Memphis

Note: I used (a slightly different version of ) this story as my admission essay for Carnegie Mellon. They accepted me, so I assume that this story is sufficiently interesting for a blog.

In Spring of 1999 I was 14; I lived in Maine and my dad lived in Panama City, FL. My parents have lived in very different parts of the country since I was 3, so as an only child, I was a veteran of traveling alone by a very young age. (Fun fact: I lost my first tooth while flying alone from Seattle to Honolulu.)

As a seasoned traveler, I knew the ins and outs of airports, flight transfers, etc. My parents had enough faith in my ability to get myself across the country that they didn't feel the need to hold my hand while doing so. Assuming this trip would be no different than the hundreds of other flights I'd been on, my mom also took off to visit a friend across the country. So, we both left the airport at the same time, just headed to different destinations.

This flight was in the evening and everything was going as planned until I arrived in Memphis. Ready to be in Florida in an hour and a half, I strutted down the terminal to the gate of my next flight. But when I got to the gate, I saw that my flight had been canceled. This was somewhat distressing, but like I mentioned before, I knew how to handle these kinds of situations. So I walked to the ticketing agent and confidently asked for a ticket on the next flight, assuming it would be an hour or two from that point. No dice. The next flight was not until 7am the next day.

So okay, this was a new one for me while traveling alone, but I'd been in this situation before on family vacations. I told the agent that 7am was fine, and could I please have a hotel voucher, since the flight cancellation required me to stay overnight?

She just stared at me and asked if I was 18, though it was pretty obvious that I was not. She informed me that they weren't legally allowed to give hotel vouchers to anyone under 18. Well crap.

Starting to get worried, I asked her what she expected me to do? I didn't live in Memphis and certainly wasn't going to sleep in the creepy, abandoned airport by myself all night. She was understandably made extremely uncomfortable by this situation and went in the back to talk to her manager. After an eternity of wondering if I was going to have to sleep on the airport floor, she reemerged and asked me to come hang out in the Northwest Airlines (yeah, I'll name names) office while they figured out what to do with me.

So I headed back to the employee area and they were very nice to me. They gave me cookies and meal vouchers that I couldn't use because all the food places were already closed. Since this was pre-cell phone age, I also used their phone to alert my dad to the fact that I wasn't going to arrive on time. Or even that night. I don't really remember how that conversation went, but my dad didn't seemed overly distraught by the fact that I was 14 and stuck in an airport overnight by myself. I guess that's what happens when you're a truly grizzled traveler growing up in a military family.

It was after midnight by the time they figured out what to do with me. After presumably making a whole lot of panicked phone calls to Northwest Airlines headquarters, they came to the conclusion that it would be okay and legal to keep me in the hotel attached to the airport. I was really tired, so this was amenable to me. That is, until I actually saw it.

I've stayed in a lot of motels in my life, since my family travels a lot. This was worse than any of them. By far. It was dark, grungy and smelly, and the employee who accompanied me to the room inspected the closet and under the bed, just to make sure no one was hiding in there. Was that supposed to be comforting in some way? This whole situation did not instill a lot of confidence in me. Nor did the stain that looked suspiciously like blood right by my door. I was pretty sure this was where I was going to die.

I really had no idea what to do all night. If I fell asleep, someone would definitely break in and kill me. But I was also really, really tired. Since my luggage was presumably in a nicer location than I was, I didn't have any clothes to change into, or a toothbrush, or any of my stuff.

Fortunately I had my CD player to keep me entertained, and to block out some of the noises coming from the hallway and rooms near me (which clearly had no sound-proofing). I really wanted to call my mom, but she was still on a plane and couldn't hear about this until the next day. So I just laid there on the bed, awake almost the entire night, positive that every sound was an intruder coming to murder me. There was even a skylight in the room, yet another entry route for deranged Memphis killers to come and get me. How was this the safest option for a 14-year-old girl?

