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Relaxing weekend - Star Wars: a New Hope on Friday night, Saturday night some great steaks, and Sunday I went golfing–yes golfing with Phil and a few of his friends. It was an interesting experience. I alternated hitting the ball with inexplicable accuracy and total incompetence. Still, it was fun–not a sport I’m going to take up any time soon, I don’t think. Too slow.

I spent most of the day on Saturday coding my first programming assignment for my splines class. It’s not very exciting, but it’s a start. I’ll probably post the code on overt once the due date is passed. The rest of Saturday I wrestled with Makefiles and dependencies trying to get SLIDE to build correctly on Mac OS X. Made quite a bit of progress, but I still have a ways to go.

I’m now reading Claude Shannon’s really old and really important paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” for my classic papers class. The man may have been a brilliant information theorist, but I can’t say much for his prose.

What a week.

On Wednesday I finally got to talk to James O’Brien, the last of the graphics profs at Berkeley who piqued my interest. It’s always a little weird going into these situations. I try to get out of the way quickly that I have an EE background, an EE degree, and that I was admitted as an EE student specializing in networks. Then I get to tell them about how now what I really want to do is graphics. You’d be surprised how well this usually turns out. I love Berkeley!

Anyway, James seemed leery but was willing to give me a shot. He set me up with a project that he described as “straight-forward.” Basically, I’m supposed to take this paper from this year’s SIGGRAPH and merge it with this paper. Clearly a piece of cake! Just extend Poisson-based triangular mesh editing to tetrahedral meshes, then project the tetrahedral mesh back onto a polygon soup to model deformations! What could be simpler?

I’m a little terrified, but also very excited. This is really a chance to sink my teeth into a project and impress someone. I’m not sure how it’ll go, but I’m definitely going to do my best to succeed. To restate what I’m actually doing in terms that mean something: Any random thing is hard to smoosh. But nice round things are easy to smoosh. So, take a random thing, cover it in goo so it’s round, smoosh the goo, then take it away to reveal the smooshed random thing. Simple. See?

Should be fun. In other news, I’m trying to teach myself MATLAB so that I can do a little project for my splines class, and I’m also still working on SLIDE for Carlo. I’m busy. It feels like my mind is really expanding again, for the first time since I left UT. I love it.

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Comments

leslie — 2004-09-24 09:28:16

I wanted him to squish peeps, but he said they were too easy. To really impress someone, you’ve got to squish tractors.

em — 2004-09-24 21:00:02

How Berkeley can you be? Did you find out today?

On Sunday. It was beautiful. If only it were possible to time my visits back to Texas such that I could be sure to catch a thunderstorm. I miss them most of all.

I dropped a class–too much time spent on problem sets. I really have grown lazy in my old age. Still, I’m hoping to pick up another independent research project before too long to fill in the gap. For now, I’ve got plenty to keep me entertained with my one real class, my one real research project, and my seminar. I found the main library stacks today. They’re amazing. The bookshelves are on tracks, and you have to slide them around to squeeze into the actual shelf you’re interested in. So many books. Still need to investigate DVDs.

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Comments

em — 2004-09-21 22:34:08

OK, I’m really having a hard time picturing how these sliding bookshelves work. Help!

bryan — 2004-09-23 19:07:57

hmm… i couldn’t find a picture. So I’ll try to describe. Think of the stacks like at the PCL. Two-sided shelves for books interspersed with walkways. The shelves are really long, and form hallways. Now imagine pushing all the rows of shelves together so that the walkways went away. All the books are still there, you just can’t get to them because you can’t fit between the shelves. So you leave enough room for one walkway, and put all the shelves on rails. at the end of the shelf, there’s a wheel you can turn to slide it one way or another. To get between two shelves, you slide over shelf after shelf until the one you want is accessible. Make sense?

em — 2004-09-24 20:56:47

I can picture it now, thanks to your comment. So, if two people want books that are on distant shelves, they have to take turns, since there can only be one walkway at once! Saves space, at the price of convenient access. I could see it working… for rarely used books, anyway.

bryan — 2004-09-29 18:20:05

When you’ve got the 2nd biggest university library in the country (second only to harvard), you have to imagine that most of the books will almost never get checked out. how crowded did you ever see it in the stacks at UT?

yes.

1515 Shattuck Avenue Berkeley, CA 94709 510.883.0222

Monday was a triple feature, and the finale was César, a tapas bar on Shattuck next to Chez Panisse. Very nice atmosphere for a bar; the music was not too loud and as always in cali, no smokers! We went with the intent of getting some strawberries and cream, but I guess they are already out of season, so we had to settle for some chocolate pudding which was so think and rich it was almost like fudge. But somehow, it managed not to be heavy. It was covered on top with fresh whipped cream. I had a sour cherry soda to drink which was absolutely delicious. Definitely a nice place to chill out after some other activity. I’m not a big fan of tapas for meals because it would cost me about $100 to get full. But in this case, it was the perfect fit.