Frantic Week

This week has been a little frantic. The proposal for our grant was due this Friday, and so we did everything we could to get it ready. We read it many, many times. We changed sentences, added new paragraphs, played with formatting, added images. It was also interesting to see all the other documents that we needed to supply with it. Still, it is done now, and I am glad for that. It turned out pretty good. Now to just hope that it will be accepted. We won't know for almost half a year... so, now to just wait.

Other than that nothing really special happened this week. I did get accepted for an internship with Google. I will be doing research on authentication. I will be working out of Mountain View. It should be really enjoyable. I am certainly looking forward to it!

Emily also got home this week. She is enjoying the wonders of American life again :) It has been good having her close. I still have to wait another two weeks before I go and see her, but I am glad that we don't have to talk to each other at inconvenient times of the day!

Anniversary

This Saturday was the one year anniversary of Emily and I beginning to date. It is too bad that we are so far apart. Still, we had fun. I sent her a fudge cake (something unheard of in China) with “Happy Anniversary” printed on it. Then Emily cut and ate it while we talked on Skype. Her roommates were there and took pictures of my and her together, and even some of me pretending to eat cake over Skype. It was really silly. Still, it was a lot of fun. It has been a good year together!

I also interviewed with Google this week. Last week I passed the technical interviews, and now they are trying to find a team that matches my interests for a summer internship. I talked to two different teams this week and things certainly seemed to go well. Hopefully I can get the one I want, but we will see :)

Other than that I have just been writing. We are currently preparing a NSF proposal. It would be so wonderful if we got it. It would help me fund all my work and equipment over the next 3 years. It would probably even allow me to get paid more than I do now. Besides, NSF grants look great on a curriculum vitae. So hope with me that I will get it. If not, it was still nice to really plan out and describe the work I am interested in doing. It will help me write my dissertation proposal next year.

And that is my life. Hope you enjoyed!

Funding Proposal

Well, not much has happened this week, so I thought I would just copy the post I wrote into another one of my blogs: So this last week I have been working on writing up a funding proposal for a NSF grant. It has been different. I have never needed to do something like this. It has been really hard, and at times I worry I could never do well enough. Still, I keep pushing through. If we got this grant it would pay for all of my schooling, computer equipment, and hopefully get me a larger salary. Right now I make just enough to get by on. It would be nice to make a little more, so that when the time comes I could support a wife, and that I could put a little into savings every month. And that is pretty much all that happened. Oh yeah, I also build a new file server this week. I am having some problems with its raid drivers, but other than that everything is good. It has 9TB of space, and so I plan to put backups of all my files, as well as all my DVDs and Blue-Ray discs on it. So, it was fun setting that up. I also transfered the hard drive from my old XBox to the new one I was given this summer. Now I can play around with the connect :)