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May 29, 2006

Memorial Weekend

Ahhh, Memorial Day weekend, the semi-official start of summer. The weather's finally been behaving like it's summer too, with temps in the 80s the last two days, and today and tomorrow slotted for around 90. I've gotta get used to the heat again.

Perhaps next time that I walk to the Sports Cafe for trivia I should actually check the radar beforehand, so as to avoid being outside getting soaked for the duration of a ten-minute downpour. But at least it was a warm rain. We were tied for first heading into the final question this week, but didn't wager enough points to come out in 1st, oh well. Second still isn't too bad, we still get free food next Friday. After trivia Jacob had a bunch of us over to his place to watch some "Family Guy" episodes, even though he had a 6am flight to catch for his two-week vacation to SE Asia. If I had to get up that early, I doubt I would've been up for doing much of anything.

It's been quite a fun holiday weekend so far. On Saturday afternoon nine of us drove up to the mini-golf course north of Bellefonte. Sadly enough, even though it's only 15 minutes away from State College, it was my first time outside State College since spring break when I went to Arizona (unless you count when I went to Clem's BBQ 5 minutes outside town about six weeks ago). I'm really not taking advantage of a lot of what this area of Pennsylvania has to offer, in terms of hiking or just driving around and looking at all the natural beauty around here. Sigh. But as sad as not venturing outside of State College is, this was my first time ever playing at a real mini-golf course. Yes, I've been a bit deprived. I think I did fairly well for my first time though, recovering from a bad first hole to nab a couple holes-in-one in back-to-back on the back 9 (and on the first of those I hit mine right after Daniel also had one, and on the second Jeff hit one right after me, so our foursome averaged a 1.5 over those two holes :-). We split up into two groups (Jeff, Rob C., Daniel & I, and Kerrie, Amber, Caren, Walter & Chris), and in my group Daniel & I managed to tie for first with 48, while Jeff was right behind with a 49, though none of us could quite match Walter or Chris, who both were a few strokes lower. It was a fun little mini-golf course (the giant buffalo was quite popular), I definitely think I'll be back at some point this summer for another go. Following mini-golf we all made a stop at the University Creamery on campus for some tasty ice cream (it being my first time there, I just had to get a Peachy Paterno milkshake, yummm). It tasted so good, especially on such a warm day. So I guess Saturday was a day of firsts for me, in a very good way.

Yesterday Daniel & I went to church, and Pastor Tober had a really good sermon on Acts 2. He asked us afterwards what we were smiling or chuckling about during his sermon, but he was crackin a few jokes, so what did he expect us to do? :-) And Ed, Ellen & Blair all seem to be responding to our requests for more hymns during worship time, there's been at least one or two hymns each of the last few weeks, which has definitely been nice.

Yesterday afternoon Jeff hosted a Memorial Weekend BBBQ for the meteo grads up at his place. There was much food and merriment out in the bright, hot sunshine (I almost sunburned, but not quite ... I'm not used to all this sunshine anymore, being at "StratoCu U" here in State College). We spent a few hours just tossing around the frisbee in the backyard and playing a little whiffleball. I totally wasn't used to swinging a bat though, so I'm extremely sore today from all the BP. Once it got too dark to play outside we all moved down into the nice and cool basement for a fair bit of Apples to Apples, which always provides for much amusement.

I've gotten quite a few more photo albums put together and uploaded to my Photos page, 11 to be exact. Now I'm caught up through mid-May of last year. It's progress, at least. Soon I hope to be less than a year behind. :-)

I just read a very fair piece out of the Washington Times about how the world's top hurricane scientists are split on the issue of global warming's effects on tropical cyclones, in response to the bit of hubbub being generated by Algore's new film, "An Inconvenient Truth." It presents what both sides are saying fairly accurately, as near as I can tell.

Whaddya know, the US Government finally got around to stop taxing us on our long distance phone bills for the Spanish-American War.

As if anyone needed more proof that the inside-the-Beltway types in the White House and Senate weren't taking the illegal immigration issue seriously, the White House recently compared illegal immigration to speeding. They just don't get it, they're completely tone deaf in Washington when it comes to listening to what the majority of people in the rest of the country are saying on the issue. The immigration "reform" bill the US Senate recently passed is a joke, and I'm hoping beyond hope that conservatives in the House of Representatives don't cave in to the pressure to adopt the Senate's version of the bill, though there seems to be a glimmer of hope that that won't happen.

