View From the Bushes

Posting pretty early today, I woke up around 5:15 becauser I'd had this really intense dream... I guess you could call it a nightmare. I have a big deadline coming up at Origins (the second biggest hobby gaming convention in the US, for those that are curious) and I dreamed that I was halfway through the convention and I had still had everything left to do on the project as I do right now, nearly two months out. So as you can imagine, the idea of packing two months of work into 24 hours woke me up so dramatically that there was no way I was getting back to sleep.

Fortunately, things are going well on my deadlines, and I've got quite a bit of motivation at the moment. Though my accomplishments and work ethic pale in comparison to that of my younger (and much more intelligent) brother, check out the most recent e-mail he sent from college:

I found out a little more about what I'll be doing over the summer. Basically I am helping to make a 2nd generation CTIS. CTIS stands for computed tomography imaging spectrometer. It is a spectrometer that works using a CGH (computer generated hologram) diffuser to allow a three dimensional reconstruction of an image, (x,y,lambda). Right now they have two systems, one has a better diffuser and the other has a better camera. So basically we're combining the system to hopefully make a better system. I am in charge of working to get the digital camera synced with the computer then aligning all of the optical components and making changes in the software to acaccommodate the new diffuser. The really cool part is that if we can get working by September 1, then we get to go to Hawaii for a test. I guess they want to use it for detecting missile launches and they are doing a test. So it should be a lot of fun, if it works out.

I'm not sure what to say about that except, "Wow!" In other news, it's still too early for most of the people on the internet, though as usual Boortz has already posted, and he has a link to another great Thomas Sowell column. This one is particularly enjoyable, because it reminds me of the elementary kid who wrote Sowell to tell him he didn't understand what it was to be poor. Good stuff.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross