last day of the conference!

times does fly! yesterday, i presented my research and it went over really well. a lot of people were interested in my stuff. i think i definitely need to do some reading into more nonlinear dynamic theory though. i had one guy who told me the way my state space was defined wasn't correct. i'm not exactly sure why, but fortunately, my advisor doesn't agree with the guy. either way i'm going to redo the analysis another way just to see if i get the same answer. today all the robotics folks presented. people brought in their robots for demos, and the one pictured to the left was one developed by the folks at delft university. i talked to one guy today who was using a model similar to something i started experimenting with at the end of the term. his model looks like it might be good to use for some stuff i want to do for my phd, and he had a few suggestions for how what he was doing might be used for what i wanted to do. in the workshop today, they had us build our own robots. we were divided into 20 teams of 5 people each. my team came in 3rd or 4th overall, which was pretty cool. we got the little guy to walk almost the entire length of the table, which was impressive given that we had 45 minutes to put everything together and get the weights balanced in such a way that the robot would actually walk. the picture below shows my team holding tryouts.

last night we had dinner at the hotel and then a small bunch of us sat around talking until midnight or so. it was mostly a group of students, a couple of whom i actually went to undergrad with, who are all in the same lab at the university of michigan. its really neat to sit around with a bunch of folks and have conversations which will jump between random subjects as they did last night. we switched from tv shows to walking to marriage proposals (there were some good ones). the other fun thing about this group (or maybe just engineering groups in general) is that i'm in the minority here--this time because i'm a woman. for some reason i feel more comfortable being in the minority. go figure. one of the other women at the conference also did her undergrad at mit. i asked her if she went to grad school right after undergrad. she said yes, but i took 8 years off in the middle to play blackjack professionally for the mit blackjack team. i think that's an awesome reason to take 8 years off of school. i approve (not that my approval matters).

this conference has allowed me to think about a lot of things both professionally and personally. one of the personal things it was making me think about though was living in europe. i think it would be fun to come live here somewhere for a year or a few after i finish my phd. there's a lot going on here related to what i do, which is great, and would, hopefully, enable me to find a job/postdoc relevant to what i'm doing. obviously i have a few more years before i even have to worry about this, but i guess its good to be that excited about what i'm doing!

amsterdam

today was conference day 2. the talks were a lot more interesting and we did a tutorial on limit cycles which was pretty cool. in the afternoon they took us to amsterdam and we got a tour of the gait lab facilities at vu and the hospital. the lab at vu actually had a really wide treadmill that you could skate on with rollerblades. they also had a leg prosthesis for someone who didn't have an amputation. i'll post pictures later though as its getting kind of late here now and i have to be up early for more conference fun.

after the gait lab tours, they took us to dinner at hole in the wall irish pub. they fit all 100 of us in hole in the wall, which was pretty cool. after dinner a bunch of us walked around the city for awhile. as one of the grad students from delft was our guide, i got to see non-touristy parts of the city which was cool. i like amsterdam. aside from the ridiculous amounts of rain and overcast skies, i would live here. i saw lots of canals and a beautiful garden in the middle of one of the buildings. i saw lots of old churches and buildings that were leaning in odd directions as their foundations rotted, causing them to sink. then our guide brought us to the touristy part of the city. you could smell the weed immediately. i'm rather naive about things like this, but i didn't know it was possible to make a whole section of a city smell like that. well, its possible. we didn't walk through the redlight district, but i don't feel like i'm missing something by not doing so. finally, i learned that the city name (amsterdam) is because of the dam built on the amstel river (which is now at the city center). likewise, rotterdam is named because of a dam built on the rotter river. until tomorrow!

an artist not an engineer

i got up this morning at 6:30a and went for a run. fortunately, it wasn't raining, but you could tell that it had recently. everything is very green here, and the hotel i'm staying at happens to be near a park with a fairly extensive trail system, so i got to see a lot of trees...and breath a lot of very clean air. at one point, i was running up a narrow dirt path on a land bridge (?) between two canals. being a bit of a water fanatic, i thought that was great.

