I actually had the distinct pleasure of having my four wisdom teeth removed this morning, an experience that turned out far less unpleasant that I’d anticipated. The procedure itself was completely painless, since I was asleep during the painful bits. My only real complaint is that I’m unable to eat any real food for a few days, but it’s not nearly as bad as when I first got my braces on (two weeks). Until I get the stitches out, I’ll be resting and relaxing at home, consuming as much ice cream and mashed potatoes as I can stomach.

Other than that, I’ve spent the past week or so alternating between working at my UROP, sleeping (including napping), and frantically trying to paint my summer room so that I can finally move all of my worldly possessions at MIT into it, which doesn’t leave too much time for blogging. At least, that’s how I rationalize it in my head.

My UROP has been going well; I actually physically go to work at CSAIL now, instead of sitting in front of my desktop in my room in my pajamas. It helps keep me disciplined and focused, and it’s nice to be able to interact with the other UROPs working under my professor. I’ve got a bit of a head start on them, since I’ve been working at Simile for an entire semester already, but I suspect that they’ll catch up quickly. Timegrid is coming along nicely. I recently tore out the rendering algorithm and completely rewrote it, due to a realization that my old design made a few features impossible or difficult to implement. The new algorithm essentially renders events and gridlines as absolutely positioned <div> elements in a container div, instead of relying on a <table> element to render lines and cells for me. The DOM actually turns out much cleaner, at the expense of a bit more code complexity.

Painting my room was a whole different venture entirely. I had actually agonized about the design and color scheme of the room for at least two weeks before actually painting, and my poor friends had to put up with some of the most ridiculously hideous combinations of color that my imagination dared bring into existence (“How about lime green, pink, and dark blue?”). I eventually settled on a comparatively tame design, with walls alternating between green and blue themes. Each wall has a larger top portion painted a light shade of the theme color, a stripe of white, and a smaller bottom portion painted a dark shade of the theme color. I still picked lime green as my light green shade, but overall the room gives off an interesting vibe laying somewhere between “responsible adult” and “oh my god, my retinas are on fire.”

I’ll take pictures once the room settles into a happy equilibrium.