I can see paradise by the laptop light

Wowza.  What a week.

We need to have our software finished by July 1 (tentatively) and we've all been so busy, I don't have too much to report, unfortunately. I fear that this journal entry will be quite boring.
This week, we really have accomplished a lot in terms of work. It's hard to think of it that way sometimes, because we do so much re-accomplishing of things we thought we'd already accomplished, but it's all for the best, I think.

This week, I wrote a simple GUI animation to display and hide a correction message. Basically, once the student inputs his/her answer into our software, and he/she clicks the check-my-answer button, feedback will be given, either to provide feedback on how the student should fix his/her solution  or to congratulate the student on a correct solution. Unfortunately this code was overhauled overnight by one of the graduate students, but my idea remains, and it looks quite nice.

This week, we allowed the professor that we are making the software for, and a few of her graduate students, to test out the software as a mini-user-study. Nearly everything that could have gone wrong, did go wrong. I left the meeting so discouraged. We got a lot of useful input and found several bugs to fix, but I cannot remember I time when I was more embarrassed for my work. Somehow, none of the users in the study drew arrows in the same way that I do, and all of them complained that arrows were not recognized at all. There were a lot of complaints about trusses as well (Travis has not finished the draw-it-any-way-you-want-it truss recognizer yet, so we were still working with the old recognizers I wrote in week 2). It seemed that everything at the forefront was my fault. I still haven't quite recovered from this meeting.

So early yesterday (Monday) morning, I started reworking my arrow recognizers, and I think it will take me quite a while longer - possibly this whole coming week.

This week, to recover from that horrendous meeting, went out to lunch at a restaurant called "Fuzzy Taco." The slogan is apparently, "If it looks like a taco, and smells like a fish, it's gotta be Fuzzy's." I was a little concerned at first, but it turned out to be pretty good. Then we went to see Toy Story 3 in 3D. It was wonderful. I cried. We all cried I think. After the movie, we went to an Asian restaurant for boba teas.  I didn't have one, but they looked really fruity and delicious. In the restaurant, we laughed and joked and were just friends for an afternoon - not stressed coworkers. It was extraordinarily fantastic.

This week, my boyfriend came to visit me from Milwaukee. It was so wonderful to share A&M with him. I am getting increasingly homesick every day, so his visit was remarkably diverting. It's amazing how much loneliness can be cured with a simple hug.

This week, I'd like to send a thousand hugs out into this endless void of cyberspace, one for every mile of distance between myself and my family and friends, to anyone who needs one. Maybe, if the hug brightens your day, you might consider sending one back.