dazzle & baffle

Homeowners at last!

2007-11-02T21:47:00.000-04:00

We own the house as of 11:06 AM on Oct. 31.

It has been a tumultuous couple of months. What I didn't tell you when I told you about how the sellers accepted our offer was the drama that ensued with our apartment. I'll tell you if you ask, but probably best not to post. So, while I was strong-arming the mortgage company and my phone ringing off the hook with lawyers and agents and loan officers, we also had this to deal with. At this point, I think we have avoided a lawsuit, *knock on wood*. Let's hope everything goes as planned.

We were trying to keep the apartment in good condition to show, because we were hoping to find a new tenant. Anyone who thinks Mike doesn't know how to clean, you are incorrect. Me, I am messy because I never really learned how to keep things clean, even though I really want to be neat. Mike really does know how to do it and he did it like perfectly for a month. At first I was like "ME-Ooowwww", but then I was like "Hey! quit moving my stuff!"

Due to circumstances at the apartment, we had to do a split move. We needed our stuff out of the basement by the 29th, and what with my bum shoulder, I knew that the two of us bringing all of the stuff upstairs was not really an option. So, I arranged for the movers to come on Sunday, Oct. 28, store our stuff for a couple of days, and then drop it off on Nov. 1, after we had closed on the house. This turned out to be about $500 more expensive than I anticipated, but there was nothing to do about it after they already had everything on the truck!

We closed on Tuesday night. Everything went pretty smoothly. The loan officer from Wells Fargo, who I had strong-armed, brought us a nice flower arrangement to thank us for our business. (Very nice of her!) The sellers left the house in great condition, which was very thoughtful of them. On Oct. 31, we brought over our food, suitcases, and the couple of things we had kept with us, like the air bed.

Mike's cousin Brian arrived in the afternoon. He will be staying with us for a couple months while he gets himself oriented in an internship in the area. The upstairs bedrooms are (were) neon green, bright sunny yellow, pumpkin orange, and mauve. Within 24 hours, Brian had the green room completely repainted with two coats of paint. And two walls of the orange room with their first coat! Without Brian, who knows how long we would have been talking about how badly we needed to paint those rooms! With the green gone, the sunny yellow isn't so bad. Not wild about the mauve, but it is not as ... extreme .... as the green. (My camera is with Christine, and so I got a disposable camera, and those pictures are still at CVS.)

The movers arrived around 9 AM on Nov. 1. They were amazing. Our house was built in 1860. The staircase going upstairs is pretty narrow, and has a moment of low clearance. It took all three of them like 20 minutes to get our pillow-top king size mattress upstairs, but they did it! (Aviv moving in Brighton, for anyone interested). Mike had said we were going to send half the stuff to the basement, and I said no way. We had taken two full carloads of stuff to the Goodwill, after all. As the boxes came off the truck, as Mike predicted, a lot of them got sent to the basement. We are going to adopt a policy of getting rid of things that have not been opened in a year. I confess to being a pack rat, but I think getting rid of stuff that is not giving me benefit will really improve the feng shui in the house!

So, having been stressed out for like two months straight, and having been running around moving boxes, out in the cold, etc. Of course, I have gotten sick. After being out of work for two days (Oct. 31, and Nov. 1), last night I said that I needed to at least show up at work today to demonstrate that I was sick. Sure enough, my boss sent me home. yay!

This weekend, I hope to arrange major pieces of furniture, and unpack clothes. (kitchen is already unpacked!) If there isn't a torrential downpour all weekend, I hope to put in some spring bulbs. I love crocus. They make me happy when there are little yellow and purple flowers in February.

Look forward to email / mail with our new address and land-line phone number!

Cheers!

What a busy day

2007-10-08T22:07:00.000-04:00

Working for a defense contractor, I get all the B.S. holidays off, so today was a free day! Mike and I went to the Aquarium and went on a whale watch. The day after we were engaged, we also went on a whale watch, and it was pretty spectacular, but no camera. This time, I brought my camera!

We passed the inspection with flying colors. Basically no problems. We have one little thing to settle with the sellers and their lawyer, and we should be all set to sign the P&S tomorrow.

In other news, we are trying to find a new tenant for our apartment, and so I took some pictures. If anyone knows anyone looking for an apartment in Watertown, I think ours is worth a look!

They accepted our offer!

2007-09-27T12:04:00.000-04:00

We have been looking at houses and condos for about a month now (maybe longer). While we were on our honeymoon, we had decided that we were going to wait a while to buy, since we didn't really have the down payment for a long term solution, and if we bought a short-term solution, the cost of buying, selling, and mortgage interest was basically the same cost as renting. All that changed when we got back and we found that some ... adverse circumstances had cropped up at our apartment. So, we looked into moving to another apartment, but the options available without going up in price were unattractive. So, we turned to buying. We had chosen two price points -- $235K, which would be the same cost as renting, and $300K, which is about the edge of affordability, if we assume that we want to be able to afford all of this on one salary.

We started casually, looking at a couple of open houses. We quickly learned some of the euphamisms : "convenient commuter location!" = "on a busy street". "Cozy" = "small". "Easily accessible to public transportation" = "Yikes!". Well, that last one is a bit unfortunate. At first, when I saw a house in Framingham that was pretty big, and "near the train", I thought -- Oh, look at that. Its near the train. Wouldn't that be convenient. We quickly learned about the wrong side of Framingham. In Boston and Cambridge, public transportation is a definite plus. But elsewhere, not so much.

We had been looking in Maynard, which seemed to offer a good balance of commute time, price and size. Our main criteria were 1200 - 1500 sq. ft at $300K, not more than 45 minutes away from both Natick and Burlington. For a while we were going to open houses on our own. When it became apparent that we really were serious, I got in touch with some mortgage lenders for pre-approval letters, and from thence I got into the real estate professional network, we found a buyer's agent, and everything seems to be taken care of from there.

We had made an offer on a Condo in Woburn, which was BEAUTIFUL, at $285K. No yard, but it had these two awesome decks. I bought a couple of books about container gardening, and I was willing to do this. The property was priced to sell, however, and they had multiple offers. We only have about 5%, but another buyer had $100K to put down, so they won. It was a big bummer.

So, we looked at some more houses. We went to some open houses in Woburn on Sunday. Some of these properties were real pieces of work... One of them, apparently the husband had house-project ADD, because some things were beautiful, some things were falling apart, and the windows weren't finished being put in upstairs, and there were no doors on any of the upstairs bedrooms. Yikes! We had started to think that we might need to come up a bit in price. Everything we saw at $300K had one compromise too many. One of the houses I had put on our agenda because it met our criteria, but when we got there, the listing agent handed us a sheet saying it was $340K. It was gorgeous. Mike and I looked around to be polite, and then got out of there.

So, I called our agent, and I said I wanted to look at a couple more things in Maynard, including going back to one of the first houses we had looked at. I mentioned the gorgeous house in Woburn at $340K. He looked it up and said it was listed at $324 -- I guess there was a mistake on the sheet!

So, we went back to this house in Maynard which Mike had liked, but I had said no way. When we got there, I felt really different about it seeing it the second time. The first time, our complaint had been that we would have liked 200 less sqare feet, but $20K off the price. They listed at $315K, and considering they hadn't had any offers on the property, we thought we could get them down pretty easily. We had seen two things that day in Maynard. The first one was close -- a very nice house, but in a "convenient commuter location." So, I might have taken this second house in Maynard, if I hadn't already seen the house at $340K, which turned out to be for $324K.

So, we went and looked at it again. (The $340K house). Gorgeous kitchen. Good space in the living room and dining room. The wood panelling will need to go. 3.5 bedrooms, 1.5 bathrooms. Full basement. Dining room, living room, eat-in kitchen. Laundry is in the bathroom -- which I don't get why everyone seems to put laundry in the bathroom or kitchen. Parking for 6 cars! Anyway, on Tuesday night, we offered $310K for the house. After some brief negotiation yesterday, we settled on a purchase price of $315K. Housing inspection is Saturday.

Wish us luck!

Fighting the Good Fight

2007-09-04T20:33:00.000-04:00

This is my license picture that was taken when I got my new license this past month.

This is my license picture from just over a year ago, approx. last July.

I am continuing to fight long and hard to continue on this trend.

So true!

2007-08-15T22:12:00.000-04:00

http://xkcd.com/303/

Pictures

2007-08-10T23:16:00.001-04:00

Thank you to EVERYONE who came to our wedding. We were so glad to have you there. And congratulations to Caitlin and Ryan.

Wedding Pictures: http://www.hinkleyphoto.exposuremanager.com/g/mike__diane

I took lots of pictures in Vegas. I will put them up eventually, but I am already a day late and a dollar short!

It was really hot at the bottom of the grand canyon!

The time is approaching!

2007-07-03T19:14:00.000-04:00

Hello to all.

It has been a very busy time, and as usual, I find myself apologizing for not updating my blog. I have been running around like a chicken with my head cut off! We have to meet with the minister this coming weekend. We have visited with every major vendor: Photos, Cake, Flowers, DJ are all set. I just got my dress back on Friday. There was some drama about the har and makeup -- I had gone to this place in Windham, called Soleil Salon, which I do NOT recommend. I guess they weren't so bad, but the thing that got me is that I told the makeup person not to put pencil eyeliner on me because it burns my eyes, and she did anyway. So, I am going to this place called Green Tangerine in Burlington, which I do reccomend highly!

The menu at the reception is set: chicken piccata and tenderloin for dinner. Hor d'however-you-spell-that will include shrimp cocktail, bacon-wrapped scallops, teriyaki chicken skewers and tomato basil bruschetta. There will be a cheese and vegetable display with italian meatballs. Our cake is going to be half chocolate with chocolate mousse, and half yellow cake with buttercream frosting.

Mike and I have recently welcomed a new addition to our family: my new 20" iMac. My old computer was ailing under the increasing weight of the Sims 2 expansion packs. Poor dear. My new computer's screen is VERY bright. When I put my laptop next to it, I thought the brightness on my laptop was like turned all the way down, but it was all the way up! Amazing. My initial plan was to put Windows on this computer for gaming purposes, but there were some hiccups. So, I decided to try out the Mac version of the Sims. At first, it looked like a disaster, but after some help from the Aspyr tech support, everything seems to be fine now. I figured that instead of giving my money to the evil empire, I could vote with my dollars to let game makers know that customers want Mac versions of their games!

My car is a year old today, with ~18,000 miles. My poor car still has an ouchy on its butt, but it is otherwise doing well.

If I don't see you before then, I will see you all next Saturday, July 14!

Vive Las Vegas!

2007-05-25T22:56:00.000-04:00

So it is finally settled: we are going to Vegas! We are going to leave Monday, July 16, and stay at the New York New York Hotel (with a whirlpool in the room!). We are going on an airplane tour of the grand canyon on Wednesday, and we are going to do Cirque du Soleil somewhere in there. It'll be great!

I had originally wanted to go on a cruise to Alaska, but we missed the boat, planning that one (no pun intended) and by the time we got around to looking at them, all of the cruises on the right dates were full. :-( But, that's okay. So far, the working plan is to go next year for our anniversary.

I got my red stripe belt at Tae Kwon Do last night. I was very happy. (That is 2 degrees, out of ten, away from black.) The last time I tested, for my blue belt (3 degrees away from black) was April 2004. Back in the saddle. Screw you, orthopedic injuries!!

On the wedding front: I had a little chat with the people at the hotel, and they have dropped the rate from $124 to $105. If you already booked, don't worry. It should be reflected when you check out. If its not, I will have another little chat with them....

David's Bridal is evil. I think, if someone asks me in the future, I would have to reccommend against them, if someone has other options. I guess they are convenient because they are one stop shopping, but I have had a couple of problems now that just makes me think they are scuzzy. My dress is pretty, and I guess everything turned out for the best with the bridesmaid dresses.... But I have decided to vote with my feet and get my alterations done elsewhere!

Good luck to my sister who is starting a glamorous life as a touring children's theatre director tomorrow!

Congratulations, Barbie and Jason! Alex is just precious!

Clarification

2007-04-25T21:31:00.000-04:00

I neglected to write "and family" on the envelopes when I sent them out. I want everyone to know that everyone's family is invited, and people can bring guests / significant others if they wish. Please note the number of people you are RSVP'ing for on the "number of guests" line on the RSVP card. Alternatively, you can use the online RSVP to let me know how many people are coming, and what their names/relationships are.

If you have any questions, give me a call or send me an email.

Thanks!

Introducing...

2007-04-22T22:38:00.000-04:00

Introducing http://www.mikelovesdiane.com ! Mike was instrumental in getting the online RSVP to work. It sends an email to both of us with whatever you put in the boxes.

I have been hard at work on invitations. They should be going out in batches this week.

Laterz!

Printer Recommendations

2007-03-25T21:19:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, we replaced our much maligned printer. When we bought it, I liked it and I thought it was cool - it looked like a spaceship and I thought it was cute. I thought its problems with paper-feeding were just one of its quirks. Time went on, and the paper feed issues got to be damn annoying. When you would tell it to print, it would make a noise, and you could see the paper in the tray wiggle a little bit, but after rolling its rollers for a little while, the orange light would come on saying check the paper. So, you press the button, because clearly there is paper in the tray. Sometimes I would shove the paper in to make sure it hit the sensor and the rollers could grab it. Problem was, they would grab ten sheets and print on the first milimeter of each. ARGH! The only way to get it to print nicely on a piece of paper was to lay in wait, and when the rollers started trying to grab a piece, jam it in there. Then everything was fine. Come to think of it, every HP printer I have ever owned has had paper feed problems. This piece of junk was an HP PSC 1510 All-in-one. As a scanner, it worked very well. The copy function, when you actually could get it to feed the paper, was also quite good.

Anyway, yesterday we replaced it with a Canon PIXMA MP600, which is another all-in-one thingy. It has had zero paper feed problems, after printing both of our tax returns twice (once for the IRS and once for us). It also did envelopes for our taxes without a hitch, and I was able to get it to print on one of the test sheets for our invitations (an odd size -- 4.5 x 7.5) inside of 15 minutes. So, I am quite pleased.

The only problem is the form factor. It is probably half again as big as the HP in each dimension, and sufficiently tall so that it won't fit on the shelf where the HP has been living. I put it on my great-grandmother's desk in the office, where it fits nicely. But I missed having the desk, when I went to try to get all the tax return crap into the right envelopes and write all the checks and sign everything. We have two desks in the office: my great-grandmother's desk (hereafter the wooden desk), and this industrial looking thing that Mike got in college. For a while we had my computer on the wooden desk, but we have a tall office chair, and my legs would get squished and it wasn't a good setup for sitting there for hours, playing games, which is pretty much all I use my desktop for. The industrial desk is a good computer desk because it is tall, and it doesn't impede the electrical cords. However, it is not a good writing desk. As I was trying to address envelopes and sign stuff, it was squeaking and wiggling back and forth. I think the printer might not get to live on the wooden desk, since I sometimes do use it for writing. I guess it can live on the floor, against the wall. It is big enough that we are not going to mistakenly step on it.

So anyway, if anyone wants a pretty good scanner that can sometimes print stuff if you want it bad enough, let me know!

My paper was accepted to CVPR

2007-03-22T20:33:00.000-04:00

My paper, with Margrit at BU was accepted to CVPR, which is an IEEE conference. CVPR stands for Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. So, this is really cool. I was telling one of the people at work about this, and she asked if I was going to go or not. And I said probably not, because it would probably be really expensive to get a flight and a hotel and take the time off work, etc. She said, that if the conference was related to tracking, I might be able to get BAE to pay for it. So, I talked to my manager, and he said that he thought it was possible, and he would ask his boss! Score!

I have been working really hard in the past couple of weeks, going to the gym. I have gone to the gym like 14 of the past 17 days. It has been hard work! Since Jason and Barbie's wedding last April, I am down a little over twenty pounds. I managed not to gain any weight (okay, maybe half a pound) over the holidays, but since January, I have been going nowhere fast. It has been very frustrating. But now, I think my gym-going might be having the desired effect. My fitting for my dress is at the end of May, so let's hope so!

Holy crumbcake!

2007-03-11T18:29:00.000-04:00

Wow, I knew I hadn't posted in a while, but this is ridicules! Sorry everybody! I will try to do better!

There have been a lot of things going on with me lately.

There has been some drama about my job. I got a call from Google (out of the blue!) in January, offering an interview. And I was like "Do you guys remember you tunred me down once before?" And they said "well, sometimes we find people are a better fit after a year." It was Google! How could I resist! This set off a whole month of drama about whether or not I wanted to stay at BAE, and for how long, and under what circumstances, blah blah. Ultimately, Google turned me down. I had a conversation with my manager about how radar tracking wasn't thrilling me, and I have decided I am going to stay at BAE certainly for the medium term, while we try to get me over to the people doing the video tracking. This really riled me up for a while there.

