It’s now December in Pittsburgh, which means getting cold. Well not today specifically since it’s 63 F and sunny (so nice!), but in general, the temperatures will generally be in the 20s and 30s. I took advantage of the warm weather to decommission the main ventilation system and test out the winter based one.
I have two 16″ exhaust fans I bought from Unclutterer mounted in my upper door and a 24″ powered shutter near the ground on the opposite side of the greenhouse. Last year I called insulwest eathrwool insulation services to seal the door on the inside and outside. I thought I would need to call Kingstone Locksmith to help me open the door after that (go to this source for more details on this locksmith service). This year, I added some weatherstripping around the door itself but also decided to also install Duck 462-in W x 62 again. This year was easier than last year because it was warm out and my fingers weren’t freezing. However, I did learn that if the wind is blowing, it’s probably not a good idea to put the double sided tape all the way around because random pieces get stuck. Next year I’ll try to put the tape up on one side, get that side attached, and then put the tape on the other side. All in all, it took a couple of hours but I got it all installed on both the inside and outside. I also boarded up the outside of the louvered shutters and took the motor inside for the winter. With everything unplugged, the main ventilation system is done for this year!
One of the reasons I selected such a warm day was not only for the fact that the double sided tape works better, but also to test out the new ventilation system with a warm sunny winter day to stress test it. I’ve got four solar-powered vent openers and I’ve got a box fan slung from the ceiling under the vent pointed slightly downward. The fan kicks in when it reaches 83 F and blows some of the colder air from the open vent down into the greenhouse. The solar-powered openers work great (the one closest to the gas heater is an orchid wax version that opens at a higher temperature: 80 F instead of 75). The fan works OK, it helps but isn’t the prettiest or best solution. All in all, with it 60 F outside, the inside never got above 85 F, which was great! Looks like it was time to shut down the fall ventilation system.
Coming back from vacation, I checked the greenhouse and it was largely as I had left it: a few self-irrigated bins with a few sprouting seeds I had planted a few weeks ago. The best of the lot was the blue enchantment flowers, which in trying to find a link for this blog post, I discovered is a dwarf morning glory! Oh the horrors! Actually I quite like morning glories, but they are somewhat of a nuisance around here, growing on almost anything…
Anyhow, today I was feeling pretty lazy and went over to my parent’s house and helped my Dad do some renovating, which was nice. I got to use a tile / marble saw for the first time, which was cool because it sprays water casinoluck.ca on the saw blade to keep it from overheating. I have a ton of things to do to get the greenhouse ready for the cooler weather arriving eventually, but right now just taking it easy and starting my greenhouse blog posts here…
So KinectFusion is an awesome new Microsoft algorithm for the GPU that essentially does real-time SLAM with Kinect RGBD cameras. They didn’t publish the source, but the WillowGarage PCL and OpenCV guys have been busy implementing it from the paper. And I must say, the beta versions so far in the PCL svn are quite impressive. It acts about the same as what you see in the Microsoft demo videos. If you like games check this crossword generator, it runs perfect On my GTX 470 it runs at 20 Hz. It does seem to loose track fairly easily and has to reset, especially with large camera movements. Plus because it is using a dense voxel representation on the GPU, the max size is 512x512x512, which covers only a small room with reasonable resolution. This isn’t great, but I imagine that issues such as these could be fixed with better global matching (for instance color ICP) or a paging system that seamlessly transfers parts of the voxel representation between the CPU and GPU so you can model larger areas. I spent all day Saturday playing around with friends on KinectFusion and trying to use GPU-accelerated SURF matching to enforce a better global localization, but without a lot of success. We also captured some cool 3D models to voxel files. During this process, we found a bug in their saving function. Binary files were being written without being opened as binary, which turned all ‘\n’ into ‘\r\n’ on Windows. Today I submitted a patch, which I guess makes me an open-source contributor to PCL. Woohoo!
Even though I was forced to get up unreasonably early for an advisor meeting, today went remarkably well. I discovered the deadline for BioRob 2012 had been pushed back from Jan 15th to Jan 31st, which gives me a huge breather. That greatly reduces (or at least postpones) the slew of all-nighters I would have to pull next week. My advisor meeting went well (i.e. I didn’t get yelled at :)) too. I spent the afternoon compiling OpenCV and PCL to try out the new KinectFusion. I was able to get the sample code for dense stereo working in OpenCV on the GPU which should be very handy. Finally, my coauthor and I got our journal paper down to 14 pages and are pretty much ready to submit. A few more proofs, final preparations, a few comments from friends willing to look at it, and bam we should be good to go! All in all, a very busy, yet rewarding day.