today was the first official day of the conference. there were a series of talks and poster presentations throughout the morning and early afternoon. around 2p or so, we had a guest speaker appear. his name is theo jansen and he is an artist. i was curious as to why in the world there would be an artist coming to speak at an engineering conference, but i quickly found out why. mr. jansen "builds animals," for lack of a better way of describing it. in fact, he builds sea creatures...out of plastic rodes, string, bottles and small pieces of wood fasioned as nails. before you start thinking this just sounds silly, check out his talk at TED for some examples of his art (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b694exl_oZo) or just search for his name on youtube. his creatures really walk, and they are some of the coolest pieces of art i think i've ever seen. he also built one of his creatures out of metal. it weighs in at 3.2 tons and is apparently on permanent display in amsterdam. i didn't get to see that one today, but he did take us to his workshop, which, it turned out, was a 25 minute walk from the hotel at which we are staying. the image to the right is of one of the critters he built, which he had walk for us. the "wings" that you can see actually help harness energy from the wind for the creature to use to move. i have actual video footage of this too (just got a video camera!), but you'll have to wait for footage as i don't have the cables yet to hook it up to my computer. mr. jansen made a comment that i really liked and which i think bears repeating. he told us that we were really all artists but that we called ourselves engineers because we were paid to create something useful. having always been attracted to the arts in various forms, i appreciated his observation.

we saw more art after our visit to mr. jansen's workshop. art is everywhere here apparently, and i was particularly impressed by the street sign shown to the left. for din KNUS for a bbq--netherlands style. apparently, chicken satay is a specialty of the netherlands. i always thought it was something from southeast asia, but apparently i was wrong. i didn't try any, but was told it was delicious. the rest of the food was fantastic. i tried cinnamon tea for the first time and it was pretty good. ice cream made with real milk is also delicious. over dinner, i asked if anyone could tell me why the holland was used synonymously with the netherlands (i realize that this may seem like an ignorant question, but i really didn't know). for those who didn't know, holland is actually a province in the netherlands and happens to be the province in which amsterdam is located. apparently because most people only know of amsterdam, people assume that if you are going to the netherlands you are also going to holland. well, i'm not in holland. i'm currently in another province though i'm not sure what the name of it is. tomorrow, they will be taking us to holland to see another lab and to have dinner in amsterdam. the other thing i learned over dinner was the solution to the large window situation i mentioned in my post yesterday. apparently the concept for the large windows comes from protestant teachings which mentioned that anything that happens in the home should be completely above board and able to be seen by anyone. not only do the dutch have large windows in their homes, but they also either do not have drapes in them or they keep the drapes open all the time. oh, but you're not supposed to look in the windows because that's rude. apparently people also use this tradition as a way to show off their nice living rooms, kitchens, etc. if you move here, just make sure you're not doing your dishes naked. apparently though its rude to look in the windows, everyone does it anyways...and doing your dishes naked might not be considered "normal" by the locals.

back to dinner though, i wanted to stop in the restroom before we started our walk back to the hotel, but in mentioning that i was going to do so, two of the guys in our party looked at each other and asked if the other was scared of the bathroom. now this made the rest of us a wee bit curious. the women's bathroom, it turned out, was normal. the door to the men's bathroom was open, however, and from the open door, all you could see were the urinals. seeing them was enough to know what our male dining companions had been discussing though. in case you can't tell from the picture at left, the urinals were painted to look like giant mouths. i think i would be disturbed too if i had to pee into that.

all in all, it was a successful first day of the conference. i learned a lot and met a lot of new people. this group seems like a good bunch, and i'm excited to get to know people better over the next few days. hopefully too, i'll be able to get some good feedback on my work. for now though, its off to sleep for me!

