With exams and projects now out of the way, I decided to attend TIG Week, a three day lecture series on engineering technical interest groups such as electromagnetics, digital signal processing, systems and control, power systems, and electronic design and application. There are a total of ten technical interest groups here at Georgia Tech.

Today, Bruno Frazier from Bioengineering, Stephen Ralph from Optics, and Jim McClellan from Digital Signal Processing spoke with us about the current technologies and innovations in their respective fields. Particularly interesting technologies included holographic data storage, compressed video editing, and the use optics in the terrahertz range for network communications. Mark Smith, from Hewlett-Packard Research, also came to demo and talk about their latest technologies from a corporate perspective.

I gave it my all and the presentation went surprisingly well. Even Christina found some time out of her busy schedule to come and attend. Adam and I had our usual lunch at Little Dino’s afterward. Juan and I met in the late evening to study for Professional Practice.

It feels as though it should be Friday for some reason, but sadly, it’s not. Spent the afternoon rehearsing and preparing for my presentation tomorrow. Since it’s such a technical and weighty topic, the most difficult aspects right now are making sure that the material is both relevant and engaging to the audience. I’m looking forward to tomorrow.

I spent the day proofreading and polishing up various odds and ends on the research paper. I used the Hyperref package for latex to utilitize additional PDF-specific document features, such as bookmarks. I left for Georgia Tech for a few hours in the evening to print the report using their HP309 laser color printers. The results were fantastic.

Worked on Problem Set 7 for Electromagnetics throughout the day, covering less familiar topics such as the uniform wave plane and wave propagation in dielectrics. Despite the fact that I have the solutions manual, it always takes me an hour and a half to do each problem. For Project Engineering, I added citations and color graphics to the research paper. Finally have a complete rough draft written and ready to go. Kat was also in town for various reasons and dropped by the apartment to visit. It was nice to see her.

The Thermodynamics quiz was simply a disaster, though the Spanish exam went relatively well. Met with Christina in the early afternoon to go over the finishing touches on the final paper and presentation. We also discussed the possibility of introducing latex as an alternative to Microsoft Word for Digital Design Lab in the upcoming terms. Completed the final release candidate of the slides and wrote some preliminary code examples in Standard ML. Using the listings package, I then successfully imported the code into latex. Finally, Professor Callen and I mutually decided that I’ll be the first one to present for next week’s presentations. He also had the following comments to make:

You could set the tone with a stellar performance, of which you and I both know you are capable. A little stress is sometimes beneficial. It enables great performance.

Nelson Abramson, a representative for the Google Data Center here in Atlanta, came to Georgia Tech to talk about the various positions available at Google to recent graduates. The presentation was sponsored by Eta Kappu Nu, and it was certainly worthwhile. Google has nearly ten thousand Linux servers to operate and maintain, and it seems like a great place to work for an Open Source enthusiast such as myself.

I met with Christina a few hours after the event to proofread a rough draft of the formal paper. I spent the remainder of the evening studying for Thermodynamics. Though everything is on schedule, I still feel as though there’s an impossible amount of work ahead of me.

The Objective Caml project now has its own notes page. Adam introduced me to OmniGraffle, an amazing diagramming and charting software product available exclusively for Mac OS X. Since it can output to PDF, it was a simple matter to import the OmniGraffle renderings into my report. Fantastic.

Ordered checks from Wachovia. Recitation was cancelled today, so I instead met with Professor Callen in his office to discuss various topics about Professional Practice and life in general. I modified the presentation slides in the afternoon, incorporating Christina’s suggestions from yesterday. I also spent several hours doing preliminary work on the upcoming research paper.

Writer’s block is such a nightmare. Despite staring at the screen for several hours, I made very little progress on the formal report for Professional Practice. I did manage to meet with Christina in the early afternoon to look over the formal presentation slides. Overall, her comments were very positive. Our primary concern is that there is simply too much information for an eight minute presentation.

With biting sarcasm, I decided to at least make a preliminary effort in looking for work. I sent off a resume to Margaret Boehme for a position in digital logic design for Texas Instruments. Curses.