Laser cutter

The laser cutter worked like a charm cutting some Plexiglas. Lexan doesn't dirty the lens, but it's not consistently cutting. We're making progress...

New editor

I just enabled the new Blogger editor. Wow. It's nicer. The main improvement for me is a larger (resizeable) edit window. Hopefully, this will make posting a bit simpler. For the full solution, Windows Live Writer is even better; you edit on your PC, then upload the results.

Back to blogging

I've decided to try doing a bit of blogging, to better communicate what I'm working on right now.

Today, I'm trying to make progress on applying for the Air Force Summer Faculty Fellowship Program, which is due Dec. 7th. I need to write a two-page statement, gather references, etc. for this. Next up is the ONR Summer Faculty Fellowship Research program, due on Dec. 4th. I'm also working on writing a recommendation, plus various administrative things (i.e. entering publications into the BCoE database).

I'm out all afternoon watching the boys while Vika goes to a check-up. Then, I'm out Wednesday to Friday enjoying Thanksgiving!

The semester's gone by so quickly. It's amazing.

Still to do: Durga's paper; search for more funding; improve our group's home page; work on planning a workshop and building collaborations for Cosserat rod robotics (I call this Cosserbotics); plan for an in-class demo robot for Micro; and so on.

Misc thoughts

I've decided to move my e-mail to gmail. Observations:

• The use of labels vs. folders seems nice, but I miss the hierarchical nature of folders which I can't seem to obviously replicate in labels. In addition, if I create many labels, I don't see any way of putting more important labels higher up, making them easier to find.
• Moving my old mail over is painful; the only way I know of is to dump mail from a folder to my inbox, then label it after gmail slooowly sucks it in.

I'm mostly working from home. Hopefully, the use of svn, gmail, google sites and docs, and the Windows remote desktop + openVPN will make that fairly productive for me.

Since Vika also uses lots of google stuff, I do all my work in IE (ick) while she uses Firefox, so we can keep both accounts open at the same time.

Getting organized again

It's time to get organized and try to keep track of what I'm doing:

• Participate in group site redesign
  
• Write a summary for the group web pages plus an extended summary / mini-paper.
• Write a "how to read a paper" set of questions
• Finish the review paper
• Present / introduce twist theory
• PIC24 debug / improved comm support
  

Tuesday in hiding

I'm hiding this morning, doing research (or at least trying to). I modified the Windows bootloader last night to allow typing into the upper text box plus a command-line bootload then quit option. That should make Intro to Robotics much easier. I'd like to dramatically improve the speed, but that's a bigger project I probably don't have time for.

On the list for today: more tweaks of the inverse kinematics paper. Plus SECON registration.

MATLAB makes creating GUIs easy! And Google Docs is great.

Weekly meeting (5-Feb-2009)

Agenda

1. Durga: limiting case introduction. To be continued next meeting.
2. Next week: Dr. Jones will do some statics, showing some 2-D and 3-D derivations.
   

Dr. Jones

1. Admin
   1. Increase print quota. E-mail sent.
      
   2. Find funding to pay for CNC work for v2 of robot. Estimated cost: $250. Done.
      
   3. We have Maple 12, EndNote x2 CDs - install and return. Done.
      
2. Research topics
   1. Revise inverse kinematics paper -- currently editing
      
   2. Finish review paper -- on hold for now
      
   3. Finish limiting-case paper
   4. Begin work on NSF proposal