Senior Year: Here I Come

  • August 20, 2009 2:51 am

Well, in short, it’s been a surprisingly fast three years at Case. In just a short few days, my senior year will begin. Before I know it, I’ll be walking across the stage at graduation in the spring. Seems things go so quickly when you’re so busy.

As I mentioned in my last post, I would be attending the 2009 Autonomous Lawnmower Competition hosted by the Institute of Navigation. Myself, along with a team of fellow Case Western Reserve University students, represented the university at the competition in May, 2009. After some frustrating hardware failures and last-minute MacGuyver fixes, we pulled through and came out on top. We placed 1st out of six teams in the dynamic mowing competition. Photos from the competition should make their way onto the site. Oh wait, the gallery is broken. Scratch that. One of these days, a new gallery should come online… and then new photos can be added. As you know, it might be another two to three months before I get that online, so don’t hold your breath. But know that it is on the list of things to do in my spare time.

This past summer, I worked at ENSCO, Inc., in Springfield, VA. I had an absolutely fantastic experience at ENSCO. My experience was so great, that I hope to go back and intern again next summer (between my Senior year and the beginning of my graduate studies.) In the mean time, I’m maintaining a few hours here-and-there with ENSCO continuing work on the project(s) I completed during my brief internship.

Ah, you see the “beginning of my graduate studies” there… Yes, that’s right; I’ll be staying at Case as part of the BS/MS combine Bachelors/Masters program in Electrical Engineering. That’s just fancy wording that should, if all goes as planned, allow me to graduate with my B.S. in 4 years (as planned.) And — with another year, my M.S. in Electrical Engineering. To kick off my masters studies, I’m enrolled in two graduate level courses this fall: EECS490 (computer vision) and EECS491 (artificial intelligence.) Other than these two graduate classes, I’m taking a relatively (only 15 credit) light workload this semester. However, I’ve got things to keep me busy…

… which is where the exciting part of this semester comes in. As I mentioned in the last post, I’m directing West Side Story for The Case Footlighters this fall. Audition information has been posted on the website (http://footlighters.case.edu.) Essentially, open auditions start on the Sunday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of the first week of classes. Callbacks are the following Saturday. First read through is the following Sunday. And, in about two months and one week later: performances.

I’m hoping that I’ll have time to blog about being director. If I don’t have time to do the updates, I’ll try to at least keep some semblance of a record of the notable parts of the experience so that I can write later.

Well, that’s all for now!

It has been a while…

  • April 14, 2009 4:59 pm

…since I’ve had the time to make a post. Granted, I don’t really have the time to be posting right now, but there some exciting developments in my life that I thought I’d share.

As many of you may or may not know, I’ve been involved with the Case Western Reserve University Footlighters for the past couple years. The Footlighters are a student-run musical theater organization dedicated to promoting musical theater at Case, CIM, CIA, and the in the overall Cleveland area (see: http://footlighters.case.edu.) We’ve put on productions such as Walt Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, Chicago, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, and The Pajama Game. We just finished performing The Pajama Game and had our semesterly show-selection meeting (a democratic process of the club members.) The results are in…

I’ll be directing West Side Story in the fall. We’re obviously months away from the production and don’t know much of anything yet.

But, I know this much:
1) Our performance will be in Carlton Commons in Cleveland Heights, OH.
2) Auditions will be held the weekend after summer break is over.
3) Callbacks will be a week later.
4) The show will be October 29-31, 2009. (8pm Thursday, 8pm Friday, 8pm Saturday, 11:59pm Saturday.)

Beyond that, no details have been set in stone… Some set design here-and-there has been sketched out… but I’m going to wait until later to share that :) .

So, after finding out that my show was voted in, we moved directly to officer elections. I was elected President of the club, and will be serving that post for the next school year. All-in-all: it was one of the most exciting days I’ve had in a long time.

What else has been going on? Well, the next month and a half is going to be non-stop work for me. I’ve got class until April 27th, and finals until May 7th. After that, I’ll be moving my stuff back home to Butler on May 9th. I’ll probably be home for about a week and will then moving to DC May 16th. I’ll fly from DC to Cleveland on May 17th to work on the Autonomous Lawnmower Competition until May 28th. We’ll drive to Dayton, compete, and hopefully win. We’ll drive back to Cleveland on May 30th or May 31st in time for me to catch a return flight to DC.

Finally, on June 1st, I’ll then start working for the summer at ENSCO, Inc. ENSCO were the fellows that gave us DEXTER for the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. I’m not entirely sure what I’ll be doing, or who I’m working for, but I know it is supposed to be cool stuff (that may even be part of classified projects.)

Anyway, I’ll try to give an update sometime at the beginning of June to let you know how everything went with the Autonomous Lawnmower competition!

Gallery2 Down! Update: Back Up!

  • July 29, 2008 6:56 pm

Just a quick note — My Gallery2 appears to be having lots of issues at this point. Not sure what happened. I can imagine it was something stupid I did when moving content for the new Footlighters site from my server to Case’s server!

I’ll try and get the gallery back up ASAP! (Thankfully I’ve got a backup dated 07.03.08!)

Ooops!

*** Update ***
I restored the DB and filesystem from earlier this month and got everything back up without a hitch. Todo List: More backups.