Numb..

On last week I went to see the dentist as I had mentioned in one of my previous posts. The cavity to be fixed was in the back tooth located on lower jaw. As I have had my share of not applying local anesthesia when stopping a tooth, I asked the dentist to ensure that this time I do not feel anything. She really ensured that, I had a right side of my lower jaw, tongue, and face completely numb for the rest of the day. So I had to be very careful for not to bite off any parts of my tongue or inner cheek.

Marjo and I also managed to assess the robotics course on last week, which means that all the work regarding that course is now completed. I also updated the course web pages adding there quite a few new links and some examples of the projects that students did on that course. I think that the course and its web pages are quite interesting, because there are not that many university level courses in Educational robotics in the world. There are plenty of courses about robotics in general and some subtopics of robotics such as A.I, but not in Educational Robotics. Perhaps this is something that we (I) have to put some extra efforts on also in the future.

I have to take back some frustrated words that I said about our Greek partners in the project that I am getting my salary from. I had taken or even misinterpreted their comments in a worst possible way. We had a Skype conference call on last week, which revealed many facts and viewpoints that were missing from the commented document and e-mails. This was a very good reminder of the difficulties that we face, when relying too much on text-based electronic communications only. Nevertheless, there is a lot of extra work that I need to do on those templates, mostly because one of the E.U. metrics for evaluating the project outcomes is the amount of content (e.g. number of pages).. Luckily, I am having time until the end of next month. But this does not mean that I could take it easy, actually quite opposite of that.

I also got some feedback from the Japanese embassy in Finland concerning my application to the JET program. Unfortunately, I did not make it to the interviews. I tried to ask, whether they could give me some justifications, but the contact person did not know about those. I bet that the problem I had was the lacking fluency in Japanese. Well, good thing about this was that I got the feedback very quickly so that I am able to start looking for some other alternatives for the fall. Let's see, if there are any projects with vacant positions at our research group then.

Interesting Stuff:
Ubisoft: Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon 3: Advanced Warfighter (XBOX360)