Fall Break:

I didn't know such a thing existed until I came to Cornell, but hey, I'm not complaining. I get a 4-day weekend here. Unfortunately, one professor decided to welcome us back from fall break by handing out a 24 hour take-home midterm the minute classes start again on Wednesday morning. This would happen to be my not-so-favored linear systems course where the current homework (which is covered on the upcoming exam) requires (on average) more than an hour per problem... if anyone can figure them out. And did I mention there's 29 problems on the assignment? While you do the math, I'll hopefully be hard at work at this ridiculousness.

Oh well. Nobody said grad school was easy. I should be able to concentrate this weekend because everyone I know who lives within 350 miles has gone home for the long weekend... which happens to be everyone I know here. So, I get a nice long weekend to chill and hopefully get not only homework/studying done, but work on fellowship applications for next year and put some time into research stuff. The research is going well. I'm in the process of integrating into the group, and I spent a good deal of time last weekend putting together info for a proposal that went out to DARPA (potential funding source) Monday afternoon concerning the digital manufacturing. A lot of this info also went into a provisional patent that is in the process of being filed this week. So things are definitely moving fast. I can go into more detail at some future time.

Of course, this probably seems to point to a somewhat dreary picture for my weekend. Although I do need to get a lot done, I also plan to play guitar and go running a lot. The weather is supposed to be beautiful this weekend, in a northeast autumn sort of way. Clear skies, a little crisp, and colorful trees all over. I went running this afternoon a few miles up the 6 Mile Creek gorge and it was a dream. Slightly crisp (but not cold) with the setting sun illuminating the golden tree tunnel I was running through, pierced here and there by vivid reds and greens. So far, Fall is definitely my favorite season around here.