Introduction

I'm here in Seattle as a visiting student from EWU in Spokane. I made the goal to graduate with my master's degree in computer science by December of this year, but I also wanted to spend the summer with my girlfriend, Jackie who lives in Seattle. As a result, I resolved to come to UW as if it were my regular job in order to work on a thesis/research project.

Today is my first day on the UW campus. Everything is in disarray, and might remain this way for a while. But there's a chance that everything might come together soon, and I can settle in to a normal work schedule. I took a campus tour, walked through all the libraries, and talked with many front desks for various departments that are all empty today because its the first monday of the summer.

Thanks to Paul, the chair of my department back at Eastern, I now have a contact in the computer science department here. Larry has graciously agreed to help me out with various things so that I don't feel like a random bum off the street using the campus resources. Right now we're looking into getting an official status for me with the university so that I might be able to take advantage of certain things like a discount bus pass, gym facilities, a refridgerator, or (knock on wood) a desk.

There will be more about my project later, but for now I will say that it has to do with video and audio compression. I have a lot of background work to do in this field because I currently know nothing. My first major milestone this summer is to write a program that allows me to manipulate video files in order to alter the visual quality (e.g. resolution, frame rate, and color).

I'm not sure where to start, but Wikipedia has provided me with some ideas. I was hoping to find some easy-to-read published standards on video files, like the standards that exist for networking protocols, but I'm not having much luck to start. Larry has a name of someone on campus for me to talk to as this person might be working in a similar field as me, but I wont be able to meet this person until tomorrow at the earliest. Until then, I'm going to keep browsing online for my answers.