The theme of this past month seems to have been 'internships, and little else.' After we got back from San Francisco, I filed all the requisite forms to get work authorization for the summer. Since then I've done four phone interviews with various researchers in my field, and a week or so ago I spent the (entire) day doing on-site interviews with Microsoft in Redmond. It's been sort of intense, but the news so far is good: I have one official offer and possibly more on the way. It is somewhat of an embarrassment of riches.

After my first phone interview with Microsoft, they (flatteringly) invited me over to Redmond a few days later. This was a little hectic, given that I didn't get my itinerary until a day in advance. One of my flights -- the very first one -- promptly got canceled, but United was kind enough to drive us from Charlottesville to Dulles instead. By the time I made it from Dulles to Seattle to Redmond, I was not in a great state. Fortunately, my 7 straight hours of interviews didn't start until the next morning...

I finally got around to 'selecting' and formatting my remaining pictures from the California Trip. The trip was split up roughly as follows:

• Thursday—Drove from Charlottesville to Richmond in the Virginia-equivalent of a blizzard; flew from Richmond to Philadelphia; ate hotdog in 30 seconds while running to the gate post-final-boarding-call; drove from San Francisco to Davis in The Gigantor (rental car) during rush hour.
• Friday—MURI meeting; presented my work on SQL injection vulnerabilities. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner with the Helix research group (quite literally).

I have no hopes of catching up on six months worth of festivities, so here's the highly abridged version instead; here's what I did during the last 4.5 months:

• I took classes: math, theoretical crypto, and security.
• There was a paper submission around mid-November. As an exercise to the reader: which two photos to the right were taken within an hour after we submitted the paper?
• After scrambling to catch up on class work, I spent most of December and January-to-date studying for the Ph.D. Qualifying Exam. That was earlier this week. The written exam took a grand total of 15 hours, leading to near-blisters from writing.

I've been back for all of two weeks, and it already looks like Semester 3 in Virginia is going to be rather busy. I think I've said that at the start of every semester in the past 3 years, so let me qualify this a little further: reaaaaaaly busy.

So the good news is I managed to get a paper published in Automated Software Engineering. The acceptance rate was under 15% this year, so that's Very Good News. The paper is titled 'Modeling Bug Report Quality' and I'll be presenting it in Atlanta, Georgia, in November.