Oose?

China was all kinds of awesome.  I was a huge fan of the food and thoroughly enjoyed seeing such an ancient yet rapidly-changing country.  If you’re a fan of facebook, I’m sure you’ve seen most of the pictures by now.  There was a lot to see and a lot to reflect on, and hopefully I will get down to writing a more thorough breakdown of all of the things that happened over there.  My family enjoyed the gifts I brought back for them, including the paintings for my mom, the sword for John’s graduation, and the jade pillow for my grandma (oh yeah, and everyone else got chopsticks and a sake set).  I had the most intense case of ‘it’s a small world’ on the way back - a prof I had interviewed with for a position at Purdue was sitting in the Tokyo Narita International Airport waiting for the same flight back to the States.  There was a brief and awkward moment of recognition followed by the silent agreement that we weren’t going to exchange a single word for the duration of our travels.

Right now I’m looking at closing out my first two weeks a graduate student here at ND.  The project I’m working on is pretty cool and I’m really hoping that my efforts on it this summer make a good impression with my advisor and the EE department as a whole.  Even though I’m already known around here, I feel like I had never had or taken the opportunity to really shine and show these people what I can do.  I have had my advisor and the two other CCLI faculty on this project as class professors before, but it’s been almost two years since those classes and it’s time to reestablish myself with them.

The CCLI investigation should have me playing with the RPI Mobile Studio IO Board project for a while.  It’s unknown as to whether or not we will eventually adopt this learning system as a stepping off point for the curriculum changes proposed in the project, or if the lessons learned from exploring with the board this summer will convince us that the entire solution needs to be packaged in-house.

The band softball team is kicking butt already.  We destroyed Beers Law 20-1 on Tuesday and hope to repeat this accomplishment against Eigenvalues tomorrow.  The team has been a cool way to keep in touch with many band people, some graduated, some not.  EO and Merten are on the team and they always seem to add their own bits of fun and personality to things.  Hopefully I will stay in touch with them throughout the awkward grad years.

Outside of research I have been keeping busy scrounging for an extra part-time job and working out whenever I can motivate myself to do so.  It’s hard to get the routine going again, but I’m confident that something will solidify by the end of the month.  China jet-lag had me getting up early enough in the morning to allow time to run and eat a healthy breakfast, but alas the insomnia has worn off and I am back to my old ways.  It would help a lot if I could find a consistent lifting partner.

I was cool to be home and see my brother’s graduation party.  Both John and Mike are headed off to college this coming fall.  The inter-school rivalry (however small) between Notre Dame and Purdue should provide a few laughs next year (God, I hope we win).  I’m sure that John will have a good time at Purdue.  It’s a good school with a lot going on and many different niches to find, including clubs, academic societies, and band.  My parents think he wants to transfer to ND for his sophomore year, but knowing John he’ll probably settle in just fine and find his own identity in West Lafayette.  Notre Dame is a great place but I think my experience here may have skewed his expectations of the atmosphere and the people.  I’m sure he would have been happy here, but sometimes these things happen for a reason and he will end up wowing some people at Purdue.

That what I have for now.  I keep promising myself that these updates will get more regular so that the quality of each topic will get better and less rambling.  Alas, I will have to save that for the next post.

-R