June 22, 2009

So I had a busy weekend. Went up to my Grandparent's place in northeast Iowa for their 50th anniversary. They have a small patch of land with some woods out in the middle of the country. Dang, don't you just love that new cow smell? (rofl) Just to illustrate how crazy Iowa weather is, on the way back it was perfectly sunny, then out of no where it started pouring so hard visibility was reduced to almost zero. After about 5 minutes of hydroplaning down the interstate at 75 mph (with very white knuckles) it just suddenly stopped and everything was bright and sunny again. I have to say, that has to be one of the biggest wtf moments with weather I have ever seen.

On a more serious note, I'm glad the tv crew is finished. That was a lot of stress and it really distracted from what we needed to do. Although I am kinda bummed we didn't really get to show off our project, but it didn't work very well either. Although, now we can get back to our main project, I just hope that they don't throw us anymore mini projects because they are really getting in the way. I think we only have a few things left to decide and then we can get to collecting data. Since it's all going to be processed offline anyways, we can hold off on a lot of the more critical decisions (such as what learning algorithm to use) until after we've collected data. I'm optimistic that we may be able to start data collection by the end of the week (though probably we won't).