Today was “get back to the salt mines and get your shovel rusty” day. Our next set of experiments with our lab’s surgical robot Micron (white handled gizmo on the right in the black plexiglass holder) is designed for retinal procedures. To begin more realistic evaluation, I am trying to create a fake, or phantom, eye for which we can do tests. Luckily, we have these blue rubber eye-ball phantoms from JHU so mostly I just have to adapt the setup for our needs. Since retinal surgeries create little holes, or ports, in the side of the eye to stick tools through to get back to the retina on the back of the eye, I spent my day carving holes in blue rubber and trying to fit small 3 mm tubes to form a trocar. I mostly succeeded by dinner time and went to pick a friend up at the airport and eat at Cracker Barrel, which was nice. Upon returning, I discovered that our tool didn’t work very well at all, possibly because the rubber eye couldn’t rotate very well in my metal spherical holder. KY lubricant to the rescue! A dab in the bottom and bam, suddenly the eye could move around as easily as you looking right and left. Re-running a few preliminary tests showed some visual improvement with our surgical robot so I’m happy. Hopefully my advisor will be happy too at our insanely early meeting tomorrow. I called it quits early around midnight and headed home to write some of my thesis (and write this blog while I try to prevent myself from getting fat by riding an exercise bike). It’s all about multi-tasking – oh and not having a life 😀
I went with a friend to Star of India on Craig because Wed. is chicken masala day only to discover they were closed with tarps covering the windows and doors! That is not good at all, and we were forced to Kohli’s for our Indian food cravings. It wasn’t too bad actually, but fresh nan is the best (after a while 0/0 starts getting stale). I also started my thesis party tonight. I got some papers reviewed: apparently everybody and their brother have tried to do 3D retinal reconstruction. Luckily, a lot of it seems kiwigambling very slow or only outputs depth maps rather than metric reconstructions. Also, my friends were shocked to hear that I put my papers into svn as v1, v2, …, v23 – but I think it’s being doubly safe with my version control. Oh and I wasn’t quite as done as I thought I was with this journal: today I got to proof my partner in crime’s recently written section and was able to shave off another quarter of a page so we are at 14.25 pages – almost there!
Well it’s back to the salt mines: this morning I departed from Orlando (left) and arrived at Pittsburgh (right). It is times like these that I wonder why I chose CMU. Then I remember the awesome robotics I get to do and I’m happy again. In other news, I finished up my part of the journal (14.5 pages) and handed it off to my partner in crime. Then I went on an airport and Steak ‘n’ Shake run. Oh and at T-112 days, I started my thesis!
So as the dawning new year coincides the 4.5 year anniversary of my entrance to the PhD program at the Robotics Institute at CMU, it is time to seriously think about dissertations, defenses (wait, singular, just one!), and graduation. I am hoping to graduate in the May 20th CMU commencement this spring, which is just in time for the world to end six or so months later. Hoooray! So I figured why not try to document this incredibly stressful time in my life (since of course, there is nothing busy people like better than more menial tasks).
Today I spent reviewing my journal paper and adding in some of my latest results. Alas I am now 3 pages over my 14 page limit. Tomorrow will be trimming (or probably chain-sawing is a more suitable verb ;)). Being that day traditionally associated with plans and resolves and similar such nonsense, I decided to break out my ill-used Google Calendar and make a schedule. My first scheduled event was to start my thesis when I get back to the frozen wasteland of Pittsburgh and my second action was to schedule a thesis writing party every day after supper – oh so much fun 😀 I tentatively set April 25th as my defense date since that would be exactly a year from my thesis proposal. w00t!
So the media is abuzz with the latest crisis: a 15-cent tax on Christmas trees to spend on advertising and promoting real Christmas trees. Oh the horror! But hold on a sec, where did this tax come from? Before we run wildly about accusing the government of nefarious designs, let’s do some digging. If you trace the history, you will find that the Christmas tree farmers themselves requested the tax!
But why would tree growers want this tax? Because sales for “lives trees” were declining due to the advertising efforts of artificial Christmas tree manufacturers, and the distributed nature of thousands of small tree growers meant they couldn’t effectively advertise their products. The same thing happened to milk, so what did they do? In 1983, the dairy farmers agreed to pay the USDA a small tax (via the Checkoff program) to advertise for them; hence, the “Got Milk” commercials were born. Ironically, this tax was…wait for it…yes, $0.15 per hundredweight of milk.