I can promise to you that when I worked for a car rental agency in the Twin Cities we made sure there weren't large snakes in the car when we rented the cars to customers. Apparently the same procedures don't apply in Ohio.

This just in: the Northeast still has the "dumbest drivers," according to CNN.

And researchers in America and Britain apparently believe that they're only 18 months away from potentially creating a legitimate cloaking device, a la Star Trek. If they succeed, that could very well be one of the most revolutionary inventions/discoveries of modern times.

Well, it's almost time for me to head off to softball, I'm playing in a game with a team from my church. This morning I dug around in some of the boxes underneath my bed and found my glove that's actually never been used yet, I'm sad to say. But I'll start getting it broken in tonight at least. Hopefully a little exercise will make me less sore, even though it's 91 degrees out right now...

Posted by Jared at 05:27 PM | Comments (0)

May 24, 2006

Jack Bauer Hates Lemonade

My week can be summed up in two words: data transfer. I'm finally about 60-65% done with transferring 140 GB of data to a 400 GB external hard drive. I might've been done by now if my computer in Walker had a USB 2.0 port though, instead of crappy USB 1.0. Oh well, I should be all done by Friday morning with it. Then this morning I went to a marathon two and a half hour group meeting, and there was some stuff I was vaguely told I would be doing, but it all went whooshing over my head. Learning curves suck.

The nice weather has helped my motivation to go running a bit, I went for jogs today and on Monday, both days going longer than I did last week. Not much longer, but it's still progress.

**24 spoiler alert:** If you're Rob T. from Australia or someone else who hasn't yet seen the season finale to 24 but plans on doing so, skip this paragraph... Amber, Bob, Rob C. & I all went up to Vic, Jeff & Rob L.'s place to watch the big 2-hour season finale, it was a 24 party! The look on President Logan's face starting from the moment the Secret Service started moving in was absolutely priceless! But as for Jack, is this the definition of "slow boat to China"? Definitely more of a cliffhanger than last season. But I'm very sad that there are gonna be no more new 24 episodes for 6-7 months. What am I gonna do with my Monday nights now?

Last night Kerrie, Caren, Amber & I had a bit of a training session to learn how to crew (push all the right buttons) for the CNET tapings. Matt, the undergrad in charge of CNET this summer, was absolutely thrilled to have the four of us interested in doing stuff with that this summer because he's so short-handed. Sometime later this summer Kerrie & I are gonna try out going on camera. CNET's probably the best place to train for that sort of stuff, since it's just videotaped 3 1/2 minute forecasts aired on the local community access channel. Meaning nobody's really gonna see my first few comical, mistake-filled attempts of doing a forecast on the air. :-)

Thank goodness another Red Sox-Yankees series is over, ESPN can stop hyperventilating for a little while. I still hate the Yankees, but the Red Sox are getting so much coverage (for instance, Kerrie complains when they're not on ESPN at least three times a week, hehe) and are just as free-spending as the Yankees nowadays. Sometimes it seems like the media isn't aware that there are in fact baseball teams outside of the Northeast. But it still doesn't stop me from watching the games, as tonight I went over to Ben's place with Tim, Steve & Byran to watch the first 6 innings or so.

The redesigned and updated Penn State Christian Grads website is now online, I spent a good chunk of Monday working on it. It's not totally finished, but at least it's got updated information now. It took a bit of rigamarole to get me added as the webmaster, but we finally figured it out so now I have access to change the website.

This just in: Britons think the French are the rudest, most boring people on earth. No way!

Hat tip to Walter for pointing out this awesome PhD Comics panel about writing a thesis.

Man, those Ruskies have a high tolerance for alcohol. A driver in Lithuania was arrested for having a blood alcohol content of .72, 18 times the legal limit of .04. Wow.

And the FBI thinks they may have found where Jimmy Hoffa was buried. So how does the small Michigan town deal with all the attention? Cupcakes. Seriously, these cupcakes are absolutely hilarious, you have to take a look at the photo included with the linked news story!

