Once upon a time,
there was a girl who loved dogs
and wanted to fly.
That was me.
The end.

“Flight is freedom in its purest form,
To dance with the clouds which follow a storm;

To roll and glide, to wheel and spin,
To feel the joy that swells within;

To leave the earth with its troubles and fly,
And know the warmth of a clear spring sky;

Then back to earth at the end of a day,
Released from the tensions which melted away.

Should my end come while I am in flight,
Whether brightest day or darkest night;

Spare me your pity and shrug off the pain,
Secure in the knowledge that I’d do it again;

For each of us is created to die,
And within me I know,
I was born to fly.”

— Gary Claude Stoker

Just a wishlist of different ukuleles I would like to own if money was no object

• Koaloha Red Label  or Black Label Concert Ukulele w/Lr Baggs 5.0 pickup
• PIGEON TREE CUSTOM ADIRONDACK SPRUCE MACASSAR EBONY TENOR – this is a one of a kind, a real beauty
• Rebel Livingston Tenor Uke – either the spruce top or cedar top version, no longer in production, only available used
• Blackbird Clara eKoa Concert Ukulele with an Anuenue Air/Air pickup installed after the fact, strung high-G
• Asonu Tahitian Whale 4-String (tahitian stringing)
• aNueNue aNN-UC3K Bird Series Koa Concert Ukulele w/air air pickup
• Petros Custom – Cedar Top, Macasser Ebony body, with the usual polynesian inlays. Unlikely to ever own one, though. I saw one for sale at HMS once, and it was $6K. Neck and neck for most beautiful sounding and looking uke I have ever seen/heard alongside the Pigeon Tree mentioned above.

Delighted to see my recent IEEE conference paper finally show up in Google Scholar and the IEEE Digital Library. I truly believe that the next wave of innovative technology solutions will embrace Affective Computing, i.e. computing systems that understand and adapt to human emotion.

S. M. Moon and Y. Qu, “A quantitative approach for determining pilot affective patterns during soaring flight simulation,” 2017 3rd IEEE International Conference on Computer and Communications (ICCC), Chengdu, 2017, pp. 2617-2624. doi: 10.1109/CompComm.2017.8323008

Successfully defended my dissertation: “An Experimental Design of a Foundational Framework for the Application of Affective Computing to Soaring Flight Simulation and Training”

There is finally light at the end of the tunnel! I’ve submitted my dissertation to my mentor, who is reviewing it for any last minute changes. I should be defending my dissertation in 2 weeks 1 week.