On her way to her TA hours on Monday, a flyer posted on the wall of the Talmage building caught Rebecca's eye. It said "Want to play with robots?" Before even noticing that it payed $10 dollars for one hour's worth of play, she immediately knew that I would love to play with robots. We found the research group and signed up to play with the robot, and it was a blast. Their research group was putting together a paper on human-robot interaction for a conference (one of Rebecca's professors this semester is on the chair for the conference). Rebecca also submitted a paper for the same research conference call. But the robot we played with was a large, wheeled, remote-controlled vehicle that we had to maneuver through an obstacle ridden course (through the hallways of the Talmage building with boxes scattered around). The research team was evaluating which interfaces allowed for the easiest and fastest time trials, whether through 2D or 3D means. They had some cool laser and sonar detection devices on the robot to dynamically produce maps on the computer we were using to drive the robot. It reminded me how much I envied kids with remote controlled cars. Robots are fun.
Rebecca was busy for most of the week putting together her part of the paper that her professor and her were submitting for this same conference. But we decided to go against our impulse to stay home Wednesday night to work on homework/papers, and we went to the Hansen Family Reunion. The Hansen family includes the Madsen's on my father's side, so a good number of them were there. Wednesday evening we all went to one of the final dress rehearsals for the Hale Center Theatre company putting on Disney's Beauty and the Beast. Usually, I've had bad experiences with small companies putting on major productions, however this performance was wonderful. Anyone in the area should definitely get tickets for it to see the performance. Had we known how much fun the performance would be, we would have gladly paid full price. The whole performance, Rebecca had a great big grin on her face and I did my best to resist all urges to sing along with all the tunes. It really was a wonderful performance.
But since we stayed out late Wednesday night, Rebecca had to rush to put the last parts into her paper and she wasn't even able to do her homework. We had more friends over Thursday evening from our ward to play games and we played the bean game (one of Jon and Faith's favorites). After having difficulty making friends in our first two wards, we learned in our Seattle ward what some of the tricks are to making friends when you move into a new ward. One of the most difficult tricks is to balance homework and spontaneous play time. But we really enjoy having people over to our house, so being stressed out about school work is something we've learned to live with.
Friday was Angela's birthday and Karl had invited us and some of their "Provo" friends to meet them at P.F. Chang's for dinner. I was highly skeptical of eating there since I'm more of a fan of tiny chinese restaurants than of big chain restaurants. I'm always afraid I'm getting a watered down version of the authentic food; large Brazilian restaurants aren't a good representation of real Brazilian cuisine. However, the food was really good and we all had a good time celebrating with Angela and Karl, so I highly recommend the restaurant. Hopefully Karl and Angela will post some things about their evening on their website soon. We thought to bring a camera, but then I expected Karl to bring his, so I didn't. But it turned out that neither of us brought cameras, so there aren't any pictures of our evening.
After dinner, we decided that we had nothing better to do than to wander around the mall. We never really wander around shops because we don't have any reason to buy things, so it isn't a usual occurrence. One of the places we stopped at was our friendly Cingular Wireless phone provider. We talked to them about our phone contract and were amazed at how expensive cellular phone contracts are now. To get a family plan for two people, like what we have, costs over $80, which is way out of our monthly budget. That is the smallest plan with only 700 montly minutes to use up. To get two separate phone lines would only cost 10 dollars more. Prices for family plans used to be dramatically less than getting separate cellular phone plans. Lucky for us, our phone plan has passed into a "contract expired" timeframe where we are on a month to month contract. Why would we ever switch out of that? It's hard to say.
Saturday morning we tried to build a wooden case for a computer that I could use in my video project and submit it to the New Zealand show I'm in. We have to put up the show at BYU's main gallery Monday morning. I wanted a nice wooden case to put the computer parts in, instead of using my beat up old computer case. However, Rebecca and I failed miserably at our attempts at woodworking. Instead we just got frustrated and gave up. I guess I'll just submit things in my old, nasty computer case. I've been trying to get the TV card that Dad Rees gave us to work with a media program so we can record TV and organize all our media and interface it with our TV, but that's not working yet either. The TV card isn't supported by Meedio and I'm just not finding any way to get it to work for that purpose.
To give ourselves another break, we had a bunch of Rebecca's CS friends come over last night and play "The Great Museum Caper," a variation of the old Clue board game. Most of them had spent the summer in Seattle, but in different places than we did (East and North as opposed to Central and U-District Seattle, where we were). It was very strange to listen to them talk about their experiences and places they went because I felt like we were talking about two totally different places. I guess there was so much more for us to see that we never saw because we spent so much time downtown and with friends. Ah, if only we could go back and live there...
We miss the west coast.
Lots of love and have a great week,
Wayne and Rebecca
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