The Recent Past - Sept 2010

September was busy. October will be even busier. I haven't gotten around to posting recently because I'm mostly been doing work instead of play and haven't take photos recently. Here's an update on my recent past.

Back near the start of Sept there was a party at Nate's where everyone dressed up as something starting with the letter A. I came as an addict (to alcohol (beer), drugs (ritalin (tic tacs)) video games, and gambling). We played some A games such as Are you the Traitor? and Apples to Apples and ate a lot of A food. I assume, someday in the future we will have a B party.

I've also gotten together with family and friends a few other times. I went and hung out in Vancouver at Rob and Q's place a couple times and we drank mango juice with mango ice cubes, and slices of mango. My brother Farley stayed with me for a week while he did some writing and he came to the drop in Ultimate. For my sister's birthday we made some sushi at her place and played scrabble. I barely beat her. In the last week I was sick for a few days, but I think I'm better now.

I've been going to Surrey drop-in Ultimate since the Spring and for the fall it's back at Newton Athletic park. Not many of my friends have shown up but it's great exercise and still fun. I've also gone to the aqua recreational goofing hour (ARGH) at the north Surrey rec center pool a couple times. It's simply called that by the grad student who organized it so that there is a time when lots of grad students go there together. Unfortunately this last week the deep end was closed for some people to practice water polo. Normally it's awesome though with a climbing wall coming out of the water, ropes up to monkey bars (called the Skywalker), a rope swing, and low and high diving boards. The pool also has hot and hotter sauna rooms.

At school, I did a couple presentations but spent most of my time running a user study and organizing the results. I managed to get 20 participants over the course of 2 1/2 weeks so I am all done now and onto analyzing the results. I kind of doubt I will prove anything statistically but I have a ton of useful qualitative feedback about what works and what doesn't with my text document visualization technique.

Eric and I presented an update on our work on my research groups software CZSaw to the Boeing guys and people from SFU and UBC at our face-2-face Boeing meeting. We have one every term. This time it was a two day thing but the skytrains were totally gibbled on the Friday so I missed most of the second day. Eric and I also did demos of CZSaw at a mini-conference on visual analytics for public safety at the Justice Institute of BC (JIBC) in New Westminster. I think that went pretty well and maybe some day in the distant future we'll work with the VPD.

This next month is going to be busy as I do a couple more little presentations before the big ones at VisWeek. I'll also be working on my thesis and study data analysis throughout. On top of all that there is Thanksgiving weekend, my birthday and then Halloween. I can't really think of anything planned for November. Perhaps I should just delay all my sleep time until then.