All in all, March was a very eventful month. I have been alluding to my pursuit of a Master’s degree for the past year or so – or as Steve affectionately puts it, I’ve been training to become a “Jedi Master”.
I started off by developing an actual working piece of software that creates an audio presentation based on motion detection from a webcam. The way that the sound responds to motion is fully customizable by way of an interface that allows you to route motion measurements from particular areas of the webcam’s view to playback parameters of the sound such as volume, left/right pan, frequency etc. Then I had to write my thesis to explain the system and its contributions to the scientific community. My document turned out to be about 150 pages long, consisting of 7 chapters and nearly 40 figures – entitled “A Visual Programming Language for Live Video Sonification”.
The final step in completing the thesis is the defence - a presentation and question period in front of a panel of academic examiners who may require changes to the thesis document before its final submission to the University. Aside from my supervisor, this panel consisted of two other professors from the department of Computer Science – one specializing in robotics and tactile interfaces, the other in visual programming languages. As per the requirements, I also needed an external examiner, in other words someone from outside my faculty; thus I approached a professor from the faculty of music whose specialty is electronic music. All in all it was a very broad range of expertise scrutinizing and validating my work.
My thesis defence date was set for mid March, only a few days before Apollo Western Cup. I had to laser print, coil bind, and deliver a copy of my thesis document to each one of my examiners three weeks in advance to give them sufficient time to read it and prepare questions. Four days prior to my exam, I did a dry run of my presentation to members of my lab. Aside from exceeding the time limit of 15 minutes, I took in plenty of critiques – it was all invaluable in helping shape my presentation into something tight, with all of the kinks ironed out.
The morning of my exam, Steve came along to help me get the presentation room set up with all the equipment I needed to do a live demonstration of the software. Although I was fairly well rehearsed, Steve could sense I was still nervous as hell, and joked around a bit to help lighten the mood. I did a last minute rehearsal in front of him just for good measure.
Then my examiners started arriving. They all seemed to understand this was a stressful moment, and offered words of encouragement before the exam formally began. I delivered my presentation with a little bit of nervous stuttering, however Steve tells me that the examiners were visibly impressed during the live demonstration. The webcam was pointed at them, and from across the room they interacted with the system and affected the soundscape that I assembled before their eyes.
Following my 15 minute presentation was the question period, where the examiners asked me a barrage of questions to test my knowledge in the realm of my thesis topic. The questions lasted the standard hour and forty-five minutes – they call it standard, but it still feels like getting thoroughly grilled. At the end of it all, the examiners conferred in private to decide the outcome. Some of the students from my lab that had come to watch my defence gave reassuring words as, needless to say, I felt pretty worn out. My mom met up with us at this point, and Steve excitedly talked to her about how well things had gone, and how cool he thought my system was having seen it fully in action for the first time. It baffled me to realize I had only been showing him isolated parts of it previously, but never the full picture.
After nearly 10 minutes the door opened and my supervisor came out to congratulate me, as now I was a Master. One examiner mused that this was perhaps the most fun defence he has ever been involved with. Another commended me for a well written document that was a pleasure to read. I packed up my equipment in a daze of relief as my supervisor chatted with Steve and my mom – I beamed as I overheard all three of them commenting on how proud they were of me. Although I was mentally and physically exhausted from it, this was my moment to shine, and I believe that I did.
For the remainder of the day, the question that kept popping up was “do you feel any different/smarter now that you have your Master of Science degree?” I found it a bit of a silly thing to ask because it’s the journey, not the title that changes a person; though honestly, if any change happened in me, it was gradual enough that I’m not overtly aware of it. Although I’m proud to have certification that my mettle was tested, I’m also humbled by the amount of things beyond the scope of my thesis project that I could not do. Apparently it’s a good thing to raise more questions than you can answer – it leaves work for other researchers, or myself if I decide to pursue a PhD...pffft, yeah right!
It was surprising to see how fast the word had spread as I photographed at the registration party for Apollo Western Cup...let’s say one of my examiners has ties with a certain swim team, and was happy to be the bearer of good news. I’m not much of an attention seeker but I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy it while it lasted.
Meanwhile, with the new cat ownership bylaw in place we had registered our 3 fur kids in February and received the tags in early March. I was a little bit angry to find out that they had to wear these tags at all times, even though we live in a 4th story condo.
So we bought collars at Petsmart, and the things apparently come standard with bells no matter what. Salem took the collar in his stride and didn’t seem to mind at all. Meanwhile, Sparky has an irrational fear of the jingling sound of bells (perhaps from some kittenhood trauma before we adopted him) and the collar really subdued him from his usual energetic nature since the more he ran, the more it jingled. On the other hand Snoopy seemed to go in the opposite direction – pretty much berserk. The bell sound made him think there was a toy in play nearby, and he kept climbing the walls after the reflection from his shiny metal registration tag. After two sleepless nights of non-stop jingling, we finally pried the damn bells from all of their collars so that we could have some peace and quiet.
Last Month
This March was one of those months from hell as community events went. With so many things overlapping in Calgary alone, we had to split up and run around like madmen, even having to outsource for a few events which we don’t usually do! But we truly covered a broad range of bars this month, with events from all 5 bars in Calgary as well as The Soda and Tantra.
