Having passed my qualifying exam, the university now recognizes my candidacy for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Check.

Well, after waiting for four months for the University construction people to actually build our lab, we've finally moved in. It's very nice. It'll be even better once the ceiling tiles, network patch panels, light switches, and lights are installed.

The furniture is classy, and I sit directly in front of an 8"x6" whiteboard. I'd post photos, but I don't have a camera. If I get around to it, maybe I'll get some off of the guys with digital cameras. Or maybe I'll draw some artist's renditions in Paint. Better yet, I could take advantage of the fact that we just got Maya Unlimited from Alias Wavefront and create a full 3-D model of the whole lab! That seems like it would be a lot of work... we'll see.

So I found out recently that I've been mispronouncing my supervisor's name for the past 2 years. Apparantly the 'D' in "Dinesh" is pronounced like the "th" in "there." It makes me feel better that everyone else found out at the same time as me.

By the way, I didn't mention it, but "Timothy" is actually pronounced nee-po-^-hai ( ^ is a clucking sound made with the tongue).

We had the inspection walkthrough for the construction plans today. The trades guys were impressed with the job I'd done laying out the proposed walls on the floor with masking tape. I'd really only done it so that we could figure out how we're going to fit 7 people and their computers into the rest of the room.

It's going to be a tight squeeze, but at least we all have flat-panel monitors - hooray! (Except Shin, who specifically requested a CRT for less motion blur when doing graphics stuff - he also hopes to get a bigger desk as a result).

I was discussing with my supervisor yesterday the experimentation booth that is being built as the central feature of the lab that he is putting together (and the reason for the existence of his flock of grad students).

It's a pretty nice setup, including vibration-damping floor, acoustically shielded walls, large-screen rear-projection display, surround-sound (in the sense of speakers all over the place), and a motion tracking system that could, for instance, track the exact location of your ears.

He concluded by mentioning that it will be a great place to watch DVDs.