live from the netherlands

i just arrived in the netherlands. my flight from austin to houston was delayed but didn't make me miss my flight from houston to amsterdam. it was a 10h 40min flight and i slept for about 7 hours of it, which was ideal. going through customs was depressing. the lines for eu passports was way shorter than the line for all the other passports. i need to get my irish passport asap so i get to go through the shorter lines (passport applications are separate from citizenship applications). after customs, i took a train from the airport to delpt. the conference organizers suggested there were three ways one could then get from the train station in delpt to the hotel: one of the organizers would take you if one of them was there, you could take a cab or you could walk. since the hotel was only 2.8km (1.8mi) from the train station, i decided to walk figuring that i would be able to see more of the city that way. the picture to the right is taken from one of the footbridges that crosses one of the many canals in the city. except for the last 400m or so of the walk, i was alongside canals the whole time. i took my time walking, partly because my bags were heavy and partly because i was trying to absorb everything. there are lots of windows here, and they're big windows too. i'm not sure if there is some energy-related reason for this, but i like it. at some point i started realizing how heavy my bags were, and conveniently, three people walked up beside me and asked if i was attending the conference. turns out they were from one of the labs at michigan and one of them was a teammate of mine from college! one of the guys graciously offered to carry my duffel bag the last bit of the way, which my shoulders and i greatly appreciated. i got checked into the hotel uneventfully, but just realized that i need an outlet adaptor for my computer. oops. the conference officially starts tomorrow and i'm excited to here what people are doing.

west coast antics

i spent the last few days in the bay area visiting my parents. within hours of arriving i was on the beach in half moon bay. my parents had told me that it was in the 100s at their house recently, so i didn't bother packing jeans, or any long pants for that matter. what i forgot was that the temperature difference between their house and the ocean is on the order of 40 degrees F. oops. so it was a bit breezy at the beach, but my dad and i took off our shoes and braved it anyways. i'm hoping to change the face of the blog soon, so stay tuned. the next day, i went into berkeley and spent the morning with one of my good friends from college (and hawaii). we had breakfast at cafe gratitude (http://www.cafegratitude.com/). it is a favorite restaurant of mine and a very berkeley-an experience. another friend of ours was having a birthday at his aunt and uncle's place. i'd been there before, and knew that we could get there via trails in the hills above the university...so we went on an adventure. turns out our first trail was wrong, and despite be a very nice hike, we ended almost exactly where we started. eventually we found the right trail though and made it to the fiesta. after losing myself in conversation with new and old friends for several hours, i left to meet up with another friend from college for dinner. it was a great day for catching up with people. i love hearing what other people have been doing and where they are heading in the near future. yesterday, one of my brothers and his dog finn drove up from la too, so I was also able to see them.

this morning, my poster for the conference i will be attending was (uneventfully) printed. now i just have to pack. normally you'd only back the bag with stuff you are taking on a trip, but i also have to get my room packed as i won't really have time to do anything except texas 4000 stuff when i return. its amazing how much stuff you can accumulate in a relatively short period of time. i have friends babysitting my car and my other bikes for the summer, but then there's all the other stuff. last summer when i moved to texas, i fit everything into the trunk of my car, except for two of my bikes, which went in the back seat. i think my mom shipped me one or two other boxes, but otherwise, that was it...well, now i look around my room and wonder how that all fit into my trunk. maybe its like one of the bags in harry potter, which looks small on the outside, but basically bottomless on the inside. with all my spare time, or maybe i should just say the time i'm spending on planes, i have finally gotten further than 20 pages into the fourth harry potter book. i've read all the books in english, but last summer i started reading them in spanish. at that point i read #2 and #3, and while i've had #4 since last summer, i was too busy and/or reading other things to really get into it. so now, i'm diving into head first. the characters just arrived at the quidditch world championships.

happy reading!

