Brian's World

Crossing Paths

This summer is starting to wind down.  I finished up my RCOS work last week, with a poster session to be scheduled for sometime in the fall.  Feel free to check out my project, Bonsai Video, to see what I spent my time working on.  I’ve got roughly 2 weeks left before classes start, but I plan to move in early in order to secure my various locations around campus before squatters move in.  In addition, moving in early will provide me an opportunity to work with RPI TV and convince someone that they want to help film senate meetings.

I think most people in my current situation would say they are “moderately overwhelmed” right now, but I like to think of it as just very busy.  Nothing really HAS to get done before classes start, but I know that if I wait for classes to start I’ll be too busy actually taking the classes to have time to adequately do what I’d like to do.  Ideally, I’d like to deploy the new shuttle tracking application and a new senate website before classes start.  Shuttle Tracking is 90-something percent complete, with most of the work consisting of server configuration and some testing when the shuttles actually move again.  The new senate website is a little further behind.  My goal with it has been to make it as flexible and coherent as possible such that the person who takes over my job next year as CIO doesn’t have to scrap the whole thing and start over again like I am.  In addition I’ve got this whole RPI TV video-on-demand/streaming thing to play with.  I’m hesitant to invest too much time into things when someone else might be providing us with a solution or forcing it down our throats… it will completely depend on how well or not well it works.

Lately I have been experiencing a lot of “one upping”, whereby I try to do something decent only to have someone else to do something bigger and better.  Its moderately frustrating when I try to do something that I find challenging and then someone else goes and does something 4 times better like its no big deal.  It makes it more difficult for myself to generate a feeling accomplishment when I know that others are accomplishing more.  Alternatively, instead of doing something better and making my experience less than I intended it to be, there are those who react by writing off what I’ve done as nothing.  Alas I press on.

I believe I would like an order of “Cheesy Bread” from Dominos to eat for dinner sometime this weekend.

My workload is compounded by my parents prompts regarding grad school.  It seems they intensify every week, despite my attempts to keep them at bay by telling them I’m “looking into it” and “thinking about it”.  My will remains the same as it has: I would prefer to get a good job/career thing, but I recognize that attending additional education may make the most sense given the current state of employment in America.  I think that if there was a grad program out there that was of interest to me and wasn’t going to spend time teaching that I don’t care about I would probably pursue it over a job however I haven’t found anything exciting (that said, I haven’t found a good place to look for exciting things).  One of the major turn-offs to me are these faculty recommendations you’re required to get for admission to just about every program.  Personally, I don’t interact much with faculty.  The one class where the professor might actually have remembered my name ended up being taught by an instructor with limited credentials.