Going on a Nature Walk

Why go for a walk in the woods?

Taking a walk through the woods gives our minds a chance to unwind from the crazy lives we have and leave us feeling refreshed when we return. It gives us a chance to reflect and relax, to disconnect for a little while from the electronic world we are perennially connected to. UR professor Adam Frank wrote a nice piece for NPR in which he more elegantly argues for nature walks. It's a good read and not too long, and outlines some of the many reasons that people, myself included, like to go hiking. His piece can be found here.

Look! A Picture!

Well, it turns out it is not hard to add pictures, which is good.

In case you were wondering, I took this a few year ago on a winter hike up Carter Dome. The sign is at Zeta Pass, and I believe on the AT.

I really want to know the story behind the added violin (viola? music?) ban.

The First Warm Day of the Year!

In theory this is a blog about my AT thru-hike, however there is very little hiking or AT related stuff going on right now. So I'll talk about other things going on in my life.

This morning I had my "Plan B Exit Exam" which is required so I can graduate with my masters in a month. As scary as it sounds, it was actually only a 20-minute presentation on something I had done in the past year or so, with some questions afterwards by the faculty members. I talked about the work I did with a professor last year on a medium access control protocol called TRACE. I think the presentation went well, and they congratulated me after having me step out of the room, so I'm all set for May, assuming I don't fail my classes.
Those classes, however, should keep me busy for the rest of the semester. This semester I'm taking three classes, Digital Communications, Digital Audio Signal Processing, and Computation Models of Music Processing, and I have three final projects to start and finish before then. For computational models, we have to pick a movement from a Mahler symphony and analyze it with various programs and pieces of software we've used over the semester. This will probably be interesting, looking for correlations between my emotional response and the characteristics of the music.

65 days until Katahdin....