olive branches

it turns out that the leis went over very well. i did, however, hear one comment that i thought worthy of note. i gave my boyfriend a lei with kukui nuts in it. if you're not from hawaii or haven't spent much time there, you likely haven't seen a kukui nut. they sort of look like buckeyes, but they're solid in color (actually, there are some that are spotted, but you don't often see them leis). anyhow, a friend of my boyfriend's saw the leis and asked if he had a necklace of olives before commenting that he looked ready to run off to the olympic games. it took a lot of self-restraint on my part not to fall over laughing. i suppose the lei could have been made of rotten, petrified olives and some leaves if you squinted your eyes, but i feel that that might be a rather large stretch. regardless, the leis were beautiful. i had the fresh ones shipped from cindy's lei shop in honolulu. it takes two days to get stuff shipped from honolulu to anywhere east of the rockies (in the us), but the flowers arrived on time, were nicely packed and looked great. if you are thinking about getting leis for graduation or some other celebration, i would recommend cindy's.

long distance squirrel

i woke up this morning and didn't have enough time to get in a decent ride, so i went running. at one point, i caught something move out of the corner of my eye. it was dark and appeared to moving along next to me. i kept running, but looked a little close and realized it was a shadow. lest you think i was scared of my own shadow though, this was the shadow of a critter, a squirrel to be exact. i looked up, and there was a squirrel running along the phone line over my head. he was keeping up pretty well for the less than 20 feet he ran with me. with a little bit of training, he might be able to keep up with me for 50 feet. regardless, it was pretty neat to have a shadow that was not my own (or another person's or a dog's) moving with me.

graduation is the weekend at ut. traffic is crazy. i'm not moving my car until i have to go to the airport sunday morning, if i even move it then. anyhow, i had leis shipped in from hawaii, and am in the process of finishing making other ribbon leis. i'm not sure people here will understand the tradition of giving leis, but hopefully they like them.

on a somewhat related note, i went on an adventure to michael's (the craft store) yesterday to obtain ribbon, and if you're in austin, i highly recommend not being anywhere near bee caves on bike during rush hour. if you try it, you'll immediately understand why. i'm still alive though, so no worries there. after stopping at the craft store, i went and rode lost creek and barton creek to get in some hills. i did lost creek for the first time last month when i was at my peak mileage training for boston. all i remember from that experience is that the hills were huge and steep. i remember having to stand up out of the saddle to get up the hills, and i very distinctly remember how tired my legs felt. well, yesterday, as i was riding up those exact same hills in the saddle, i found myself musing about how one's imagination can really affect one's memory. i'm not saying lost creek doesn't have respectable hills. they are respectable. they are short and steeper than a roller. BUT they are no where near as bad as i remember them being from that first experience. the whole ride yesterday told me a few things: (1) my training for boston this year was more draining than i thought it was, (2) my legs have recovered well and (3) i just love riding my bike (though i think i already knew that).

storms!

i love storms. last night we had rain, hail, thunder, lightning and a tornado. traffic lights are still shut down all over the city and roads are blocked off because of trees that fell. basically the road looks like a garden came through and hacked at every bush and tree in sight and then just left the scraps for someone else to clean up later. we also lost power several times last night. i went to sleep initially when the power was off and woke up a little while later to my bedroom light turned on and an odd silence. when you get used to sleeping with an ac unit on, the silence when it is not, is weird. i turned my ac back on three or four times last night because we kept losing power.

the weather before and after storms is also pretty neat. i was cold last night pre-storm, and it was very overcast. this morning, the air is cool and smells good (still not hawaii pre-/post-rain, but i digress), and it is very sunny. oh wait. i spoke too soon. it was sunny 30 minutes ago, but now it appears to be getting overcast again. alas.

yesterday was my last day of work before my ride. i work with some pretty cool people, so it'll be a bummer not to see them for a few months...but i don't have to go to work! i didn't really get to celebrate this yesterday because i had a long meeting almost immediately getting back to austin about summer ride logistics. i think the take-home message from the meeting was: weird stuff is going to happen and there's not really anyway to prepare for it. great? i revert back to earlier statements i've made to people that this ride will challenge everyone participating in a way they need to be challenged. for some people that will be just to ride everyday and for others it will be to lead their peers in some activity or another. i am looking forward to it. back to the celebrating though, after the meeting a couple of us went to a (very) late dinner, and shortly after that the storm happened. so really i celebrated by watching mother nature flex her muscles. it was impressive.