There was also some drama about a PhD. I had this life plan all laid out -- work for a few years, have some kids. Then, when the kids were preschool aged, decide about whether the PhD was for me. In the midst of all of this job drama, I started thinking about / talking about this. All of the people around me thought I was crazy for wanted to go back to school AFTER I had kids. I want to have kids before I am thirty-five, after all, so doing a PhD before kids means I would need to get cracking, PRONTO! So, I met with Margrit (my advisor from BU) and we had this conversation about my career, and so on. I started thinking it would be nice if I could take classes for a couple years, to stay sharp, while still working so we could buy a house or something. And BAE will pay for classes if you enrolled in a degree granting program. Score! Problem is that BU is kinda evil about who they let take classes. You have to be in the program to take classes in CAS, and, as it turns out, once you enroll in the program you must take 2 classes per semester. Which is a bit of a tall order if you are working full time (and expensive! BAE won't pay for THAT much!), so that option is out.

After a month and a half of drama about this, I have decided that I really want to work on this particular idea of mine a whole lot more than I want to be a professor. To be a professor, you need a PhD. To work on an idea, you certainly don't. People have been building things in their garages as long as there have been garages, and in equivalent places before then. When you do a PhD, you also have all these issues of funding, so there's no guarantee I could work on my idea, even if I was in the program. I would probably have to spin it something fierce. So, I have decided I am going to work on my idea(s) in my garage. I am going to fund myself and my own research. When my ideas have matured, maybe there is some entrepreneurship in my future -- then I wouldn't have to develop a huge amount of robotics expertise; I could just hire someone who already has it!

Phew.

There has also been some drama about the wedding. You remember that Christine was in that terrible car accident. Well, that was when she came down to Boston to help me with invitations. We had been working on this very formal looking invitation, with an embossed hummingbird, and lots of layers on a folded card. I was just kinda hung up on the colors. Christine had this idea that we could save ourself a whole lot of fuss and bother if we bought invitation kits, rather than ordering all the paper and making them ourselves. I was skeptical at first, but read on my friends. Whenever we would got to A.C. Moore, I would always pick up the hand-made paper with the rose petals in it, and so Christine took me over to the invitation kits, and lo and behold. There were invitations with rose petals in them! And there were MATCHING programs! This weekend, I was working on the invitation text. It is getting to be about time that I start thinking about putting them together.

These are the invitations from the kit

This was the old design with lots of layers of paper.

Alright everyone, I need your help. If you DIDN'T get a Christmas card from me, its because I don't have your address. So please send me your addresses (and where applicable, your children's addresses!).

Last weekend, one of my bridesmaids brought it to my attention that my dress was about to be DISCONTINUED and we had to order them THAT WEEK. And I was like "oh, my poor brain." So, I created some drama for about half a day about that, but by Wednesday, everyone had ordered their dress, and everything was fine.

Friday, I bought shoes for the wedding. You are going to laugh! I went in there and I was like "I want a flat, with a closed toe" Look what I came out with!

I've got a Golden Ticket!

2007-01-21T13:21:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, we had dinner with our friends Ben and Rebecca. After dinner, we went back to Ben's house to play with his Wii. Now, I had planned on getting one of these things for Mike for his birthday, but to be truthful, I was kinda dubious about it. I was afraid I wouldn't see him for a month if I got one! After playing with it last night though, I was totally convinced. So, this morning we set out to buy one.

The previous day, I had been to Best Buy and I had actually asked if it was still insane to get a Wii, and the guy there told me that you still had to try to get one, but there weren't people lined up outside the door. Well, this morning we got there at 11 (they had just opened), and there was a huge line at the door! There must have been a hundred people in line at the customer service desk to get a Wii. We got in line, but weren't hopeful. This one guy in line told us that he had managed to get one at an EB Games at the corner of Harvard and Beacon St. We thought, hey why not, and so we headed over there. Going into Allston and Brookline is not one of my favorite things to do because it can be insane to park over there. We managed to find a parking spot behind the Trader Joe's. and we went to the game store. (It was a Game Stop, not an EB Games).

In the Game Stop, there was a line to the counter, and so we weren't hopeful. We stood in this line for like 20 minutes, without moving, but it was just because this one guy at the front of the line was having trouble with his credit card, and wasn't willing to give up trying to get the Wii. The dude behind the counter brought out like 3 of them, but there were four people in front of us, so I was worried! When we got up there, I asked if he had another one, and then he went back in the back and brought out three more! There was one for us, and one for the woman behind us who had been after one since Christmas, and the people behind her! Hurray!

Food for Thought

2007-01-11T21:15:00.000-05:00

Mike bought me a Roomba for Christmas. I was afraid to turn it on for a little while, because we have lots of cords running everywhere, and I felt like there was too much crap on the floor to use the Roomba. This is ridicules, since it IS a vacuum cleaner. So finally, I got enough oomph together to pick up enough of the stuff on the floor to turn it on. The little Roomba had a rough maiden voyage. It got caught under our bed a couple of times and I had to fish it out. It will pick up electric cords and pull them, which means it needs supervision, so I am not ready to use the auto-scheduler feature. It also doesn't like coins or bottle caps. Those get caught behind its brushes before they make it to the dustbin. Overall, it did a good job. I ran it again when I thought the floors were still pretty clean, but it filled its little dustbin right up, so I was pleased.

At work yesterday, we did this "FOCUS" Franklin Covey training. It was nominally a time management and productivity session, but in the middle there, they were asking you to think pretty deeply about your core values and life goals. I am still working on this. They also talk about making room for your "big rocks". They illustrate this with a little video they show where the dude in charge fills a big bowl full of fish gravel, and then points to a big pile of big rocks and asks a woman to fit them in. She starts wiggling them around in the gravel, and gets a few of them in, but she is running out of room. Then, the dude gives her an empty bowl and asks if she would like to try a different way. Of course, she puts the big rocks in first and then dumps the gravel on top. The rocks, big and small, are like your goals and tasks. The moral of the story is to consciously decide what tasks and goals are most important to you and schedule those things first, before letting all the other crap fill in. This all sounds good, I think. They gave us a free planner, but boy is it a monster.

We are going up to Castleton tomorrow to talk about the details of the reception and the menu.

Holiday craziness!

2006-12-22T21:41:00.000-05:00

Merry Christmas Everybody!

I'm sorry I haven't posted all month, but I have been going a little crazy! Last weekend, I made candy for 30 of my and Mike's closest friends at work. I was going to make truffles, but Mike talked me out of those. Good thing, because I was ready to quit by the time I was done making fruit and nut clusters! We bought two 10 lb bars of chocolate, and about 15 lbs of nuts and fruits from Trader Joe's. After all was said and done, we returned one of the bars of chocolate, and between a half and a third of the fruit and nuts. It was a lot of work!

Last weekend, I was also in a mad dash to get Christmas cards and presents out the door. Phew! I had a stack of Christmas cards like 4" - 6" high! If you didn't get a Christmas card from me, it is probably because I don't have your address, so if you send me your address, I will send you a card. Send me all of your addresses anyway, so I won't have to hunt you down to send wedding invitations. I got a lot of addresses from Christine, but I still don't have a lot of phone numbers, so if you want to send me your phone numbers too, that would be great!

I am thinking about getting custom postage made for the wedding. Using this picture:
How much postage do you think I'll need? I figure minimally 2 stamps per invitation (one for the invitation and one for the RSVP). And since I plan to invite like 150-175 people, that probably means something like 200 - 300 stamps. Although, a lot of cousins have their own families, so that might mean more postage than I am counting. There is also postage for the thank you cards to think about. Maybe another 100 - 150 stamps. So, maximally, we're talking like 450 stamps. At stamps.com, they charge $15 per sheet of twenty stamps if you buy 20 sheets. $14 if you buy 25+ sheets of stamps. Address labels would probably be good too -- I don't want to address all of those envelopes by hand!

I have put together a little mock up website for the wedding. I am still deciding where I am going to host it, since I am pretty much set that I want to have it. I am NOT leaving it at the media lab website, although that is where it is now. You can look at it here: http://web.media.mit.edu/~dhirsh/wedding/.

We are going to North Carolina to my uncle's house this year. All of the Hirshes are converging on my uncle. I haven't seen this set of cousins since my grandmother's funeral two years ago, and before then I hadn't seen them for four, maybe five years. So, in my head, my cousin Rachel who is graduating from high school is still ten. This will be a shocker. My mother is not coming to Christmas. She says she doesn't feel up to travelling. The way she let this be known was, shall we say, sub-optimal, and my dad was royally p.o.'ed. But, when I talked to her, she sounded like she was really scared of the process of getting through the airport, given that her heart is not in good condition. They are coming from O'Hare, so I can definitely see how that could be daunting. So, I'm not mad, but I do hope we can find a way to make this work come July. Anyway, I am driving myself nuts right now, since I have got it into my head that I want to make truffles. I made all of the ganache tonight so all I will have to do is dip tomorrow. Wish me luck!

That's what I'm Talking About!

2006-12-04T20:42:00.000-05:00

Aww YE-AH!!

Looky! Looky!

2006-11-13T21:00:00.000-05:00

http://www.hinkleyphoto.exposuremanager.com/g/mike_diane

Apple Pie Contest

2006-11-12T22:30:00.000-05:00

This weekend's activities have largely revolved around the applie pie contest being held at work next Friday. I have decided that I would like to win this contest, and so this weekend, I set about doing some analysis...

The first component of an apple pie is the apples. Since there are about a bazillion varieties of apples, I decided to find out if there was an optimal apple pie apple, or mix of apples. So, I went to Shaws, and I bought 2 each of 6 different types of apples.
I brought these home, chopped them up, sprinkled them with exactly 1 tablespoon of Diane's special apple pie mix (which basically came out of the Fannie Farmer cookbook), and baked them at 350 degrees for half an hour. Then, Michael and I had a little apple tasting, where we went through all of the varieties of apples. Wouldn't you know, the traditional granny smith baking apple has a fairly unpleasant aftertaste. We decided that the optimal apple pie apple mix was a 50-50 split of Cortland and McIntosh.

The second component of applie pie is the crust. I wanted to try a butter crust, a shortening crust, and a crumb (upper) crust. Now, since this is where all of the calories are, I was not about to make 3 full-sized pies. So, I went to Stop & Shop, and I bought little 4" tart pans. Today, I was baking up a storm. I made mini pies with the shortening crust, butter crust, shortening and butter crusts with crumb toppings, and both crusts with egg and sugar glaze. We invited our landlord's son, Zach, and our neighbor upstairs, Jane, to help us with the tasting and eating of the copious pies.

Now, I was expecting to love the crumb crust, since ever since I discovered Boston Market candied sweet potatoes, I have been trying to duplicate that crust. Everyone else seemed to like it except me! The all around favorite was the butter crust with the egg glaze. I was a little concerned about this crust, since it is a little ... more substantial ... than the shortening crust (you can't just cut through it with a fork). I hesitate to say it is tough, because once you get it into your mouth it is great! But, maybe I just didn't do it quite right. I am considering a shortening lower crust, which would be crisp and easy to cut with a fork, and a butter upper crust, which has lovely flavor and texture.

Jane had some additional ideas: she suggested lemon in the apples, and pecans and oats in the crumb crust. The lemon didn't do much for me, and the oats might not have been added to my left over crumb crust in the best of circumstances, but the flavor of the pecans was very nice. They didn't trump the butter top crust, but I think I will chop them finely, toast them, and put them in the body of the pie with the apples.

The pie contest is this Friday. Wish me luck!

Thanks to my pie-tasting panel!

New Stuff!

2006-11-04T22:49:00.000-05:00

So, last Saturday, we had the new couch delivered. Here are some pictures:

old couch:

new couch:

We also had a little problem with our shredders. The blades got all bent when one of us tried to jam too much junk mail through in one go.

old shredder:

new shredder (so cute!)

While we were at Target last week, I found out that the Sims 2 Pets was out. And I HAD TO HAVE IT! So, that is new too.
http://thesims2.ea.com/ . I have like every single Sims2 expansion pack. I love it! The only problem is that my computer, which was fast when I built it, has trouble keeping up. So Sad.

Last Sunday, we had our engagement photo session with our photographers. A few of the pictures can be found here: http://hinkleyphoto.typepad.com/hinkleyphoto/. Our photographers put up a few initial photos from all of their photo shoots on their blog. We have confirmed that they are very young pups -- both of them are younger than me!

Today, I went up to Exeter NH to meet with the florist. I shopped around pretty aggressively for other vendors, but I am getting to the point where I just want to pick things and not fight too much. So I looked at websites for several florists, and then I picked this girl because I liked her portfolio the best. http://www.cymbidiumfloral.com/. I bought this book that I found at Barnes & Noble, called "The Bride's Bouquet". It had a bunch of pictures of bouquets that I thought were GORGEOUS and I HAD to HAVE them. I didn't buy it at first because it was a $40 hard cover. I should have bought it on Amazon, because last night I just wanted to have it, since if were are going to spend several hundred dollars on flowers, $40 to have pictures of basically exactly what you want are worth it, right? Well, she bought the book off me, and she is going to take the cost of the book off our bill. :-)

This week, Mike and I are pitched against each other in Fantasy Football. Both of us have abysmal records, so the only good thing about this matchup is that at least one of us will win!

In a funk

2006-10-22T11:55:00.000-04:00

I have been in a sort of funk the past couple weeks. I am in this mode where I am like obsessing over calories, money, and time.

So, my scale is not, in fact, unstuck. My weight is just going nutso. I think I have decided that I want to go to a doctor and see if there is anything wrong with me, why my weight is not going down despite all my hard work. So, the first thing they are probably going to do is send me to the nutritionist. So, I decided that instead of just writing down what I eat (I can tell you everything I have eaten since March if you want to know), I would do my best to estimate the calories. The dreaded "calorie counting". I wanted to do this so that if the doctors told me to eat less, I could and say "I have been eating 1700 calories a day for three months! What are you talking about???" I decided that a target of 1700 calories a day sounded good. Various websites said that I needed between 2200 and 2500 calories a day, so I subtracted 500 and came up with 1700. Every day (except Wednesday) I was under by at least 100 calories, and I didn't feel like I had changed anything about the way I was eating. On Monday, I came in at 1300 calories for the day, after dinner, and I looked at that and I thought that that really wasn't enough. So we got hot chocolate from Dunkin Donuts. :-)

The trouble is that it is REALLY HARD to figure out how many calories are in the food you eat. Like, Friday night, we went to get sushi. And so, I lay in bed for like 45 minutes before we went, scheming about how I was going to use my calorie budget to maximize my enjoyment of the sushi. I decided I was going to charge 75 calories for the nigiri, and 50 for the maki. This sounded good at the time, but after I got home, I started thinking to myself that 75 calories for a little nigiri seemed really high. There is probably about two tablespoons of rice in those things (25 calories) and probably not even half an ounce of fish. Also, consider that at 75 calories, that implies that 4 nigiri is 300 calories. Well, you know what else is 300 calories? A whole (5.3 oz) chicken breast and 3/4 cup of cooked rice. There is NO WAY that 4 nigiri is the same amount of food as that, since the rice is the same, and the fish has a similar calorie density as chicken. Any way, you get the picture. I have been thinking this sort of nonsense ALL WEEK and I CAN'T get it OUT of my HEAD!

Another thing that I am stressing myself out over is money. Now, given that Mike and I are both software engineers and doing pretty well, if I do say so myself, this is RIDICULES! My first line of analysis was to try and figure out if we were going to be able to pay for the wedding with the money that we will make between now and then, or if and how much we would have to dip into savings. I was a little unhappy to find out that we would need to dip into our savings, given our current expenses and spending rate. This wouldn't be so bad, except that we would also like to buy a house, and I was hoping we could save some money for a down payment. The house idea has me pretty unhappy and stressed out. We would like it if we could live on Mike's salary (minus my car payment) and have my salary be gravy. This is because I don't know how I am going to react when we have kids. Right now, I am pretty ambitious and I am all about having my career blah blah blah, but I might change my mind. The places we can afford to buy houses on just Mike's salary are not the places I really want to live. :-( Especially not for the five - ten years we anticipate staying in a first house. And it is possible we might end up there forever, so I don't want to live in a slum!

I have also been reading this book, called "Wealth Building". This was fine, and had some good things to think about, until I got to the chapter about estate planning. Then, I flipped out. They had these three terrible stories about people whose estates got mangled by the probate process because they didn't set up their estate planning properly... It made me very upset and sent me into a frenzy of cleaning for a couple of hours. Then, I sat down and read the next chapter, which was about planning for end of life care, and I cleaned for a couple more hours.

On Monday, I realized I had made a big mistake with my FSA account. My medication is about $100 a month, and so I said I would put $1200 in the FSA. Unfortunately, they are taking that as $1200 for the year of 2006. So, $400 a month for October, November, December. Yike! Now, I can charge against in until March 15, 2007. But, by my estimate, that still leaves like $500 which I will lose thereafter. They have pretty strict rules about what you can charge to those accounts, which sucks. I am going to see if I can get a doctor to prescribe an "exercise program" that involves my personal training sessions at the gym. If anyone needs stuff from CVS, let me know!!

