Recommendation done

The recomendation I needed to write is now done. I'll PDF and post it next week when I return to work. Now, time for some Thanksgiving fun!

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

ONR done

It turns out that the ONR program is fairly easy to apply for, while the Air Force program requires a lot of writing. So, I've essentially finished the ONR application while there's still lots to do on the other. Sigh. Now, time to write some reference letters.

I know someone who has a nice "Subscribe to post via atom" link on their blog. I don't see an easy setting and found a way involving template modification using Google. What am I missing?

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