online treasures

Found this on a test I was taking online for a biology class.  I loved that it was part of the answer.

fish sticks and guitar music

My niece and nephews staying with us are pretty fun.  We just had dinner and they were a blast tonight.  I wasn't able to spend most of the day with them (like each day since Sunday) because I had a study group for a quiz I have tomorrow.  But when I came home, we had a great time.

Dinner was a classic dinner at the RFC.  Yeah, you guessed it.  Fish sticks.

We love fish sticks at this house.  We eat them all the time.  My father is actually quite in love with them.  We have them about once a week but tonight they were also accompanied by home made baked fries and a romain lettuce salad.  Yum.

But the best part of the evening was sitting in the front yard.  We haven't had a great bench in the front yard so it normally gets quite a bit of neglect.  But for Father's Day, we got my father a new bench and it's changed how we spend time here at the RFC.  It's warm so now we can spend as much time as we'd like out there.  We all sat around the yard on the bench and some camping chairs.  I got my guitar, my father played his, and we sang songs that the kids knew and loved.

Summer rocks.

life is like lego star wars

So I've spent the day with my niece and nephew.  It's been a blast.  I have learned a lot from my nephew who is 5 (although he claims to be 200), mainly that babies are born knowing how to do backflips, climb houses and jump off without getting hurt.  Little did you know, right?

You can learn a lot from kids.  I have found that my nephew follows after my own love of videogames.  While the rest of the family was getting some sleep (8-hour time difference calls for some jet-lag) he played games on my computer for quite a while.  In fact, in anticipation, I bought some games on Steam for just this occasion.  Not too long ago, I sent them a link to Sushi Cat, a flash game that is well known and easy to play and they have loved it.  So, since Steam decided to have a major sale, I thought, "why not?"

So in a depression of spending way too much money on things that don't matter, I thought, I'll buy some for me to make myself feel better.  Here's the list of new games:

(For the kids... and myself)
Plants Vs. Zombies
Peggle Deluxe
Toki Tori

(for me)
Audiosurf
Deus Ex
Deus Ex: Invisible War
Half-Life 2
Half-Life 2: Episode 1
Half-Life 2: Episode 2
Half-Life 2: Lost Coast
Left 4 Dead
Left 4 Dead 2
Portal
Team Fortress 2

So yeah... I may have gone a little overboard.  It's okay though, I figure that I've wanted these games for a while and they were all on sale.  Nice.

Just so you don't think that this is all we do, I've also had them on the trampoline and playing outside.  I'm not THAT irresponsible.

all in a days work

There's a reason that I love my job.  That reason is because it rocks.

There has been a summit planed where kids would come and see each of the engineering groups do presentations about their field and how it "changes the quality of life."  And as a naturally born awesome person, of course they came to me (and my group) to present on behalf of the computer science department.  We were thrilled because we really haven't had much to do since school got out, so we quickly got to work coming up with some ideas to show how computer science helps for a better life.

First stop, the SCI institute.  Now SCI does some pretty cool things.  They have movies about doctors who are doing surgery on patients just by looking at monitors doing images and representations of what they are working on, they have models of chemical explosions with timelines to see how everything looks at a given time in 3D space, and countless other cool stuff.  So we thought, "Hey, let's do a tour!"

Next, we recycled the module they did from last year.  It's based on a simple green screen and the program would take in the first photo, and a second photo to overlay on only the green parts.  This is a thing they do in basic movie making to make the characters look like they are somewhere else because the second image (of Mt. Everest or cemetery) is overlaid.  This makes actors happy, because they don't have to climb Mt. Everest nor do they have to deal with rotting corpses climbing out of the ground hunting bbrrrraaaaaaaiiiiiiinnnnnnnsssss.

For two weeks setup and stress, the group coming was a tad smaller than I had expected.  There were only eight.  Now, don't get me wrong, this worked out pretty well for us because we could do some more one-on-one helping with our presentation (which rocked.  Hard core) but I hope to get the word out a little earlier next time so we can have TONS of kids.

It was fun and I think the group had fun too.  They were quiet, but they seemed interested in the stuff they were doing with our groups today.  We go again Friday so they can show us their finale.  (A letter/ powerpoint going to the governor).  Awesome.