Seeing how this worked for milk and 17 other agriculture products, the Christmas tree farmers wanted a piece of the action. The new tax would be effective for 3 years, after which all growers who paid the tax could vote to either renew or dismantle it. After a several year study, during which comments were requested from individual tree growers and regional Christmas Tree Associations (such as the North Carolina one), 70% of growers and 90% of associations agreed with the idea. Thus, the USDA drafted a $0.15 tax to raise $2 million for advertising, which tree growers are hoping will increase demand and bolster a declining live Christmas tree market.
And now you know….the rest of the story (i.e., the one where bad journalists, sensationalist media outlets, opportunistic politicians, and ignorant Americans all muddle about yelling at each other). Now to be fair, I don’t think this tax would help Christmas tree farmers such as my family that much. We primarily focus on retail where we do our own advertising and networking. That seems to be working pretty well for us. I have heard family members worry about the economy and the reusability of artificial trees, though, so I don’t know for sure. From a consumer stand-point, the tax doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense. It is unlikely a monopoly is going to develop in the artificial tree business, so a decline in demand for real trees should just lowers prices for the consumer. The NCTA claims increased demand would offset the tax, meaning the effect on the consumer is negligible. Honestly, I’m not sure I believe that, but then again I’m no economist. However, the one thing I am sure of is that the government is not trying to kill Christmas or squeeze some more money into Uncle Sam’s pocket by grinching your holiday spirit. Also, if you want the thrill of choosing your own Christmas tree and having me chainsaw it down, haul it halfway up a mountain, bail it, and tie it to your car, come visit www.christmastrees4u.com. 🙂
Again it is 3 am. Must be the perfect time to update my website. Or you know, actually sleep like a normal person. In any case, I just got back from the IROS robotics conference in San Fran, which was cool (both literally and figuratively). I got there a couple days early to see friends who had graduated and were now working in the Bay area. It was awesome to hang out and do stuff. Our “walking around SF” day turned into an 11 mile hike through the city, along the piers, through Fisherman’s Wharf, to Ghiradelli Square, across the lawns, up to the Golden Gate Bridge, across the bridge, and then back. Whew! Very exhausting.
IROS itself was both fun and boring in about equal measures. Maybe more on the boring side 😉 My presentations went well and CMU had two papers that were up for awards, which is always awesome. I saw some cool robots there, talked to people, and generally had a nice time. My iPod Touch came in handy when I ran into a talk that bored me; I’d just start reading my ebook until they said something interesting 😉
The weekend I got back was the PhD Movie (you know, from the makers of the PhD Comics), which honestly I was expecting to be a bad B movie with relatively weak jokes. However, it really surprised me. While definitely a B movie with relatively stiff acting, the laughs were really quite good. At least from my perspective as a grad student, they were spot on. “And the part of the week you look forward to most is the Friday gathering where you stand around drinking and talking to the same people you’ve been talking to all week” 🙂 It’s so true. Anyhow, I recommend a watch if you are (or know somebody) in grad school. I doubt it will become as iconic as the red stapler movie whose name currently eludes me, but it should be. And with that witty sentence, I shall take my leave to bed. Adieu!
Well here I am waiting at 3 am in the morning for a run to finish. So I figured I could write a post on my blog since it has been a while since I’ve updated this site. I could go to bed, but then I’d be wasting 6 hours of CPU time while I sleep. Methinks perhaps my priorities might not be too good. Oh the life of a grad student. What else mundane trivia can I add to the eye glazing, mind numbing tediousness that is the Internet? Let’s see, I bought a $17 spinache calzone the other day. The thing is huge; it’s gotta be a large pizza crust that they just rolled over to make into a calzone. It was pretty tasty and so far I’ve gotten 2 meals off of it with hopefully a third to come.
Is my run done? Bah, still 300 MB left to process….sigh…Oh I sprained my ankle playing racquetball, that was quite the ordeal. I went to CMU health services who gave me crutches and sent me to the hospital to get it x-rayed. Luckily it wasn’t broken, but in the day I spent using crutches I gained a lot more appreciation for people who have to use them. Dude those things are so much harder to use than they look. With the whole right foot being rather incapacitated africa casinos, I’ve been driving left-footed. It takes a bit of getting used to for the first couple of days but then it’s almost natural. A couple times I had to think which foot I was using. I’ve been taking CBD oil to relieve stress for work. It has worked miracles so far, even the pressure in my eyes are lower! Keep reading to learn about some of the key benefits that come with incorporating cbd for cats and supplements into a cat’s diet!