The last thing I have been stressing out about is time. Like I said, my weight is still stuck, and so I am saying to myself "Why the f*ck am I spending like an hour in the gym every day if nothing is happening??" I guess I just feel like it is really eating my time, and I am not getting what I want out of it. I also feel like I'm not doing a very good job of providing dinner -- at least half the time I make microwave things that have tons of sodium (but have well measured and controlled calories!). I really cook twice, maybe, possibly, could be three times a week. I just can't handle really cooking any more than that. And, the house gets to be a mess, because I feel like I don't have the energy to do anything about it. Except when I read scary chapters about estate planning, apparently. And the messy house stresses me out too.

I also haven't been playing my guitar hardly at all. I was having a conversation with myself last week about how I haven't played my guitar. I had this plan to save Christmas with my guitar. You see, every year up until last year there would be a sing-along and my mom would play piano. But, last year we went to Eloise's house in Chatham, NY, and there is no piano. So, I wanted to bring my guitar and a selection of Christmas songs that I could play and save Christmas. But how can I save Christmas if I don't practice??? I don't really have a good reason why I haven't been practicing. I just feel overwhelmed and vaguely unhappy.

I am in a funk. I hope it passes soon.

Long time, no see!

2006-10-08T20:33:00.000-04:00

Welcome, Marie! (And congratulations Ben and Kerry Lee!)

I am still trying to figure out how to balance my work schedule with all of the other things I am trying to do. Like update my blog regularly. I may be trying to do too much, but all of the things I am trying to do are important to me, and I want to add one more on top! I am trying to go to work, go to the gym, play my guitar, not eat out ALL the time, and not live in a very messy house. I'd like to add spending some time drawing or painting regularly, but right now I have my hands full. Going to the gym like every day really chews up a lot of time.

I have got my wedding dress. For those who are curious, you can see it here: Michael, don't look!. Although, you can barely see it in that picture. It has massive beading on the bust and on the back. I took possesion of it on Friday, and brought it up to Maine for Anne's wedding, to show off. Christine and Barb and I found good jewelry to go with it at Marden's.

Last weekend, we went apple picking. We were trying to go on a field trip with my company, but we couldn't find anyone. So, we just picked our 20 pounds of apples in the pouring rain and went home. Then, when we got home, I made my first apple pie ever. I was anxious about the crust. Making yummy apple filling is a piece of cake (ha ha!). My mother always tried to make pie crust with whole wheat flour to make it more "nutritious" and I really hated it. (Sorry, mom.) But, my crust turned out great! And it got rave reviews from Mike, and our landlord's son who came down to eat pie and watch football.

The marketing ploy of fantasy football has TOTALLY worked on me. Not only have I been looking at that dumb website all the time, I have actually become INTERESTED in seeing certain games. I have also become much more sympathetic when Mike wants to watch football.

My last bit of news, I feel a bit sheepish about. I have gotten myself a personal trainer at the gym. Yes, I know. Her name is Katrina, and she is a perky blonde. We have found out that I can do a lot of things that many of her other clients can't. For example, I can do like 60 of those evil bicycle crunches.

I am just trying to get my scale un-stuck. My scale has been mostly stuck since the end of July. A few weeks ago, I took the drastic step of making rules against bread to try to get it unstuck, but it wasn't working! (For those of you who don't know, I already had rules about fried food and sweets.) So, this week, I put myself on this radical new diet : going to bed an hour earlier, taking a vitamin pill, making sure to get my liter of water, and ditching the diet soda (mostly). Preliminary results suggest that this might have done the trick.

The rationale for kicking the diet soda is interesting. I read on the internet that diet soda makes you hungry. It does this because when you have a sweet taste in your mouth, your body tries to get ready for the incoming sugar with extra insulin. But, with diet soda, the sugar never comes, and so the insulin response only serves to lower your blood sugar, making you hungry and tired. This pretty much described how I was feeling in the afternoon, so I decided to give it a try, and I have felt better.

Getting more sleep might be the most important part of the whole equation. Like I said, I am still having some trouble balancing all of the things I want to do. I figured out that I would rather get to work a little earlier, than leave a little later. So, I had been getting up around 7:30, and going to bed around midnight. Now, those of you with kids might scoff at me, but I have still been feeling tired and dragging in the morning. I got to thinking that maybe that tired, dragging feeling was the feeling of my metabolism in low gear. So, I have been going to bed earlier and feeling better, and maybe my scale is unstuck.

Last time I saw Katrina, on Thursday, we started by doing some boxing (sorta.) Now, coming from the do-jang, gym boxing is anything but. (And when I watch the "kick-boxing" classes, all I can think about is how people would sprain their toes and ankles if they actually made contact with anything, kicking like that.) Katrina was telling me to do straight punches across my body, going left and then right. And I was like "What scenario would cause you to ever do this??" I could see hook punches, but straight punches??!? But, that's not the point. And its not the point of my story. The point was that after I did all that hitting, my shoulder(s) felt fine. And, I did a couple lines of various kicks (crescent kicks in particular, which really make you stabilize on your post foot), and my knees were fine too. (As fine as they are liable to be.) If I could do a couple lines of roundhouse and side kicks, and have my knees be fine ... This has me thinking that maybe I could start going to Tae Kwon Do again. That would make me happy.

The Stardancers!

2006-09-08T22:53:00.000-04:00

I don't know if I told y'all, but Christine bamboozled me into playing Fantasy Football. And here is my logo for my team, the Stardancers! I stole it off the internet and then did some editing. :-)

Well, now I don't know what to tell you. Their clever marketing ploy (Fantasy Football) has worked, because I actually want to see the New Orleans / Cleveland game, because three of the players on my team are in that game! (2 on New Orleans, 1 on Cleveland.) On top of that, I am playing Jason, and one of HIS players is in the game too! Jason has Cleveland's quarterback, and I have one of Cleveland's running backs. So, let's hope for a high scoring game, where Cleveland scores all their points by running the ball.

Yesterday, Mike and I were talking about something, and I said "hey, what about those baseball tickets that Jason gave you?" Good thing I asked, because they are for tomorrow! So, we are going to the baseball game tomorrow.

My car has its first doctor appointment (oil change) tomorrow. I get the first 3 free at the dealership. I am supposed to get email reminders that the car is due for servicing, but I haven't gotten one yet, and the car has like 4300 miles on it. (The first one was supposed to happen at 3750). I guess, how are they supposed to know that I have been driving back and forth to Maine and New Hampshire?

My assessment of my job stands. I think it is a good fit. I have been given my first task, and I will soon embark on its implementation. At first, I thought it was going to be hard, because it was not at all obvious to me how the thing was going to fit into the existing structure of the program. But then, I found out that the hard part had already been done! Now, I just have to implement this similarity measure for Gaussian distributions, where the similarity measures have all been spelled out for me. No problem.

My wardrobe needs an upgrade

2006-09-04T21:12:00.000-04:00

So, I have done my first week at BAE. My impression is that it is a good fit -- interesting problems and very nice people, with lots of potential upward mobility. They use very formal software development processes -- every step of the way must be documented in triplicate. It is a bit daunting, but I suppose that this is what you must do. Dress code is corporate casual. I can wear jeans, but t-shirts are "frowned upon." Time must be charged to various projects (or the overhead account) in 15 - 30 min. increments. I am going to be getting a security clearance so that I can handle classified stuff. I won't be able to talk much about what I am doing, since I don't want to let something out that shouldn't get out -- BAE proprietary, classified, etc.

Remember how I told all of you that I would be working at BAE, building bombs (ha ha)? Well, now that doesn't seem quite so funny. I feel a moral imperitive to participate in the political process. Here is my spiel on it: I wish no one had nuclear weapons. But, if someone has to have them, I really want "my side" to be the one that has them. I will be helping to build the tools of war. The only control I have over the way those tools are used is to vote, and make political contributions.

That was more of a downer than I meant, but I wanted to say it. Anyway.

So, I was put on two projects right off the bat. One of them, I haven't heard too much about. The other, I have a whole load of documentation to read. I was also put on a third project. Some dude is trying to get a project off the ground, and he asked my boss for someone who knew fourier transforms and Matlab. Everyone else was swamped, so, she put me on it. Yay Fourier transforms! After 24 hours, I went to the guy to tell him that I had made some good progress. He was on a phone call, and he told me to come in, and then sit down and listen in. They were talking about methods for figuring out the position of the hand and arms using accelerometers and acoustics and so on. I asked the guy if they had looked into the gesture recognition work -- there are lots of people in gesture recognition who want to know about the position and movement of arms and hands -- and then he told me to say it louder so the other person could hear. After that, I was like a full-fledged participant in the conversation, and afterwards, we talked about various modes of imaging that could contribute -- they had primarily been investigating other modes, but I had some thoughts about use of imaging that were good. So, I felt like I was able to contribute meaningfully after being on the project for 24 hours, and at work for 3 days. Yay!

We have got most of the big things down pat for the wedding. We have the venue, we have a minister, a dj, and a photographer, and a cake. The minister is Mary Wellemeyer, and she is associated with the Unitarian church in Manchester. The DJ is Shaun Yelle, the same DJ as at Christine's wedding. The photographers are Hinkley's Photography. The cake will (probably) be from the Breadbox Bakery in Windham. We are going for a tasting not next week, but the week after.

The photographers are a husband and wife pair -- just out of school by the looks of them. I think their pictures are very good -- as good and better than photographers charging more. I think they are talented, but relatively inexperienced, so they can't quite charge premium prices. Their wedding album format is kinda like a magazine with a hard cover. If they had told me ahead of time what I was getting, I think I would have been turned off, but after I saw it, I kinda liked it. I felt like it was something I would be willing to leave out for people to look at instead of hiding away in a bookcase. Their website is a little annoying. Too much flash. If you let it do its thing, then its okay. Just don't try to, like, control it. http://www.hinkleyphoto.com

Mike and I have had it with our cable/internet provider and we are going to go elsewhere. The cost is really through the roof, and sometimes the internet service cuts out, and sometimes the sound cuts out on the TV. We have been paying way too much for a while now. We are going to replace RCN cable and internet with a mixture of Verizon DSL, and DirectTV. That's the current plan at least.

7 - 14 - 2007

2006-08-27T20:12:00.000-04:00

We will be married July 14, 2007 at Castleton in Windham NH. We went up there today to deliver the deposit. It is official!

I have been in contact with some photographers, a DJ company, and a cake person. We have settled on the DJ Christine had at her wedding. We have a cake tasting scheduled for Sept 9. When Christine and I were looking at places, we kept seeing Jacques European Pastries everywhere, so I thought, okay we can go there. But, the lady at Castleton told me that their cake will probably end up being like $5 per person, and she knew this other bakery where it would probably be half that, and just as good. So, that is where we are going to go for a tasting. I have been in contact with a number of photographers. This one is going to be hard. Its hella expensive! Also, I probably shouldn't forget about flowers.

Oh, ha ha, I almost forgot, Ministers! Yes, we probably need someone to actually marry us, ha ha. So, I emailed the Unitarian Universalist Association of NH and VT. They sent me a list of people who had asked to be on the contact list for these things, so I started calling down the list. The first person on the list, I found some of her writings on the internet and I thought they were really beautiful. And she was available for the date and willing to do it. I thought I was set! Then, she calls me and tells me that she forgot to say that she can't sign our marriage license, and I was like "why not?" And she said that it was because she can't sign it for same sex couples (because they can't get married), so she won't sign it for anyone. So we'd have to get a Justice of the Peace to do it later. How would we even do that? This is not the stated position of the Unitarian church because, let's face it, there are very few things where the unitarian church has a stated position. So, we should be able to find someone else to do it. She gave me the name of the minister who is supposed to do these things in Manchester, and I called her and she is very nice, and we are going to meet with her next weekend.

We have chosen our dish pattern. I hate our current dishes. They are a mix of the celedon green dishes I had in college, plus the green glass dishes I got at Pottery Barn (which I think are pretty, but are REALLY HEAVY), and then the ugly brown dishes from Target that Mike bought for his bachelor pad. I have been pretty serious about my dish shopping -- I have had a hard time finding a pattern that fit all of my criteria. I hate the flat, shallow bowl shape that is prevalent these days; I like a nice round bowl. I also want to be able to get service pieces for my set, which has been harder than I thought for some patterns (esp. at Crate&Barrel). I looked at Bed Bath and Beyond, Crate&Barrel, Pottery Barn, Target, Pfaltzgraff, Corelle, and a couple random things I don't remember. I looked at the Pfaltzgraff patterns on the website, but Christine said I should go to the store and see them in real life. So, Thursday, I went to the Wrentham outlets to scout them out. (I bought a pair of shoes while I was there!). The early front runner had been the "Garden of Eden" pattern. I loved the design on the salad plate, but HATED the design on the dinner plate. And, the eating bowls were really small and shallow -- I'd want the small serving bowls as the eating bowls. I tried matching it together with some other sets, and I had some combinations worked out that would be nice. Then, I got to looking around. I found (and this had been true at BB&B as well) that I found the white plates with blue designs very appealing -- clean and striking. I made a list of the things at the Pfaltzgraff and Corelle stores that I liked, and Mike and I looked at them together that night. We settled on the Yorktowne pattern from Pfaltzgraff.

I start my new job tomorrow. First day of school! I hope I get along well with all the other kids!

Done!

2006-08-15T09:43:00.000-04:00

I have it in my hand -- my reciept saying that the department received my thesis. (185 pages) Yipee!

I moved up my start date on my job to August 28th. This start date has the advantage that I will be eligible for benefits in September, instead of needing to wait till October, and I will get Labor Day as a paid day off! (The old start date was Sept. 5)

Now, I am back to wedding planning. At the Holiday Inn, the person we had met with at first has left, and the person in his place didn't return my phone calls for a week, and was only going to be available 9 - 5. There might have been someone else available at other times, but this person didn't have the wherewithal to tell me who that person would be or when they would be available. So, I nixed the Holiday Inn, but that left us with only our sky-high priced options, all of which I felt lukewarm about.

Christine had a great idea, though. Why don't I have the wedding in Manchester? There is an airport. It is within driving distance (sorry, guys from MA). Things are VASTLY less expensive. Sounds good! I am going to go up to NH on Wednesday night, babysit Ally Thursday morning, and then go galavanting around with Christine Thursday afternoon and Friday. I called some places, made some appointments, and ran some numbers. Things are like 50% less expensive, on average. And I like the looks of them better. The flight to Manchester might be more expensive -- I checked Orbitz. But, I expect hotel accomodations to be significantly less expensive, so that will probably balance out. And people won't have to deal with Boston traffic. This all sounds good to me. Still looking for May 12. May 19 is an option if May 12 isn't available, and I think that May 11 should be an option too. Some places didn't have Saturdays in May available, but Fridays were wide open (and subject to discounts!) Does anyone have opinions?

So, Saturday, Barb and Christine and I went around to about 10 garage sales, being silly. I bought an ice cream maker for $5. I thought that if i used it once, I had bought $5 of fun. Well, I used it once. Zach (our landlord's son) had a barbecue on Friday, and we ran the ice cream maker. It took a LONG TIME, and the ice cream never froze solid. Maybe I didn't do it right. But, we emptied the ice cream slush into containers and stuck it in the freezer, and it came out pretty good!

Almost ... there ...

2006-08-01T23:11:00.000-04:00

So, my advisor is ready to sign my thesis, and David Cavallo has already signed. Now, I am waiting on Pattie. The final page count is 181 pages, with acknowledgements and all the stuff everyone wanted.

I don't think David actually read my thesis. Every time I sent him an email, asking for his feedback, he would send back an email promising to do it that night. Then, I would wait. On top of all this, he was in Brazil, so I couldn't go and bother him. So, he was back from Brazil (finally) and he signed my cover page so that if he went back to Brazil, I would still have his signature. I don't think he thinks he is actually going to read my thesis. But, that's okay with me -- he signed it.

Pattie has been pretty flaky. I finally got a meeting with her the Friday before Cape Cod. (This was two weeks after I had given her my thesis.) When we met, she had only read the first two chapters. So, we talked about those, and then she said she would email me. And she didn't. I checked my email twice in Cape Cod, both times hoping for something, so I could move things forward. Nothing.

Theses are due August 11, so that is when this is going to be over, one way or another.

I think I am technically free. I received a full stipend for the month of July (I was only expecting half). And, I think, I will not receive a stipend for August. I took the last week of July off, and I was only half there the week before then, so I probably owe my advisor a week and a half, which I will do in bits and pieces.

Otherwise, I am mostly on vacation. My plan for the month is to have a good time -- play guitar, paint, draw, play computer games, and watch Star Trek. And take car of some odds and ends like getting a MA license, and signing contracts for a reception and ceremony site.

173 pages and 1000+ miles

2006-07-11T22:53:00.000-04:00

My thesis, in its nearly final version, has weighed in at a whopping 173 pages. Anyone who wants to help me out by giving me feedback, now is a great time! http://web.media.mit.edu/~dhirsh/thesis/

My advisor said "It looks a lot like a thesis! Let's discuss it Friday morning."
Argh! Friday! What am I going to do with myself for 2 days! I feel like I can't make revisions, because then his remarks will be out of date. I can't program because then my whole document will be out of date. All I can do is clean my office! Argh!

