Jared's One Blog

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December 30, 2005

Friends and Fun

You know, I think I could really get used to this whole sleeping in till 10am thing...

Like I mentioned in my last post, on Tuesday evening I went over to Nathan & Laura's to play a game of "Settlers of Catan: Cities and Knights" with them, Mark & Wayne. After last weekend's quick one and a half hour stomping by Laura, this one was certainly a much better game. It was fairly even throughout, and everyone was fighting tooth and nail for every bit of board position. It just kept going and going and going, with nobody able to get quite enough to finish it off and win, until Nathan managed to pull it out, five and a half hours after we'd started. It was by far the longest game of any version of "Catan" that I'd played, but it was also by far the most fun game I've ever played, even though I came in 3rd or 4th.

Wednesday afternoon I was outside replacing a couple of light bulbs outside the garage, and a truck came up the driveway with four teenage guys (probably college freshmen, I'm guessing) from Bloomer, asking if they could go ice fishing on our lake. They'd only heard of our lake before, because on of the kids claimed his uncle had been fishing the day before on the lake and caught a bunch of northerns and other fish. We didn't recall seeing anyone on the lake, but that doesn't mean nobody was out there. But we let them all go out on our land down by our dock and onto the lake. They were only out there on the lake for about half an hour wandering around, drilling a bunch of holes, testing depths, and suddenly they packed everything up and left. I guess they didn't find the fishing that good.

On Wednesday evening Mike, Kevin, Shaun & John all came over for a few hours. We just hung out, played some pool, watched a couple funny videos on my computer, and just generally goofed off for a bit, it was fun. I also gave Mike & Kevin a couple small Penn State glasses, and though Mike forgot it that night, in return they got me a UW-Green Bay t-shirt in "Pfizer Viagra" wrapping paper for Christmas, haha.

Last night a few more old friends came over here, Abby, Janelle, Martin, Sarah, Sarah's new husband Ezra (they just got married on the 23rd), Sarah's older sister Jess, her husband and their infant, and then we all went out to eat at Applebee's in Rice Lake. It was so good to see all of them again, and catch up over a good meal. After dinner Janelle and Martin hung out for a bit longer at my house, I showed them a few pictures from Oz/NZ, mostly the awesome road signs and various LOTR sites, which they got a kick out of.

Overnight and all day today to this point we've gotten probably a good 3-4 inches or so of fresh new snow, making everything look bright, fresh and clean outside. The snow had definitely started to look a bit dingy, and there were large areas where the grass was arrogantly poking through the snowpack. That shouldn't happen in late December, but now everything's back to how it should be. Now I've gotta go out and shovel sometime this afternoon, that's the only downside. And it's still snowing too, which could make driving a bit interesting this afternoon and evening.

Speaking of weather-related events that shouldn't be happening in late December, there is ANOTHER tropical storm out in the Atlantic -- Tropical Storm Zeta. Absolutely unbelievable. You can check out the discussions and forecast tracks by the National Hurricane Center here. The Atlantic hurricane season "officially" ended on December 1st, but in reality this season just doesn't want to end.

Well, I'm excited for tonight too, because I'm gonna be heading down to the Twin Cities for a bit of a phun physics reunion at Dick's Bar in Osseo, which Cory's dad owns. I'll be staying overnight at someone's place down there tonight, and probably comin back on Saturday. Though there's still a chance I might stick around into Sunday, I'll just play it all by ear. It should be a really fun time! I'll be heading out in an hour or so, I just hope the roads aren't too bad on my drive down there...

For those of you planning on flying anywhere soon, just make sure you don't have a case of air rage while flying on Monarch Airlines, they'll leave you on a small desert island in the middle of the ocean!

The other day I also updated my Links page by adding a ton of useful weather links, such as satellite loops, model runs, observations and the like. Check em out, there's some cool stuff in there.

Happy New Year everyone! 33 hours and counting until 2006!

Posted by Jared at 02:47 PM | Comments (0)

December 27, 2005

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas everyone! I hope you've all had a wonderful holiday, filled with good times with family, gifts being given and received, delicious meals and tasty sweets. I definitely had a good Christmas, but I'll get to that in a bit.

Back on Friday night the 23rd my younger brother Jake came by and we went into Cumberland to meet up with my friend Pete at the Corner Bar, whom I hadn't seen in over two years. After awhile a bunch of other people came out too, lots of old friends from high school, many of whom I hadn't seen since graduation four and a half years ago. My how time flies! But it was absolutely wonderful to see so many familiar faces and to catch up with all sorts of people again! Now let's see if I can keep in touch with at least some of them.

