Mission Accomplished
One of my missions in life is to be an advocate for all things TeX and MetaPost related. Today I had a break through with my roommate, Oscar, in which I, *without intending to*, persuaded him to learn LaTeX and MetaPost. It hinged around showing him Alan Kennington’s superb MetaPost illustrations for his forthcoming differential geometry book, which I will buy as soon as it is available, and I have money.
Speaking of books, during the time I spent here at the lab I have had the not so distinct pleasure of being able to check out books from their library. I have to say I was disappointed at the quality of it, however: UH has a better selection of books. But then again, all the people here can generally get funding to buy the books they might need for their specialized areas of research. I was particularly impressed by the lack of books on computer graphics related subjects: radiosity, ray tracing, etc. Even the programming and math book sections, which I would expect to be huge in a research environment, were sparser than UH’s. I did notice a few books that I would really like to have to read at my leisure, one of them “Image Processing and its Applications” edited by Al Bovik, is a phenomenally comprehensive (in breadth, at least) encyclopedia on image processing techniques. I intend to buy it as soon as my financial situation stabilizes.
Today I started on the first step in returning to Houston: shipping all the books that I bought here in Livermore back. I bought the box, which just barely holds them today, and I’m going to go buy some duct tape to hold it together tomorrow, or beg some off someone here at the lab, and send the box off tomorrow for hopefully less than $20. We shall see.
In another sense, my mission as an intern has been accomplished. I shall post my presentation here as soon as possible– hopefully the review and release process will be over tomorrow– and maybe write up a more sensible explanation of what it was I spent six weeks of my summer doing. I still have a few bugs I’m working on with the algorithm I’ve written up, but that’s ok– I figure they won’t use my code when I’m gone anyway 
They’ll say, “Oh, glad that’s over. Now the interns are gone, we can get back to the real work!”
Oh, my sister left for Italia the Saturday just past, and I haven’t heard from her since, which I thought really unusual, because Tuesday is her birthday. Whatever. Maybe she found some Italian guy to fawn over her. Why would she need her family, then?
Possibly relevant posts:
- So much to learn (3/19/2005)
- My first OSWD design– rejected (1/8/2002)
- Fast Lane (7/24/2003)