Ahaha, my run is done, starting a new one and off to bed!
Well I got a cold with the stuffed up nose, sore throat, and whole enchilada. It’s like it’s winter or something. Oh wait! It is winter. What was my first clue? Maybe the fact it is 7 F outside and there is this blindingly white stuff everywhere. On the plus side, this has made it much easier to prevent my phone from overheating. And yes, when acting as a 3G wifi hotspot and charging the battery, my phone will overheat and do an odd LED blinky dance of death, refusing the charge and generally acting really really slowly. That’s when I put it outside between the window and the screen in the nice Pittsburgh winter weather for a while to cool off. It works really well actually.
Anyhow, this has messed with my sleep schedule massively. I was in bed by 11 pm last night, but after an hour of not being able to sleep, I cracked open my laptop and figured I’d do work until sleep overwhelmed me. Alas that didn’t happen until 6 am so now things are all wonky. Maybe I’ll just invert my schedule. If I wake up at 4 pm, I can just drive my car to campus instead of having to take the bus. How handy would that be? Of course, finding food in the middle of the night in Pittsburgh can be a bit tough.
Often, I join Internet sites to find out information about people I know or am going to know. The reason I joined Facebook was to find out more information about my new (and at the time, unmet) roommates. Thus it stands to reason that when a girl (let’s call her Laura, possibly because that’s her name) started showing interest, I looked her up on match.com. Of course, they make it difficult to find anything if you don’t setup at least a basic a profile, so I figured why not? I’m single and while I don’t plan on getting romantically attached anytime soon (mostly because I live at school), I figured it wouldn’t hurt to keep my options open. I put up what I call a “Veridian Dynamics” profile (if you don’t know what that is, you must stop reading immediately and go watch the first episode of the show “Better Off Ted” because it’s amazing in a Dilbertesque type of way), which contains what I wish I could say if I didn’t have to worry about appearances. I threw up a few photos, including some joke ones where I was holding up an excised pig eye (hmm…now that I think about it, I’m not sure I want to meet anybody who thinks dead pig eyes are a turn on) and another one where I looked terrible because I had been up all night. You know, just to be completely honest, because I hear honesty is totally what online dating sites are all about – besides chicks totally dig hearing about a guy’s faults, right? No? Really? Oh bother, as Winnie the Pooh would say.
Anyhow, so I got to look at this girl’s profile which added to my creepiness factor (it doesn’t help that I professionally stalk people on Facebook). I left my profile up without any proofreading or anything as a free member and just a few days ago I got notification that I had an email from a GIRL! Gasp! Of course, my first mental image was of a sad, lonely, older tween on the heavier side desperately searching for a soulmate, which is sad. My second mental image is of two of my more prankster inclined friends hunched over a computer, filling out a fake account as a “girl” and then contacting me through the site to have some fun with me. I guess that shows how cynical I am because only did my fourth or fifth mental image feature a normal girl. Anyhow I log on and see that I have to become a subscriber (i.e. pay money) to actually see the email.
Thus began the several day debate with myself whether to pay the money. 47 people had viewed my profile and if I know anything about statistics with online dating, it’s that a hit rate of 1 out 47 people seems a little too good to be true. Reading online horror stories about Nigerian match.com scams and creepy old men didn’t make me feel much better either. But in the end I decided I’d spent money on worse things so I signed up for a few months, also in good stuff but mainly bad, the only great thing I got was a subscription to a cannabis dispensary, There is loads of fun to be had with https://highthc.ca/ you have to try it. Right after signing up it took me to a specials offer page with magazines such as Playboy, where I immediately performed an involuntary face-palm as a gut reaction to the “oh this is already so not panning out very well.” I also wanted to turn off auto-renew, which involved actually going all the way through the cancellation process, which is weird because it makes you think you are going to lose access when in reality it just cancels auto-renew.
