On Sunday, I was actually pretty girly and went out shopping with Stephanie, supposedly for stuff for Halloween and our upcoming conference. I was good and didn’t buy much, although I didn’t find the sort of shirt I wanted for my costume. I’ll just have to make do, I think. That evening I headed up the hill to Joe’s place to hang out, and, on the way, I noticed that the sunset was lighting some clouds up beautifully, so I stopped to take some pictures.
Monday I woke up feeling sick, but I’m at a point in the semester where I can’t afford to stop or slow down, so I worked a full day anyway (and then came home and worked some more). The notes my drugs are sitting from my turbulence class, where I have an exam later this week.
Currently teams from both my department here at Cornell and my alma mater, Case Western, are competing in the National Qualifying Exam for the DARPA Urban Challenge for which teams have built vehicles that will compete in completing a race in an urban traffic-like environment without a human driver. This means the robot has to not only get from Point A to Point B entirely without human direction, but must do so while following all the rules of the road and dealing with traffic - including human drivers as well as other autonomous ones.
It’s a pretty tall order.
I’ve been following TeamCASE closely through their blog, but TGDaily also has video (the second one) of their robot, Dexter, in part of the NQE where the robot has to perform left turns with traffic. Dexter does fabulously–exactly what I would expect such a great team of engineers and computer scientists behind him! Go TeamCASE and Cornell!
It’s an awful thing to wake up sick and know that you can neither stay home nor come home early in order to get better before you get worse.
Just so you know: those of you viewing this through RSS or the LiveJournal feed are missing out on the festivities.
Anniversaries are an occasion for Sekt.
I did quite a lot, on Saturday, beginning with donating at the blood drive on campus. Most of the rest of my day was spent working on slides for the first half of my APS presentation (personally, I think there are already too many, and I haven’t filled in the ‘previous work’ ones yet). Around sunset, though, Joe and I poked around down on the Commons before deciding that the restaurants there were all rather crowded and/or expensive, so we drove to Chili’s instead. This particular picture is one that I took out our sunset walk on the Commons. I wanted to capture the lights of the State Theater, as well as the general busy-ness of Cayuga Street. Still need to work out just how to get awesome nighttime traffic photos, but this isn’t bad.
I made my return to conducting experiments in the wind tunnel today. Unfortunately, today was not what I would consider a good day. On the bright side, however, I got some fun research photos. Have to have images for my upcoming conference presentation, of course. But that doesn’t preclude me from taking a self-portrait of myself working.
So I’ve spent the last couple weeks playing with an account on Pownce. It’s a fun little way of sending, sharing, and discussing links, files, events etc. with friends online. The thing is… it’s more fun when I have friends I know on the site. Enter the 27 invites I currently have. I’d like to give them to a) people I know who b) are interested in giving the website a genuine try. If you’d like to know more about it, try here or there. If you’re interested in giving it a go, leave a comment to that effect. The e-mail that you use for the comment (which, as always, will be visible only to me) will be the one I send the invite to.
Today I attempted (yet again) to make a hotwire with the 1.27 micron wire instead of our usual 3 micron stuff. When Stephanie etched the metal, we got a truly bizarre curlicue in the 1.27 micron wire. Miraculously, it didn’t break; but it was totally unsuitable for use in the wind tunnel. This particular image is one I took by holding my camera to one of the eyepieces of our microscope. It’s crude, but effective.
Ironically, this was not a photo that I’d originally had in mind as a Project 22 subject; I was just taking a picture of my professor’s notes on the blackboard because I hadn’t bothered to write them down. But somehow, the photo managed to capture the mood of today extremely well. It’s been a day where I’ve felt harried, confused, and generally unwell about my world and my place in it.
Tonight I spent a little time poking around the law school for photographic inspiration. The law school’s buildings and grounds are so beautiful that’s it’s truly a shock to turn around and see just how ugly the engineering buildings directly across the street are. Alas, that engineering buildings are confined to utilitarianism!
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