So it’s the middle of week 2 of the 10-week REU program. What better time to write about week 1?
Monday: Move-in day
Travelling to Wisconsin was surprisingly smooth. I’m the kind of person who expects a lot to go wrong, probably because that’s what happens. It’s one of those “If you expect the worst, you’ll be pleasantly surprised if things go well” mentalities. The plane was delayed 30 minutes (apparently there was something wrong with the AC) and the departure gate was moved, but I’m willing to call that “going well.” The 2-hour flight was uneventful, and one fairly quick taxi ride brought me to the apartment around 1 pm.
Two of my flatmates had already moved in, but they were out when I arrived. I didn’t want to just claim a bed without talking to them first, so I checked out the apartment while they were gone. It’s pretty nice: Oven, stove, full sink and refrigerator in the kitchen (with plenty of cabinet space); two bathrooms, both with showers; the world’s oldest functional TV in the common room, etc. There’s one bedroom downstairs, which was completely open. I didn’t want to take a bed in there since it is right next to the common area and is connected to the downstairs bathroom. The other two bedrooms, which are upstairs along with the second bathroom, both had one bed claimed already. I ended up rooming with DW, a (if I recall correctly) math major who attends UMass Amherst.
Tuesday: Orientation
Orientation started bright and early at 9:00. OK, so that’s really not that bad at all. It was all pretty straightforward: Meet the mentors, fill out paperwork, visit the lab, tour the campus… Normal stuff.
The lab is pretty cool. There are about 20 computers, half Linux boxes (Fedora 15+) and half Windows boxes (Windows 7). There’s a server cabinet with all the tech used for research, such as the Linksys routers and the system that controls them. (I’ll go into more detail later.) One side of it is a large glass window that looks into the center of the building.
Lunch…sucked. I accidentally ate potato bread because I thought it was just plain white bread. Thankfully, I didn’t throw up this time.
The campus tour was more or less uneventful. One cool thing we saw was a chapel built in the 14th century. Allegedly, Joan of Arc had visited it! I spent a good amount of time trying to figure out that little mystery… Turns out the chapel was built in the 14th century in France. It was eventually moved to a Long Island estate, which burned down. Marquette University then obtained the chapel, which was shipped brick-by-brick and rebuilt on the campus. The Joan of Arc thing could still be true though, for all I know.
The really interesting part of the day was the e-limo tour. Marquette has one of those “Safe Ride” programs: Students can call up and get a ride around campus if they need one. The engineering department recently finished a multi-year project to create an electric “limo” for the program. I say “limo” because it’s really a van with an electric motor and many, many batteries attached, plus some software to manage the whole thing. It’s quite good, especially since students did all the work on it. It had some trouble going up hills and has a top speed of around 35. (Officially, anyway. Our driver was the faculty member in charge of the program, and he’s managed to get it above 50. At around 45, the program interface for the van crashes so you can’t really keep track of the speed.) You’ll get there, just not very quickly—and really, it’s designed to drive in the Marquette Campus, so range is more important than sheer power. It was very cool to see a big student-led project have a concrete and useful result.
Wednesday: Library Tour and Research Day
Wednesday started with a tour of the Rayner Memorial Library, which is the main library for Marquette. It’s a very beautiful building. I have no real need of it right now, since most of what I will be looking up can be find on the Internet. Also, it turns out that we can’t check out books from the library, which is just great. Though I was very intrigued by Marquette’s integration with online journal databases. TCNJ has many of them too, which I am sure some of you are familiar with. Marquette takes a step further through an app/online service for creating, organizing, and using citations. You can pull them straight from the database, then use the same app to throw them into your Word document. I think there’s even support for BibTex for those of us who are awesome enough to use it. I haven’t investigated it too much yet.
That started at 10 a.m. and took an hour, which was great since I had an appointment with my mentor, Dr. Dennis Brylow, at 11. Unfortunately, he wasn’t there, so it didn’t happen. I went back around 3 or 4 after hearing from DW (my roommate) that Dr. Brylow was back in the lab. We still didn’t really have a meeting then, since he was busy trying to fix some computers. Oh well. He did give us homework from his OS class in order to refresh our C and to give us a first look at the Embedded Xinu operating system.
Thursday: Research Project Day
Thursday started with another research meeting at 11. (I realize the sections are getting shorter and shorter – and with reason. There’s less to talk about! Pretty much everything from here out will be about my research with maybe some social stuff mixed in. I’ll try to keep you posted about what I’m doing, what’s going wrong, and so on, but there’s not much else!) After talking to Dr. Brylow about possible projects and different areas that Embedded Xinu can be used, I decided to port the Lua scripting language to Xinu. It’s a big project, and like many other things, I will post about it later! Ethan, who lives in the apartment with me, is also working under Dr. Brylow, so he picked out a research topic at the same time. He decided to bring Xinu to the ARM architecture. (Check our user pages for more information.)
Friday: The First Researach Day
Friday involved showing Brylow my homework, which I did very well on, and looking into my research. The big event for today was going to the Brewer’s baseball game at Miller Park against the Pittsburgh Pirates. Most of the REU students went (two of the girls had to go home, I believe). It was…fun? I spent most of it talking to people about research and things. We left at the top of the 8th, Pirates winning 8-2. I’m guessing that the Pirates ended up winning the whole game.
The Weekend: Relaxing Days
Saturday and Sunday were spent watching movies and relaxing. I watched “A Monster in Paris” with a couple of my roommates. The movie is about, well, the titular monster in the titular city. It’s originally a French film, and is a very good mix of Moulin Rouge! and Phantom of the Opera. I highly recommend it. The soundtrack is absolutely beautiful. The animation and voice acting are also very high quality, and I was surprised how good the plot was! It’s a movie that definitely should go on the “watch” list.
On Sunday I opened a Netflix account and started watching Avatar: The Last Airbender. It’s fantastic. I’m absolutely in love with the show. (Maybe I’ll write a post about my observations on bending. Maybe not.)
So, really, that’s the account of my first week in Milwaukee!