Is this a Team or an Army?

I still find it ridiculous the amount of people on an American Footbal team - no wonder no body plays passed high school/university as there is just way too much involved to organise things...

Survival

I have survived.

I have survived a challenging nine months, full of stress, education, fun and excitement. I have learnt a lot, and can say I am better for it - yay for graduate school in the US...

At the moment I am just trying to relax and do a little project before my summer internship starts.

Spring

With the weather warming and the last of the rain gone, wildflowers have sprung up all over campus. Here's a patch I thought looked good - interestingly I found out that poppies are the flower of California, and that they grow all over the place...

Easter Greetings

A Happy Easter to all. Sorry for neglecting my blog, it's been a tough year in terms of finding interesting enough things to write about that the average lay person would want to read, and finding the time to write it... ;)

So here I write quickly now
while it's buzzing in the background
writing a quick Easter word
that's short and not absurd
oh wait I have to go
busy me, I know...

Google April Fools Joke

Ha! Google is promoting a service to auto-reply to messages. It's actually quite funny because I studied that stuff, so to me I know that there is no way they could have technically achieved such a great auto-reply message maker. Take a look at the sales pitch yourself - http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/landing/cadie/

busy busy busy

So I have some interesting projects I'm working on here at Stanford.
1) trying to count and track stem cells that are dividing so that the biology researchers can quickly get the results of their experiments.
2) implementing a speech recognition system for the Stanford STAIR robot.
3) implementing a visual classifier for five objects, e.g. implementing something for finding all the mugs in a photo.

This has been a really busy quarter and at the moment I'm studying for my midterm test, or exam rather. It's three hours, so I class that in the exam category...

But anyway a happy Fat Tuesday to all, bring on Lent...

Two years away from home

The other day was my two year anniversary of being away from home. It seems awfully long ago now. I hope that all will go to plan and I will be able to travel back for a visit this year.

Otherwise I have been rather busy, and the time has just been flying by. Don't worry, I haven't forgotten about where I'm from completely. Every now and then I do get nostalgic, e.g. about what I would be doing at this certain time of the year, etc...

OpenCV MS Studio 2008

+++++++++++++Geek time+++++++++++++++++++++
===========================================
Ok I have managed to get opencv1.1pre1a working with MS Studio 2008.

Here are the steps I followed:
Go to this link and follow the instructions - BUT only:
- add the folders that actually exist
- additionally add to the source and includes sections, the other folders in the 'otherlibs' directory.

Unrelated but possibly relevant, I tried to follow the instructions here but they didn't work as I had to get GLUT, but after installing glut I still couldn't compile it... but then I double checked my project options and found that the steps I took in this link were outdated.

++++++++++End Geek time++++++++++++++++++++
===========================================

Winter Summer?

This past week, the weather has been sunny blue skies, with the temperature hitting about 18-20 degrees Celsius! Very pleasant winter weather :) heh, it could even pass for a cool Summer day for me ;) But the end of the week sees temperatures dropping slightly but it still looks all nice and not very wintry.

Natural Bridges Monarch Butterflies - Attempt II

My second attempt at seeing the monarch butterflies at their winter roost in Santa Cruz was a success! It took about ten minutes of looking for the supposed 1000 that was still around to find them. They were clumped together, and from a distance you would just think that they were leaves, but infact they were a clump of several hundred butterflies.

I was lucky enough to witness a micro burst - when all the butterflies in a clump spontaneously take to the sky. Thus they burst and it looked pretty neat with them all flying about :)

Then with some time and good winter weather, I went to the state park just up the coast. There I saw an animal only beach (closed for human access), two seals (which oddly enough seemed to be looking at me the whole time...), and a sea otter!! The sea otter was pretty cool. It was submerging itself and coming up with some food and lying on it's back munching away on it :] There were two seagulls following it to see if they could scavenge any leftovers.