On Monday I got a second cast made for what will likely be my permanent prosthetic. I took pictures of the process and added them to the text describing the first casting.
On the Monday before Thanksgiving I got word from my prosthetist that I could start walking unassisted. Immediately after hanging up the phone I walked across the parking lot to my surgeon's office. It felt great! I was beaming, but my surgeon was nonplussed. "Oh, I see you got your prosthetic. Good." He said.
Two days later I spent an evening with Michael, Elise, and Eric. I drove and had my magical handicap placard, so we parked in a handicap spot right next to some bicycle cops. One of them came around to my door and said, "excuse me, sir. We aren't traffic cops, but my boss is a real stickler for handicap spots..." Before he could finish the sentence I pulled up my pant leg to reveal my aluminum ankle. He swallowed and said, "we'll take that any day, sir. Have a good night."
My gait has gotten smoother since then, and passersby don't notice anything strange about my legs. It feels like my life is finally returning to (what passes for) normal. Last week I even went to the gym for the first time since July.
Aside from the University of Illinois, I have never named my employers on this website. Doing so could cause problems if a coworker or supervisor did not like being associated with something I wrote. I don't think I have ever written anything compromising, but there are too many stories of people whose jobs have been affected by something they posted online.
However, I think I can now make an exception for Agitar Software, the company that I worked for last summer, since they named me in a recent press release:
AgitarLabs is actively involved with the open source community and academic researchers. In addition to the "No Java Class Left Behind" initiative, AgitarLabs runs internship and fellowship programs involving high-impact industrial research projects in software testing and test automation. This past summer, AgitarLabs hosted Brett Daniel, a graduate student from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), who worked at Agitar's California headquarters for several months.
"I am very glad that Brett Daniel interned at AgitarLabs," said Dr. Darko Marinov, a professor at UIUC and Daniel’s dissertation advisor. "Agitar’s research interests align very well with the topics of Brett’s work in my research group. It's great that Brett had an opportunity to focus on real-world research issues, with the potential to publish research papers contributing to his graduate student career."
Agitar is a vibrant startup that is heavily involved in research. Marat Boshernitsan, who is the Director of Research at Agitar, and I are collaborating on several projects. He recently came to UIUC to give a talk in CS527: Advanced Topics in Software Engineering, the class that I TA'd this semester. I have had a very positive working relationship with him and Agitar, and I am sure that it will continue in the future.
About a year ago I posted some examples of the geometric designs that I often draw in my class notes. Here are some more recent examples. As before, these pictures are scans of the original freehand drawings. I only modified them by reducing noise, adjusting the brightness and contrast, and in the first one, covering a line of text with a black box.
