So I overheard a conversation among my roommates yesterday. They were complaining that the cable has been out for over two weeks. I had to turn around and interrupt to see if I had heard correctly. Apparently we haven't had cable for over two weeks. I never even knew. Which is both good and bad. Good because I haven't turned the TV (my TV) on in over two weeks. Bad because I haven't had enough free time to have even sat down on the couch to turn the TV on in over two weeks.

At this point, I'm just looking forward to when I move out and the apartment is empty, because I'm the only one that owns anything. Then the bums that sit and watch hours of TV a day are going to have to get jobs to pay for a TV of their own. Let's see in the living room I own: TV, Surround Sound, Xbox, wireless internet router, DVD Player, Curtains (bought from Josh), movie shelf, 95% of the movies, the coffee table, and the 30' coax cable to connect the cable to the TV. Which leaves the couches and the end tables (all provided by the apartment complex).

I'm going to Beverly Hills tomorrow for an interview. I'll let you know how it goes.

[This Entry]

Vegas was fun. I'll try to put some pictures up here eventually... I don't really have time to be writing this post, but I'm taking a short break from my project. Brady has some pictures up on his blog, so if you follow the link on the right you'll see some and his summary of the adventure.

We mostly relaxed in the hot tub which was quite nice. We saw the sharks at Mandalay Bay which was neat, and a sea turtle - sea turtles are awesome. We walked the strip, and stopped to see the fountains at the Bellagio (always my favorite). Inside the Bellagio we saw the Jean-Philippe chocolate shop, with their fancy chocolate fountain. We went shopping at the open-air outlet mall, but didn't buy anything. We had dinner at Black Angus, which was excellent even though the waiter spilled a drink all over the table. We went to Sacrament meeting with Josh's brother, sister-in-law, and nephew. Josh made a little girl cry; but it was an over-reaction on her part. Driving home took way too long due to: 1. construction just south of St. George. (We stopped for lunch at Denny's in St. George, which was excellent). 2. Multi-car accident 1 outside of St. George. 3. Multi-car accident 2 (including an upside-down SUV (see Brady's picture)) outside of Cedar City. It was snowing/sleeting/raining pretty much the entire way back. I drove from St. George to Provo, and whenever I tried to start moving again after being stopped in traffic the tires would just spin. These conditions, and sitting through the traffic for these accidents didn't slow anyone down though when as soon as the accident was passed the people in their SUVs would start flying down the road at 90+ MPH -- morons.

Now we're back, I have another CS478 project due tomorrow that I'm hoping I won't have to stay up until 7:00 am to finish... so I should get back to work on that. Then I have a CS455 project due Friday, which I'm about 80% done with.

[This Entry]

This is the post of pre-trip information. Stay tuned after the specified dates for post-trip information. This coming weekend, Presidents' Day weekend, we will be taking another brief vacation from Provo to enjoy Las Vegas. I'm not entirely sure who all is "we" but I believe at the moment it is at least Josh, Christine, Brady and me. Josh and I have possible plans to take a run down the strip Monday morning to make up for missing our regularly scheduled run on Friday. That could be fun. It's going to be a relaxed trip, we'll probably wander around the strip, hang out at the pool, and just have fun.

On March 1 I will be flying to LA for a day (I have plane tickets with my name on them -- well, in electronic form anyways) to visit Madison Tyler Trading, LLC. (I still plan on attending grad school starting in the Fall, but I might as well keep my options open in case that falls through, right?) They want to interview me and see how I like their offices. It looks like a really interesting company and I'm willing to hear what they have to say. One thing I need to figure out though is what to put for "Desired Compensation: ___ / month" on their application form. Looking at that spot I realized I don't have any idea what an appropriate or fair value would be. I wouldn't want to put something too high and appear arrogant, but nor would I want to put something too low and appear either naive or desperate. And then, their offices are in Beverly Hills, so it's not like you can really live in the area effectively without a 6 figure salary. Here in the lab we're trying to decide whether it's acceptable to just write "competitive" in that spot. Oh well... I'll just have to see what I can find out about that kind of thing....