Overnight and for much of Christmas Eve I didn't feel well at all, I think I caught some sort of bug, or had something the night before that I shouldn't have. Yeah, something like that. Anyway, by mid-afternoon I was finally starting to feel a little bit better, or at least well enough to get my presents wrapped and help with cleaning the house. Once those duties were done I went over to Nathan & Laura's place in Rice Lake to hang out and play a game of "Settlers of Catan: Cities and Knights." The game was fun, if short-lived. Laura just got every single roll imaginable, and had the game won in an hour and a half, perhaps the quickest game ever of that. I'll be going back over there tonight for a rematch, hopefully this one won't end so quickly. :-)

Christmas was just a small family affair this year, with my brothers and their families all coming over here to my parents house, as has been the tradition the last several years. The Christmas dinner was fabulous, with grilled pork chops (who says you can't grill outside in mid-winter way up north?!), baked potatoes, fruit salad, broccoli salad, plus all sorts of bars, cookies and a wonderful cheesecake. Mmmmm, so good... All the kids went out sledding after lunch and had a good time, even though the abnormally warm temps (mid-upper 30s) we've had the last several days have really eaten away at our snowpack, so that now there's grass poking through in many places. At least it was still a white Christmas though, you've gotta have that. After everyone came back from playing in the snow we all sat down in the living room and sang a few Christmas hymns as a family before opening presents. I think that'll probably turn into a new Christmas tradition in our family, we hadn't done it before but it was cool.

For Christmas this year I gave small desk calendars from PSUBAMS (the weather club at Penn State) to my parents, Nathan & Laura and Aaron & Eve, since one of my photos was picked as a winner in the weather photo contest this November at PSU, and made it into the calendar for July. Of course I had bought all those before being notified that this year our family was having all the adults just draw one name of someone to get a gift for, to make it all a bit simpler and whatnot. I guess that's what I get for trying to shop early, I've definitely learned my lesson! I had drawn Aaron's name, and got him a nice Penn State polo shirt which he seemed to like (even if he isn't necessarily a PSU fan, hehe). My one gift came from Nathan, he got me a cool cookbook for all sorts of recipes that can be made in a crock pot. When I was flipping through it I was noticing all sorts of tasty-looking recipes that I'll definitely have to try out at some point after I get back to Penn State. And after I get myself a crock pot too. This is the first cookbook I've gotten, and it'll definitely be fun to expand my culinary horizons a bit, beyond the usual sandwiches, spaghetti and hamburger helper that I had a steady diet of last semester. Thanks Nathan!

Christmas didn't end so well though, as Aaron & I stayed up to watch the Vikings lose to the Ravens, eliminating them from playoff contention. It's probably just as well, since they probably would've been killed in the first round of the playoffs anyway. But on the bright side, even with the "love boat" scandal and all the other off-the-field issues the Vikes had this year, at least they were better than the Packers!

Aaron & Eve stayed yesterday until after lunch, and then in the evening I went over to Greg's place for a bit. It'd been three years since I'd seen him since he lives way down in Dallas, Texas, so it was fun to catch up and everything again. He taught me how to play "Go," and the first game of course didn't go well, even though he gave me a handicap of six pieces already placed on the board. But afterward he was able to point out some of the pros and cons of my various moves, and what I perhaps should've done, so that by the second game I managed to beat him. But since it was still with a handicap of six, that's no giant accomplishment. But it was definitely a fun game, one I hope to play again sometime. I also showed him some of my pictures from my trip to Australia and New Zealand last year, that was fun.

I just saw on the local news that down on Prior Lake in the Twin Cities, six cars fell through the ice yesterday. So today all those people, instead of fishing for walleye, were fishing for their trucks and cars with a tow truck. Fools. I don't know what those people were thinking, it's been warm enough for long enough lately that it's clearly not the smartest idea to drive a vehicle out on the ice. Our lake up here definitely has some large dark spots, and even a couple small holes in the ice have appeared in the last couple days. I'd be nervous about even walking on the ice right now, much less driving on it. And it looks like this mid-winter melt will continue for the next few days, by the weekend we might not have any snow left. It seems like just about every day for the last week has been in the 30s and cloudy/foggy/misty, it's getting a bit old.

Well, the next few evenings I'll be busy hanging out with a bunch of friends, both up here and down in the Cities. I'm really looking forward to being "busy" with all that, it should be fun!

