updates

ok so haven't written a post here in a long time. life has been incredibly busy again with finals and projects coming up. i'll make this short and to the point. about three weeks ago i did my first presentation during group meeting. i think i did fairly ok. was a little nervous of course. but advisor didn't grill me too badly. the preparation for the talk was the most difficult part. essentially i had to present something that was already proven to be np-hard most of the time. =\ anyway, i'm glad that i got to do that. finally feel like a grad student officially.

last week i skipped out on group meeting for the most part because i had a class at the time. of course on monday i was told that advisor made one of the visiting students cry. and this week she was missing from the group meeting. i think she's still pretty shaken up. words got around pretty quickly, think my advisor is going to get a reputation of making girls cry during group meetings. haha. but to be honest, i don't think it was his fault. the girl was never very well prepared during her previous talks. and also, it's obvious that her mind wasn't sat on doing the necessary work. so maybe crying is a bit too extreme, but at least she can use the reminder that she's here not to enjoy life, but to put in some hard work like everyone else.

last week i finished the project for dsp with my group. it was actually a very interesting and practical project where we took a wav file and converted the sound into readable notes. i thought that was pretty cool. at least much better than the stuff i have done before. now i just have to focus on doing the last two hw assignments and the two finals.

in terms of research, i'm back to where i started last semester. the problem is again taking a symmetric matrix and decompose it into two rank 1 matrices. i wasn't able to do that last year. but i'm thinking maybe i know how to do it now. hopefully the code i wrote before will still be useful. anyway, we shall see.

last week marks 6 months since ruby and i got together. =) were supposed to go to dinner last weekend, but both of us got really busy, so hopefully tomorrow night, we can finally go out to get some quality food. =)

ok back to work now.