Journal Club Quasi-Catastrophe

I just finished my journal club talk on Dome C seeing measurements. It started off badly, with my laptop refusing to cooperate. I wish I had shown up earlier, so that I could have learned this and moved my talk over to Alek's computer before journal club started. Unfortunately, I didn't, so my advisor had to leave before I gave my talk as he had class to teach at 1pm. And then of course the powerpoint file didn't translate well to mac, so there was some weird-ass contrast shit going on. And naturally I put over half the audience to sleep. But who cares! I'm ecstatic cause it's over with! Yeah!

Time Warp: Yesterday' Entry

This is weird. Southwest is screwing shit up left and right tonight. Lots of
delays and things that are not typical of Southwest airlines. I've finished
getting my talk ready for journal club on wednesday. At this point, all I have
to do is talk through it a couple of times and I should be ready to go. The
Las Vegas airport is a nice place to stay though. They have outlets on the
wall where you can plug in and charge your laptop or cell phone or whatever. I
wish more airports had them. Of course, it's still an airport and it sucks.

Law Student for a Day

Today's exciting news is that I've spent the morning sitting in on Tiffany's law school classes. Overall, I think they've been interesting and very challenging. In fact, I think they're significantly more challenging than my classes, because there is so much more information presented that must be distilled by the student. In other words, you hear too many words to write them all down and still understand the important aspects of the discussion, so you have to trim and summarize on the fly. It's a skill that I've never developed because in my classes all you really need to do is copy down equations that the teacher writes on the board. Heck, these days you get power point presentations where you barely have to copy down anything.

One interesting aspect of the three classes I've been to today is the male/female participation ratio. The first two classes were taught by male professors and had very high m/f factors. This is in stark contrast to the class I'm in right now, where we have a female professor and comparatively low m/f.

Another interesting thing is the way students are called on semi-randomly during each class. It definitely involves the class in a more proactive manner. The way students are able to answer these questions makes me think about my own classes, where most of the students (including me) would be unable to answer 90% of questions asked during class. This is at least in part due to the general attitude of indifference towards classes at Steward and in Astronomy grad school on the whole. In the long run, I suppose this attitude of indifference is fine, since classes really do seem useless after you've passed your prelim (that's what I assume, anyway), but on a daily basis it makes classes a major drag.

Good Old Jeff Tedford

Making me eat my words! Well, in my own defense, Ayoob didn't start. Although, the way the game was described, it seemed like I could have started the game at quarterback for Cal and won. Sadly, it wasn't on TV, and I was busy finishing second in a poker tournament after halftime. The person who finished ahead of me is none other than my housemate, Eric Nielsen. Congratulations, Eric!

Big Game Prediction

I'd just like to go on record predicting the following outcome for the 2005 Big Game: Cal will give up a quick score or two to Stanford, then hang in there until the end of the third quarter, when Ayoob will throw his third interception and the Cardinal will march down the field, score a touchdown, and break the game open.

I'm a true optimist, aren't I?

Giving Linux the Beatdown

For a long time, this data analysis software called GILDAS was not supported for 64-bit machines like mine at work. This forced me to log in to another computer to do any data analysis, which was very frustrating. However, I recently discovered that the software is now supported for 64-bit machines. Consequently, I spent a good part of yesterday attempting in vain to install GILDAS. Finally, today, I successfully compiled the software. And it works! Linux is a major pain in the ass most of the time, but occasionally it does do what you want it to do.

Learning

I just discovered that leeks are like spinach in the sense that they go from being gigantic vegetables pre-cooked to tiny little shrivels of vegetables after being cooked. Live and learn, as they say.

Poker tonight.

Hawkeye Bussmann

Would you want to face a pitcher with this kind of intense gaze on the mound? I know I wouldn't.

Toys

I got a bunch of stuff delivered to me today. 4 CDs from BMG, a bunch of pens, and of course my shiny new cell phone. Sadly, the phone must be charged for 8 hours before use, so I can't try it out till tomorrow. But my intention over the course of the next couple of weeks is to call everybody on my old phone list so they have my new phone number. Sure, I could send out a mass email, but I'm hoping this way I'll get a chance to talk to people that I haven't talked to in a long time, like Andy Morrison and Nick Laskowski.

I have a mosquito bite on my cheek. It's really irritating.

Half Full

I have a new cell phone plan, but I don't have a new cell phone. At least, not yet. It's scheduled to arrive Thursday night. 7pm, in case you were wondering.

Softball E League tournament is tonight. We play the team we forfeited to last week. Should be a good game. If we win, we play a tough team directly afterwards.

A Shift in the Balance of Power

I just signed up for an account with cingular wireless, meaning that I shall soon be departing from my association with Verizon wireless. The purpose of this shift is to make it easier for Tiffany and I to converse with each other at any and all times of the day. Unfortunately, my contract with Verizon doesn't run out until April of 2006, but I think I'll be able to schlep my old phone off on my Dad when I go back home for Thanksgiving.

In other news, I bombed my instrumentation midterm. It isn't the greatest feeling in the world.