I must have eventually fallen asleep, because I awoke to my alarm clock and booked it the hell out of there. My 7am flight left as scheduled and, amazingly, both my luggage and I arrived in Panama City, FL completely unscathed. And with an awesome story.

Another note: Not long after this event, TSA issued a new policy that unaccompanied minors are not allowed to fly on the last flight of the night. I'd like to think I was involved in the birth of that policy.

Gigapan

Gigapan was the second project I worked on at the CMU Robotics Institute. My team comprised several unfathomably brilliant scientists and me. For instance, the person who interviewed me for my job? Turns out he's the head of robotics at NASA Ames. Thank goodness I didn't know that at the time.

So, the idea behind the Gigapan was to allow anyone with a digital camera to (affordably) take massive-scale panoramas without requiring any extensive knowledge. Basically you'd be able to plunk your camera onto the Gigapan, set the four corners of the desired panorama and it would snap all the necessary pictures for you. After uploading them to your computer, it would then automatically stitch the pictures together and spit out an awesome multi-gigapixel panoramic image. That is, in fact, how it works now; however, when I worked on the project, it was still in alpha mode and did not perform quite as nicely.

My role in all this was to alpha-test the heck out of the Gigapan. Why they chose me for the position is a mystery for the ages, but nevertheless I used my nebulous skill set to go out and take a crap ton of panoramas around Pittsburgh.

There are a lot of elements to taking a good panorama, and up to this point I really knew nothing about any of them. My Photoshop skills were okay, but I'd never had more than a passing interest in photography and knew nothing about depth of field or parallax or vignetting. Yet here I was, bafflingly put in charge of all these expensive cameras and high-tech robotic equipment. I still feel a twang of guilt that there were so many aspiring and knowledgeable photographers out there and that I was essentially shoved into this job. But anyway. 

Unfortunately I can't find any pictures of what the Gigapan used to look like, but basically it was a small robotic mount attached to a circuit board and a battery pack. In effect, it looked exactly like a bomb. Every time I set it up, I'd get a lot of questionable looks from people assuming I was up to no good. A few brave ones would ask questions about the device, but most just looked and left me the heck alone.

Between May and August, I probably took 20-30 panoramas around Pittsburgh (and a handful in Gettysburg!). Not all of them made it to the site, and unfortunately a lot of them have been digitally lost. Each one comprised up to several hundred individual photos, which were then stitched together using PTGui to create a single image (tech note: I believe there is proprietary stitching software that comes with the Gigapan if you buy one now).

This was an interesting gigapan to take. That group of nerds is the CMU Class of 2007, which coincidentally would have been my graduating class, had I graduated and not joined the Gigapan team. To take this, I had to get up on stage, in front of all those people and hit a lot of buttons on a thing that looked like a bomb on a tripod. Here is a picture of that:

You can't see it in this picture, but Bill Cosby is also on that stage. This might have been one of the most nerve-wracking hours of my life: getting up there, making sure everything actually worked (a lot of the components were often faulty), sitting there nonchalantly to not draw attention to myself while Commencement happened, and then disassembling the equipment once it finished. Me being me, I also woke up late and had not planned how to dress myself beforehand and showed up looking like Neapolitan ice cream (though, punctual Neapolitan ice cream!), but I digress.

One Saturday that summer, I felt suddenly compelled to go and take a really freaking awesome gigapan. Since it was a sunny day, I went to work, grabbed all the equipment and trotted around Pittsburgh until inspiration hit. And it did: the top of Cathedral of Learning, duh! I didn't know if it would be possible to get a decent gigapan through glass, but it was worth a shot. There were a bunch of people up on the 36th floor, but I told them I worked for CMU and this was official business. They left. No one questioned me after that and I was able to take 2 or 3 entire gigapans (at least 2 hours and 3 SD cards worth) and head back to the office to get them stitched and see if any even turned out. Amazingly enough, something resembling this appeared several hours later. A bit of tweaking in Photoshop and voila! 3 years later, this will be on display at the US Steel Tower from October 11th to November 19th, 2010.