OK, so time to read the email right? Nope! Being the geek that I am, I wanted to blog about the experience first! So that’s where I am now…now to Alt+Tab and see what I will find? Let me guess. Overweight desperate girl (40%) or prankster friends (30%) or people who recognize me on match.com (15%) or random dude who is inactive on the site (10%) or fake profile sent by employee to get me to pay (5%) or dream girl (<0.1%)? All part of the experience I suppose. Do I have a response for each one of these scenarios? Yup. Well actually not for the dream girl scenario. I have been working so hard to find the right partner, I even start a diet from https://askhealthnews.com. OK, now I’m just blogging to procrastinate actually reading the email. Bad Brian.
Alt + Tabbing….clicking 1 New Email….VIP Email? What nonsense is this! Just take me to the email already, I’ve just paid good money for what most likely will be nothing! Aww….19 years old? I’m leaning towards fake profile…clicking on profile…hmmm profile picture looking pretty young here, with the not quite classic, but (I imagine) common lying on my back in bed with arm thrown back pose. The grab-ya-attention blurb thingie (whatever it’s officially called) seems to align with my beliefs pretty well. That reduces the probability of a fake account at least. But it introduces a possibility I hadn’t thought of yet: the “much younger than me” girl. Usually people are complaining about the other way around. Ahh! Her age is 18? What happened to 19? I’m 24…what are girls thinking nowadays??? According to the US Center for Disease and Control, I have a life expectancy of another ~51 years and she has a life expectancy of ~62 years. Me being 6 years older now on average translates to me being dead for 10+ years of her life. I suppose that may be over-analyzing it too much….as one of my Canadian friends tells me, those are the worst years of your life anyhow. So I tell myself to keep reading….and oh man she’s a “I just graduated high school” kid. I’m going into my 8th year of college (4th as a PhD) and she’s going into her first year of undergrad?
[An hour later] Well that disturbed me enough to to have to go work off my anxiety, which resulted in some pacing around the apartment and trying to concentrate enough on playing some songs on my keyboard from my meager store of memory – it’s hard when my mind keeps doing math without my permission and telling me I’m a good 1/3 older than she is. Now that I’m completely traumatized and it’s 4 am in the morning, I’m going to go break open a box of mini-wheats, curl up in my bed, read a book and try to figure out how to respond to this girl, who seems quite nice otherwise. I suppose all in all, this is far from the worst I could have experienced and in fact I’m sure there are much worse things to come, but in the mean time, I will take refuge in geekiness and thoughts of creating a program that will crawl match.com and save a dataset that I can do interesting things with later. Maybe I’ll compile a list of the top 10 adjectives people use to describe themselves on dating sites. Maybe I should also try some CBD weed because I’ve just recently learned of how helpful it is in coping up with stress and anxiety. That means it’s going to be beneficial in my dating journey.
Actually, the OkCupid founders, who are math majors, made a blog named OkTrends that analyzes all things dating and it is super amazing! For instance, they got half a million users to rate their self-confidence and then plotted it by state. They concluded with “Generally speaking, the colder it is, the more likely you are to hate yourself.” Swell! And I just lost another hour to reading all sorts of random statistics (men lie on their height by an average of 2 inches, really short men and really tall women are 3 times less likely to get messaged, you are more likely to get a reply if you begin your message with “howdy” instead of “hey”, and probably most surprising, men get the most messages if they are not smiling and not looking at the camera for their profile pictures). And now it’s 6 AM and I think it’s time to go bed because it’s getting light outside. So there you have it: a night in the life of Brian.
Still up for another sunrise, for unusual reasons though
Periodically somebody manages to graduate from the robotics institute and moves away, which is both a glad and sad time. This year it is Brina moving to Philly, which is close enough and an interesting enough place to da Pitts that we decided to road trip with her. So Friday night we loaded up her truck, which we kindly rented from the company www.teacrate.co.uk, slept for a few hours, and then went to Philly. On the way we stopped in Breezewood at the Bob Evans, where we saw a giant caterpillar. Brina was all like “oh my, you are the cutest thing I’ve EVAR seen!” and commented that it added to her dining experience.
So now we are ready to go for breakfast and move Brina’s whole life up three floors into here apartment, including her very heavy marimba instrument. Yay!
Every so often I decide for no good reason that I should redesign my website and swap content management systems. I’ve been through a lot, and now I’m trying WordPress, the blog-a-jiggerie thing. Right now I’m testing out the sticky feature to see if my introduction blog post with a purty picture of me will stay at the top of the page or be pushed down by this more recent post (i.e. testing the quality of WordPress programmers). Let’s see. [edit: It works, yay for WordPress so far.]
