FIRST DAY

1009: first day of real classes...just eating breakfast (coffee, cheese, bread, oj), reading feeds and what does it start doing outside? rain, what else? pat, you told me it was going to rain a lot. i believed you, but living through it is something else entirely. :) in the past week, 2 days of sun, 5 of rain. oh, well.

new find: www.playthisthing.com

843am: wow, it's pouring down rain. i mean really pouring. i'm taking a movie of it. i'll try to get that and all the other movies posted tonight.

557pm: back from an entire day spent at FMI. i had class with Robert Jan Smit today. he's the resident robotics/hardware expert. he was about 45 minutes late (lives near amsterdam) and he's a lot of fun. i spent the first 45 minutes watching a dutch soap opera (see above). robert showed us a bunch of his work...we (me and one other first year, more further on) spent the first half hour tearing apart some old equipment looking for a functioning motor to tape to the side of a fish tank that Robert had filled with water and put a mirror in. the idea being that robert would project images onto the mirror which was angled to reflect the images onto the ceiling. the water made the images ripple and distort a bit, but not enough, so Robert wanted to tape a motor to the side of the tank to make high-speed vibrations. :D it was a lot of fun and didn't work right in the end, so we abandoned it. later on i helped pascal clean out our shared space, just the two of us and it's huge. i need to get some pictures of the studio tomorrow to upload and share with everyone. still working on finding a linux flickr uploader, or i can do it the hard way. met one of the other first years today: cheung hong song (enoch) from hong kong. he's 36 and pretty cool. lives in the same house as i do, upstairs, but on the same wing. i'm going to go exploring later and try to find his room. also found out that there is only one other first year, bringing the grand total IME first years to THREE. annica (de managementassitent) told me today that soon (within the week) my name and school email/website links will be up on FMI website. which is cool and makes me feel a bit more legitimate :) yep, grandma, this place exists :)

oh, and it's raining again. :D i'm going to go take a shower and eat. bye all.