So, just in the rare and unlikely case anyone is interested about how I am spending my time, I’ll give you all an update: Right now I am working on two major projects, and preparing for qualifying exams.

The first major project is an NSF funded endeavor called InTEL (Interactive Toolkit for Engineering Learning). The project is a significant high profile collaboration with the engineering department and my home department of LCC. It’s a pretty crazy project, we’re basically trying to proceduralize Statics and make a software program that will help students understand its core principles and use contexualized and real-world examples to help emphasize the relevance of the discipline. Right now we can do a small subset of it, but we’re planning the rest, and it is my responsibility to develop a schedule and coordinate with a new programmer for the summer work. Also, there are about a dozen bugs and things that need to be fixed before the applet is deployed to students next week!

Mermaids is an MMOG based around the principles of emergence. We’re building it with Multiverse, which is a great and powerful architecture, but still in its developmental stages. Since I’m the person on the team the most familiar with the architecture, I’m responsible for coordinating the work that everyone else is doing and getting it incorporated into the whole. We have models to convert and import, areas to build, and there is the social system and the ecosystem plugins to get working. Most of this needs to get done before next Tuesday, when one of the students is presenting his MS thesis that uses Mermaids. Also, there’s Demo Day.

I am also going to be taking my first qualifying exam and am busy covering a ton of reading to get there. The good news is that I only have about 20 texts to read or review before the exam, which is the day after Demo Day. Exciting!

Given that I’m currently wrapping up the 2nd year of the PhD program, I have a lot of people, such as my advisors, asking me, what am I going to do for this degree anyway?? So that’s been much on my mind. There’s a lot to be done there.

Also, Audrey and I are moving. So we need to find an apartment. Our deadline: Demo day.

So amidst all of this, Audrey drags me to see Explosions in the Sky, which were playing locally. It was hard to put the work down and let it go for a little bit, but it was not disappointing. Beautiful harmony and loud distorted guitar noises are awesome.