Where are all the Yellow Roses?

It's my second full weekend here in Texas, and I'm inside, not enjoying the sunshine. To be fair, I took a book and sat outside for a half an hour and tried to read this morning, but after about a half hour i started to break out in a sweat, so I went back inside. I guess I can still enjoy the sunshine from inside, but I love being outside in this weather. Its interesting that they don't provide that many places to just sit outside around here.

While I'm on the subject of the weather around here, its a lot different. In Indiana, thunderstorms roll, rain thunder lighting and do their thing, and then sweep right back out again, and all in about 15 minutes, usually. Here in Texas, I haven't seen that happen. The skies get darker and darker, almost to the point where you think the sun is setting, and then you start to hear the thunder, and then the rain slowly starts, gets harder and harder, etc. It takes like 2 hours for the storm to roll in, and then another 3 for it to end and roll back out again. This has happened several times, so my impression is that that is the norm.

On other subjects: I was able to get a library card and check out some light reading from the library. This is an enormous relief, because I really have had way too much time on my hands some days. I also paid a reasonable amount for a gym membership here at the university. It's based on a per-day, so I hope that because I already paid for every day, I feel compelled to go because the day is already paid for. So... here's hoping.

As far as my research goes, I now have a direction. It turns out that I don't really have to come up with a new theory, just an inventive way to implement an idea he came up with, i.e. write code that performs the semantic caching the old way and his new way, and compare the two. So, shouldn't be too immensely tough, but enough of a challenge to where i won't get bored.

As for everything else, well, at this point there is nothing else. I got paid this week....yup, that's about it.

Summer starts with Texas

I can't believe it's been almost two years since I actually wrote anything on my blog. You would think I would have things to write about, but I guess not. In reality, my life has not changed that much. In the intervening summer, I did another stint at NSWC Crane, working as an engineering intern yet again. I also switched my major from Electrical Engineering to Computer Engineering; that's kind of a fine switch, and there's really only a difference once you get to some of the higher level courses. CompE will let me do more of what I want to do without all the EE classes getting in the way.
I guess the most significant thing to report is this: I am writing this blog post from Beaumont, Texas on the campus of Lamar University. At the moment, I find myself unable to fall asleep, but yet direly in need of sleep, and so I thought that perhaps piddling around facebook and writing a blog post would help calm my nerves enough to fall asleep.
But what am I doing in Texas, you might ask? (Or maybe you don't. Whatever.) The story is this: Earlier this spring I applied for and was accepted into a "Research Experience for Undergraduates" program sponsored by the National Science Foundation that was based out of the computer science department of Lamar University, in Beaumont, TX (about an hour east of Houston, 20 min. west of the Louisiana-Texas border, and half an hour from the Gulf Coast). I really had no idea what I would be doing until I arrived down here on the 24th of May. I actually brought a car down, thinking it might be useful (it is), and I braved a 16 hour drive from Bloomfield to Beaumont in order to get here.
There are 10 of us that were accepted into the program, and 7 of us are not from Lamar University. They put all 7 of us right next to each other in the LU dorms, which is really nice and has led to us becoming an even closer group than we might have. Most of us are from the midwest, with a few exceptions. Now, we are all mostly working on seperate research projects. However, the professor in charge of our program, Dr. Kami Makki, insisted that we be given at least a cursory introduction to every person's project, so that we had some level of understanding about others projects. Everyone has very interesting projects.
My research that I have been assigned delves into semantic caching and query processing in mobile environments. To put that in laymen's terms, I am looking at figuring out how to most effectively temporarily store data in your mobile devices, such as cell phones, that you have downloaded from the internet. The project itself deals with theoretical data in the form of rows from a database, such as a parts database, or an employee database. The part I am working with, semantic query processing, involves taking a request generated by the user "I want to see all employees from list a with a salary over $50k" and seeing if some, any, or all of the information requested can be retreived from temporary storage on the your cell phone, which would happen if you just accessed that same list. That way, the device doesn't have to connect to the internet for as long as it would otherwise.
I have also been able to get out and enjoy Texas and observe just how different this region is than what I am used to. I was able to take some time off on Saturday and cruise around exploring the area with a couple other people, and we even made it down to the Gulf of Mexico. Beaumont is not exactly the nicest town the the whole world, and it is clear that the city is past its prime. It seems to be an oil town thats running out of oil. All in all though, I am glad I took this offer, because I am getting to experience living somewhere else for a while. I am so thankful for this opportunity.
Right now, I'm getting pretty tired, and I can't think of anything else I forgot to post.