I’m going to just not think about that yet. At our pace, running 24 miles will take over 4 hours. Not thinking about it. No. For now, 9 miles. About an hour and a half. Water. Gummi bears. I’ll be fine.

My typical day for the last week before the SIGGRAPH deadline went something like this:

Wake up at 8, shower, dress, eat. get on my bike about 9:30 and ride to the BART station. Spend the next hour in bliss reading a book or a magazine that has nothing to do with smoke. Get out at Berkeley, walk up the hill to Soda (since the campus buses mostly weren’t running). Arrive at Soda about 11am, an hour or so before almost anyone else will show up. At noon, join the author of the paper I was helping with (also named Bryan). Work on getting smoke to look right until the last train home (usually 11-11:30pm). Repeat.

Now, to be honest, not every day was like that. I took a few nights off to spend with Les or to hang out with friends and exercise, but mostly that’s the way it went. It was gruelling, but mostly fun. The atmosphere in the lab of all the people working day and and out on the papers was electric. I was usually one of the earliest to leave. Bryan stayed many nights until 3 or 4, and he had company.

At the end I got to help out with more than just rendering. I put together figures, and also helped on the text. In the end our product was a 5-page paper and a 2-and-a-half-minute video. I think, in sum, the work I did for those two weeks exceeded that which I did in any three months at Apple. But what motivation. Looking into the future, I hope that writing the paper can be done another way. It’s just not my style to pack it all into a month of frenzied work at the end. Hopefully I can exert enough control on the process to work mostly during the day the next time around–when I’ll hopefully be working on my own paper.

Anyway… quite an experience. It has triggered some serious slacking this weekend, so I’ll probably only start thinking about my classes tomorrow when I have to go back to school again.