Mail #1

I came home today to find my very first piece of mail. (actually my second, mom did send me a card earlier...)

I stepped inside the door to see a box addressed to me, with a little Battle Droid picture strapped to it. Inside I found the following:

One Reversible Belt (black on one side, brown on the other)
One Pair of Black Suspenders (way better then the belt)
One Medical Insurance Card (way better than both the belt or suspenders... lol)
One Bottle of Lizano (if for some reason you have not met my father, you should get some, it is amazing!)
Two AA batteries (I assume for my camera)
One card from James' Parents
One card from my Parents
One Popular Science
Various Comic clippings from the Spokesman (I didn't get one of them)
One very robust looking dog toy for Benny
Four rawhide bones for Benny
One bag of very melted chocolate candy things...
One bag of Quake Oat squares
One bag (at least 2 dozen) of my mother's world famous snicker doodles.

Others take note... my mother sets a high bar, however I challenge anyone to beat it. :) Contact me if you want an address, I don't think it would be a wise choice to post it here.

Thanks Mom! Thanks Dad!

Oh, as for the day, it was good! When I was walking to the bus, at about the 2 block away point, I saw it drive past.... ugh... they are about 30 mins apart. Oh well, I was not in any hurry. I had class at noon, which was a very interesting and informative look in to how we perceive the world around us in terms of the visible spectrum and the actual mechanics of the human eye. We also got our first assignment, just before the advent of color photography a guy took a whole bunch of pictures in Russia, but he would take 3 consecutive photos, the first with a blue filter, the next with a green filter, and then one with a red filter. He knew that at some point there would be a way to combine all of them. That is what we get to do, but a little more sophisticated. We are going to be using Matlab (yep James and Jamie, I will also be using Matlab) to write a program to automate the process of lining up the photos and cleaning them up a bit.

After class I had a bunch of time to kill, so I took a research integrity online course. They require this of all grad students, basically it is outlining how research works, and some very important dos and don'ts in the research world. Around 4 I went over for the first of a series of Thursday talks that the ECE department puts on. Today a guy from Berkley lectured on Ultra low logic devices, it was very impressive, a little over my head and outside my interest, but interesting. After this the Lunar X team had an open house, they are competing for Google's Lunar X prize, basically the first team to get to the moon with a rover to take high-rez photos gets an exorbitant amount of money. CMU is one of the leading teams, it was very interesting, and I might contact some of the people to see if I could help out.

After coming home, Larry made a very good dinner, with BBQed chicken with Corn, green beans and fresh potatoes. All around a great day. Tomorrow should be great too! Welcome Friday!