Posted by Jared at 07:53 PM | Comments (0)

December 21, 2005

Quiet Days

We must've gotten a little bit of cold fog around here last night, because this morning all the trees were coated in a beautiful layer of hoar frost, making everything look so soft and velvety. And it stayed cloudy and calm all day too, so it's still on the trees. It's scenes like this that make winter so pretty.

I haven't been up to too much these last couple days, basically I've been a bookworm bum. I felt like a change of pace from the type of stuff I'd been reading, so I perused my parents shelves and decided to pull off Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls." Got through 170 pages today so far, not too bad. He's definitely got his own unique style, it's taken a little while to get into it. But hey, I figured I should get around to reading another "classic" (haven't done that in awhile), especially one that's set in Spain. :-) It definitely is nice being able to take some time and just sit down and read a good book, not having to really worry about anything else. I'm definitely looking forward to some of my old friends getting done with their finals and coming back to town though, so I can hang out with them. I'm not used to being done before everyone else, this is kinda odd. :-)

My parents are finally gonna be getting rid of their current dial-up internet connection in favor of a speedy DSL hookup. It's about time if you ask me, but their boss deciding to foot some of the bill (since my mom works at home as an off-site secretary) was the final push they needed to go for it. There's even a chance it might get installed before I fly back to Pennsylvania. Hmmm, the possibilities of not having to spend 2-5 minutes waiting for a website to load... I hate dial-up.

We're almost all done being decorated for Christmas around here. My dad and I got down one more tree tonight, plus a giant wreath for the outside of the house that we put the lights on and got hung up. Probably my mom and I will spend part of tomorrow decorating the last two trees. Not much time left, as Christmas is almost here! It definitely feels a lot more like Christmas here than it did at Penn State, since we didn't have any decorations up in our apartment or anything. That, and homework and finals tend to suck any Christmas spirit right out of ya.

Happy Birthday Dad! Just thought I'd throw that out there. :-)

And finally, some people just don't have luck with animals, as evidenced in these three stories from The Australian's "World Wide Weird" section. First, a man snorkelling on the Great Barrier Reef got attacked by a school of great white sharks, but managed to fend them off. I'm definitely glad I didn't have the pleasure of encountering any sharks down there while I was going for a snorkel! Then you have the people who are just plain stupid, like the Tasmanian woman who had her finger bitten off by a lion at the Melbourne Zoo, when she tried to pick a flower from inside its enclosure. Some people... And then where would this world be without stupid criminals? If you're feeling police after robbing a bank, where would your first choice of a hideout be? A tiger enclosure? Sounds like a plan, at least for this South African fellow, who didn't exactly fare too well.

And Josh, I can't guarantee that I'll put up any pictures of your present to me. That entirely depends on what the present is. :-) Oh, and Zach, sorry, but a Lexus just isn't in the cards for ya, no matter what the commercials might tell you. I don't even think I'd be able to afford the big red bow!

Posted by Jared at 11:51 PM | Comments (0)

December 20, 2005

Home Again, Home Again

At last the semester is finally totally done! I finished the last half of my Meteo 3 exam grading a bit after noon on Friday, at which point I was finally free of all my responsibilities for the semester. I would normally have mentioned some of the funnier answers I saw on the exams, but I was trying so hard just to get them done as quickly as possible that I can't really remember too many of them, sigh. At any rate, after grabbing some lunch with Kerrie & Amber, we managed to convince Amy to come out with us too, and take some pictures on the snow-and-ice covered Lion Shrine. Man that sculpture was cold to sit on...

In the afternoon I did a little bit more Christmas shopping, and then I went to the Sports Cafe for a good chunk of the evening with Daniel, Frame, Vic, Chris, Petters & Steph, where we managed to win 1st place for the second consecutive week in trivia, woot! Another $25 gift certificate for wings comin up next trivia night, that'll be nice. And yeah, that totally wasn't Jack either, as Frame & Daniel can attest, boo to that.

Kate came up from DC late Friday night for a visit, that was fun. Saturday I showed her around campus and downtown, I think she really enjoyed the chance to get out of the rat race in DC and experience a small-town/college-town atmosphere for a day. In the afternoon we also went to see "King Kong," which was pretty good. I thought it was perhaps a bit on the long side (just over 3 hours), and a bit overdone at times, but it was still good. After the first 45 minutes or so, the tension hardly let up for the whole rest of the film, and the action was mostly relentless. It was actually almost exhausting in that respect. Sooo many dinosaurs, enormous insects and other monstrous creatures, parts of it felt like "Jurassic Park" almost. After the movie she went back to DC, and I finally started getting ready and packing for going home.

