Week in Review

Hi Blog Readers:

Sorry for the sporadic updates..  It's been a crazy month!  As many of your know, I'm getting married to M on Saturday.   We are doing much of the work ourselves to save money.  It's been very hectic, but in the end, I think it will be a great ceremony and reception.  I'd like to give a shout out to people who have been helping us along the past few weeks... Centime, Tung Lee, Sarenna Stein, Brian Thomas, Isabella, Z. Alonso, Margaret, Vuto, and the many others who I am too frazzled to mention at the moment!  

In other news, I had a pretty good week last week.  I gave a one hour talk at Draper Labs for my year-end review on June 22.  A research grant from Draper is funding my education, so I am grateful for that.  The talk went very well.  My current research is in graph-based information handling and manipulation for engineering systems architecting.  Twenty people showed up at my talk, which is a very good turnout for these types of things.  19 of 20 liked it.  The one guy who objected, didn't object too strongly, he just didn't like being told/didn't believe that my way of doing things is better than his way.  We'll see...  ;)

I had a good game of softball last week.  Our manager, Dan Kwon writes up funny articles after each game in our softball blog.  I hit a game winning double to end the game on Wednesday.  It was a great feeling, because my hitting has really stunk recently.  (I think I've been too distracted by off-field stuff!)

Last week M and I watched two movies at home:  Il Postino and Everything is Illuminated.  Both were fantastic, and I highly recommend them to almost anyone.   However, if you only like action movies and hate reading subtitles, these are not for you.    Il Postino is mostly in Italian with a bit of Spanish.  Everything is Illuminated is a mixture of English and Ukrainian.

I went to an appointment with Margaret's Radiation Oncologist on Wednesday.  She was her normal self, messing with the staff a bit.  This is the first appointment she has had since the radiation stopped three months ago.   The radiation used to treat her tumor takes about 6 months to 2 years to take effect.   The staff was very impressed by the improvement they could see in her.    There was one particularly funny exchange between Margaret and her doctor:

Margaret (in a gruff voice): "GENERAL!, has the radiation infiltrated the battlefield?"
Dr. Ramakrishna (standing tall, in respect): "Yes, Margaret!  Our intelligence images are showing the enemy may have begun a retreat.  It appears the enemy is not successful in it's attempt to call reinforcements, however we need more time to see the full effect of our attack!"
Margaret: "Great job, general!"

[In other words, so far so good.  There is some indication that the tumor is shrinking, but it's still too early too tell....  The good news is that the radiation did not cause the tumor to grow and did not cause any new swelling of brain tissue.  This is fantastic...  The next MRI and appointment is another 3 months from now.]

That's all for now.  I'll post more when I can.  Large numbers of family and friends are flying in soon, so I'll do what I can...