Checksum Arcanius

The first day of classes went well enough. With the help of a Windows XP scheduled task and Foobar 2000, I woke this morning to the sounds of the Halo 2 Trailer music (randomly selected). I left for class early, which was good because the first time I forgot my bike lock, so I had to return home and get it before returning to school.

My 7:30 BioChem hasn’t gotten too terrible yet, Advanced Digital Design is going to rock — we’re building a graphics card!!! — and Neural Engineering looks like it will be interesting while not too hard or time-consuming — perfect for a senior elective. Computational Bioengineering is tomorrow.

I also met some new lab members today, including the guy I’ll probably be working with on my capstone most of the time. He seems cool, so I’m teh happy.

I got paid back by Christine finally, from money she owed me since the Long Beach trip. Speaking of Christine, she was suddenly friendly to me yesterday and today, after not talking to me for most of the summer, and I’m not sure why. But these days I just assume the worst possible reasons so I can be pleasantly surprised if the real reason is something else. This also helps me avoid getting in to any more bad situations.

After classes, I biked down to the bus stop and took the 545 into work. While waiting for the bus, I ran into Todd, and we ended up taking the bus to the eastside together.

Overall, a good, productive first day.

Compared to the last iteration, on this one I have dropped CSE 444 (Databases) and added BioEn 499 (Neural Engineering). I am also considering taking CSE 401 (Compilers), which would be MWF 12:30-1:20. This conflicts with the Bioen 485 Lab (Computational Bioengineering), but I have already received approval to miss the middle hour of the lab from professor Wendy Thomas. Somewhere in here I have to find 12 hours to devote to my capstone as well (UPDATE: It is now included). Then there is work (UPDATE: Now also included).

UPDATE: The graduation plan page has also been updated.

With this latest addition, my overall GPA has reached 3.7 — w00t. The X simply means no grade — I have to complete another 6 credits of 482 before I get a grade in that class; it is my Bioengineering Capstone project.

Major recent events thats I would like not to forget:

• Presented a poster about my CREE project at the UW’s Summer REU poster session at Mary Gates Hall on Thursday, September 16, 2007
• My brother Ben and his wife Kaylee came to town last weekend. I got to play ultimate with Ben and eat dinner and watch Serenity with the whole family
• I’ve been spending about one day a week testing Cochlear implant users with the Rubinstein lab at the Bloedel Hearing Research Center at the UW Medical Center. A lot of their stories are truly incredible — cochlear implants have had huge positive impacts on most of their lives. Its great to talk to the subjects between tests and learn about their stories
• Today (Tuesday), was the final “required” CREE event, the third BRI lecture
• Also today, I got to run a major software package at work that I built. After a little debugging, it is working well, and it is an incredibly fulfilling feeling to have it working so well at this point

A little earlier today, I finished up my CSE 461 Networks Final. Predicted grade is a 4.0 ;-)

This means that I am done with summer school, for what should be forever!

To add to the delight, it is a beautiful day.

As part of my CREE Traineeship, I am in Long Beach, California, for the 34th Annual Meeting and Exposition of the Controlled Release Society. I’m not too interested in controlled release myself, but I came here for the location and the people. We got in last night a little past 10 after a slightly delayed flight, then we took a shuttle to our hotel before wandering around the waterfront for several hours, returning at around 2:00am. The night was nice and mild; this also means that there were many homeless people out and about or sleeping. We weren’t harassed too much though. Despite our wanderings, we didn’t find the beach (we happened to head the wrong way along the shore; my fault), so along with checking into the conference, I think we will try to find the beach today.

The hotel we are staying at doesn’t have any wireless, so this morning I went to the local Radio Shack and picked up a MIMO Wireless-G router. I’ve been without an extra router for a while, so I think it was a worthwhile purchase even without the current need. Plus now I can blog from anywhere in the hotel complex, and everyone around has access too, since I don’t implement WEP or WPA.

Now its time to shower after my morning job to Radio Shack and then head to the convention center.

This morning at 9:30 I had my first lab meeting with the Rubinstein lab group. I didn’t know quite what to expect, because I’ve never been in a lab group before. I ended up enjoying myself and leaving a little bit giddy about the skills I’m going to acquire and the information I’m going to learn during my capstone project. These guys truly are at the cutting edge; the state of the art. It is truly exciting to finally be here.

I also had a good meeting with my CREE project mentors — I finally have a pretty good idea of what exactly I will be doing and why it is exciting. I think this is going to be a great summer.