This week was a little more frustrating than I thought it would be, but it also was a lot sadder than I thought. On Monday and Tuesday, not much happened, except for the ineptness of the software I was using. Insight3D, which was the OpenSource tool that was supposed to create 3D models on Linux. However, after spending days uploading image after image, only to see it fail after a 5 hour upload, I decided to choose only 20 select pictures. The software took this to mean that no common points could be found, and it once again failed miserably. Angered, I went to Venkat to ask if he knew of some other software that I could use, and he recommended Autodesk's Remake. This software had two benefits to it. Firstly, it was completely free, granted I sign up with a student license, and it additionally created full 3D models with texture and everything else I needed. After fiddling around with the software through Wednesday and Thursday, I was confident that coming in on Friday I would be able to create a full 3D model of a book easily. I left my computer on overnight to analyze the pictures, and went home. When I arrived to work on Friday, I found out that the windows partition of my computer, where I had been using Remake, was going through a system update. Ok, I thought, this seems pretty routine, so I'll just wait until it finishes. I'll put in a disclaimer here. My computer, in order to switch between Windows and Linux, is on a partition system. That means that whenever I boot up the computer, I can choose which operating system I want. The hard drive space is divided accordingly, and it usually is supposed to work. What I had found was that after the update, the Windows partition had somehow unallocated all the data on my Linux partition, effectively deleting it. I had essentially lost all the work I had done in the past five weeks. Luckily, the software genius Andrew had just gotten into the lab and we were able to rescue my Kinect Picture node with a flash drive and some downloaded software.
On the other side of things, this was the last week that Shivam, the intern from India, would be at the lab. Joe and I decided to make it an incredible week for him. We went out to dinner, got waffles and pizza and heaps of nachos every night after work, and on Thursday I threw for the two of them a tortellini bash. Basically we just made tortellini and curry and watched a bad movie. Another day, we went up to the top of the learning tower at Pitt and took pictures. And finally on his last day, we went out to the park to get sugar waffles and play catch before the park workers told us to stop. It was both really fun and really sad at the same time to know that one of my closest friends in Pittsburgh would no longer be working at the lab. When we returned to the lab, I said goodbye and departed home to watch baseball. Over the weekend my dad came over, and we watched a Pirates-Phillies game, with the Pirates winning 7-4. We also went out for some food and got a tour of the campus, which is about 10 times smaller than Pitt's. Hopefully next week will build on what has been an incredible time in this city.
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