i suppose i also celebrated the night before my last day of work too though. my boyfriend finished his last final and i wanted to take him out for sushi to celebrate. so we got all dolled up and went out on the town, if you will. as it was a tuesday night, i didn't think (neither of us thought really) that we'd need a reservation. we showed up at uchi (http://www.uchiaustin.com/) and were told the wait would be an hour and a half. we looked at each other and decided that was unexceptable (i'd just gone running and he hadn't eaten in awhile--two really hungry people = bad combination). so we went to eddie v's (http://www.eddiev.com/) instead. its a seafood place (inland, i know), and the food was amazing. we were seated around 8:15p and the place was packed. in the next 45 minute or so people started leaving and it quieted down. i'd recommend going for a late dinner if you go because its a bit more amenable to, well, talking with your dining companion(s). the restuarant is kind of expensive (especially if you're a student), but if you're looking for good seafood and/or celebrating something special, i'd recommend it.

i'm getting my poster printed for my conference this afternoon...and then i'm really done with big things related to school and research that needed to be completed before june 1. yeah!

for every end, a new beginning

i've had a lot of lasts in the past week or so. i finished my last final (for the term) on saturday. i'll be honest. it felt amazing. this was also my last semester as a kines student, and may potentially be my last spring term of classes. tonight we had our last riders meeting before 'camp texas 4000'--the week long preparation we do the week before pedalling onwards towards alaska. my last day of work is on wednesday. i'm excited.

but with all these lasts means there are a bunch of starts to new things. i'm now officially a biomedical engineering phd student (back to engineering--woohooo!). i have to meet with my advisor in the next couple days, but it looks like this fall might actually be the last semester of classes i have to take. after that, i'll just be working on my dissertation. in two weeks, i will be the netherlands presenting at my first professional conference outside of the us (fortunately the presentation will be in english, not dutch). this summer will be the first summer since sometime in high school that i haven't had a paying job, and it will be the first summer in about five years that i will not be doing research. yep, it's going to be weird, and i intend to enjoy every minute of it.

on sunday to celebrate the end of the term (and the beautiful weather), i took one of my bikes on a little tour of austin. i grabbed a small backpack and packed a book, a camera and some sunscreen. lest you think this had the potential to turn into a serious ride, i was wearing my bathing suit and board shorts (meaning no 100 milers). i went to mozart's, a great little coffee shop on lake austin. it was nice to see the water. i am definitely missing it and am really looking forward to being in san francisco next week. after enjoying a cup of chai and a bit of my book, i packed up and rode westlake dr out to 360. it was fun to just 'putz' around and not have to worry about work to do or places to go. lately i have had it pointed out to me repeatedly how i have 'very different philosophies' on various aspects of life relative to other people. i have to say though that my sunday was very relaxing, even riding up hills. it just felt amazing to be outside and free from studying.

its scary to think how much has to be done in the next three weeks before i leave for alaska!

just keep swimming, swimming, swimming

that's what i did this morning. i woke up and didn't feel like working out. that was weird. so i went to the library to start studying for my final, but i only lasted an hour before i needed to get up and do something. i headed to the pool to swim, and figured that since i hadn't been swimming in awhile and was apparently experiencing a severe lack of motivation, it would be good to get in just a nice 2000 yd swim. well i started swimming and my body felt like a rock. i kept going though and 4000 yds later, i finally made myself get out of the pool and go back to studying. unfortunately though, i found out today that if i'm not registered for classes during the summer, my gym pass on campus stops on may 13th, which is next tuesday. bummer. so i think i'm going to start doing early morning runs to barton springs and swimming there for a bit and then running home. i only have to worry about this dilemma for about 2.5 more weeks though because then its off to the netherlands, then back to austin for a week and then i'm headed to alaska! the trip is now less than one month away. woohoo!

