four weeks? seriously?

Four weeks left in school and I have way more than four weeks of stuff to learn and do this semester...

So it's looking like I will be at Virginia Tech doing research this summer in storyboarding type stuff with Dr. Scott McCrickard. I'm looking forward to it. It's completely different than anything I've ever done, and it's fun to get a complete social restart somewhere. You can be anyone you want to when no one knows you. Not that I plan on changing much, it's just nice to have no history preceding you.

I was also accepted into a REU at Ithaca College. It was longer, farther away, and similar to my previous work, so (with the advice of my mentor, Dr. Hodges) I decided against it. My opportunity was then given to Toni, a computer science student here and one of my very good friends. She hasn't decided whether to accept or reject it yet.

It's a really happy time. All my friends are getting to do research where they want to--CIA, UNC-Charlotte, Department of Defense, Harvey Mudd College, Naval Research Lab, Harvard...we'll come back in the fall with all kinds of experiences and knowledge to share.

Things have been crazy stressful lately because so much has been due, but overall good. I've had good and bad days. Lack of sleep and high pressure situations make me an unhappy person, but I think the worst of it is over now and things should be returning to an approximation of normal.

Okay, so, for the interesting part that you might actually care about.

I was debugging in the lab the other day with some younger CS students. One of them had a problem with their code that took us a half hour to track down. His code looked like this:

string temp; //\
temp = array[i]; // \
array[i] = array[j];// swap
array[j] = temp; // /
temp = ""; ///

Logically it's correct. I spent a very long time putting in cout statements figuring out what was going on. Turns out nothing was ever being assigned to temp and things were going wrong from there. Why? This guy:

//\

Even though it is commented out, the \ character is a newline symbol in C++ (thanks, Amy, for helping me figure this out!), so the comment carries over to the next line, nothing gets into temp, and things die from there.

Other recent accomplishments include:
-- learning to use pthreads in Linux, vaguely
-- realizing that PHP is a lot more powerful than I initially thought
-- finishing a paper and a presentation on computer vision
-- reading some of I, Robot
-- working through a Bach piece for juries
-- making my roommate procrastinate from doing work

I wrote a quick analysis program for Avari, my research project. After leaving her out in the hall for people to speak to for three days, she's held 80 conversations that were over 10 seconds long. We'll do more detailed analysis soon. It should be interesting to see how this turns out.

Okay, enough of this for tonight. More coming later.