Things started off innocently enough, with the AFQOL Awards Gala at the Backlot and the Dirty Bird Awards...though damnit, we got beat out for Best Lesbian Couple! Then things were mostly quiet here, so Steve popped over to Edmonton for a number of events. Pride Center of Edmonton’s Roman Pride Party was hit by nasty cold weather, so sadly many didn’t go for the prospect of wearing a toga out of the house. One event that took us by surprise was the Woody’s Anniversary Party (congrats by the way), which Steve didn’t find out about until the week before it happened. While photographing, freakishly Steve won a major door prize draw, and had even more to lug back with him to Calgary on the Greyhound!
The Femme Fatale Carnivale, a precursor event to the Vagina Monologues, was hosted at Tantra this year and hit new heights. The larger venue was chocker-block full, with the audience watching the stage from multiple tiers. We were pleased to see such a large turnout of lesbians, even though the event is predominantly geared toward a straight audience. The show was entertaining for Steve and I, but funny enough the line-up of scantily clad women had us noticing a number of straight guys discretely adjusting themselves. In the end, the event organizers were overwhelmed by the turnout, and initial tallies had them estimating that they raised as much money for FFC this year as the past two years combined! We received a letter to the publisher this month from the organizers with more information.
Somewhere in all of this, the ARGRA Dance fit in; this month it celebrated the 15th Anniversary of ARGRA. For the past couple of dances I have been enlisting the help of Vicky as my guide to seeking out lesbians that want to get their photographs taken, as on my own I seem to have the worst of luck. Although she says she really doesn’t know too many people, she did a fine job of whisking me from one group to the next, and I finally feel satisfied that the dance-going lesbian crowd is getting fair representation.
Western Cup Weekend was the climax of this month’s brutality. In preparation, we resolved our camera problems by getting Steve a newer model, and I received the hand-me-down. Friday and Saturday during the daytime, we split up to cover five different sporting events at venues across the city – in a few cases, returning to events we had already done on Friday to get more pictures. People kept asking us which sports had the sexiest people, and I seemed to confirm the pre-existing consensus that (from my experience) Volleyball was the winner – though Steve held fast to swimming for obvious reasons!
Instead of the usual Sunday awards brunch, Apollo decided to host a Friday night dinner and comedy routine which turned out very well. The dinner was amazing and the comedy routine had us all roaring with laughter. The Saturday Night dance, reFresh, was impressively slammed for such a large venue, not to mention the fact that the dance floor was still going strong by the time we left at 1am. We took the time to talk with people that we had seen only through our cameras’ viewfinders thus far, as well as marvel at the number of local faces there that we rarely see out. It was a humble reminder that Calgary’s GLBT Community is vastly larger than what we see at the bars alone.
Unfortunately with no awards brunch to wake people up the next morning, the Survivor Parties seemed to indicate that not many people had indeed survived – at least, not until later in the afternoon when the hangovers began to wane.
March gave us one last kick in the ass on the way out, with Calgary Cares happening at the exact same time as the new Girlsgroove dance. While our writer Dallas took care of Girlsgroove (apparently packed by the way), Steve and I sat at opposite sides of the Jack Singer concert hall, both taking photographs to lower our chances of missing important shots from the spectacular performance. The party continued out in the Jack Singer lobby with dancing, an amazing array of silent auction items, and mounds of food and CANDY! Ohh, the awful temptation for a diabetic.
This Month
We barely have a breath before we start getting into the ISCCA’s Coronation week, with a gauntlet of events starting April 16th and running through to April 20th. Most importantly the Coronation itself is happening on April 19th at the Metropolitan Centre. But even before all of that, don’t forget to vote for your Emperor and Empress candidate of choice at the Backlot on April 12th! Visit www.iscca.ca for the up to date list of events and details.
Other upcoming events are the annual GLASS Gender Bender, Dining Out for Life in Edmonton, and a number others that elude my memory at this moment. Visit www.gaycalgary.com/events for a complete listing of upcoming community events.
Lesbian Sex?
We were a bit scared of our Whole Lesbian Sex column last month, but judging from the response it was nothing to worry about. We spoke to a number of lesbians that read it and they were extremely excited to finally see an article devoted to and representative of their sexuality. Even those who hadn’t read it yet seemed very stoked at the prospect. Phew.
GayCalgary Online
Despite the insanity this month with community events and wrapping up my schooling, I managed to make a wee bit more progress on the GayCalgary.com website. We had an Events Calendar component whose administration interface I was wary of releasing to the public, so I fast tracked this component and redeveloped it to solve those problems. Non-profit groups and advertising businesses can now easily self-manage their events – all that’s required is for me to grant permission to their GayCalgary.com user account. Best of all, this also makes our job easier while administering events.
For visitors just interested in browsing the event listings, a couple of new features make this task a great deal easier. The introduction of Event Scenes and Cities helps you narrow down the often crowded month calendar to only show events that you are interested in (for instance, the Charity Scene in Calgary). Our list of sponsored events and their corresponding posters also help to give visitors an idea of upcoming community events at a glance.
Upgrading the photo gallery is my next task...this should be interesting.
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