snakes!

today is a double posting kind of day. after i posted my last blog, i went for a run on my usual boring, out-and-back 5-mile course. today, however, there was something different. on my way back on the out-and-back, i was running along and noticed something across the path in front of me. it appeared to be a large stick laid across more than three-quarters of the path. as i approached, however, i noticed that this stick was abnormally straight and smooth and decidedly not brown. i got even closer and realized it was no stick at all, but a rather long snake. it was green and purple and had a large oddly shaped bulge in its middle (dinner anyone?). upon realizing this i stopped in my tracks and trotted backwards a few steps wondering what i should do. it looked at me and then turned its head back and continued moseying its way across the path. clearly, i wasn't that interesting. i had (and still have) no idea what kind of snake it was. i decided to go around behind the snake, giving it plenty of space. this may have been stupid, but it was clearly interrupting my run. action needed to be taken. fortunately, mr. snake didn't even flinch as i stepped (trotted?) through the leaves behind it and picked up my pace a little bit. the funny thing about this whole experience was that i wasn't out in the middle of nowhere on some seldomly used trail. i was running along shoal creek, which has a wide, well-maintained, gravel trail. it is even paved in some places. so the moral to this story is: look out for snakes. they eat small people, i mean creatures, and apparently they're still out celebrating cinco de mayo.

cinco de mayo

happy belated cinco de mayo all. i didn't get to wear a sombrero or anything but i did get to have people over to my house last night to celebrate. it was the first time i've had a group of non-german haus people over for socializing. i invited all of my housemates, and while not everyone came, i was happy that a good chunk of people hung out for awhile. it's always interesting to see what happens when you mix different groups of friends, and i think these groups meshed well. no one from either group however really seemed to know exactly what cinco de mayo is aside from a good excuse to eat tortilla chips and (for many) drink cervezas. on a sort of related note, i was told in the last month or so that at least one of the microbreweries we'll pass in colorado sells kegs of rootbeer. i am going to have to look into this.

phd comics had a great cartoon yesterday concerning what goals in grad school as one progresses through the years :http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?n=1012. I wonder what happens when a few months off to ride one's bike across the country. does the end result involve those extra years in grad school? or does one tend to change paths and do something completely different? or stay on the same course? i was looking at what courses i still have to take, and i think there's a possibility that i could be done with classes in the fall, which would be awesome. hopefully that will be hammered out before i leave...

dam loop

just one final now stands between me and end of the term bliss. in the meantime, i finished up my two term projects and emailed them to my professors today. this was the first saturday in awhile when i have been able to sleep in a little bit and then roll out for a nice 50-miler at 10:30a. it was fantastic. the ride itself was pretty exciting. in mile number 2 of my ride, a cannon went off about 50 yds from me. seriously. i was riding through west campus about to turn in a corner when BANG! it scared the crap out of me. turns out some fraternity was having a parents weekend or something and everyone was sitting outside on the lawn in rather fancy attire for a random saturday morning. i have no idea what they were doing but my riding companion informed me that it was something to do with southern roots. i had a lot of friends in fraternities in college, but i'm not sure any of them had a cannon. texans like shooting things though so apparently things are run a little differently down here.

don't worry, i wasn't swearing in my blog title today. for our bike ride, we went on what's called a dam loop. its about 50 miles total if you ride from campus, and roughly in the middle of the ride, you ride over mansfield dam. if you're a cycling austinite and haven't done this loop in awhile (as i hadn't) i would recommend not doing it for another week or two. they seem to be repaving 620, and the road and shoulder are really torn up right now. this makes for sore hands and a sore rear. the next part of that route brings you down 2222. at some point, you hit an enormous hill on this road. fortunately, we were going down it. my riding companion said his speedometer hit 51 mph as we were speeding down it. i think my previous record for speed on a bike was about 45 mph, so as you can imagine, this was a pretty sweet hill. other than some wind, it was generally just a beautiful day to ride--sunny but not too hot.

happy cycling!