Time Flies

I can't believe it has already been two weeks. It feels like i wrote my last blog post yesterday.

Peter, another student from Colby, arrived here a week ago! I am so excited to have him around. We are working on a project together. Inho assigned us some topics to read up on so we can simulate the Puma robot. This robot has six degrees of freedom which means it can reach anywhere in three dimensional space. But before we start virtual building we have to learn about forward and inverse kinematics, denavit-hartenberg parameters and homogeneous transformations, which all sound really smart to people who don't know what they are (and really hard to people who don't know what they are and are about to learn about them). At first we were just reading from a text book but that was a disaster. It is a lot of math that I hadn't learned yet so reading about it was difficult. I hit the internet and found out that Stanford records all of its lectures and puts the videos online. Oussama Khatib teaches an introduction to robotics class that i have been watching and makes it sooooo much easier to understand. It took me 45 minutes into the first class to recognize that I had just read 50 pages on the subject. But now I am going in the right direction. We have moved from Robotics Lab to Webots, another robot simulation program. We have started playing around with it to get familiar and probably sometime next week will get down to working on the puma. Currently the robot I built in Webots to play around just spins on the spot so I clearly still have some learning to do.

This week was also one of bonding with the lab boys (or men i guess but
whatever).It is nice to be able to move past the formalities and be friends. Danielle and I made an awesome ice cream cake for Inho's birthday and already have some plans for Choel's birthday in a week. We continue to play soccer at ungodly hours in the night and fool around in the lab (when we aren't working (which is all the time) ofcourse).

The president of Israel came to KAIST earlier this week to see Hubo! Peter, Danielle and I asked Dr. Oh if I could tag along to the demonstration and we got to see him! We were told to stand in the corner and not make any sudden movements. Since it was a private event though there weren't that many people there anyway so we were really close. I was on my best behavior (no heckling) and it was realy exciting. Peres rolled up with a motorcade surrounded by service men to be greeted by Hubo. Hubo is heading off to Mexico at the end of the month for some other important person to meet or somethign like that. so popular. Danielle came up with the idea of making t-shirts that say "I'm with the robot" instead of "i'm with the band" : )

The world cup has been really exciting! This means staying up until 6 am to watch all of the games but there is no other way to do it. Koji is a brazilian who works in the lab so watching the game with all of his brazilian friends is intense. Here is what they have taught me so far: argentinins wears their jerseys really tight, argentinians always start fights, argentinians try to draw fouls all the time, don't call it soccer and don't call him a goalie. This will be a fun filled month. Go Red Devils!