In other news, my car passed 1000 miles old on our way back from Maine on Saturday. I got it from the dealer with 136 miles on it (I guess it went on a few test drives), so I haven't put 1000 miles on it myself yet, but I am getting there with the odometer presently reading 1054 miles. It is on its third tank of gas, if I am not mistaken. I got it from the dealer with a full tank, and I have filled the tank twice (although the tank was at about 3/4 both times.)

This weekend, Mike and I are going on the Mathworks summer outing. Its to Vermont or New Hampshire, some where. Should be fun.

I bought a car!

2006-07-03T23:34:00.000-04:00

A Honda Accord EX-L, in silver. That is the car that has heated mirrors, leather seats, heated front seats, power driver seat controls... The key fob can lock, unlock, pop the trunk, and roll down the windows all from a distance of like 50 ft. away.

Me and my new car. What should I name it?
The front of the car
The back of the car
Inside the car, complete with a soda bottle and my purse!

I bought the car Saturday. I had initially done my car shopping way back in April. I looked at the Honda Civic, the Toyota Corolla, and the Volkswagon Jetta. My favorite of these was the Civic, although its engine was a bit wimpier than I could bear. So, I decided that what I wanted was an Accord. I needed to get the car before I start my job (Sept. 5), and I had been told that a good time to do it might be around July 4th, when there might be all kinds of specials. I don't know if I got the most amazingest deal ever on this car, but I got it for less than their first offer, and just a bit more than what I wanted it for. I knew that I wanted an Accord EX-l with a 4 cylinder engine when I walked in. The only concern was about the color. Silver is the color I wanted, but Mike's car is silver, and I thought it would just be too disgusting if we had matching silver cars. So, I go around and around if I want the "desert mist" or the "charcoal" colored cars. I settled on the desert mist, but when I got my price down, it was on the condition that I took the EX-L that was in stock, which happened to be silver. I guess God wanted us to have matching silver cars.

This morning, our task was to get insurance. Initially, we went to AAA in Newton, but the guy there was REALLY MEAN. Like, he made me want to cry. Someone at the dealership had forgotten to give me the bill of sale. When I told this guy that I didn't have it, and didn't they have some magic system where the dealership had already sent the information. (They do, by the way; it is called the Drive program. It just wasn't as magic as I thought it was.) He looked at me like I was nuts and talked to me like I was an idiot. He sent us back to the dealership for the bill of sale. So, we get to the dealership, and when Mike sees the salesperson, he walks towards the guy with PURPOSE. I called after him -- I didn't want things to get ugly. So, I explained to the salesperson what had happened, and he said that it was just a mistake that it hadn't been given to me, and he had it in his office. Problem solved. So now, no WAY are we going back to the jerk at AAA. So, we tried a couple of local insurance people's offices. They were all closed for July 3rd. So, I went to Commerce's website (Mike's insurance is Commerce) and called down the list of insurance agents until I found one that was open. The person we bought insurance from was named Vicki, with Guard Insurance Agency, and she was very nice. So, I guess its good that the Honda dealership forgot to give use the bill of sale, or we would have bought insurance from that jerk.

So, I took delivery of the car today at about 5:30. When we got it home, we knew we had to take it for a drive somewhere, and Mike said "I don't know if I feel like going all the way out to six flags." After some hemming and hawing, that is precisely what we did. I thought it would be fun -- we would drive 2 hours to get there, have 2 hours to ride roller coasters before the park closed, but everyone would have gone home so we could actually ride them instead of waiting in line, and then drive 2 hours back. Well, on the way there, we hit a massive traffic snarl in Springfield of all places. So, we got to the park just in time to see the closing fireworks, and then turn around and go home. We plan to try again tomorrow, the crowds be what they may.

P.S. My thesis is 145 pages

My thesis is 131 pages long

2006-06-28T21:08:00.000-04:00

The length of my thesis has ballooned because I started working on the appendices again, which led to the initial explosion of the page count when I first began. The actual content of my thesis is 53 pages.

I redid my user testing today. One of our UROPs brought a bunch of his friends over, and I baked brownies for them. I had redone the user interface, the remove a screen in the middle, which had been giving users difficulty. Everyone still complained about the terribleness of the cursor system, and its like "I know it sucks! Its not my fault!" (It sucks because the computers are too slow for what we want out of them.) But, at least people were able to do the task.

I also revamped my intro, and will probably soon revamp chapter 2, and then chapter 5.

My thesis is 102 pages

2006-06-25T22:06:00.000-04:00

I have posted a new chapter on the Diane's Thesis Webpage (http://web.media.mit.edu/~dhirsh/thesis. Anyone who wants to read it, please let me know how it goes -- how it reads, if you are confused about anything, if you are thinking to yourself "huh?" That will help me a lot!

Tomorrow, I am going to redesign the user interface, and Tuesday, I am going to re-run my user study so I can write chapter 4. (After reading my first draft of chapter 4, my advisor told me to do it again.)

After I finish writing this entry, I am going to take a crack at my "future work" section, but I think that the conclusions might need to wait until after I re-finish the user testing. (Although, I basically plan to re-do the user testing until everyone is able to do the task, and then say "see? the framework works because everyone can do the task!"

We went to the Publick House yesterday, and I wasn't thrilled. If it were ten minutes away from us, it would probably be my choice : it has a lot of the good things about having the reception at a big hotel, without being a big hotel. But its not 10 minutes away, its an hour and change away. So, it didn't edge out the Holiday Inn, which is still the front runner.

We are going to the Newton Marriott next weekend. The price difference is significant, so they are going to have to wow me to get my vote.

I really want something to wow me and get my vote. Because I'm not really voting for anything at this point.

My thesis is 88 pages

2006-06-21T22:48:00.000-04:00

I have finished chapter 1 and 2. (The Introduction, and the description of the framework).
For those interested in such things:
Here is where I am posting the pieces of my thesis for my advisor.

Working on the section where I talk about the applications, the user testing, and the future work.

We are going to Sturbridge this weekend to check out the Publick House, which looked very nice in the photographs. It will be a pain for people flying in from out of town, and certainly won't be conducive to site-seeing. But, maybe that will be okay.

Today, as I was leaving school, I stopped to talk about getting some sort of group rate on a Beantown Trolley. He gave me the unexpected piece of information, that I could charter them to bring people from the hotel to the ceremony, or from the ceremony to the reception, or probably anything else within reason. This could open up some new possibilities for the Downtown Boston soiree scenario.

We have a new contender

2006-06-17T17:15:00.000-04:00

So, today we went to look at the Holiday Inn, and the Doubletree Guest Suites in Waltham. I tell you, between the two of them, I like the package at the Holiday Inn better. Now, if this sounds crazy to you, bear with me. There was nothing wrong with the ballroom at the Holiday Inn (I actually kinda liked the style of the chandeliers better than at the Doubletree), and there was this cute little separate area where we could have the cocktails that had some trellises and an garden-ish feel. And, we both liked the person there (who Mike said was quite flaming, but I didn't get it.) better than at the Doubletree. So, the Holiday Inn and the Aquarium are now tied. This is a long way from the day when Mike came home, and the first thing I did was stomp my feet (literally) and declare "I don't WANT to have my wedding at the Holiday Inn!"

The problem with the Aquarium is that the whole package is expensive and kinda inconvenient. I feel like the way they sell their stuff is kinda nickel and diming (You have to count how many pieces of passed appetizers you want to pay for). And the hotels downtown would represent a financial hardship! (I will look into is more, however). And parking is a PAIN IN THE A**. The problem with the Holiday Inn is that its kinda in a slummy area. Which is probably why it is 2/3 the cost of the Aquarium or the Doubletree. And its not as fun. Maybe I could buy like 20 plush penguins and have them as centerpieces.

Does anyone have any thoughts?

P.S. My thesis is now 73 pages.

If not for those penguins...

2006-06-15T19:51:00.000-04:00

So, we went to the Aquarium last night to check out the layout, and ....
I wasn't thrilled.

I wanted to walk in there and be like "Oh, this is perfect! THAT'S where you put the tables!"
So, there's the penguin tank in the middle of the aquarium (surrounding the big tank). There's a little over-hang in front of the penguins, and they put the tables on the side and in the back. So, the tables on the side can't see the tables in the back. And, if we go over 120 people, we have to put people on the second floor where they can't see anything (except the fish and penguins, of course). And god forbid YOU are the one at the table NOT next to the cute blue penguins, and next to the weird tank with the red light and nothing in it. And most of the the tables can't see the front, where the toast, dancing, cake-cutting would happen. Everyone could come to the ramp, and look down at it (which is a pretty nice view)... And I couldn't have my fruit centerpieces, because the skewers could hurt the penguins. And we'd have to start late. And there is paid parking. And rooms at the Marriott are EXPENSIVE, and not only that, they won't give us a block of rooms unless we have some sort of function (rehearsal dinner) there. And, and and... In short. I disliked the package deal enough that I am re-examining other options.

This is my diagram of the aquarium layout:
The 'T's are for Tables.
The B is for the Bar
The P is for the Podium
the space in the middle is the penguin tank
The (ooo) represents the big tank in the middle.


_________________________________
|                               |
|   T      T     T    T         |
|       __________________   T  |
|      |                  |     |                                 
|      |                  |  T  |  
|      |     (ooooo)      |     |  
|      |    _________     |  T  |  
|      |    |       |     |     |  
|      |____| P     |_____|     |                                      
|                               |
|          B                    |
|_______________________________|

But the penguins are so cute!

P.S. My thesis already 70 pages long!

Blast from the Past, Man!

2006-06-14T15:26:00.001-04:00

My Dad just sent me this photograph from BU graduation.
From the left, Mike Theriault, Richard Hirsh, Clara Hirsh, Dave Hudson (in front), Diane Hirsh, Janet Hirsh, Ed Carrel.

My thesis is already 35 pages long!

2006-06-13T13:45:00.000-04:00

And I haven't written a thing! Well... I've written chapter titles and sections. And LaTeX did the rest! Yay LaTeX!

Once again, I am VERY SORRY I have not been good about updating the blog. I am just trying to graduate, man!

Right now, I am going to document the APIs of my various modules, and start writing some English paragraphs about how my modules are put together and why I made the design decisions I made. My related work section is going to be ugly -- I have like 5 or 10 areas of computing that are relevant to my work. Dear god, I hope none of them already did the stuff I am writing about in my thesis. That'll learn me -- do the reading research BEFORE you start writing code.

We are just about settled on having the wedding reception at the New England Aquarium. We are going to go take a look at it, set up for an event, tomorrow evening. I got good reviews from the references they gave me, so I hope everything just goes smoothly. I want to have these fruit bouqets as my center pieces. They want to approve all centerpieces, because of the penguins, and I hope there isn't a problem with the fruit bouquets!

When I told my Dad that we would probably get a DJ, his exact words were "DJ, patooey!" So, if he wants a live band (and he wants to pay for it), we can have my crazy guitar teacher's band play for us so we can dance in front of the penguins.
I am thinking I am going to try to reserve rooms at the Marriott on the Wharf, which is right next door to the Aquarium.

We're engaged!

2006-05-09T22:50:00.000-04:00

Here's the story:

Wednesday night, Mike was having trouble with his phone, and needed to go to the Verizon store to get it fixed. So, he planned to be home late Thursday.

Thursday morning, Mike wakes me up, and is talking crazy talk about taking a weekend trip to New York, even though he didn't have the ring (which I KNEW was coming). Thursday, day, my office-mate tells me that our research group is hosting tea, and we need to go shopping for snacks, and we are all going to go at 6 pm. I email Mike to tell him I will be home late. While I am at my guitar lesson, my office-mate calls me to say we will not be hosting tea, and we don't need to go shopping, and I can go home. So, I go home, ON TIME.

When I get home, i take the laundry downstairs, and I run into my landlord, who is here supervising renovations upstairs (we are about to have neighbors). So, I am busy trying to talk him into letting me have a cat, when I hear the car pull into the driveway. I go out to greet Mike. He is sitting in the car listening to the radio. When he finally turns his head and sees me, he jumps a little bit. He gets out of the car, carrying a bag that I think must be from the Verizon store, when he went to get his phone fixed. He continues acting a little nervous and jumpy. And then, it hits me: blue isn't Verizon's color. CAUGHT!!

So, I could have been engaged Thursday, at my option. But, I declined. I may be petty, but I wanted to have a longer story than "so I caught your father bringing the ring home and so he proposed."

Friday night, we were watching television. Mike likes to lay on me when we watch tv, and I don't really dig it that much. I was trying to play on my computer, when Mike says "Honey, I'm going to do something because I love you." And I thought "Oh, what?" And I looked up, and he pressed the "Buy" button for Rent on the video-on-demand. Awwwww. I had wanted to see Rent when it came out, and it had been the subject of much teasing : "Mike, if you're not careful, we're going to go see RENT!" So, that he voluntarily put himself on the block like that (and he didn't hate it, after all), was very sweet.

So Saturday, there was no trip to New York (thank goodness!). But we did get out in the beautiful weather (we went for a reasonably extensive walk), and we made a little trip to Best Buy, where Mike bought me my birthday gift a little early... (only a month..) : The Sims, Open For Business. He also bought himself a game: I think it is something like Command and Conquer.

Mike's plan for the BIG EVENT was to make dinner for me. There was some debate about whether I should take myself shopping, to get out of the house, while he made his preparations. I said I didn't want to spend an hour travelling each way, and it would make the timing so tricky, so we decided that I would play Sims instead. So, Mike headed out to get groceries. While i was helping my landlord with his computer, Mike came back. He started banging around downstairs, and so on. When I came back to the apartment, I walked through the kitchen with my eyes closed, straight to the room where my computer lives, to play Sims. I asked Mike for a Dr. Pepper (so I wouldn't have to go back in the kitchen and see his secret preparations). And he put it in a wine glass for me. Awwww. Then he brought me an appetizer : a little plate with smoked salmon, cheese, crackers, and a rose. AWWWWWW.

So then, he was doing things in the kitchen while I was playing Sims. (By the way, he was wearing his suit, and I had changed into my red dress.) I guess he put the water for the pasta on to boil, and then, he came in to see me. He offered to rub my feet (WHOO HOO!), and while he was at it, he said "Gee, I wish I had the ring right now." Then, he thought about it for a little bit. "I'll be right back." So, he went and he got the ring, and then he proposed. :-)

The menu was steak, shrimp and pasta. There was some uncertainty about how much butter to use for the shrimp, and how long to cook the steak (these were ridiculously thick steaks). But we got through it, without too much interference from me.

Sunday, we went whale watching. I have wanted to do this for some time, and I was very excited. I was worried that we were only going to get to see like ONE whale from like 100 feet away, and it would be a big waste of money, but Mike was more optimistic. We thought the boat left at 10:30, but we left early just in case. We made it onto the 10:00 boat by the skin of our teeth! The boat had three levels: enclosed cabins on the lower two levels, and a third level that was open. On the lowest level, there were two places for observation, which jutted away from the main cabin, and were enclosed with hand-rails.

It was an hour before they started talking about seeing whales. It was hard to make out : there was some mist from the whales' blow holes off in the distance. We saw one whale come to the surface a couple hundred yards away. I was happy, but I was thinking "I hope that's not as good as it gets". We went on, and as we got closer to some activity, Mike and I went out on the observation areas, with the crowds of people. There were dolphins everywhere (Barbie would have been so happy). It was amazing. They were ten feet away from the boat, criss-crossing in front of the bow. We went after places where there were sea gulls gathering -- they said that this was a good indication of where whales were feeding. We came acorss a pair of humpback whales that were feeding. I swear, they came up with their mouths open like twenty feet away from the boat, and you could see the bumps along their necks. There was lots of tail action (when they dive deep, they flip their tails up in the air to push themselves down). It was pretty exciting to see the whales so close. I didn't get any pictures (Sorry!). I forgot my camera, and it would have been hard to get pictures anyway, because everything happened so fast.

So then we went to Legal Sea Food for lunch, where I whisked the check out of Mike's hand. (Ha ha!). Then, we came home and took a nice nap.

The End.

So, here is what you have been waiting for: pictures of me, Mike, and the RING:

The center stone on the ring is 87 points, and the two side stones are about 25. There are five little diamond flakes on each side.
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I am already rather attached to the ring. Like, I took it off to show to my office-mate, and I felt kinda funny!

So now, Mike and I are engaged. We are thinking late April, early May. My sister wants us to do it May 12th. (She graduates from college the week before). I will have to do some looking around at venues, before we can say for sure when things are going to happen. But we will keep you posted!

Mike got a raise. :-)

2006-04-27T17:02:00.000-04:00

Mike got a raise! In particular, a big fat raise. When I start my new job, there will only be a couple thousand dollars between us, instead of the comfortable $12,000 I had been gloating about. Mike's review (which he got on Tuesday) went okay, not great. So, the big fat raise was a nice surprise!