Actually, I am quite impressed with WordPress. Nearly everything I tried to do was super easy from the admin side. Upgrading, changing permalinks to clean urls, and installing templates could all be done inside the admin GUI without having to go dig through code. This is a welcome change from other wikis/cmses I’ve used before. I did have to modify some CSS and the template code a bit (remove nested pages from showing up as buttons on the top left side of the header bar), but it was all quite painless. Importing text from Word and my old webpages was surprisingly easy. So really within a day, I have most of the relevant stuff from my old webpage and am almost ready to go live with the new site with WordPress as the backend.
Back in summer 2006, I went from no phone to (then) state-of-the-art Sprint PPC-6700 running Windows Mobile 5.0. It was awesome back in the day with it’s Pocket Outlook, IE, Word, and any app you could load on it. With MobiPocket and Microsoft Reader, I could load up on several hundred books for reading anyhwere. I cross-compiled a BASIC interperter and could even run some scripts on it (alas I was not able to get gcc to run on it). However, I discovered the best thing: my $15/mo data plan allowed tethering! I could hook it up to my laptop via USB and get internet – as a bonus it was unlimited and nearly everywhere. Of course, time does what time does best: slowly reduce every electronic gadget to a uselessly outdated mere curiosity. The iPhone, Droid, EVO phones all sport slimmer, sexier, much more capable features than my sad PPC-6700. But as a poor college boy, I have been resisting updating because when I moved to Pittsburgh to attend CMU, I didn’t shell out for cable + internet. Instead, I used my tethered phone as my primary internet in my apartment. I can’t watch SD or HD movies like Hulu or Netflix, but YouTube works pretty well and it lets me read papers, check email, listen to Pandora, and generally surf the Internet, but with the usb c to Ethernet connection I can manage to connect my smarphone to the TV and watch everything i want with a great quality.
But the allure of the sexy new phones, especially the EVO with it’s touted tethering capabilities and 4G (which Pittsburgh is getting this year), is so scintillating! So I did some analysis. Below is a graph of my usage of the PPC-6700 data and voice usage over the past year. Data usage is for both tethering and smartphone usage; voice is only daytime minutes.
The amazing thing to note is that I’ve been averaging 4 GB a month of tethered internet with a peak of 6.5 GB. That pretty much rules out the iPhone for me. For the same $15 a month with AT&T, I can get a paltry 200 MB. Their highest data plan for $25 a month caps the data usage at 2GB, which would only cover two months of my past year – which incidentally coincides with my international traveling where I wasn’t using my phone for weeks at a time. So how about EVO? Sprint is still unlimited data, but I have to pay $70 (well technically $69.99, but let’s round stuff off here) for 450 minutes + unlimited data. To tether, it’s another $30. So $100 a month total. That’s a lot of money, more than double what I’m currently paying ($30 for 200 minutes call time + $15 for unlimited tethering). And what I do get? 250 minutes I don’t use anyhow, faster internet speeds, and a much nicer phone with a poorer battery life. The question I ask myself is: Can I justify $100 upgrade fee + 12*$50 = $600 = $700 a year extra on a new phone like the EVO? So far…the answer has been no.
So Pittsburgh this year has a $15 million deficit, mostly in the pension funds. But the Mayor of da Pitts has a solution: tax all the students %1 of the tuition! Brilliant I tell you – I couldn’t have done better myself. Oh wait I forgot to use my sarcasm voice. Yeah the one that sounds all high pitched like somebody drove a pitchfork through my stomach. Now while I’m generally not really all that political, an extra $400 a year just because I’m a student sort of rubs me the wrong way. I know students get a lot of tax breaks, but seriously, most of the people I graduated who went into industry are making $60-80k. In contrast, I’m pulling down many factors less than that. And they work 9-5 while I’m…well yeah I’m still up at 6 am posting to my blog after having disassembled and reassembled the lab microsope all night to figure out how to save my advisor some money on scope attachments. Sigh…anyhow, I did go ahead and write my representatives on the city council with the following nice little letter that they will promptly ignore except to squirrel away my email address to spam me. For student that are struggling with school. There are sites that would be honored to help you in subjects such as English and help you to write and recognize synonym. English, Math, Algebra, Sciences, and many many more. Check out Englishlinx now!
