Slept, woke up at my alarm, felt like crap, went back to sleep. Woke up again at 3pm. I felt great (I should, since I’d slept for 12 hours), but at the same time I knew since it was the afternoon that I was going to have a hard time getting to sleep tonight, which is something of a problem given that Anastasia is visiting for this (long) weekend starting tomorrow, and I need to be up (relatively) early to go get her from the airport.

Anyway, I went in for the Colloquium in the afternoon which was on the SIGGRAPH papers that the UW graphics department had submitted this year. There were some really, really cool things in there. Some of it was a little over my head, but there was definitely some great stuff in there which made me want to dive into working with graphics even more.

After that I went back to my apartment to do a little bit of email and prep, then headed back to the CSE building for another Microsoft hosted event. First I went up to my office and dropped off my laptop and bags for me to do work afterwards, then it was back downstairs for some free food (burrito, chips, chocolate chip cookie and a can of soft drink). After and during the food was a short presentation from the guy who’s in charge of the Windows kernel (the nuts and bolts of an operating system), who is a UW alumnus. After that we had a weird ‘speed-dating’ style interaction where everyone went around three different tables from the different sections (there were a dozen or so) that were available. I stopped by Windows Media, Mobile and Embedded Devices and Xbox. After that time was over there was a prizes give-away (in which I sadly won nothing) and then general mill-around-and-chat time. I saw the Windows Fundamentals guy and briefly the guy from Microsoft Search, although he was busy explaining some aspect of grid computing to this other guy. I also caught up with Jill, whom I met at the Xbox tournament last time and chatted to her about some of my options. She’s going to be talking to the other people involved and hopefully I’ll be able to swing some interviews and so on later in the year in preparation for an internship or something next year! ^^

Anyway, after that was all said and done I went back up to my office. I wrote out the right trace file for my graphics artifact, then set it to start rendering. I think the rendering took about three and half hours. I did a few things on my computer while it was doing that to make sure that I had a backup in case it didn’t finish rendering by midnight submission time, but other than that I sat and did some readings of the graphics papers we had to look over. I also talked to Anastasia on the phone for a little while.

After I’d finished the rendering (which you can look at here), I sorted out which buses I needed to take tomorrow morning then got stuck in and did some work. I have to say, sitting in my office doing work makes me feel more like I’m working, weird as that is. I didn’t actually leave my office (or working) until well after 2am, when I went home to try and catch a little sleep before I needed to get up and go get Anastasia.