Many of you have asked how my thesis is going. Let's just say, we'll talk about it when I'm ready to talk about it. Right now, I have spent the past several (4, 5?) weeks getting the user input system working properly. So, you have the tiles, and you have the balls. You hold up a ball, and the tiles talk amongst themselves about who should have the cursor. Then, a cursor appears on one of the tiles, and as you move around, the cursor passes from tile to tile. And, when you do things, like make gestures, all of the tiles know, even when only one tile saw what happened. This all sounds so simple when I summarize, and it even seemed kinda simple when I was writing it. Yeah, a huge big mess of lots of simple problems with competing solutions. That sounds like distributed computing in a nutshell!

I realize that this was my goal for the week two weeks ago. Last week, Monday, I had meant to just tie up some loose ends and be done with this. But, one small problem led to another small problem, and I could probably go on for months fixing all the small problems with the system. But, i have declared today the cutoff day. No more problems are going to get solved, unless they are emergencies. Period. Now, on to the simulator.....

After the wedding last weekend, Barbie and Jason came down to Boston to leave from Logan. They needed to do some laundry before they left, so they did it at our house, so we could visit. Jason said that our apartment was cool. :-) I don't remember exactly what he said, something about our apartment taking his apartment to school. I think. Anyway, I don't remember what he said, but it was very funny. We went to get dinner at the Cheesecake factory, and we invited our crazy friend Nuno. Mike and I were slightly concerned that they might clash, but it was great! They were soooo funny.

Nuno is moving to Providence this Saturday. He is going to do a PhD at Brown University. He likes hardware-ish embedded devices and that sort of thing. This is kinda sad, because I won't be able to summon him to Harvard at the drop of a hat (or find him already at Harvard, as the case may be), but I am sure we will still see him.

My friend Ben Waber from Boston University is getting married soon. I've known about this for some time now, and for some reason, I thought he was getting married in Boston, and I was excited to go to his wedding (I've never been to a Jewish wedding before). But, alas, it is in Philadelphia, and so I will not be able to go. So, he and Rebecca are having a dinner party on Sunday for people who can't go to the wedding in Philadelphia.

Finally, for those of you who I didn't tell, or who were wondering what the "almost engaged" business was at the wedding... A thousand apologies for not putting it on sooner. Easter weekend, Mike and I went to Barmakian jewelers in Framingham, and he bought the ring. :-D I was thinking I was gonna be all cool about it, and just put up a picture of my hand, wearing the ring, when I finally got it or something. But no. So, that's what all this is about.

The Barmakian jewelers store in Framingham is HUGE!! It is like two stories tall, and maybe the floor size of a good-sized CVS. It was HUGE! When I told my advisor about the ring shopping adventure the weekend before, he said "Oh, have you gone to the Jewelry Exchange?" and I said "What is that?" It is an agglomeration of jewelry stores in downtown Boston. I found a little, dinky Barmakian jewelers in the Jewelry Exchange, and they made me feel comfortable. And when I saw they had a location in Framingham, I figured that would be more convenient for Mike.

Oh, and finally (this time for real), my vegetables are coming up! I planted vegetables in the little plot next to the house a couple weeks ago, and now, the onions and garlic are surely poking their little heads up (which is exciting because I've never planted onions or garlic before) and now, the peas are starting to come up. I hope the tomatoes come up and the cold weather didn't kill them. If it did, then I will buy tomato plants and put them in. I planted 3 kinds of tomatoes, cucumbers, green peppers, jalepeno peppers, onions, garlic, and peas. I will see about doing the flower bed this weekend. I am going to do zinnias and larkspur with alyssum and lobelia. So excited!

Check it out!

2006-04-12T11:41:00.000-04:00

How to Tie your shoes
Who knew there could be such an extensive knowledge about how to tie shoes???
Thank you, internet!

Holy Moley!

2006-04-11T21:08:00.000-04:00

I can't believe its been almost a month since I last posted! Sorry everybody!

Yesterday, I got my Brass Rat. This is the MIT Ring. It is not really brass -- it is gold. And it is not really a rat -- it is a beaver. Or, there is a picture of a beaver on the bezel of the ring. There is also a map of MIT on the inside of the ring. And The Boston and MIT skylines on either side of the ring. I also got a silly walnut box to put it in. I figured that if I was going to spend $400 on this silly ring, I might as well spend the $12 on the little box with the MIT crest on it. I didn't get a ring from BU, but the MIT ring has a lot more character. The main picture on the ring is a beaver holding a scroll and a piece of pizza, among other things. The BU ring would have just been a stone with my graduation year on it.

My landlord is in town. He just got here today. He lives in Florida. His son has been occupying the apartment above us (which was previously occupied by his mother, but she died in December, a month before we moved in.) They are now renovating the upstairs apartment so someone else can move in. I have managed to procure rights to plant in most of the back yard. Well, I didn't really "manage to procure" so much as I said I wanted to plant things, and they told me to go right ahead. I am very pleased about this. I plan to do tomatoes and cucumbers in the sunny side, and some flowers (poppies and larkspur, I think, with some lobelia and moss roses) in the bed with the roses.

Today, I got one of my research goals accomplished that I have been trying to accomplish for the past three weeks. Really, this was the goal I was trying to accomplish back in January, when I got derailed by the nonsense with my thesis proposal. So, get this. The tiles are looking at you, and you hold up a ball. Instead of all of the tiles grabbing it -- they now talk to each other to agree about who should have it. Tomorrow, they should be able to pass control of the cursor, representing the ball, amongst themselves, so that as you move the ball around, it can go seamlessly from tile to tile. This is my goal for this week.

Over the weekend, Mike and I did a little car shopping. I will need a car when I start my new job, come September. We first went to the Toyota dealership. The Corolla is cute, but didn't grab me. Then, we went to the Honda dealership. We had read on Consumer Reports about the strange layout of the Civic dashboard. I wanted to see this for myself, and I thought I would hate it. I actually liked it quite a lot. I had a very good connection with the girl at the Honda dealership, and they took me seriously, even though I said I wasn't buying. Last, we went to the Volkswagon dealership and I drove a Jetta. I responded negatively to the ergonomics of the Jetta, although it was much spunkier than the Civic. But, on the other hand, to get the Civic with the moon roof and other silliness, is the same price as the "value" Jetta. I decided that what I wanted is a Civic with a bigger engine. They make such a thing -- it is called the Accord. I looked online, and it seems that I can get an Accord with a moonroof, heated seats, heated side mirrors, and all the other silly things I could possibly want for the low, low price of $25,000. Now, don't laugh, but I am seriously considering this. I got 2 phone calls from the Honda dealership on Monday -- neither Toyota nor Volkswagon called. I told the saleswoman about how I thought I might want an Accord, but Michael took issue with how much I have suddenly become willing to spend on a car with silly heated seats. She pointed out that there are lots of nice pre-owned Accords I might buy. I said I would think about it. So, maybe we will go back this week sometime, and I will test drive an Accord and see if I like it. I will start looking at pre-owned vehicles closer to the time when I will actually want a vehicle -- late July, August.

Over the weekend, Mike and I also did *TRUMPETS BLARE AND DRUMS AND CHOIRS SINGING* a little ring shopping. *SHHHHHHHHHHH*. We went to the Burlington Mall, where there are only 3 jewelry stores -- I could have sworn there were more. We went into Both Zales and Alpha Omega. At Zales, there wasn't really anything for me. At Alpha Omega, everything seemed over-priced, and there was really only a couple options for me. The third jewelry store was Kay, but Mike *hates* their "every Kiss begins with Kay" ad campaign, and he doesn't want to buy from them. Last June, when I worked near the Cambridgeside Galleria, I had done a little shopping at the Whitehall, and I had brought home a catalog with various options circled. But I eventually tossed the catalog after Mike only looked at it when the cable got turned off and I said I would call to have it fixed if he looked at the catalog. There was this adorable ring they were doing last year -- it had three white diamonds in the center, and then yellow saphires down the sides. It was so cute! I wonder if they still have it.

Oh, and I am definately not going to graduate this term. :-( This is not doom and gloom -- I took my name off the degree list. My office mate, Jim, who is way further behind than I am on his thesis, intends to graduate this term. I have no idea how he is going to pull it off. But, I am not going to pull it off, and I will not get to walk. :-( I will probably be done around the end of June.

Totally stressed out

2006-03-19T22:55:00.000-05:00

So, it is looking increasingly unlikely that I will graduate on time. This is not for lack of trying, mind you. I have been working my poor little brain all day and all night since January. I am on track, making good progress, but, mostly thanks to DCGS, I am a month behind schedule, and I can't think of a way to recover the time that doesn't involve me losing my mind.

The thesis is due, signed, sealed, and delivered, by May 12. To do this, I need a draft by no later than May 1. That is approximately six weeks from now. It will probably take me three weeks to a month to actually write the thesis (Hell, it took three months to get the thesis proposal approved...). That leaves me two weeks to work, and I have WAY more work to do than that.

In related news, last week I accomplised a pretty cool set of goals... First, the tiles know to ask their neighbors for help when they can't see the ball. The "asking for help" mechanism is very non-trivial and took many weeks to get working properly. Now, I have a little paint program running on the tiles. So, you hold the ball, and a little tail follows you around. When you shake the ball side-to-side, the color changes. Then you can draw a stroke, and when you make a circle at the end, the program puts the stroke down in the current color. Neat! Then, if you shake the ball up and down, the screen clears. PHEW!

This all works on just one tile (who can ask its neighbors for help.). Next, I need to make one paint program run across ALL of the tiles. You might say "Diane, that doesn't sound so hard, now that you've got it working on one tile." And then I will say "ah, but the devil is in the distributed computing," And I would tell you all about how hard it is to get everyone to agree that right now the ball is GREEN, much less where they should draw a magenta line overlaying a red one, oh, and the current cursor position is on my neighbor above me, and oh, what do you want me to draw?

And this paint program isn't the thing I said I was going to do for my thesis. This is the thing I said I was going to do, which was REJECTED as TOO SIMPLE. What I said I was going to do, was make this cool animation/simulation application, where you can design little agents and have them walk around interacting with each other. If you thought it was hard to make everyone agree that the ball is green, guess how hard it will be for everyone to agree on the state of a hundred interacting little agents that need to be aware of each other, without respect for inter-tile boundaries. HUFF!

I really don't know how long this is going to take me, but I bet it will be longer than two weeks.

In other news, last week Mike and I got a coffee table and another book case from IKEA. What was funny is that in every department, I was drawn to pieces from the LEKSVIK collection. I would just look at a piece, and I would think "Oh, isn't that nice?" then I would walk up to it, and it would be LEKSVIK. Our coffee table and new book case are from this collection, to match the first book case we got, also from that collection.

Last weekend, we also put up the curtains that we had bought the week before. Well, we put up the curtains in the living room. The curtains in the dining room are still waiting to go up. We had some trouble with the drill -- we didn't have a bit that was large enough, and by the time we got to Home Depot to get a bit, I was pretty stressed, and I like freaked out because there were like a hundred different types of bits and I felt like I didn't know what I was doing (remarkably like I didn't know what I was doing...). Anyway, so we went to drill the holes, and we marked them out so the curtain rod would sit level and all that. Then Michael, the brave soldier, went to drill the holes, and put the plastic screw-holder thingies in. Well, the drill wouldn't go in far enough to get the plastic thingies all the way in. So we had to drill extra holes. Mike was not very happy about this, and so the dining room curtains are still waiting to go up.

Finally, this weekend, it had to happen sometime. I finally ran into the wall with Mike's car. I have been freaked out about this since we moved in (our driveway is VERY narrow, and there are cement walls on both sides), and I have tried to avoid driving. On the driver's side, the wall kinda creeps up on you -- the driveway goes down, and there is a retaining wall for the yard that stays level, so you can really get very close to it without realizing it. And on the passenger side, the wall rises up about seven feet from the ground, and I'm always scared of smashing the rear right corner into the wall. Well, I smashed the front left corner into the retaining wall. Not smashed, really. Scraped against. It was kinda scary really, because once I got that close to it (I was like completely parallel to it) I couldn't turn away from it, because I couldn't turn the wheel. The only way out was to scrape. When I hit the wall, I was very close to the end of the driveway, so I was able to get out, but then I was freaked out (are you noticing a theme?). It really wasn't so bad -- Mike had done a similar thing a few weeks before. Mike made me drive ALL WEEKEND. I had to back out of the driveway FOUR TIMES. I almost smashed the rear right corner, trying to avoid the wall on the left. I will need to come up with more devious ways to avoid driving.

This weekend, we also (finally) got a filing cabinet. I have been working with one of those file accordians since freshman year, and Mike... Well. Mike doesn't really have a system for filing papers and stuff. Let's leave it at that. So, we got a filing cabinet and some colorful hanging folders, and file folders. Yay! Mike decided that he wanted a label maker. I thought this was pretty silly, but Mike said that this is what they recommended in his "Getting Things Done" class at work. So now we have a label maker.

This weekend, Mike and I did our taxes. I had been freaking out about this, because I sold this little mutual fund that my father had bought for me when i was five -- it hadn't been performing very well lately -- and I was totally freaked out about computing the cost basis. I was sure I was going to owe extra money, since it had been growing for twenty years. I sold it now, so that I would pay less taxes on it that I would next year, when I am finally going to have a real job. I wouldn't have thought it was a big deal, except that an ex-boyfriend of mine, who happened to know a few things about money had made it all sound very complicated. So I was freaking out and avoiding it. We tried to do taxes last weekend, but we got stuck on Mike's educational expenses. After getting stuck on such a little thing, I was even MORE freaked out. Well, this weekend, I finally took out the twenty year history of the account that I got from American Century, and put it all into Excel. Wouldn't you know, it was a capital loss! "What?" you say, "that doesn't sound very good." Well, no, not "good". The thing was worth more than my father put into it. This was mostly due to all the dividends being reinvested, while the price of shares in the mutual fund had peak out in 1999, and have been in a slump since. So, I think I picked a good time to trade in for something else. No need to stay on a sinking ship. And it isn't very much money, so I don't need to worry about having made too bad a choice.

After doing our taxes, we wanted to print them out, so we could send them. I haven't owned a printer in years, and Mike has been saying how nice it would be if we could print directions off of Google when we want to go places. So, guess what. We got a printer. It is a multi-function print, scan and copy machine. And it does the printing on the photo paper, and you can plug your camera straight into it, and so on and so forth. It looks like a little space-ship.

I am freaking out, man!

New Guidelines

2006-03-06T14:34:00.001-05:00

So, I am *deeply* bummed that I missed the Museum of Science trip. So, in light of my disappointment, I am issuing some new guidelines for those who want to get in touch with Michael and I.

1.) Call me.
2.) If I don't answer, email me.

Michael isn't really very careful to be sure his phone is, shall we say, "on". And it certainly isn't a given that it is "charged". And, even if it *is* on and charged, it is probably in the car. And if it isn't in the car, half the time when I call him, he says he never heard the phone, even if it is in his pocket. And Mike checks his non-work email about once a week, if that.

After seeing Christine talking about going to Maine to do laundry, I had concluded that the Museum of Science trip had been cancelled, otherwise I would have been more aggressive about trying to call. And I don't have all the relevant Theriault/Kennedy family phone numbers, because those are in Mike's phone and palm pilot, which may or may not be on, charged, and available in a given day.

Anyway, after concluding that the MoS trip was off, Mike and I decided to go anyway. We got there in the afternoon, and there were no more tickets for the Star Wars exhibit, and there were no more Omni shows for the day. So, we went back to the Galleria, where we must have just missed Christine and Company, because we left there between 4:30 and 5.

In other news, last Monday, I had my first guitar lesson. I wanted to talk about how to hold the guitar and where to put my fingers. We spent the whole hour talking about music theory and modes of the major scale. At the very end, I actually picked up a guitar and attempted the C major scale. I have another lesson on Thursday. I am not sure how long I am going to keep this up, since my graduate stipend is small, and I cannot spend like I already have my new job.

Spent all week and most of the weekend working with networking code in C. For anyone who has not done this, let me tell you, it is ugly. The C networking libraries must have been written by about a bazillion people, and the structures and names make precious little sense. And I am doing multi-threading on top of this, so my threads that are doing the sending of messages sometimes try to chew up all of the CPU time, so my real program can't run. Grrrg.

New toys all around

2006-02-26T18:57:00.000-05:00

Today was a major shopping and cleaning day in our household.

I awoke this morning to the sound of the dishwasher. And I thought to myself "Aww, Michael did the dishes." Then, Michael came to the bed and asked a bleary-eyed me what I wanted for breakfast. I responded "huh?" Once I figured out what he was asking, I said that I wanted "eggies". And Michael made me eggs for breakfast. :-) He had also shoveled the driveway. All of this put me in a very good mood to start the day.

