Am I really creating the first day log of today? That's cool. And for some reason, I just assumed that all the day log nodes just existed and people added writeups to it. But, hey, you learn something new every day.
So, this has been the beginning of what promises to be a completely unproductive weekend. I woke up around 1:30 today, didn't actually get up and get dressed until after 3, and didn't start doing anything until 5:30. Then, I made some phone calls, bought airplane tickets to Atlanta, ate dinner and then played poker with some people from my boyfriend's fraternity.
I've never played poker for money before. In fact, I would have to say that I've never really played very much poker in the past. Needless to say, I lost pretty quickly, which is why I am upstairs writing this node, instead of downstairs, taking people's money away. But, I did learn a bunch of new games. Did you know that there are about a hundred million variants of poker? So, we played Seven Card Stud, Baseball (which is like Seven Card Stud except 3s and 9s are wild and you get an extra card for every 4, and you have to pay a quarter for every 3 you are dealt), Challenge (a terrible, excruciatingly boring game, but one where I won most of the money that I eventually lost), My Guts (a good game because it moves pretty quickly), something about Queens that I don't remember the full name of, and probably a few others. They play pretty low stakes here, so I only lost 5 dollars, and it wasn't my money to begin with. All the same, I've had enough. Too many people downstairs, being too loud and making me claustrophobic by hovering over my shoulder.
I didn't write a day log yesterday, so I'll say a few words about it. I gave my first lecture ever yesterday. It was for the class that I am a TA for. I don't know the full title of the course, but it has something to do with Data Structures, and it's in Java. The professor was out of town, so I gave a lecture about word search puzzles. The class is 50 minutes long, and I ran out of material to talk about after 25 minutes, but no one ever minds if class ends early... :-)
It got sunny in the afternoon so I tried to take te Robobuggy out to take pictures of shadows, but as I was pushing it up the hill, the program crashed. I noticed because it stopped responding to the remote control. Since there's no video output, I had to take it all the way back up to the lab to figure out what was wrong with it. I still don't know what the exact problem was, but the program had frozen, not crashed. Hmm..
By far the most exciting part of yesterday was that I got an email from Maja Mataric. She's the director of the Robotics Labs at University of Southern California, and her research is primarily about multi-robot controlm which I'm very interested in. I read a bunch of her papers last semester and her work seemed awesome. Anyways, she sent me email saying that she's intersted in my joining her group if I decide to go to USC, and she would provide funding for me and she wants to call so we can talk about it over the phone. She's so hardcore, and she sent me email!!!!!!!!
On a totally unrelated note, I've noticed a trend in the things I node about. Most of my writeups are about:
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
feminism
Judaism or Israel
I just think it's
interesting beause if you asked me what things characterize my life, I guess I would have answered "
Judaism" and
maybe"
feminism", but
Buffy was kind of a surprise. Well, at least
E2 is helping me to learn about myself. :-)