The Near Future - October 2010

First the recent past again, then the future. This week has been pretty busy.

I wrote an outline for my thesis and gave it to my supervisors, although I have already written a bunch of pages in some of the parts. It's crazy that the biggest task left is just the writing of my thesis. I'm also working on some analysis of my study data. It's not good. I don't think the numbers prove anything. I learned a ton watching people use the tool and hopefully that's good enough for a master's thesis.

I also gave a presentation to some first year students about our lab and what we do as grad students in it. It went well, I made some jokes and they laughed and hopefully some of them found the subject interesting.

I also went to one of the Vancouver International Film Festival movies with my brother who bought 20 movie tickets. I used one of his tickets but my birthday is just around the corner and he did stay at my house for a week. We saw End of Animal, a Korean film directed and written by someone just out of film school. It was one of the first times it aired outside of Korea and the director/writer and producer were in the audience. The director introduced the film by warning that it might get boring at times. It really wasn't...it was very intense and quite dark. Afterward, the audience asked him questions through a translator. It was pretty sweet to hear directly from the director.

On Tuesday I went to drop-in ultimate and got a good workout. Tonight I went to the pool for some swimming but the damn deep end was closed again for some water polo practice.

So I have a really busy month ahead of me.

I am continuing work on my thesis and analysis of study results. But I'm also doing an internship with a sub-company of Boeing called AeroInfo so I need to get a lot of work done on our software for this.

On top of that I need to prepare for the VisWeek conferences in Salt Lake City from October 23rd - 29th. We have 3 presentations there of varying lengths and a lot of demoing. I will most likely be doing the medium length presentation of 3 minutes. It's at the start of the workshop we're going to along with all the other people who submitted entries to the challenge. The conference should be awesome. I went last year and this year I am again a student volunteer. I should meet a lot of new people and recognize many from last year. I've managed to schedule all my volunteer hours so I have no hours on the VAST presentation days. The conference location in Utah is pretty much the opposite of Atlantic City where it was last year. Maybe I will get more sleep this time around.

In the short term future of next weekend I'm going to the BC lions football game with some other grad students. Also, there is a LAN party at a friends house. I don't think I've technically ever been to one of those. I will most likely be slaughtered in a variety of games.

In the shorter term future I am traveling on Friday to my parent's new place on Saltspring Island for Thanksgiving weekend and also an early celebration of my birthday. Last time I visited the place was to help them move in so I haven't seen it with them all settled in yet. It will be quite the packed house but it'll be lots of fun. We should go play some disc golf and hopefully the weather will be nice so we can go swimming. Maybe I'm a little delusional about wanting to go swimming in a lake in October. I don't think I've done that for my birthday before.

In the very short term future, the students of my research group are getting together tomorrow to plan some programming and how pieces fit together on version 2 of our software. Development has been moving at a snail's pace but hopefully it will pick up soon. I should get some sleep.