I had to get up really early to finish getting ready and whatnot, I wasn't exactly thrilled when I heard my alarm at 5am. But anyway, I picked Daniel up a little before 7, and by 10 or so we were at the airport west of Pittsburgh. I gave Daniel the Christmas present I'd picked up for him, the book "How to Talk Minnesotan," I figured he'd appreciate that, especially since his "all ya'll" and other vocabulary has started creeping into my speech, it just slips out every now and then, rolls off the tongue, much to the dismay of some of my friends back in the midwest, hehe. I told him I expected him to study the book and be using a little of the Minnesota lingo by the end of break, we'll see if that happens. :-) Anyway, while we were grabbing an early, overpriced lunch in the airport, at the table next to us there were two parents, a grandma, and a little 4-year old boy. The little boy was being a bit of a brat and making a fuss about wanting the toy that came with the meal right away, at which point the dad got up and started chasing the kid around the table. After giving the kid a good wallop, then the dad was practically shouting at the kid, "If you're gonna challenge me, you better be prepared to back it up!!" and all sorts of ridiculous stuff like that. That whole episode was a bit uncomfortable to be around, Daniel & I were just trying to look the other way while all that was goin on, though we did have a chuckle about it after they left. At any rate, my flight left at noon, but Daniel's didn't depart until 4:30. But that'll all even out when we come back on the 5th, I'll have to wait about 6 hours before his flight will arrive in Pittsburgh. That'll be time for books and people-watching, to be sure. I just hope at least one of us will remember where we parked my car two and a half weeks from now...

Upon landing in Minneapolis (it was a cool 5 degrees out, a nice welcome home) my parents & I drove out to Hutchinson to attend my niece Gabriella's dance recital. She's only 4 and a half, but she danced pretty well. Some of the even younger kids were inadvertently funny up on stage too, some of them just kinda doing whatever they wanted, whether it was dancing or not, it was cute. :-) After that we drove back to Aaron & Eve's for a bit of supper, and then proceeded to head home to Cumberland. Needless to say, I was a bit exhausted from all the travelling by the end of the day. Waking up really early, three hours driving, almost three hours sitting on a plane, and then sitting in a car for another almost five hours. I was very glad to get home and go to sleep.

Today (Monday) was nice and relaxing. Absolutely nothing to do, it felt great. It was so nice just to be able to sit down and read a book for awhile, and even fall asleep for a bit in the afternoon out on the sun porch. More of the same will probably be scheduled for tomorrow, I can't wait. It's nice being home again.

Posted by Jared at 02:16 AM | Comments (2)

December 15, 2005

Done With Finals!

Well, I had my final final of 2005 back on Tuesday afternoon, in 501 (Atmospheric Phenomena). The exam wasn't all that hard, just a bit on the annoying side, as around 70% of it or more were dinky little one-point questions asking for "typical values" of certain parameters, such as "the vertical vorticity at 500 mb over a developing extratropical cyclone is ___" or "the saturation vapor pressure at 650 mb in winter above State College is often about ___." Talk about maddening. But it's all over, and now I'm officially done with my first semester of graduate school! It feels so odd saying that...

So to celebrate being done with finals, a bunch of us went down to Beulah's BBQ for a very tasty dinner, and then afterwards we all just moseyed on downstairs to Bar Bleu for a couple drinks. The lounge chairs were soooo comfy... :-) It was a fun night just to hang out and relax without having to worry about exams or assignments or anything, I wish more nights out could be like that.

Yesterday, even though I was free from my classes for the very first time since August, I still came into Walker. I had an appointment with Dr Brune, the department chair, to talk about me finding research funding for the summer and beyond. Basically he told me that I shouldn't be panicking just yet, but that I should really pound the pavement in January and February in search of research opportunities, and that I should "expand my search horizons" a bit. I'll definitely need to make time to do that in the first few weeks after break, I don't want it to get to be April and not have funding lined up yet.

I guess I'm not quite totally done with everything I need to this semester actually, as Bill is having us TA's grade all the final exams for the Meteo 003 students. Wonderful. At least a bunch of students decided to take the exams early in the conflict slots, so I got 18 of the exams yesterday and got a jump on those, finishing them today. I'll get the rest of them tonight at 8 when the final exam slot is finished, and at least I'll only have 29 more exams coming tonight. The downside is that Bill wants them all graded by tomorrow at noon. Oh joy, oh bliss. So guess what I'll be doing tonight? On the plus side, I finally figured out how to get my laptop connected to the wireless network here in Walker Building, so that'll make everything a bit nicer.

