Welcome to UMBC

As I give the short tour of campus, you have to keep one thing in mind; the campus here is not very old. They will be celebrating their 40th anniversary this coming year. As such, there are lots of new buildings, but there are still many that are temporary and others that are forthcoming.

Here is Casselman Apartment, my humble abode on campus. Each of these units contains twelve separate apartments (mine is second floor right-hand side). There are a couple dozen or so units like these working their way up the hill on one side of campus. Apparently, they were supposed to be "temporary" housing when they were built something like 20 years ago. I think they're actually pretty nice.

I work in the ITE building, shared between the Computer Science and Information Systems departments (and maybe a few others). The Human-Computer Interaction group is a subsystem of the IS department. All of our facilities and labs are on the fourth floor. This is an example of one of the buildings that is relatively new on campus. From what one of the other students in the program explained, about half of the buildings have sprung up in the last 5 years or so. A new music building is in the works.

Here is the Albin O. Kuhn (AOK) Library. Since my project was initially intended to assist library patrons to locate books and other objects in the library, I have spent a little time here. Also our final poster session is on the 7th floor.

Some things I've learned about the Library (I'll explain in a later post -- it has to do with my project):
- Not all of the outlets on a given floor are on the same phase of the cycle.
- A compass can't find North inside because of the steel shelves and wiring.


Before I came here, I was expecting a modern campus, and indeed, that is what UMBC is. However, they have made an effort to make the campus beautiful. Every day, I get to walk past the pond on the opposite side of the library from the one that I posted the picture of. Below is a closer picture of the bridge that crosses over part of the pond.














I'll leave you with a couple more pictures of the campus. The first is the Commons, which is their Student Union. It is another of the very new buildings on campus. Unfortunately, I've only passed through because most of the eateries are closed over the summer, or if they're open now I've become used to cooking enough that I don't really care.


The second is a set of bicycle "racks" that I thought were very interesting (I don't really know what to call them other than that). They are all over the place around the classroom and administrative buildings.
P.S. - - I'm sorry about the formatting... I'm still learning how to get it right on Blogger.

Summer's only half over... it's not too late to start blogging

Hello everyone,

I promised some of you that I would start posting pictures from UMBC once I got my new camera, and now that I have it, I can start to. I've had it now for several weeks, and so I thought that the time has come to actually post something. If the narration sounds corny, then it probably is; my main goal is to show you a taste of things here in Baltimore.

For the moment, narration on my experience here is all that I plan to put, but if I start to think of anything profound, then I may start posting those as well.

The second point of this post is to test to make sure that Blogger is working properly. It's the nerd in me, I just can't help it. Here's a picture from testing my camera.