I feel powerless everytime I realize that the major success and failures of my life rely on the performance of a $100 CPU chip. Months of hardwork end up eliciting nothing more than a few chuckles from the audience when things don't go as planned.

I feel extremely uncomfortable saying this but last night's presentation of my research to my professor didn't go well at all. To put it midly, Titanic was a success compared to my blasted Java code. For some reason, both the computers I tested my demo on couldn't play the sound. My professor wasn't impressed and neither were the 5-6 PhD students who he asked to review my research. Took me only a few seconds to realize what a miserable failure I was too.

Then I came home, instead of studying for the exam that I have in 4 hours, I spent a good amount of time just relaxing, trying not to think about proceedings of the night. I realized a lot of things often go wrong in life. Optimism and pessimism aside, failure is determined not only by the outcome of the event but also the amount of time we spend moping on the results. So yes, things absolutely blew up in my face with regards to my research and while my professor is not angry at me, he sure is extremely disappointed. However, he was very VERY encouraging and told me to continue on to the next step in my research: writing a thesis paper describing my algorithm. Despite the fact that my current model doesn't work, he wants me to sit down and clearly write what I did, so that he has a better understanding of my methods.

After some yummy dinner last night, I realized what exactly was screwing up my demo and removed that module from my code. I rewrote a few lines to realize there IS a way I can make my code work everywhere! I now know what I have to do and tonight I shall do it. By God I will do it :) And you will see it and play it even on the slowest of the computers!

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