Ahhh, the ever infamous song by Green Day. Not that I have anything against the some or the band. I just didn’t like the fact that just last year, every radio station had to play the song every hour.

I wish I could fast forward the whole month and the first part of October just in time for semestral break. But until I find the ‘Click-ish’ solution to my present situation, I have to figure out the following:

1. How to be a recording artist and the audio engineer in a span of a week
2. How to extract all the parameters for our thesis. And prepare the project proposal as well.
3. How to master the 2nd law of thermodynamics by Wednesday
4. Read 3 chapters of Rappaport by the end of the week
5. Present a panel discussion for Comm 3
6. Submit the taxation assignment in CE 22
7. Help with ‘MC in a day’ seminar this Saturday

And that’s just for this week. Come to think of it, the next weeks will be tougher.

However, there should be overwhelming good news to counteract my stressful weeks ahead…

Cheska will be back by Friday~ and

Congrats to my dear friend, Jamie for passing the MedTech board exam!

After weeks of much anticipation (brought by the fear of the proposal deadline, mind you), my thesis topic has already been decided.

Development of Emotion Classification for Call Center Speech Analysis

Basically, my thesis partner and I will have to analyze a number of recordings to determine the factors indicating certain moods of customers. Of course, this could be done by the call center agent but the goal of this project is to actually replace a call center agent with a machine so that he/she could go on doing more tasks.

Truth to be told, I have never been this excited to take on an academic project ever since the license plate recognition project for a number of reasons:

1. I am officially assigned to the speech group of DSP — my preference ever since my application
2. I get to be tutored under Sir Franz and Dean Gev (yup, THE College Dean). Both a blessing and a challenge, if you ask me.
3. I have the chance to learn a new subject aside from hardcore signals processing.
4. The project is part of a big undertaking of DSP, in partnership with the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Speech Comm and Theater Arts. Plus, it has already been approved by the OVCRD (Office of the Vice-Chancellor for Research and Development).
5. A corollary of number 3: My thesis partner and I will be granted honorarium! Woot!

Of course, there are times when I ask myself what in the world did I put myself into. Then again, it’s only a few moments where you could actually seize an undertaking that will be worth all the hard work. Yes, Risha the geek is alive once again.

And since it will take a huge amount of my time, expect more thesis entries from this point onward.

First wave of exams have commenced — damn.

For everyone’s information, this entry is an attempt to calm myself before I dive once again into my piles upon piles of books, notes, and scratch papers full of computations (hopefully, my calculator won’t break the fall).

I should have seen this coming anyway. With 20 units (again) to endure this semester, 17 of which fall on the ‘eng’g majors ‘ category, 2-3 exams in a week are expected. Fortunately, I don’t have to relive the time when I have to take 3 2-3 hour, major exams on Saturdays. Come to think of it, it’s been so long since I had those days, I already forgot my batting average.

Anyway, as a way to motivate (or intimidate… I’m really gunning for the former) my psyche, here is the list of the storm called exams:

Thursday – July 19: CoE 127 (Speech and Audio Signal Processing)
Tuesday – July 24: EEE 53 (Electronic Circuits II)
Thursday – July 26: Comm 3
Friday – July 27: CE 22 (Engineering Economy)

Until then, any thought-provoking, profound, funny, angsty blog entries would have to wait.

Wish me luck!