Multiple Updates

In list format...

• I bought some noise canceling headphones recently at Amazon.com. After using them for a total of about 8 hours while flying to Hawaii and back, I can say that they do a good job of attenuating the low frequency noise associated with the roar of an airplane's engine. However, there was still a significant amount of higher frequency hiss-like noise that did not get attenuated at all. Since these headphones were cheap ($20 when I bought them; they've since gone up about $15), it's not a huge surprise that they don't have spectacular dynamic range. It is possible to reduce that higher frequency noise simply by pressing the headphones tighter on my ears, but then my arms aren't free to do anything else. I've thought about making some contraption (duct tape, perhaps?) to hold the headphones tighter on my head automatically, but that might be a bit more trouble than its worth.
• I'd like to do a post-conference wrap-up for PPV. First off, about the registration fee, no, I don't have to pay for it myself. But, somebody does, and in this case it happens to be my advisor, who receives his funding from taxpayers. So ultimately, it's everybody else who is paying for extravagances that are unnecessary. Besides, a lot of the stuff that drove up the cost of the conference was simply wasteful.
• I wrote a summary of my experiences during the conference and in Hawaii in general for the week. The summary of the summary is that I learned a lot about star formation in general, didn't have much of an opportunity to discuss my research with other people, and was able to find some time to explore the island a bit and have some fun. It was good to hang out with Trent and Brandon again as well.
• I took a couple of midterms the week after I got back and did "all right" on them. What "all right" means is unclear at this point.
• During that week, which was last week, I found myself low on food at frequent intervals. It wasn't pleasant. Today, however, that was rectified with a two hour trip to a couple of grocery stores. I'll spare you the list of what I bought since there was so much. Suffice to say that tonight we made miso soup for anime night and tomorrow night I'll be making apricot bulghar pilaf.
• I played in a goaltimate tournament yesterday morning and afternoon. It's like regular ultimate, except with half-court style, continuous play, and 4 on 4 action instead of 7 on 7. It was a lot of fun and my team dominated in going 6-0 over the course of the day!
• Last night I won a 20 man poker tournament and made a tidy profit of $62 in the process. I had to get pretty lucky several times, including spiking a set of nines on the river to crack pocket rockets and making two pair queens and threes to beat pocket kings. This was my first win in a big tournament (defined as having more than 15 players), so I was pretty happy to finish first.
• Friday afternoon I visited Brandon Swift's house that he just bought in the past month or so. The purpose of the visit was to see if I'd be interested in moving there. It's a 4 bedroom about a mile east of my house (i.e. 1 mile further away from the university), so the primary advantage would be a significant reduction in rent, probably $100-130 a month. Unfortunately, the house is on a relatively busy street, and based on the visit it seemed to me that only 1 of the 4 bedrooms was isolated enough from the street to be quiet at night when I'd be trying to sleep. And that bedroom had only one window and consequently didn't get nearly as much natural light as any of the other bedrooms. Also, the living room is smaller than my current one and is at the front of the house, close to the street and all that noise. I liked the kitchen and the bck room, but again I'd be concerned that there wouldn't be enough room for 4 people to live comfortably (remember that this is Tucson we're talking about here, not San Francisco). The house does have a pool (with a diving board!), but it seemed that there might be a leak issue with the pool that is a potential problem. The last thing that made me somewhat cautious is that the bedrooms were all about a foot smaller than the one I'm in now. But the main issue is the noise from the busy street. Bottom line: I'm happy where I'm at now.

Cowards

None of you have stepped forward to identify yourselves, so I'm forced to call you out as no-good yellow cowards. And punks, too. Jerks.

In case you haven't notices, pictures from my recent trip to Hawaii for PPV are up, as well as pictures from a hockey game between Phoenix and Detroit, a birthday party in San Jose, and a trip to a mini-farm in Berkeley.

Stalkers Beware

Since I got site metering set up for my blog earlier today, I've had over a dozen visitors, many of whom I can't identify. This fact surprised me a great deal. So, if you're one of the following visitors, why don't you identify yourself?

• Columbia, Maryland with a 1280x1024 resolution monitor
• Mount Laurel, New Jersey (1024 x 768 -- get a new monitor, jeez!)
• San Francisco, CA (1024 x 768 yikes; also MacOS X)
• Cambridge, Massachusetts (800x600 people still have resolution this low?)
• Tucson, Arizona (1024 x 768 no it's not me; linux)
• Saint Joseph, Illinois (800 x 600; windows 98?? that's from the stone age man)
• London, Lambeth (1024 x 768; linux)

I would like to say that I'm proud of the non MS-ness of the operating systems of people checking out my blog. Way to go guys!

In other news, my softball team lost tonight. I'm sure where to categorize this one though. We lost on a technicality, because we batted out of order in the first inning. It was unfortunate because we were playing a team we definitely could have beaten. However, it wasn't like our playoff destiny was on the line, since every team makes the playoffs. It would have been nice to taste victory, but it really isn't a big deal.