Yesterday was kinda also movie night. In the afternoon, after going downtown to buy my brother Aaron's Christmas gift (no telling what I got him, in the off chance that he actually happens to read my blog), I met up with Vic, Frame, Robert, Amber, & Kerrie to go see an early evening showing of "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe." Talk about an AWESOME movie, I absolutely loved it! Everyone else did too, and not everyone had read the books either. The movie stayed pretty close to the book, which was nice to see. The visuals and acting was really good, I thought, and all the talking, fantastical animals were realistic, allaying the late C.S. Lewis's fears that any movie would make a buffoonery of the animal characters in his books. And while the religious allegories and symbolism weren't exactly blatant, they were there in abundance if you were looking for them, which I was. The movie even brought a couple tears to my eyes at points, especially several of the parts involving Aslan. I'd be more than willing to go see "Narnia" another time or two in the theater, it was that good. Then later on in the evening Daniel & I got some pizza and watched "Hero" over at his place, since he'd never seen it before. That's another film I love watching, it's so beautiful visually. There were even a couple little details I caught this time around that I hadn't noticed before, so that was cool.

We've got a nice little winter storm that's whacking us today here in State College. Already we've gotten about 3-4 inches or so (though I haven't been outside since lunch, so it's hard to say), and it looks like we're gonna get some sleet and freezing rain mixed in with the snow from now through tomorrow morning. Fun fun fun. I wish it would stay all snow, that way we'd get 10 inches of the white stuff and the roads wouldn't suck quite so bad. Oh well.

Well, time for supper, Daniel & I are gonna try out yet another new State College eatery, hopefully we don't pick a dud. Then I've just gotta wait around till 8, when the grading fun resumes. Almost there...

Posted by Jared at 06:47 PM | Comments (0)

December 12, 2005

2 Down, 1 To Go

And then there was just one left. Our Rad Tran final was this morning, bright 'n early at 8am. Let's just say that I'm very glad it's over. I think I did fine on the first three problems (60%), but then the final problem (40%) rocked me hardcore. Part of that was due to my brain gradually turning to mush from rad tran/exam fatigue. I was trying to figure out for a long time what I was doing wrong, but after spending 30-45 minutes literally just staring at my paper, I decided to quit at 11:30, half an hour before our time was gonna be up; I just wasn't gonna get any further in that half hour. I think this exam went better than the second midterm, but then again that's not saying too much. Basically everyone was worn out afterward, but very relieved that it was done. After grabbing some lunch at Fraser Street Deli with Daniel and spending an hour or so in the review session for the 501 exam, I just came back here and took a nap for 2-3 hours. I was so tired. I haven't really gotten too much accomplished tonight, maybe an hour or so of 501 studying, and then other random stuff.

I'm just glad I didn't have alarm clock issues this morning like I did yesterday morning. Daniel & I had been planning on going to the 9am church service, but I didn't wake up till 8:50 when he called to let me know he was in the parking lot. Sigh, stupid not turning on the alarm clock... So anyway we wound up going to the 10:30 service, and then we decided to try out the Waffle Shop for lunch, as neither of us had ever been there before. Mmmm, omelette and pancakes, so good...

Well, maybe I'll resume some studying for 501 when I wake up. The final's from 1-3, and I'm pretty sure that after that there'll be some celebration or get-together of some sort, particularly since a bunch of people are going home on Wednesday. I mean, you've gotta celebrate finishing the first semester of grad school in style. ;-) Almost there!

Posted by Jared at 11:57 PM | Comments (0)

December 10, 2005

Done With Class!

Amazingly Rad Tran didn't quite kill us the last half of this week, like we'd been fearing it would. It certainly wasn't fun, and involved many trips to Eugene's office to ask him questions about the exam corrections, but eventually I got as much done as I cared to correct. I think I at least got my exam grade up into the 60s somewhere, but I know I didn't earn back quite everything (which would've gotten me a 74), because correcting the last little bit of one of the problems was total bull and way too much work for 11pm on Thursday night. Apathy was definitely another factor. Gotta love apathy. But despite Dr Clothiaux's continued insistence, these were not good exam questions. They would've been fine homework problems, but in an exam situation they were terrible because of how much work they required. Oh well, it's over now. Unless Eugene gives us back our most recent assignments next semester to correct, if it'd make a difference in our grade. Aren't classes supposed to be contained within a single semester??

