DC Metro Fiasco

The efficiency and accessibility of the DC Metro to riders with bicycles has been vastly overstated. Friday, I had planned to meet a friend at the National Mall during my extended lunch break. Instead, I spent over five critical minutes trapped in an elevator on the train platform at the Ballston station and missed a train thus delaying me by about thirty minutes. I encountered more broken elevators at Metro Center where I decided to disembark delaying me further. The lack of any other cyclists on the train confirmed what I've already come to believe: that bicycles on the metro are a mistake and you shouldn't attempt it ever. After arriving at the Mall, I biked back to work passing the National Cemetery on my way.

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Work is enjoyable. I've accumulated one gold star so far. I'm eager to get results and finish the VSIPL implementation they want ported. After that, we start investigating methods for application development and, potentially, compiler research though that's typically not the best level of abstraction to perform crucial restructuring for parallelism unless you modify the programming language as well (with CUDA, Cell SPE intrinsics, and Fortran as examples).

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PhysX is pretty straightforward with a sensible class hierarchy and all of the objects you would expect: a generic scene, a generic shape, effectors, linear spring and damper systems, force fields, triggers, convex meshes, ray tests, etc. Coprocessors are supported by encapsulating objects in non-user space and providing explicit means for transferring object state back to user space.

Achieving a fast platform-independent [PC, PS3, Xbox360, GPU soon] implementation is something NVIDIA hasn't published yet, but I'm really interested in seeing about that when the time comes. They may not open source it for a while though.

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Plan for Monday [Visiting Research Assistants are not hourly, and we all have Monday off]: get up at reasonable hour, bike through the district, and have supper at the Quarter Deck, a seafood restaurant near the river. I'm determined to develop tastes in seafood having largely shunned it up to this point.

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I'd rank El Ranchero in my top three Mexican restaurants of all time.