[This Entry]

So I had a Machine Learning project due today. I was hoping that it was due anytime today; but I emailed the professor and he said it was due in class at 9:30 am. I had already done a healthy piece of it, but it was a big project that required a lot of code, running data through, analyzing the results and writing a report about it. The project was implementing the ID3 Decision Tree algorithm for classifying data. Once it was running it was really neat to see that it could "learn" how to identify something based on it's attributes. I had gone through all the pseudo code in the book and rewrote it in my own pseudo code so that I understood it better. I started working on the project at about 4:30 in the afternoon yesterday. I took a short break for dinner, and then another hour for running. At 1:00am I went to 7-11 for Mountain Dew. I drank 1 Liter between 1:30 and 2. From 5 - 6 I drank another half liter. I finished all of my code around 5 and then I had to write the report. Obviously my writing a report between 5 and 7 am was going to result in the most awesome writing ever. Regardless I finished up at 7 and emailed it to myself so I could print it at work before class. So I set my alarm for 8:15 and went to bed. I had been up since 9 that morning.

This morning I got up and stumbled through my morning routine, not sacrificing hygiene for sleep. Printed off the report, and went to class. After class I went and bought a couple of books on sale in the Wilk and had "lunch" with Courtney. ("lunch" because I had a bagel, and she had a vegetable tray... we weren't very hungry). Then I crawled underneath the table in my lab and fell asleep for an hour before jogging class. In jogging class we did a training run for about 2.5 miles. Then I went home and slept for another 2 hours. At which point I got up and cleaned the kitchen and made dinner for dinner group (BBQ Chicken pizza, yum). Then Erin dropped off Will and I watched him drag out 80% of my movies, read him his counting book, fed him fruit snacks and generally just laughed at him being silly. Mollie picked him up and then I cleaned the kitchen again. And now I'm going to go to sleep for real... Because I need to get up and study for my History of Creativity test that I have to take in class at 11.

Weekend, please come soon.

[This Entry]

I went to the Divine Comedy show with Josh at 7. It was great, some really good skits. I get back to my apartment and check my email. I have an email waiting for me from one of the companies I talked to at the career fair on Wednesday. They want to fly me down to their office in Beverly Hills next week to see their headquarters and to conduct some interviews. It's kind of exciting. I look forward to seeing what they have to offer, but I still plan on telling them that I want to use the next 2 years to earn my Master's Degree, and if they're willing to put me through grad school then we've got something to talk about. I won't say the company name here, but they are a financial company that uses lots of custom designed software to enhance their trading ability and lower their operating costs. I'm definitely interested in hearing what they have to say. Of course, if I were to go work for them at some point in time I don't know how I'd live near LA. I'd have the same problem Mike has, a 600 sq ft, 1 bedroom, 1 bath in Beverly Hills cost $500,000. But hey, it's a free trip to California for a day, and I might as well at least hear them out, right?

And tomorrow morning Jessica is having people over for waffles. Yum. This has been the best day I've had in like 6 months.

[This Entry]

Ok, so as my last post said my boss was happy with my progress, but check this out. So I've been working on making a program that will take a satellite image and then produce a synthetically textured high res image for us to use in our flight simulator, Aviones. I just finished some more tweaks and created almost 60 texture swatches for the program to choose from when making the new image. On the left you'll see a screenshot using the original image, and on the right one using my artificially created image and my tree models (which I built into the simulator last summer). They're links and go to a full size image each. Isn't that just awesome, it looks like it could be from a video game.

Original Screenshot	Enhanced Sythesized Screenshot with Tree Models

[This Entry]

Today has been a really good day, and I see it continuing through the evening. Josh picked me up this morning and we went up to the MVM office and I signed my contract for Spring/Summer. So I now have somewhere to live in the summer. I'll be living in Millrace North Condos with Josh and Brady again. We are going to have a blast. Basically anticipating the end of April is my motivation for the semester. Graduation, moving in with awesome friends, getting a car, not having classes.... After signing the contract Josh and I went over to Starbucks (where Josh is working job #2) and picked up some hot chocolate and an apple fritter (so good). Then I came up to work, got some stuff done, went to class and then headed over to the Wilk to help with the Board Booth. It was lots of fun. Got to wear a paper bag on my head and hand out fliers to people. Won free tickets to the Divine Comedy show tonight by performing a stupid human trick. Just really enjoyed being there and being alive. Now I'm back at work, writing this, and will soon proceed to get some more good work done.

Oh, and my boss came by yesterday and I showed him my current progress. He was really happy about it, and felt that it was coming along really well, so yay for being good at what I do.

[This Entry]