The snow geese had been honking for most of the week, and they finally got their wish Thursday night, when central Pennsylvania got whacked by a good snowstorm that moved up the spine of the Appalachians. It didn't start snowing until after 10pm, but by the time I had given up on working in Walker on the exam corrections at 11pm, there was already over an inch of snow on the ground. I brushed off my windshield, but by the time I'd finished brushing off the back window, the windshield was completely covered again, that's how hard it was snowing. Pretty cool if you ask me. :-) By the time I woke up Friday morning 7-8 inches of new fluffy snow had fallen, yet because the snow had mostly stopped by 3am (meaning we got all that snow in 4-5 hours!) it wasn't quite enough to delay classes on Friday. Bummer. But hey, at least we got a good snowstorm, so we can't complain too much.

Once Rad Tran was done on Friday, we really didn't know what to do with ourselves in the TA office with absolutely no work to do (unless you count studying for finals, but who wants to do that?!?). Eventually Daniel & I decided to walk downtown get some lunch at another new place (well, new to us), India Pavillion, for their lunch buffet. Now that's the way to sample a whole bunch of good food you've never had before, a buffet. It was really good, but we both probably ate a bit too much. Mmmm, naan bread and chicken masala... So when we got back to Walker we discovered that Amber, Kerrie & Caren's game of tic-tac-toe had morphed into a bunch of morbid but absolutely hilarious drawings (I even added a couple of my own to go with the theme), little cartoons of all sorts of inventive ways to commit suicide. We were so proud of it that we hung it up on the corner of the whiteboard in the TA office, go check it out! My favourite was Amber's drawing of a guy who's thinking to himself "I'm allergic to bees!" while bashing a beehive with a stick. Seriously, it's some great stuff. :-) Can you tell we're all glad the semester's over?

Last night at team trivia we actually won first place for a change! I think that's definitely the first time this semester that we've pulled out a win at Sports Cafe on Friday night. It's always nice to get free wings out of answering some trivia questions, can't beat that! Afterward, Frame, Vic, Daniel & I headed up to Kerrie & Brian's apartment to watch "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" with them, Amber, Mario, Caren, Aviva and a couple of her friends she brought along. People seemed a bit more interested in just hanging out than watching the movie though, which was fine, both were fun.

Today I've basically been doing just about everything I could think of to procrastinate. Haircut? Check. A little Christmas shopping? Check. (To everyone who was lobbying for me to keep my shaggy, curly hair at least a bit longer to see if it'd grow into an afro, my apologies, I know you're disappointed. But it'll be getting long again in 2-3 months, don't worry.) Vacuuming, sweeping, mopping and cleaning the apartment? Check. Talking to Mike for awhile on the phone? Check. Writing a new blog entry? Check. Various IM conversations? Check. Doing laundry? Check. Man, talk about a full day! Now it's time for bed, aww shucks. But in all seriousness, I'll hit the books hard tomorrow after church, though I don't really know how much good it'll do for the Rad Tran final Monday morning. I just don't really have much of an urge to study about radiance, irradiance, solid angles and optical depths, plus anything else that can be derived from the radiative transfer equation. I just don't. I can't imagine why not, they're all so interesting...

Posted by Jared at 11:52 PM | Comments (0)

December 06, 2005

Rad Tran Hell

There's really no other way to describe the past several days. This past weekend was undoubtedly the absolute worst weekend I've experienced homework-wise since late in the fall of my junior year, when we had a killer Mechanics assignment and the longest Advanced Modern Lab or two to write up. That weekend sucked. But so did this one, I just don't know which one was worse. That's the main reason I haven't posted for nearly a week now, I've just had absolutely zero time until this evening. And I probably don't even have this time. But I digress. The primary culprit for my suffering these days is Radiative Transfer.

My Rad Tran marathon started on Thursday, by which point Dr Clothiaux had thankfully pushed back the assignment from being due on Friday to Monday. I stayed in Walker till probably 10 or so, I really can't remember. About all I remember is that when I was giving Daniel a ride up to his truck in the stadium lot on the other side of campus, I had to bust out the scraper to get some ice and snow off my windows. We've all been teasing him for awhile now that he's gonna have to get a real scraper, that a calculator cover (or a spatula, but that was inspired by Amber) just won't cut it up here like it would down in 'Bama. I think now he realizes just how handy a scraper can be in these parts.