Then, we had a major cleaning fit. Mike took the dining room and I took the kitchen. I had tried to be diligent about cleaning our hardwood floors, but I the last vestiges of dust still stuck, and we have needed to mop for some time. I have had trepidations about mopping, however -- is it okay to mop hardwood floors? I didn't want to damage them. And (shh, don't tell anyone) I don't really know how to mop. My mom wasn't really much for the whole "cleaning" thing, and so I didn't learn a lot of these life skills till college when horrified room mates made me clean. Anyway. I have been scared of trying to mop for fear I would damage the floors. So, Michael took the mop and Pinesol in hand, and he took care of everything. Like I said, very good mood.

Now, our bottom sheet on our bed had developed a very large hole. And it was on my side. It had started off as a little bittie hole smaller than a dime, and grew to a huge run the size of my hand. This was unfortunate, since these sheets had been like $80. But, they have been used constantly for a year, so I guess we got our money out of them. So, today was the day that Mike asked if I wanted to go to Bed Bath and Beyond to get new sheets. This was amazing, because usually when I bring up Bed Bath and Beyond, Mike's eyes glaze over and he says something to the effect of "Do I really have to?"

We also need curtains. There are no curtains in the dining room, and there is a straight shot from outside, into our bedroom, and the bathroom. Most incommodious. Also, there are blinds in the living room, which is okay, I guess. But, there is a draft that comes off the windows (our couch is right in front of the windows), even though we put the plastic over them. And, one of the blinds doesn't have the twirly thing to close it. I asked the landlord about it, and he said the previous tenants had put them up, but we could drill holes in the walls for curtains. We had three curtain panels from the old apartment, where we had purposefully broken the rules to put them up. So, we needed short curtains for the living room, and curtain rods for the dining room.

When we got to Bed Bath and Beyond, the first thing we saw in front of us was a clearance bin. Inside the clearance bin was a whole array of sateen 400 thread count flat and fitted sheets marked down to $24.99 from $79.99. What a deal! So, we solved our sheet problem forthwith.

Next, there was the kitchen section. :-) I had $180 of allowance money that I could spend, and I had a mind to spend it. I bought a big Oneida cutting board with a grove all the way around it to catch juice. (It fits into our dishwasher by the skin of its teeth!) And I also bought an OXO chopper. You bang down on the handle on top, and a rotating blade cuts your onions for you. This should be more effective than my mini cuisinart which makes onion puree with big onion chunks. I also bought a scoop for my flour. Since I got the bread machine, I have become aware of how heavy a cup of flour can be when you are trying to scoop it out of the bag with the measuring cup. Every time I go to make bread, I have to bend the handle of my measuring cup back into shape. So, this scoop should solve that problem.

Next, we tried to solve our curtain problem, but all they had was 84" long curtains with fancy-shmancy window treatment thingies. This would not do, because our window in the living room is short, and our couch is in front of it. But, we did get some curtain rods for the dining room.

Next, we hit the bedding section. I have had terrible trouble with my pillows. I think I have gone through 5 or 6 in the past year (most of which were subsequently given to Christine). And I am not talking about $15 Target pillows either. I started with a $15 Target pillow (well, a $15 Bed Bath and Beyond pillow). When that didn't pass muster, I moved up a notch to the $25 pillow, and then $40, and then I found a $60 pillow marked down to $25 in the clearance bin. This has been my pillow for the past few months. It is okay. But, like all the others, it leaves a crick in my neck when I sleep on my side, and pushes my head forward uncomfortably when I sleep on my back. And it generally has not stayed sufficiently fluffy. So, today, I took the plunge and I bought one of those silly Tempurpedic pillows. I am a little skeptical, but I will give it a shot. It is the most expensive pillow I have bought to date, clocking in at $99. When I got this thing home, I decided to take it for a test nap. So, I put it down, and then flopped into bed. I hit that thing and stuck. Slowly, it shape-shifted to fit my head, but that initial thud surprised me. All in all, I had a good nap, although it smells a little funny. I will keep you posted about how well this thing stands up to a couple months of use.

Now, Michael has decided that he wants to get a Napster subscription so he could have all-he-can-eat music to listen to at work. Unfortunately, the iPod I bought him last year will not due for this purpose, because it doesn't have the evil Windows digital rights management (DRM) scheme. So, we went to Best Buy to get him a suitable mp3 player. He settled on an iRiver T30, which is tiny and red with a blue screen. It is about 3" by 1", and deep enough for a AAA battery. Its pretty cute, and came with 2 free months of Napster. He is now happily downloading music. He says that it feels like the Napster of old because he can pick and choose whatever he wants in a rather random-ish fashion, but without the guilt. Pack rat that I am, I am still happy with my iPod, buying CDs when I feel my music collection has gotten too stale.

I have had my guitar now for a week. I have amassed a small repetoire of chords, including D, G, C, E, A, E minor, A minor and D7 minor. phew! Most of this has been accrued by reading out of this Beatles-made-easy book I got at Guitar Center when we bought the guitar. I also technically know how to play F, but it sounds terrible. The other chords, you just put your fingers down on the frets, and then strum the appropriate strings and pretty sounds come out. F, you put your fingers down on the appropriate strings, but you have to put your first finger all the way across the neck. Ha! I have been trying to play Let it Be, and With a Little Help from My Friends. In the Beatles-made-easy book, these are quite easy songs. I also have another book that I got at Beatlefest, that has the real chord progressions for Let it Be, where it is not so easy, and F figures prominently into the song. I have gotten in touch with a guitar teacher at the Cambridge Music Center, and I hope to take at least a few lessons, to get me started.

Looky what I got!

2006-02-20T17:20:00.000-05:00

Who is the proud new mom? -- Me! Its me!

Mike got me a guitar for Valentine's Day. :-)
(The guitar is my new baby.)

I am such a shark.

2006-02-14T10:33:00.000-05:00

I negotiated for three weeks of vacation instead of two. :-)
The HR guy from BAE said my new offer letter will be delivered today via FedEx. Once I acccept, I will have three days to get the drug test.

I blew like $90 on CDs, and another $80 on crafts (if you don't count that I bought an easel for $70 a couple weeks ago). I probably have another $100 of CDs lined up on Amazon. I am going to do my best to hold off on those. It is natural to want to blow some money, but I must remember that I have not begun the new job yet. But I am making good progress on my thesis.

I have it in my hand.

2006-02-08T23:14:00.000-05:00

I have the offer from BAE in my hand. It is a significant amount of money, with the usual health, dental, 401K matching, and so on. I got it today, while at lunch (which took 2 hours!) with my soon-to-be new bosses.

Yesterday, I was in the MIT career office freaking out about this meeting, because I was convinced that the salary negotiation would come up, and I didn't know what to do about it. We went through the spreadsheets of other Master's students who got jobs last year. The average of S.M.'s going into software engineering was $85K (!!!). Before that, I would have been thrilled with X. But, after seeing that number, when I got Y (where X < Y < $85K), I was like "ah. right." I feel like I was cheated out of my shriek of joy.

And, fifth time's the charm: My thesis proposal was finally approved yesterday.

With all this good fortune going around, I hope nothing bad happens. On the other hand, I had some pretty crappy karma that I didn't deserve last year, so maybe with all that bad fortune going around, good things were bound to happen. :-)

Mike's birthday was today. I got him the Nintendo handheld game thingy. Nuno got him a game for the thingy. He is happily playing with his new toy as we speak.

I got a job!

2006-02-04T14:45:00.000-05:00

I thought that I posted on Tuesday, when I got the job offer, but apparently Blogger had another idea. Anyway...

I got a job! From BAE, where I really wanted to work. I don't have the offer in my hand, but I am going to meet with my soon-to-be new bosses next week on Wednesday. I assume salary negotiations will come up. I think I interviewed for the position of "Software Engineer II". According to Salary.com, the average pay for this type of position is something like $65,000. According to the MIT career center, the average MIT student graduation with a Master's degree starts at $75,000. So, I have dollar signs in my eyes.

In other news, my thesis proposal was rejected again (for the fourth time). They said I needed to be more "focused". This was after the last time, where they said I needed a more interesting application, so I wrote more about the application. Ugh. It goes back in for approval on Monday, and the meeting is Wednesday.

I am going to have a party soon. I do not know when, but I am going to. To celebrate that I got a job, for Mike's birthday, something. I am going to have a party and everyone is going to come over and its going to be fun and I will have lots of friends. Yes. That is what is going to happen. I hope.

That's all for now folks.

I (almost) won the brownie contest

2006-01-19T11:15:00.000-05:00

The brownie contest was this past weekend at MIT, sponsored by the MIT chocolate club. Pardon me, the Lab for Chocolate Science. There were about twenty entries. There were five judges who rated each brownie out of ten. I got second place. I missed first place by half a point (half a point!) and only because one of the judges changed his rating of the brownie that won first place. The judges complained that the acidic taste of the cherries was a little jarring, but I think it was because my brownie was one of the last ones to be tasted, and when you only take a little nibble of my brownie, it can be a bit jarring. You need a full bite so that the cherries and the chocolate blend.

And now, for my next trick, I would like to make a caramel brownie. I think that it will be interesting to make a light caramel out of the sugar which is destined to go into the brownie. And then, make a thicker caramel for a caramel swirl, which would go in at the last minute. This brownie sounds like a lot of work, and it might be, but I am going to try anyway. I would also like to make a mint brownie. My first attempt at a mint brownie was only modestly successful, and I think that the addition of a number of different sources of mintiness would add (mint extract in the brownie, crushed mint hard candy, etc). I think that my cherry brownie, substituting the cherries for almonds, and half the flour for almond flour, makes a very nice almond brownie, as is.

In other news, my thesis proposal was rejected AGAIN. On the day I found out it was rejected, I almost made a post here with lots of swearing and cursing f*cking Andy f*cking Lippman. But I decided not to. And this time, he might not even be the culprit (although last time, I am sure it was him). This time, they are complaining that my application sounds too simple. I think that's because they don't know any better. The application(s) I had proposed were a paint/illustrator program, and a model building program where you could pick up and place blocks. Most of the complexity comes from the distributed nature of the application, not from the application itself. I was really mad about this for like five days. But on Tuesday, I met with members of my committee, and David Cavallo had a really good idea: what if I kept the Paint concept, but I added animation! So this sounds good, and I am going to try to think more about how to do this.

I have been more productive lately than I have been in quite some time. Last week, my goal was to put my old tracking functionality into a new software framework that would be conducive to the distributed tracking. Despite all my anxieties about this, it only took me about 4 hours of actual work. If you don't count the time to fix the new networking code. And if you don't count the time I spent writing and thinking about the new software framework. This week, my goal is to get the "distributed" part of the "distributed tracking" working. So far, I am on track to acheive this. The tiles are communicating about what they see, and they are grouping tracks from different sources correctly, unless I do stuff to mess them up. Like hold up two balls of the same color, at the same time.

Last weekend, Mike and I went out with our crazy friend Nuno. We went to Chili's in Burlington, and there was a 45 minute wait. So, we went to the Barnes&Noble next door. Mike bought a magazine called "Make" which had instructions to make a guitar out of a cigar box. I bought a book about Needlcrafts. I think its called "Michael's guide to Needlecrafts" (The store, Michael's). It has stuff and patterns for crochet, knitting, and embroidery.

So, the next day, Mike and I are shopping for our respective things we want to make. We head to Home Depot to get supplies for the cigar box guitar, and while we were there, we picked up some other supplies to make a little workbench. Then, we went to Michael's to get me some circular kitting needles, a cable needle, and some yarn. (I had decided that I was going to make a hat for Mike, using this knitting-in-the-round pattern with cables, to practice some new skills). I think I am on my third or fourth try with this hat. The circular knitting needle was too long, and the yarn was too thick. So, I switched to double pointed needles, and they are a pain in the butt! Last night, I found a website that showed techniques for knitting small pieces using a large circular needle. I think I will try that with some easier yarn.

I went to this IAP class yesterday, called Women's investing for Retirement. It was mostly a bust, but I learned the difference between a growth stock/fund and a value stock/fund. A growth fund is one where the stocks are already performing well, and the future earnings are banking on the current good fortunes of the stock. A value fund is where stocks are undervalued, and they are bought based on their potential for future earnings. So, if a pharmacuetical company just got FDA approval for a new drug, then that is (most likely) a growth stock. But, the same company was just rejected by the FDA, but will soon be approved, that is a value stock.

This weekend, Mike and I are going to Maine. I'm not sure if Barb knows this yet, but now she does!

Mike has a phone again!

2006-01-12T13:10:00.000-05:00

Last night, we went and got Mike a new phone. We now have a family plan together from Verizon (aww). Call me, and I'll give you the new number. (And I will record YOUR phone number in my laptop so we can stop calling Barb and asking her for everyone's number every time we need it.) Or you can email me, since not everyone knows my phone number: dhirsh@mit.edu.

Tonight, we are going to a chocolate tasting event hosted by "The Lab for Chocolate Science" at MIT. Basically, its a club for people who like chocolate.

Tomorrow is the brownie contest, and my cherry brownie is ready and raring to go. I hope I win. I don't even know if there is a prize, other than bragging rights. The cherry brownie is a little risky, because if people don't like cherries, you're in trouble! But, I have worked to make sure that the brownie part of the cherry brownie is solid.

Now, my mother. From what I have gathered, "Congestive Heart Failure" is the generic term doctors use to say "your heart isn't working right." More specifically, it means that the heart is, for whatever reason, unable to pump blood to the body effectively.

I guess this isn't all bad. "Congestive heart failure" sure sounds a lot more scary than "I'm tired all the time and I sometimes can't catch my breath." But, it also means that she is under doctor's care, and she has a documented history, so that if something very bad happens (*knock on wood*) the doctors in the emergency room won't just think she has pneumonia or something. So, I hope she does what the doctors tell her to do, and that things get better.

Official Diagnosis

2006-01-07T18:54:00.000-05:00

My mother has been diagnosed with congestive heart failure with atrial fibrillation.
:-(

Update from BAE

2006-01-06T23:00:00.000-05:00

Quoting:

Diane,

Happy New Year!!

Thought I'd drop you a quick note to let you know what's going on here.
We are still very interested in you and were wondering if you have
gotten a better handle on when you will finish your MS work?

. . .

Oh, and if someone has given you an offer and is pressuring you to
decide PLEASE let us know!

Talk to you again soon.

:-)

Moving, New Year's, and the continuing story of the Breadmaker

2006-01-02T17:10:00.000-05:00

I want to give a shout-out to Aviv Moving Services : Thank you!
Last Monday, we came back from the Hirsh Christmas, and we got packing, basically immediately. We took loads of small and odd-shaped stuff to the new house until Thursday, when we had hired movers.

Michael was cool through the whole thing (while I was like a bee in his bonnet), until Thursday, when I finally calmed down, and he got all antsy! Watching the movers struggle with that massive King-sized mattress, we were very glad that we had hired them. It took three hours to move the remainder of our stuff from the old place to the new place.

So then, we set about the daunting task of unpacking. We have a lot of stuff. Not as much as I thought, really -- it mostly fit in the dining room. But boy, oh boy. Looking at all of it, stacked up, was very intimidating.

So, the next day, we begin digging out. I began working on the easy-ish things -- putting away supplies in the bathroom. I also began work in earnest on the kitchen/pantry. When we tried to move Mike's dresser, we put a shallow scratch in the floor -- no big deal, except that the landlord had told us to be very careful with the newly finished floor. We finally got the furniture in the second bedroom in approximately the right place. I was kinda flitting from one thing to another, mostly trying to work on the kitchen.

We didn't have some important pieces of furniture, and this made it hard to put things away. I didn't want to put my wire book case up in the living room -- it was too "dorm". In the kitchen, the stove is kinda sitting in the middle of a wall with no counter or anything next to it, and I wanted a cart to put next to it. We also needed a bedstand, a book case for the living room, a table and chairs where we could eat, and a dresser for me. Off to IKEA!

At IKEA, we had a pretty organized trip -- we knew what we were looking for, and I had a rough idea of what kind of things to get. We wrote down all the numbers for all the things we were going to get, and went to the ground floor to get them from the huge warehouse. The first two items we looked for were not in stock. This was a bit of a blow, and Mike and I were getting testy with each other. Finally, we had some success, getting the dresser, and then the table and chairs (which were massively heavy!). We went to the desk about the book case we wanted, which we had only seen in this ugly white color. Finally, we got everything in the cart that was to be had, and we went to check out. They told us that we were missing a box -- apparently, the dresser came in two boxes. So, we went back for the other box, and we finally got out of there. I was worried that the book case box wasn't going to fit in the car. We had measured the back of the car with the seats down, and found that it was 63 inches long. The box for the bookshelf was something like 89 inches. Mike was totally confident that it would fit. Well, despite my skepticism, he was right. The book shelf poked half way through to the windshield, between our heads. I tried to hold it to the side so Mike could drive, unencumbered.

When we got home, I tried to set about getting the kitchen in order enough to make dinner, while Mike worked on putting the table and chairs together. The table went smoothly, but the chairs were much more complicated. Mike suffered a number of setbacks, before we decided to scrap it and go to dinner.

