That busy feeling...

I'm afraid my frequency of blog posts seems to vary inversely with how busy school is... which doesn't bode well for lots of posts on this blog. However, I'll still try to post quick updates here and there.

At this pointI'm in my 5th week of class, (you guys at UW just start tomorrow??) so I'm at pretty much full workload for all of them... and the first tremors of midterms are coming. Also, I'm fairly certain what direction I'm headed in terms of PhD research. I'll be working with Prof. Hod Lipson doing same exploratory work in digital manufacturing (note: digital manufacturing, not digitally controlled manufacturing). Nobody has really done any work here before, so its total uneplored territory, with several potentially revolutionary concepts. There's already a pretty well defined publication to write on the preliminary thinking I've been doing, and some patents on the not-so-distant horizon. So I am very excited, but I have that feeling that I just jumped off the diving board into a big pool of research... and that I won't have much free time for the next, oh, 4 years. Oh well. It'll be fun.

For those of you less technically inclined, what this boils down to is that I get to play with Legos for the next few years. Not "Lego" legos... those are much too limited. More like uber-legos.. that you can "automatically" assemble almost anything out of. Even robots with built in circuits. Yeah, its wild... but you can check out http://ccsl.mae.cornell.edu/ to see what other kinds of research Hod's students are doing.

So far I've still had time to be social, both with my fellow Mech.E grad students and Bible study folk, which I intend to continue as much as I can.