Friday began oh so wonderfully. We all got to Rad Tran, when Dr Clothiaux was like, "So, remember that exam you all took two and a half weeks ago that nobody finished in time? Yeah, I haven't graded them yet, so I figured I'd give you another hour and a half to work on them this morning. Here they are, go." Or something to that effect anyway. But seriously, we had absolutely no warning about it, so most of us had kinda forgotten what the second test was on, partly deliberately since we all knew we did so poorly on it. I think I eked out a few more points with that extra hour and a half, but I still really had no idea what was going on. And still nobody finished before the extra hour and a half was up, so what Dr Clothiaux thought would take nobody more than an hour, took everyone at least two and a half, still without finishing all the problems. Argh. He still maintains that it was the best exam he's ever given, even though he admits it was also the most difficult he's ever given. That's just great... After recovering from that shock in the morning, it was back to work on the Rad Tran hw though. Friday evening Daniel & I managed to stick it out in Walker and work on Rad Tran until about 10:30, when we gave up and joined Stephanie, Jacob, Petters, Frame & Chris up at the Crowbar to hear the 80s rock band "Bad Hair Day." They were pretty decent, it was just extremely loud most of the time. Fortunately my hearing loss was only short-term. But Jacob's dancing and Frame's air guitar were hilarious almost all evening, it was definitely an entertaining and worthwhile break just for that. Little did we know that'd be our only quasi-break until this evening.

Saturday I had been planning on taking off some time either in the afternoon to watch the Army-Navy game, or in the evening to watch a couple of the other conference championship games, so I got myself up to Walker in the morning to get to work. Other than a break for lunch, it was 11:15pm before I left. I put in a good 10 hours of work on Rad Tran. On a Saturday. How sad. At least there was a rather large group of us there for most of the afternoon and early evening, so none of us were slaving away alone at least. It's just that I spent almost the entire day working on one problem, which Dr Clothiaux had drastically updated/changed earlier that morning, so part of what took me so long is that nobody else had started working on it yet, so I couldn't really compare ideas too much. Very slow going. And I didn't even finish it.

Sunday morning at least provided a bit of a cheery respite. First of all, it snowed 2-3 inches overnight Saturday into Sunday morning! So everything was all white and really pretty around here. I also had to dust off my winter driving skills a bit when I was on my way to church, as the roads were only partially plowed by that point. At any rate, church was nice as usual, and we had some special musical guests joining the worship team this week, a trombone quartet of four older guys who've been travelling around the country playing at different church services here and there. Their name is awesome too: "Totally Bone-ified" (hopefully I didn't butcher the spelling, but that at least gets the pun across, hehe). It's just fun to sing Christmas hymns like "Joy to the World" and "What Child Is This?" accompanied by four trombones. Just kinda adds something special. :-)

After a much-needed grocery run it was time to head back up to Walker for another 12 hours of work. Again, it was mostly on Rad Tran, though I did manage to sneak in a couple precious hours starting on my 501 hw. Yay for Skew T diagrams! Anyway, after Daniel & I had a late-night talk with Dr Clothiaux letting him know how much time everyone had been sinking into this assignment so far (yet nobody was finished yet), we convinced him to eliminate the entire assignment that he was gonna make for this coming Friday, and to push back this assignment to Friday, along with everything else that he was gonna have due on Friday. But when we started complaining about how hard and how much work everything was, he kinda put things back in perspective, asking us if we'd rather be doing backbreaking manual labor or living in some third world country. I guess when you put it that way, we have a pretty cushy job after all, where get paid, albeit not very much, just to think. By the time it was all said and done, Daniel & I gave up for the night at 1:15am.

Another thing that came out of the discussion Sunday night with Dr Clothiaux was that I discovered that he never received the email I'd sent him a week before Thanksgiving about my preferences for TA assignments for spring 2006. This was no good, because by then all the TA spots had been decided upon, based on the preference requests they received. So instead of getting perhaps one of my first couple choices, like Mesoscale Meteo or Forecasting, I got stuck with another three sections of Meteo 003 Lab. Even though I knew it was gonna be too late, I sent both Bill & Dr Clothiaux an email explaining why I didn't particularly want to TA Meteo 003 again, and they both were real apologetic, saying that they basically couldn't do anything about it at this point, that it was all already decided, but that if they'd actually gotten my email when I originally sent it, that I definitely wouldn't have been put with Meteo 003 again, because I had very solid reasons (namely, that I wouldn't learn as much or get as much out of it by teaching it again, that I wanted to learn something new). Daniel, who was placed as the Mesoscale TA, very kindly basically offered to switch assignments with me, since Mesoscale was my #1 choice, but I didn't take him up on that, since he also really didn't want to do Meteo 003, and since he's also got more of a meteo background, and is hence better qualified to TA Mesoscale than I am. But this morning when I talked to Bill about this whole TA business I found out that there might be a possibility of a switch for me. The person who was assigned to TA Synoptic wasn't all that thrilled about it for whatever reason. If I wasn't planning on taking it next fall from Dr Nese I would've included that on my preference list for courses this spring I'd like to TA, but if Brian does indeed agree to switch to take my Meteo 003 labs, then Daniel would probably like to get the Synoptic spot (his top choice), and then I'd take Daniel's place in Mesoscale (my top choice). That'd make probably just about everyone happy. But I'm not really gonna push that hard for it, if it happens it happens, if it doesn't it doesn't, either way I'll be fine. I figure everything happens for a reason. If I end up doing Meteo 003 again next spring (which is still by far the most likely possibility), I'd be TA'ing from Dr Nese, who Daniel says is really nice and fun to TA for (and everyone says he's an awesome prof), and cool about deadlines for us getting stuff graded. There are other plusses to doing Meteo 003 again too, such as not having to invest huge quantities of time learning new material, since I've already done that for this semester (not that most of it wasn't review for me anyway as it was), unlike what I'd have to do if I were TA'ing any other class. So who knows what's gonna happen on this front, we'll see. A bonus about this happening is that Dr Clothiaux said he'd give me first pick of what class I wanted to TA next fall, should I still need a TA position (basically, if there's no funding for the research I want to do).

