NUTS

Went to SigGraph, the biggest international conference for Graphics in Boston last week.  The poster I presented won the best poster award in the conference.  I also won the first place award in the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Student Research Competition sponsored by Microsoft.  For more information, please see news on my department website: http://cs.brown.edu/

 

News! I have finally spare an afternoon to sketch up my personal website in the department.  The intial version can be found at: http://cs.brown.edu/~wzhou

For those of you who are interested in knowing what i'm up to nowadays, please take a look at my research page.  Any comments are very welcomed, my page is still in the under-construction mode.

 

Take care old friends!

 

ps. UPDATE as of 8/11, now the news is even on the official university site: www.brown.edu, hahahaha

Went to a very interesting talk about Ph.D. life couple days again... (of course, the main reason of going there is FREE PIZZA)  It's a Stanford student who draws a lot of comics about Ph.D student life. Take a look at the website: www.phdcosmic.com

 

He stated the secrets to success in graguation school.... procrastination!!!  haha.  which is different from laziness, being lazy is - u always dont' want to do something... but procrastination, you just don't want to do it NOW. 

 

many of the cosmic stories are so true that really touches the heart of every Ph.D student.  It's a nice website to go to to relieve some stress for phd students.  Highly recommend.

an experiment about human hearing that i learned in class today:

 

if you take a collection of words such as:

The *hat* is on the table.

The *cat* is on the floor.

...

 

and replace the "h" and "c" with a frequency of random noise and replay the sentences to people.  Asking them to write down what they hear, they would have no problem figuring out/matching hat and cat.  To be exact, they hardly realize that there was something funny going on.  Our ear make us believe in what we want to hear.

 

=) we learn new things everyday...

 

 

Interesting thing i learned from my graphics class today.  In France, there are big fields of sun flowers, and as you drive by on a road, if on your right you see all YELLOW, what color will you see on your left?

 

=D

We had a faculty-student lunch where the students and faculty sit toghter and ate pizza - yeah, pizza again!!~~ 

 

so one student said, even if u make it through the Ph.D, you will still be end up on the street.  The market for academia is really tense.  The teachers didn't quite agree, they said the market is not better than any of the previous years, but it is not worse either.  He pointed out that you can still work for companies like GOOGLE.  Another teacher then commented, "i think that's what they call living on the street!~".  Hahaha, working for google = living on the street??!!  i don't know what those people's standards really are!  I would be happy to work for google. =D  but of course, an academia tenure job would be much more attractive.   

 

anyway, stop dreaming, right now i'm still struggling to make it through... =D

havn't updated my blog for a long~~~~ time......  sorry guys!

 

basically because nothing interesting happened around me...

 

i bought 2 lottery tickets last weekend trying to win the biggest lottery in the US history... 360 million dollars......   as you can predict, i'm not the winner.  (because otherwise, i won't be sitting here at all! )  but! someone from Lincoln, NE won the ticket!  i should have stayed in the city....!!!~~ hehe

 

if you ask me what i like most about being in US... I would say, the people, really.  when u go and return something to the store, u still see a nice happy face.  if you do the same in China, you would see the most scary face ever! (i never consider returning anything after i buy them in china)  People would give out free furniture to help out poor students like me.  They would help you to take the furniture apart and help you to move them into the car!~  You can often find people who would greet you kindly on the street.  Just a smile from a stranger would cheer up your spirit sometimes.  Make you feel:  world is still filled with nice people. 

 

I'm not a very social person~~ but occationally i would talk to people on the hall way and have lunch with friends outside.  that actually makes me feel good.  I realize that we are still human, staying i the office 8 hours a day staring at the monitor would only make us feel that life is so dull.  take a break, meet some friends, have some chat, you will feel more motivated when u return to work!!~~

 

alright, will keep bla bla bla next time.