The next day, our washer and dryer were supposed to be delivered between 7 and 9 AM. Mike was up very early, trying to put the chairs together. and I got up to help him. We suffered a couple more setbacks, but we finally got the chairs together and had our first meal at home -- Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

When the washer and dryer came, we could not take delivery of the dryer because it wouldn't fit in the door. Bummer! So, we are sitting here with a washer, but no dryer. We had to go back to Best Buy to order a smaller dryer which hopefully will fit in the door. It is going to be delivered tomorrow. I was proud of myself, because I talked the guy at Best Buy into not making us pay for delivery again.

Later, the guy from RCN came to bring television and internet access. We had asked for a DVR box, but the message hadn't gotten through. We wanted to set up our wireless router, and so the guy didn't test the internet connection. He just left us to our own devices. It didn't work, and calls to RCN were not terribly helpful. But, they sent someone over for the next day.

We put my dresser together -- which took a very long time. It had a lot of pieces, and was awkward to manipulate. It was definately a two-person job. There was more unpacking.

We went to Christine's New Year's Eve night. The weather was awful. When we got to New Hampshire, we were turning off the main road, and the wheels just let go. We slammed into the divider. I was afraid that we had blown a tire or something. Going gently uphill, towards Christine's house, the wheels were slipping and it was pretty scary. I felt bad for suggesting that we head out in this death trap. We left the party early, because we were worried about the weather. On the way home, it turned out that things weren't so bad. The streets had been plowed and salted, and we didn't have trouble getting up the very steep hill where we now live. It was getting into our driveway that was really scary. Mike just plowed in, and the wheels were slipping, and the car was slipping. The driveway is narrow, and I was afraid he was going to hit the wall next to me broadside. Everything was okay, but I was very scared. We got into the house and turned on the TV about ten minutes before the ball dropped in New York. Yay!

Yesterday, my kitchen was finally together enough to manage to make a meal. We had meatloaf and purple scalloped potatoes -- which were less striking than I had thought they would be. We figured out that the shelves for my wire bookshelf fit perfectly next to the stove. So we bought some new poles, and put it together to serve as my kitchen cart.

Mike has been psuhing to watch the instructional video for the breadmaker (He likes bread). And last night we finally watched it. The breadmaker has a timer function -- so you can put the ingredients in the pan, and it will make the bread for you at a later time. So, we set the breadmaker to have bread ready at 8 AM this morning, which was quite pleasant. I made eggs and sausage to go with it.

We still have some crap left in the living room, but we are mostly settled. We got our CDR / HDTV box today. Mike is drooling over the HD sports. And that is about it!

Tomorrow, Mike goes back to work, and after the dryer comes, I will go to school.

The Hirsh-Theriault Jugernaut

2005-12-28T22:08:00.000-05:00

We are nearly packed. The movers will come tomorrow, and then we will be out of this place!

This morning, our present landlord called us to remind us that our lease would expire at NOON on the 31st. *rolls eyes* And he would be by today to inspect the apartment. Fine. He never came, but still. This dude ... well ... let's say Mike and I are glad we are moving on SOOOooo many counts, including the landlord and his personality problems.

I have been scurrying about furiously, putting things in boxes and so on and so forth. Michael has done a lot of heavy lifting -- taking things to the car and driving off to Watertown. On Monday, we dropped our suitcases off at the new apartment after returning from the Hirsh Christmas. And now, we are 98% packed and the movies are coming tomorrow! Unstoppable!

Speaking of the Hirsh Christmas, everything went fine. All members of my family (including the two I was worried about) behaved themselves, and no one gave Mike a hard time. Mike's mother gave him an apple corer/peeler/slicer gizmo, which was PERFECT! And she gave me a pi plate. Yes, a pi plate, with pi written on it out to some insane number of decimal places, and a big PI symbol on the bottom. It is ADORABLE!

In not so good news, my mother is back in the hospital. She didn't come to Christmas, because she wasn't feeling well, after having been in the hospital and having blood work done in the previous couple of weeks. Her heart has been fibrillating and running fast, and she has been feeling weak. So, Christmas day, we get this call that she has gotten one of our neighbors to take her to the hospital. They found a blood clot in her heart. They gave her a bunch of drugs, and she said that she was feeling better. I think she would have been discharged today. And my father hasn't called me. So I guess everything is roughly okay.

So, we are mostly packed, and ready to go! Here we go!

My breadmaker has arrived!

2005-12-21T10:24:00.000-05:00

I am sorry not to have posted in so long. There has been a flurry of activity and I have been so busy!

Today, my Christmas present from Mike arrived in the lab -- a breadmaker from Woot. Hurray! Now, to get it home on the crowded rush hour train...

In other news, I had another marathon interview with BAE on Monday. I was interviewing with the other group that was interested in me. The sensor fusion group. At the end, they were telling me about how it would be hard to put together an offer package because I need to graduate, and I might miss the June deadline and graduate in September instead -- which would put them in the next fiscal year. So, I should keep them posted about when I am going to graduate. Yesterday, I talked to Jack, the HR guy, and he said that all the feedback he had gotten about me had been positive. He said they hadn't made final decisions yet, but I am hopeful!

Mike has taken this class at work, called "Getting Things Done". I have been slightly startled to find him keeping a lengthy to-do list. We spent all day Sunday trying to find him a palm pilot. First, he was going to buy the Palm TX, but they were out of stock at Microcenter. Then, we were going to get the Treo, because I think Mike would rather have just one gadget in his pocket, and the Treo is an organizer, cell phone, and camera. At the Verizon store, we waited for 45 minutes for them to tell us they couldn't help us because Mike is still on the family plan and doesn't have the authority to change his phone. Boo Verizon! So, we ditched that idea. Monday night, we finally got to a Staples, where the Palm Pilots were prominently displayed (unlike at Best Buy). Mike got his little $99 palm. When we got home he exclaimed "My toy! My toy!" as he dug into the bag for it. He has said that if he is able to keep up this whole "being organized" thing for a month or so, he will buy himself the Treo, and I will get the Palm Pilot. :-)

My Pampered Chef order has arrived with all of MY toys. Too many to describe. But I now have the stocking stuffers for Barb, Barbie, and Christine. I hope you like them!

Mike's Christmas present -- an EZ pass -- has also arrived. I got this for him, loaded with $60 = ~ 2 months of tolls, to mitigate the fact that we are moving closer to Boston and he will have to spend a lot more time on the Mass Pike. Everyone asking me for present ideas for Mike -- I don't know! Silly boy, when he sees something he wants (which doesn't happen too often), he buys it! Leaving nothing for poor slobs like us to buy him for presents. Music, DVDs, clothes (Men's XL), Sports things (football and baseball). Those are my best suggestions.

Last week, we hired movers, and we are officially moving on the 29th. Mike had originally called Gentle Giant -- they wanted $225 an hour!!! I said, heck with this. I went on two of those websites where it was like "Get ten quotes from ten movers for free!" No sooner had I put my information in there than my phone was ringing off the hook! I had like ten phone calls in five minutes. While I was on the phone with one person, two others called! Insane!

There was a flurry of baking last night at Diane's Diner. I was behind schedule on the candy-making, since a batch of caramel (a good batch too, with the right texture and flavor. :-( ) stuck to the wax paper and by the time I had gotten it off the wax paper, my hands had been all over it, and I wasn't comfortable giving it away. So, my presents for the North Carolina Hirshes will be going into the mail today, and hope to get there in time. There will be another flurry of baking tomorrow, as I play hooky from school, preparing candy and gifts for the rest of the Hirshes for Friday.

Mike and I are going to the Hirsh Christmas. I have had serious anxiety about this for some time. Others seem to be a bit puzzled by this -- Mike will be able to handle himself, and the Kennedy's and Theriault's are good families, after all. Yes, I know that. I am more worried about my family being nice to him. I hear that my cousin Madeleine is also bringing her boyfriend. So, I hope it won't be so bad.

And finally, last week, my thesis proposal was rejected AGAIN. Sooo so mad. They complained about things the second time that weren't even mentioned the first time! Argh! I will have to try again for the Jan 6 meeting.

I nailed it!

2005-12-09T22:07:00.000-05:00

My interview with BAE yesterday was a full eight hours. I got there at 9:45 (I was supposed to get there at 9:30, but I got very lost). First, I gave my presentation. It was a pretty full crowd. I'd guess about twenty people. Never mind that I am talking about tracking an pseudo kalman filters to a bunch of people who are serious experts with tracking and the kalman filter. Then, I talked to seven or eight people for about an hour each. Phew! I think I did not put my foot in my mouth, and I got positive vibes from everyone.

I also got a perfect score on my test that I took Wednesday!

Unfortunately, my thesis proposal bounced back to me, from the committee that approves thesis proposals. It isn't anything major, they just want me to be more specific.

We signed papers for our apartment on Wednesday.

We are snowed in for the weekend. This means that we will hopefully eat up all of our food so we will not have to move it!

The End is Near!!

2005-12-05T23:09:00.000-05:00

Half of the items on my worry list have cleared in the past few days!

My thesis proposals is in.

I turned in the last homework for my class today. The test is Wednesday, but it is open book, notes, and calculator.

I have a job interview with BAE on Thursday.

We have found a place to live. It is in Watertown, on a (very steep) hill. It is a block from a bus stop that will take me to Harvard Square, and half a mile from the Commuter Rail stop at Waverly Square. We will have our own laundry machines in the basement and we will never have to fuss with quarters again. It has a fireplace. We dropped off papers for the place yesterday.

So, who wants to help us move! I'll bake you cookies!

Thesis Propsal is All Clear

2005-12-02T01:13:00.000-05:00

I turned in my thesis proposal ahead of schedule and under budget. Ahhhh. I run a tight ship. Not that I *had* a budget, but that's not the point. Its done and signed and turned in.

I will have my interview at BAE next Thursday.

Mike and I have begun looking at apartments in earnest. On Monday I spent like an hour and a half on the internet and on the phone. We looked at something Wednesday, and three places today. We will look at another two Saturday. Then, we will probably be done and make an offer. I will be very glad when I don't have to worry about this any more.

I found out today that my tracking on the tiles is zippy enough that I can toss the ball in the air, and the tracking will keep up. This is in contrast to the way you had to do it before -- where you had to hold the ball and move it in a vertical line slowly. This is very good because it means that I can make the tiles do things in response to natural human actions, like tossing the ball.

I spent most of the day today trying to make the tracking better. It is difficult, because we don't know a priori how the ball will move. With the bats, they were all basically going in the same way, and they kept going that way. The ball is in a person's hand, and can move any way the person likes. It was encouraging that the tracking was working except for strange edge conditions that I had to work very hard to create.

I will probably try to do some usability testing soon. Any volunteers?

AHH!!! My Thesis Proposal!!!!!!

2005-11-29T00:12:00.000-05:00

AHHHH!!!!!

My thesis proposal is due Thursday.

So, a month ago, I sequestered myself in the house to write my thesis proposal, so I wouldn't end up caught off guard. Then, I gave it to my advisor, like three weeks ago. Maybe two. Last week, he suggests who one of my readers should be. I email the suggested reader and wait, not wanting to be too pushy. It is Thanksgiving week after all. She has probably gone somewhere fun. The other reader, I obtain by shameless solicitation.

So today, I finally track down this first reader person. Good thing too -- she had never gotten to my email, and I would have been really sunk!

She emails me tonight (THANK YOU FOR THE FAST TURN AROUND!!!) to tell me my related work section needs work (ha ha I made a pun). She says I need to include more about "ad-hoc networking" and "decentralized distributed computing". Fine. I had a feeling that this was going to come back to bite me. I included plenty about smart rooms. Advisor-Mike said that I need more about "sensing stuff". I had those references all ready to go, and it was fairly painless to put in. I am not at all familiar with the ad hoc networking literature, except by its tangental relationship to ubiquitous and pervasive computing, where it is often mentioned as a foot note. I am in trouble!

How has it come to be that two days before it is due I am not ready!!!

Ugh.

On top of this, I am trying to find a job. I had my very promising phone interview with BAE three weeks ago now. I know it is three weeks because the message that was left for me after the interview just came up on my voice-mail thingy for deletion. We are still trying to find a good date for this to happen. I would really like it to happen. I have my slides for the talk they wanted me to give already to go!

On top of THIS, we have to move. So, today I spent an hour and a half calling around to see if we could go see any available apartments. The first place I called was 21st Century, whom I had called a month ago, and whom had told me to call back in a month. They tell me they don't have anything, and that our $1400 ceiling is low for apartments in Newton. (AHH!!) I turn to the trusty interweb and I find some promising matches, and email and make phone calls.

The last phone call I make, the guy actually had someone cancel on him, and he showed us an apartment this very evening! I liked the apartment a lot. Mike (boyfriend Mike, not to be confused with advisor-Mike) was lukewarm towards it. We have a tug-of-war going on about location. He would want to move further out, towards work, and I want to move further in, towards MIT. I thought the location of the apartment we saw today was just dandy. It was two blocks from the commuter rail and the gym. There are restaurants (like Blue Ribbon Barbecue!) and even an Irish pub. Mike was not so happy about it. It is beyond the expensive toll (the one that is $1, instead of 35 cents), going out of Boston, and has not entrance onto the Mass Pike.

This weekend was nice. Ally is very, very cute. I think four days of doing nothing might have been the thing to cure what ails me. Of course, I feel some of my progress towards there being less of me to love more was lost to the strategic pie reserves. Although, I do give myself credit for restraint. I was conscious not to go way overboard. Except for pie. I am also now addicted to Civilization IV. This is not good because this game takes an insane amount of time to play. I spent 5 hours on a single game on Sunday.

And Michael, sweet Michael. He brought me breakfast in bed yesterday!

Google, you don't know what you're missing!

2005-11-22T21:16:00.000-05:00

I got the call from Google yesterday. They do not want me.

I was being pretty successful, not taking it personally. The recruiter was giving me the whole "we thought you were great, but you're just not a good fit" talk. Which is fine. I understand this is a numbers game. It was when she started talking about their "bar" being high that I took it personally. She said "oh, you know. Our bar is very high..." and I thought to myself "Honey, I can jump over whatever bar you've got up." I didn't say that obviously. Arguably, I can't jump over their bar, because they didn't want me. But, I know I am damn capable, and so they are just missing out. So there.

Yeah, so, the job search. It is making me a little nervous. I know you are supposed to get more rejections than offers, but still. My short short list, and the rejections I've gotten from general software engineering positions ... There is still BAE, Brontes, and Mathworks. Mathworks is kinda my backup plan. Mike's boss's wife really likes me (she is a manager there.) And I am being shuttled into their general entry path. So I feel fully qualified there. At Brontes, I dunno. They were asking really deep questions about machine vision and machine learning. I feel like I would be, shall we saying, stretching it. I would have a lot to learn there. BAE seems like the best fit. So, I am going to go work on my slides for my job talk. I had better knock this one out of the park.

I have banana bread in the oven right now. We are going to Mike's parents' house tomorrow (hence the banana bread). After I started the banana bread, I saw my yeast in the cabinet, and thought it would have been nice to make cinamon rolls instead. But, my banana bread is good. I use a standard recipe, but I swap out half the flour for whole wheat flour, half the sugar for molasses, and the other half of the sugar for brown sugar. This results in a dark soft bread that I like a lot.

I tried to make candied lemon peel yesterday. It was a disaster! Last Christmas, my aunt and cousin made candied grapefruit peel and it was lovely. I like lemons better, so I wanted to do lemon peel. I followed the directions in the Joy of Cooking. You take the peel, and then you boil the heck out of it. You scrape out the pith, and then boil it again in sugar water. Everything was going well until the sugar water. Then, my soft tender boiled lemon peel turned into lemon flavored leather! I don't know what happened, but it wasn't like the candied grapefruit peel my cousin made. I think there might have been a coat of wax on the peel. I didn't think to wash them carefully, and I hear that its standard practice to put wax on citrus fruits. I will try again with organic lemons.

Hirshes and Bats

2005-11-20T22:20:00.000-05:00

We have returned from Mike's mother's family's Thanksgiving shin-dig. I had been wondering how many people actually read my blog, and now I know how popular I am!! I have learned that there are two things I should clarify. Ben asked about the bats. Mike's grandmother, Mike's mother, and Aunt Tina all asked about my family.

My mother's name is Janet, my father's name is Richard. I have a sister, Clara, who is 3 years and 3 months younger than me. My family is more closely tied with my father's side than my mother's. My family is scattered all over the country -- St. Louis, Salt Lake City, New York, Boston, Chicago, North Carolina. I think that does it. Christmas is the big family gathering. We don't really do Thanksgiving or Easter or anything. My grandmother died in May 2004, which was the first time we had all gotten together in a few years, since the Carolina branch hasn't made it to Christmas since they moved from St. Louis. It is from this occasion that I have the most recent pictures.

Here is me with all of my couisins. It wasn't posed. We were all just sitting on the steps, when my mother said "oh, that is a nice picture." My sister is on the rightmost side, hugging my cousin Rachel. My father is in the background with my uncle Don.