Oh, and yesterday in Rad Tran we got back our exams too, Dr Clothiaux graded them over the weekend. You know it's bad when a professor says to the class, "don't cry, but there was a 71-point spread from top score to bottom, and both endpoints and the midpoints have company" right before he hands back the exams. I was one of the midpoints, 48%. Ouch. I think that's probably the worst I've ever done on a test, apart from possibly Calc 2 at Gustavus my freshman year (what a horrible class that was...). But we do get a chance to correct it at least, and earn back up to half our points. So that's another thing due Friday, hooray. The sad thing is, I don't know that most of a week thinking about the problems will help me fix them, they're pretty tough. But I had to put it out of my mind, as I had grading to do for Meteo 003 yesterday, about 8-10 hours of it. Daniel had a bunch too, more than I did, and it was 1:30 when I finished and gave him a ride up to his truck, so he wouldn't have to walk the half hour in the cold wind across campus in the middle of the night. So all in all, that made for two nights in a row of being in Walker past 1am, three past 11pm, and five past 10pm. Not fun. But it did start bringing back memories of all the time I'd spend in Olin back at Gustavus. I guess at least I'm not in Walker until 2am every night like I had to be in Olin to get my homework done...

Today was the final lab for one of my Meteo 003 sections, I just handed out evaluation sheets and let them go. Easiest. Lab. Ever. It was nice too, since I had homework basically all day today for tomorrow's assignment in 501. At least that wasn't terribly difficult, just tedious. But now the next couple days will be devoted to finishing that awful Rad Tran assignment that I'm still not done with, correcting my exam, correcting another assignment that we'll get back tomorrow morning, and starting to study for Monday's Rad Tran final (which, by the way, Dr Clothiaux is making not two hours, but four -- we're all scared to death now), and basically in general trying not to go insane. Studying for Tuesday's 501 final will have to wait until Monday afternoon. I hate finals season. But at least we have one of them out of the way already, thank goodness.

Winter's definitely here. It's cold (though not nearly as cold as the subzero stuff in the midwest), and so the snow's still hanging around, which for Daniel & David is highly unusual. They've both said this is the longest they've ever experienced snow staying on the ground. And this stuff fell only back on Saturday night! Boy are they in for a long winter. :-) And the snow geese are definitely honking again, there's a good chance we'll get 3-6" more of the white stuff on Thursday night into Friday here in State College. At least that's what it looks like at this point. Oh please, oh please, can classes on Friday be cancelled?

And now for a few interesting stories. If you're interested in buying some shoreline property, may I suggest avoiding Hawaii? Because it just might collapse into the ocean, ya never know.

There's a UN Climate conference going on this week up in Montreal, and apparently they're going a bit wacky up there. Apparently some activist group up there is trying to blame global warming on men exclusively, painting women as the innocent victims of it. Whatever.

Some people are just starting to notice that young men are disappearing from American colleges, that they make up only 43% of college students nationwide. Here are some theories as to why that's the case.

And finally, apparently the University of Wisconsin system took a page out of the playbook from China, North Korea, Iran and several other countries and banned Bible studies in dorm rooms. The issue is really coming to a head at UW-Eau Claire, where the university has told an RA that he's not allowed to hold a Bible study in his dorm room. Have the dimwits in Madison who made this policy ever heard of the First Amendment? I think not.

In just one week this semester will be over. In just one week this semester will be over. In just one...

Posted by Jared at 11:59 PM | Comments (6)