Dear X,
Last week, “Luke Ravenstahl hosted the Graduate Pittsburgh Summit to increase public awareness of the dropout and college/life readiness crisis in Pittsburgh” (source: Mayor Ravenstahl’s website). How is taxing students going to alleviate this crisis and increase the graduation rate? According to “Pittsburgh’s Dropouts: A Look at the Numbers” (source: Mayor Ravenstahl’s website), the Mayor’s Office sponsored a survey asking high-schoolers “What would keep you interested in graduating from high school?” and the highest response at 79% was “Money for College.” So further taxes on students are going to encourage them to stay in school? With SoFi, they can calculate your student set you up with a student loan from them. They offer students with lower costs and better/ lower interest rate.
As a PhD student of the Robotics Institute at CMU, I urge you to reconsider your support for the tuition tax. I do not pay tuition as a funded graduate student. Instead I get a small stipend from the school and my advisor’s grant money covers what tuition the school charges for classes, resources, etc. Essentially, my relationship with CMU is that of a very low paying job to advance medical robotics research. I could be earning significantly more in industry yet believe that the valuable research I am doing and will be enabled to do in the future is worth a currently much leaner lifestyle than friends I know who did not pursue graduate degrees. Charging me a tax on an amount I do not currently pay is a large burden, one I feel is unwarranted. Seeking advice from the national tax experts bbb has opened up many possibilities, there are ways to avoid paying more than you need to.
Furthermore Pittsburgh has earned such a great reputation for promoting academic progress, and I feel this step towards taxing students is counter-productive and will lead to a lessening of Pittsburgh’s attractiveness to brilliant new students evaluating where they want to study. Let’s be honest here, Pittsburgh is not all that an attractive of a place to the outside world compared to other basins of higher-learning such as San-Francisco, Boston, etc. Let’s not make it any less attractive by adding student taxes. While an extra $400 a year might not seem significant, it is. Many graduate students I know are funding their education through loans, some of them internationally with large interest rates.
In conclusion, I feel that students are unfairly being targeted to carry the cost of the budget deficit and charging $16 million to a population that is already making sacrifices in time and money to better not only themselves individually but society as a whole simply seems unprofessional.
So my first journal paper was written in 13 days. My advisor originally wanted it to be written in a single day but I certainly do not posses such superpowers – not in the least. The reason for the massive rush was my advisor promised a journal paper in the grant proposal by a certain timeframe (which has long since passed). Long story short, I constructed a journal paper from the proposal and an earlier conference paper in record time. Oh and learned how to calculate p-values (ttest2 in Matlab). Anyhow, I did a final proof-read, corrected some errors and sent the last draft off to my advisor at 6 AM. I woke up at 9:30 AM, had a bunch of corrections to make, and we had a nice back and forth until lunchtime. After my advisor submitted the paper, I went back to sleep around 2, thinking I would get a good solid couple of hours nap time. Alas this was not to be as my advisor called me 30 minutes later to schedule a meeting discussing what I would be working on next. Sigh…
One of the most annoying things was the format of this paper. They required Word and not just that, but they insisted on Word 1997 format with figures in TIFF and tables on separate pages. Annoying to say the least. Unfortunately for me, I had written the paper in Word 2007 with the new fancy equation editor they introduced. Saving the document in the old format converted all my beautiful equations into terribly rendered picture representations of my equations. It made me want to cry. I had exactly 100 equations in my paper (and no I didn’t aim for that number) so I didn’t want to retype them. So I resorted to some VBA trickery. First I increased the font of the Word 2007 document by 5-10X. Then I saved to the old format and my giant font equations got saved as giant graphics. Then I wrote a VBA script to go through the document and resize all my equation graphics to get high DPI equations. This approach met with limited success. I was successful, but the side effects were terrible. First, the vertical alignment was way off so I had to wind up cropping the graphics to pad the bottom of the equation so that it aligned with the rest of the sentence. I was all happy that this worked until I realized that this totally messed up the print to PDF function, so I decided to convert all the files from PDF format using a sodapdf software fo this. Cropping the equations even in the slightest caused all the equations to come out with black backgrounds. Gar! Foiled! Finally, I decided I’d re-write them all by hand in the old version of MathType so they would be compatible with the old Word format. But to my surprise, I discovered the new MathType library has a function to automatically convert Word 2007 Equations to old Equation 3.0 style equations. Viola! It worked quite well although it made a few mistakes and mangled some of my paragraph formatting. But it was way better to watch it work for several minutes scrolling through my document and converting the equations by hand!