Here is my father with his siblings: Libby, Richard, Don, and Eloise.

Here is my mother and father talking to my aunt Lisa.

And now, onto the bats. Every job interview I have had, after the person has read my resume, they ask about the bats. The bats are called Tadarida brasiliensis (Tah - DARE - i - dah). Every year, they migrate to Texas from Mexico, and they form huge colonies, containing millions of individuals. Maybe tens of millions, we're not sure. These bats are about 12 grams, and they eat about 8 grams of insects a night. So, 8 grams times millions times the six months the bats summer in Texas is an awful lot of bug control. So, we were trying to census the bats. We did this by setting up infrared thermal cameras outside of the cave.

I did this work at Boston University. My advisor was Margrit Betke. On my birthday, we went out to photograph flowers, and we got caught in a rainstorm. We were photographed when we got back to the house:

Bats are cool!

My short list just got shorter

2005-11-18T12:33:00.000-05:00

Tessella has taken themselves off my short list of places I want to work. :-(

On the bright side, I had a very good phone interview with BAE on Tuesday, and I will go for an onsite interview, probably, Dec. 1. So that is good.

In other news, I am sick (again). I will be sniffling all through the Kennedy Thanksgiving.

Despite my sniffling, my demo yesterday for Johnson & Johnson went well. They were down with my idea of a model builder using the ball. They said they could imagine their own engineers using such a tool -- where a model was created on the wall using gestures and so on. They also said they could see the tiles in an office, with a smart desk. You could have documents on the desk, and then when you wanted to put them elsewhere, you could just gesture them up to the wall! So, this bolsters my spirits somewhat.

I still haven't found my bug that is tripping me up. I suspect hardware problems, but it could still be a memory problem. I had our UROPer swap the camera out of the tile that has been acting up. I hope that fixes it.

Boycott Amtrak!

2005-11-12T22:44:00.000-05:00

I had the worst experience with Amtrak on my way home from New York.

I lost my ticket in my hotel room. I realized this about an hour before my train was to depart. I called the hotel, and they said that they did not find it. Then, I called Amtrak to ask if anything could be done. I had bought my ticket over the internet, and the prevailing opinion among the people I had talked to was that they would just be able to reissue the ticket. The lady on the phone informed me that Amtrak's policy, as of Oct. 31, was that if a ticket was lost, a new ticket had to be purchased. If, after 5 months, the original ticket had not been found, there was possibility of a refund, less a $75 processing fee. These tickets are like $100. I think this policy is ridicules, not to mention unfair, and in bad faith. Anyway, I got to the train station, and I had to wait in a line for like 40 minutes. I only got to a ticket window about 5 minutes before the train was supposed to leave. Luckily for me, the train left late.

I sent a nasty complaint letter to Amtrak, saying that I thought their policy was grossly unfair, and that I felt they had failed as a service provider. Their service was just as much, if not more, than a plane. Their service took longer than a plane (I had thought it might be less, between getting to the airport, needing to arrive and hour early, and taking a taxi from the airport.) Their service was just as much hassle as a plane. And, the thing that made me maddest, was that they did not respond in a way I felt was fair when I had a problem. If I had lost my boarding pass, an airline would simply have reissued it. I have absolutely no intention of ever taking Amtrak again. Which is unfortunate, because I think people should take more trains.

Compounding this, I felt very crummy after this whole ordeal. Michael and I had agreed to meet at a train stop about three quarters of the way up the green line. Because I felt crummy, I didn't want to spend another hour on the train to get all the way home. Michael didn't want to come to get me because he was afraid of getting lost. I pressed him, and he agreed. I didn't know how to give him directions to South Station, so I told him to go to Back Bay, and I gave him directions there. He check the email I had sent and saw that my train was supposed to go to South Station. He tells me he had a very traumatic journey to South Station, which involved being afraid of needing to retreive his car the next day. Starting at like 7, I am calling him like every 15 minutes to tell him when my train is getting in. After an hour, I figure that we had miscommunicated, and he had already gone to the train station. I am just about to get off the train when my phone rings. It is poor Michael and he is very upset after his ordeal. So in conclusion, it was a pretty bad day for transportation yesterday.

Anyway.

The interview at Google went reasonably well. I had three interviews in the morning, and then in the afternoon they gave us lunch and ice cream. In my interviews, I had three things to do, one for each. One of the questions was to write a program to implement the game of life. This was not too bad. Another problem was to find the minimum string in a document that contained all words of a search query. This had to run in time linear with the number of words in the query, and the length of the document. The last problem was to help the user with typing on the phone. If the user wanted to enter 'C', you wouldn't want them to have to press '222'. You want to take in a string on numbers, and then provide a list of all possible words that could be represented by that string of numbers. This had to run in constant time. yikes.

Anyway, I got to the solutions, or near the solutions in all the cases, so I hope I did okay.

Last night, I found that I had gotten an email from Yahoo asking me to finish some things up. I don't think I would accept an offer from Yahoo, but I am very interested to see what the offer would be like.

I got another email from 21st century technologies. I'm not sure what they had done. They said that they were still very interested in me personally. And that made me feel good. They are in Texas, so working for them is all but out. But, I still felt good.

Thesis and Google

2005-11-10T11:53:00.000-05:00

On Tuesday, I sequestered myself in my apartment to force myself to do my thesis proposal. It took me the full day. I basically wrote down what I have been planning on doing, with some spin. I gave the draft to my advisor yesterday and I hope he will tell me useful things soon. My related work section needs some help. It is peppered with asterisk'es saying FIXME!

I am going to New York today. I have an interview with Google tomorrow. It will be a long day of interviews, followed by a sort of party afterwards that I'm told will include ice cream. I will meet up with my aunt, Eloise tonight. Tomorrow, Mike has promised me sushi. :-)

Ah! Jim's claw just fell on me!

I have homework due Monday. Didn't I just turn in homework?

*EOF*

Are you going to Scarborough Fair?

2005-11-07T10:32:00.000-05:00

Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. And celery, carrots and onions. And potatoes and beef. That is what is in my crockpot at home today. My crockpot is getting its third use since I bought it. I hope it will help solve my not wanting to cook during the week.

Last night, I successfully roasted a whole chicken, which came out well. The first one I tried to do, a couple years ago, turned out quite badly. So I was glad that this one won great praise from my taste tester, Mike. I was going to give my candied lemon peel another go, but while I was peeling potatoes, I took off a piece of my finger, and I didn't want to get lemon juice in it.

Michael and I are going to move. We were going to try to stay in our apartment until June, after I graduate. But, the landlord wanted an extra $200 for the privelege, and so we are going to go elsewhere. I talked to a realtor, and he said that a.) rents are softening, so we should be able to find something nice, for less money than it was last year b.) the prime time for rents to come up is in the spring or fall, so it wasn't very nice of the landlord to try to add this $200, because it would have been to his advantage for the lease to come up in June, to get another tenant. I am not excited about moving, because it will be the end of holiday season, and it will be winter, and I am injured and can't lift anything heavy. Oh well.

I continue to fret over my thesis proposal. I will try to write a preliminary draft today.

Interviews

2005-11-05T00:43:00.000-05:00

So yesterday, my interviews. They went well, I think. I didn't blow them away by any means, but I think they went okay.

The first interview was a phone interview with Tessella (TessELLa). The person I was speaking to was the HR manager/recruiter, and she was British. So, I had trouble reading her. She sometimes laughed, but not neccessarily when I was making a joke. I told her about my work at the media lab, and I convinced her that it was relevant and not merely an academic exercise. It seems that Tessella seems to have a bit of a stiff upper lip -- formal dress code, lots of travel, both as daily commuting, and possibly as longer-term assignments, expectation to complete extra training materials in off hours. So, they are still on the short list, but I don't know if they're still at the top.

The second interview was my on-site with Brontes. First, I thought I was going to be there for an hour, but I had been scheduled to be there for 3 hours. They all asked about my work at the lab, and my previous work at BU. I brought my laptop with me, so I could demo the bat tracker. But, since I installed OS 10.3, the bat tracker has been ungodly slow, so its not as impressive looking as it once was. They seemed suitably interested in / impressed with this. They asked a combination of technical and "what do you want in life" quiestions. Their technology is pretty cool, but I don't think I can really say much about its operation, because they asked me not to disclose details. :-/

I am still affected by a mysterious affliction. I slept like twelve hours last night, but I didn't manage to get through my class from noon till one. I am up now, watching Star Trek. This is actually an episode I don't recognize. Which is odd, because I usually recognize arbitrary episodes of Star Trek (Next Generation) by any arbitrary 30 second clip from the episode. I will spend this weekend trying to sleep off my affliction.

Stupid Tiles

2005-11-02T23:00:00.000-05:00

Today was solidly in the category of not-good days.

So, I get to the lab, and check to see if my demo is still running on any of the tiles. Of course, its not. Most of the tiles, the network connections have just timed out (stupid network), and it has properly crashed on two of them.

***TECH ALERT***
So, for the past week and a half, I have spent all of my research energy trying to track down this damn segmentation fault. (A segmentation fault happens when a program tries to get at memory outside of its little sandbox).

My program crashes in a blaze on 2 out of 6 tiles. And it only crashes in a blaze after about twenty minutes (better than it was ... it used to be two minutes). However, the long crash time is VERY ANNOYING because every time I make a change, I have to wait half an hour to figure out if something broke again.

I have also spent a significant amount of time trying to get the gosh-darn tiles to core dump, when they crash in a blaze. Gdb (debugging program) doesn't run on the tiles (or, we don't have a version for the tiles). So, when the program crashes, that's it. No more information than that. I have been trying to produce core dumps to run through gdb at a later time. First, I put in handlers to catch SIGSEGV and SIGBUS and abort. No core dumps.

This afternoon, I figured out that I needed to change the limit of the size of the coredumps, in order for them to happen. Yay! I got two cores. I try to put it through normal gdb, and it doesn't know what I am talking about. Go figure -- the core was produced on a different architecture. So, I dig around and I try to find a gdb for the tiles, or at least a cross debugger, analagous to our cross-compiler. I do, in fact, find such a program, called arm-linux-gdb. Hurray!

UNFORTUNATELY I did not realize that I had not compiled the stupid program with -g, so there was no debugging information in the core. SO, I recompile the damn thing with the right flags and set it running remotely, from my laptop, during MythBusters / the Celtics game.

Throughout the game, I am tapping my laptop, looking at the terminal to see if the thing crashed. It hasn't. "Oh good" I think to myself. "If I compile it with the debugging flags it won't crash." After MythBusters, I pick up my computer and try to kill the program on the tile. The gosh darn terminal is hung (network problems) and, what's WORSE, I can't get back into the tile to see if I got a core dump! ARRGH!
***END TECH ALERT***

One of the tiles, mysteriously, will not even power on. I open it up to find a crispy, blackened power connector. Good thing it won't power on, it would cause a fire!

Well, to top of my ills for the day, I got a bad grade on my test. :-( Which was all the more disheartening because I walked out of the test thinking I had it in the bag. Almost every point I lost, I could attribute to my own silly mis-reading the problem statement. This was most irritating.

On top of THIS, I have been trying to beat this ... thing. This affliction of mine. Since I had surgery, two months ago now (already two months?) I have been tired tired tired all the time. I can't keep my eyes open before 1 pm. This is above and beyond my normal -- being a night owl. I do not know what is wrong. I'm just tired tired tired.

So, I felt sad because of my test, discouraged because of the tiles, and I felt crummy because I am mysteriously ill or something. So I induced Michael to skip the gym with me, and we ordered Chinese.

I hope today is a better day -- I have interviews with two of the companies on my short list!!

Silly little Tiles

2005-11-01T18:31:00.000-05:00

So, I have pictures of my stuff: balls and tiles.
The balls are used as an input device for the tiles. The tiles have cameras on them, and they look at the balls and respond to them (we hope) in a meaningful way.

Here are some of my balls, erm, spheres, sitting in a basket.

These are the balls in various states of preparation: raw styrofoam, gessoed and sanded, and painted with colors.

Here is a paint program running on all of the tiles simultaneously. The tiles are running autonomously in this case.

Here is a drawing that spans many tiles (tile in the upper left corner is tempermental). This is like "the goal".

So, if you can think of any more interesting applications to put on the wall, please let me know! I need to do my thesis! I had thought of something like a bulletin board, or a model viewer (not shown.)
I know it doesn't look like too much, but believe me, it was really hard to get the last photograph! The tiles have very strong personalities and sometimes they are shy, and sometimes they just don't want to do what they are told.

A difficult Day

2005-10-31T22:04:00.000-05:00

After we got back from Maine last night, I felt yucky and I had a hard time sleeping. This morning, I felt like hell, but I trooped off to school anyway. Jim (my office mate) had asked me to give a lunchtime talk about my bat tracker, and I had forgotten about it until about ten minutes before bedtime. When I got to my office, Jim was sleeping on the couch, so I couldn't nap. So, bleary-eyed, I sat upright and worked on the presentation for the talk. The talk went okay. I forgot my VGA dongle (to make the picture from my screen go on the projector) and so we had to do some interesting maneuvering to make a picture happen.

During class, I was totally falling asleep. The past two weeks, I've felt like I've pretty much understood what was going on. At least, I understood all of the individual words. Something about information and entropy and communication channels and radio and television. You know, for such a "simple" device, telephones, radios and TVs are damn complicated. Well anyway, I roughly understood what was going on. I think.

After class, I was going to work in the conference room, but my advisor was in there with his freshmen. I tried to nap on the couch, but didn't get far. Jim and I are being kicked out of our lovely, spacious, 3-person office, and into a much smaller, 2-person office. I do not think the couch is going to fit in the new office, but Jim said that the couch is more important to him than his desk. Anyway, Jacky came by to give me a key.

We talked about what I should try to do, with respect to job-getting. She thinks that I should go for the start-up. She says that now is the best time in my life to do it, when I am young, the salary differential is low, I don't have too many committments. Mike gave me the green light to roll the dice with the start-up -- make less money and be less reliably employed than him, but take a risk that the company booms. At BAE , I'd be working for a unit that was just bought. She thinks this is a bad power structure to be involved with, and she is skeptical about consulting companies. We'll see.

Anyway, after I was done talking to Jacky, I tried to rest for a little bit, but I was restless. I went back to the conference room, and advisor-Mike and his freshmen were gone so I settled down for some bug-hunting. I have a good idea about the class of the problem, but I cannot find the site of the problem for my life. This silly bug has de-railed me something fierce. But, my demo is crashing, and it needs to be reliable. Jim's old demo would run for days on end. Mine won't run for more than a couple of hours. It was running at the lab when I left. If it is still running now, I would be quite happy.

I felt crummy, so I skipped the gym. I still don't feel great. I just feel wiped out. Mike has had some difficulty with his registration, and was quite flustered. So he was upset and I feel crummy. I will probably play hookey from school tomorrow. Clean the house, find my cell phone. Work on my thesis proposal.

*EOF*

Hello World! (2)

2005-10-29T23:36:00.000-04:00

So now, I feel like I need to introduce myself.
Most pressing on my mind at the moment is finding a job and doing my thesis.

What will your thesis be about, Diane? you ask.

This is what I have been telling sponsors about my work for the past two weeks:
This is the Smart Architectural Surfaces Project. We are working on creating responsive, context-aware spaces using modular units. We are trying to find ways for users to address the system as a whole, without cognizance of the individual pieces of the system. Here, we have created a system where the units respond to a brightly colored object, like this ball *shows red ball to sponsor* to either create a drawing *demo # 1* or to control the view of a model *demo # 2* (Will post pictures of demos later).

"We" is the Object-Based Media group at the Media Lab, of which I am a part. So, basically, what I am trying to do is put cool applications on the wall. The wall being composed of a bunch of computers, which all have sensors, so that they can respond to you. And they all have wireless cards so they can talk to each other about what they see.

Making these guys play nice together will be the subject of my thesis.

Now, about this finding a job business. My job search began at the MIT Job Fair on Sept 22. I think it is safe to say that I have been quite successful. I have had all KINDS of interviews. Many at the MIT career office. I flew out to California for an interview with Yahoo!. I had an invitation to an onsite interview from Google (pending). My hit ratio (on the MIT job site) of resumes submitted / interviews received is something lik 80%.

Right now, I have three companies on the short list: Tessella, BAE Systems, and Brontes 3D. Tessella is a scientific and engineering consulting company based in England. BAE is a military contractor. Brontes3D is a startup with a 3D imaging technology for medical use. I had preliminary interviews with Brontes and BAE systems last week, which went well. I have a preliminary interview with Tessella and an onsite interview with Brontes3D next week. (Excited! I'm so popular!)

Right now, I am at Mike's parents' house. His sister has a blog with cute pictures of his neice, and I was jealous and I wanted to join the party. I have been tip-tapping away for the past couple hours, and now *I* have a blog!

Hello World!

2005-10-29T23:26:00.000-04:00

I am a techno-phile at the head of the computing revolution. And yet, this, in the year 2005, almost 2006, is my very first blog post.