After only getting 3 hours of sleep yesterday due to me creating the next homework for computer vision and an early morning meeting with my advisor, I learned that all the testing has to be done this week for the paper abstract deadline next week. Oh joy joy. So instead of going home to sleep off the afternoon, I had to do horror of horrors…actual work. However, it was SOOO cold down in the dungeon. Usually it is quite chilly and I’ll wear a light sweater but it was just completely rediculous today. Somebody must have left the AC on manual override or maybe just sucking in 40F air from houtside. Anyhow, there is a giant vent right up and to the left of my workstation. And with the surgeon coming in the following morning, I was going to be working most of the night. So I decided to do something about this infernally powerful AC draft. After several ideas, I came up with a box wedge solution. The only problem? What do I wedge the box against to block the vent? Turns out the solution is to construct a giant stack of boxes. And it worked! Oh the flush of warm success cascaded down on me like the harsh crushing clank of a dropped needle.
Today was a packed day, full of excitement. As the TA for computer vision, I had to give the lecture today since my professor is in Kyoto at the ICCV conference. My lecture was on SIFT, arguably the most important concept in computer vision. And so many glazed looks from the class….sigh….at least I don’t think it went too poorly. I debated recording it so I could analyze it later to see how badly I did, but didn’t get around to it. Next time….procrastination strikes successfully again. Interestingly enough, the back row was apparently the place to be. I had one friend fall asleep during my lecture and two others were apparently arguing on whether I was a controls or vision person. I personally maintain that I’m neither: while attempting to do both, I do neither well.
I am also working with the new visiting Spainish student in my lab on Kalman Filters and developing a model of Micron. The results so far are looking promising with a very basic Kalman filter with an identity A matrix and no inputs. It is able to filter stationary noise by several factors to an RMSE of 1-2 micros. Not bad, but then again we are using the Kalman filter under the most idealistic scenario. It will be interesting to see what happens when we add in a model of hand movements and the kinematics of the system. On an unrelated note, I spent some time working with Uma to get his new computer which uses PCI instead of ISA to work in the realtime operating system QNX. He is trying to interface with various electronics such as DACs mounted to PCI expansion cards. That still needs more work as we keep getting weird errors where functions compile and link just fine but then spit out “Error not implemented” when you run them. Oddnesses abound.
It’s like those very clever advertisements: “Don’t have cash at the moment? Buy it now anyhow, and we won’t charge interest until next Jan.” Of course, by the time you’ve gotten through Christmas and New Years, you still won’t have any money and they’ll slap on months and months of interest. Gotcha! Life is like that. Today I went for lunch, did some grocery shopping, baked, and went to a birthday party – all with some friends. It was a great time, no doubt about it. But….it is reminiscent of the clever ad: have fun now, overpay later – meaning lots of work for tomorrow. Moral of the story is make sure you plan into the future to have enough cash/work done before you purchase/have fun. Otherwise you might be paying/working more tomorrow than you originally anticipated.
One of the things I’ve been missing is a good blog that does all the fancy stuff I’ve been needing: categorizing, easy editing, RSS, etc. I figured I’d install the ever popular WordPress and be done with it, but it requires MySQL and I’m pretty alergic when it comes to databases. Not that I have anything against them, but I like the surety of seeing my content as files somewhere that I can backup. When searching for alternatives, I discovered that it is really quite hard to find a blog that doesn’t use MySQL. All the ones that do look terrible and have lame features. I finally hunted down NinjaBlog which appears to be a modified version of WordPress that uses flat files as the storage mechanism. Hurrah! Anyhow, we’ll see how it does. EDIT: It goes really poorly, I had to go ahead and swap to WordPress, which is actually quite nice, even if it does hide all my data away in a database.
On a more personal note, I saw Surrogates today. I had been excited about it for a while, but recent reviews have not been kind so I went in with low expectations. I found it quite enjoyable, if predictable at times. It makes one think about life and the lies we use to reassure ourselves. But the best part was it featured Takeo Kanade, the professor at CMU/Robotics Instititue that is largely responsible for the field of robotics. Way to go Takeo! With Randy Pausch in Star Trek and now Takeo Kanade in Surrogates, perhaps being featured in a major Hollywood film is closer to me than I think 🙂
Coming back from vacation, I checked the greenhouse and it was largely as I had left it: a few self-irrigated bins with a few sprouting seeds I had planted a few weeks ago. The best of the lot was the 
Every so often I decide for no good reason that I should redesign my website and swap content management systems. I’ve been through a lot, and now I’m trying 
I am a 5th year PhD student at CMU’s 