And oh, I hate PSU Security. They have absolutely nothing better to do than give me two parking tickets for parking in a completely legal spot in the White Course parking lot. Supposedly I parked in a "reserved space," but it's unsigned, unmarked, and a normal parking spot that tons of residents from White Course have used all year long, including me. I guess I need to make time for a little walk up to Eisenhower Building tomorrow to go yell at them. I better get out of these tickets, because I did absolutely nothing wrong...

Posted by Jared at 11:46 PM | Comments (3)

May 21, 2006

A 'New' New Office

Drat, I've caught a cold again. Fortunately this one doesn't seem too bad, and I've already had it for a couple days now after a little bit of a sore throat on Thursday & Friday, so hopefully it'll go away pretty soon. Thank goodness for Cold-Eeze though, I really think it's helping. And so did going for a run yesterday (Saturday) morning. In my experience, running or some other form of exercise has almost always helped me either ease or completely get rid of a cold or some other minor illness. So perhaps if I would've gotten up the motivation to go for a run Thursday or Friday I'd be in better shape. But as it stands I only ran twice last week, so it only took me two weeks to fall short of my goal of running 3-4 times every week this summer. Oh well, I knew it'd happen at some point. The weather's gonna be nice this week though, unlike this past week (today we finally got rid of the crappy, cloudy, damp weather!), so I'm rather certain that'll give me more motivation to get out there for a jog.

Thursday evening Daniel came over here and we watched "Half Baked," which he'd seen some time ago but I hadn't seen yet. I've been meaning to see it for years on the recommendations of several friends, and I'm glad I finally saw it because it's pretty funny. Though I still can't believe that I believed Daniel when he said initially that he had rented "Steel Magnolias." Tsk, tsk, tsk, I'm so gullible. My high school and Gustavus friends would be glad to see that I haven't changed in that respect, haha. But rather than thinking of it as "gullbile," I prefer to think of myself as being "trusting." Perhaps too trusting. ;-)

For lunch on Friday a group of us went out to eat at the India Pavillion, mmmmm, so good... I definitely didn't need to eat again the whole rest of the day, I totally stuffed myself. I absolutely love their naan bread and "nuclear chicken" (as we call it), it's so delicious (despite what Frame would argue, don't listen to him). Then on Friday evening we won 1st place at trivia again at the Sports Cafe, wooo. Our team name was a Helen Keller joke (I can't claim that I came up with it), but if you really wanna know what it was let me know and I'll tell ya. I just don't want all sorts of people getting mad at me and leaving nasty comments on my blog. It's really not that offensive, but whatever. :-) Anyways, afterward several people came over to my place to play the LOTR board game and watch the Mavericks-Spurs basketball game. We tried two games at the hardest difficulty (and failed miserably quite early on both times), but then in the third game we made it a fair ways in at the intermediate difficulty. That's sure a tough game to win. Most everyone left at 1am, but Bob and Rob C. stuck around till almost 2:30 just chatting. Bob filled me in a lot on what goes on at AccuWeather (he's a forecaster there), and I'll likely end up taking him up sometime in the near future on his offer to have me shadow him during one of his shifts at AccuWeather (which is based right here in State College), so that I can get a feel for what it's like to have weather forecasting be your job. Since that's a career I'm definitely quite interested in (though definitely not for the money, as it doesn't really pay all that well), I'm glad to have the opportunity to do this. Now I just need to find some night where I wouldn't mind pulling an all-nighter, since Bob usually works the overnight shifts...

Last night I went out for some wings at Quaker Steak & Lube with Daniel, Stephanie, Petters & Mario. The name might sound kinda disconcerting for a restaurant, but their wings are quite good. The wings themselves are better than the ones at Sports Cafe, though I still like a couple of the sauces on the Sports Cafe wings more than at Quaker Steak. I hadn't ever been there before, but I give it a definite thumbs up. Daniel will need to try the atomic wings sometime though; I may try them as well in the future, if I get up the courage to risk having my taste buds seared off.

Today at church and then this evening at PSCG there was a fair bit of focus on the Da Vinci Code, but not really in going through and picking apart the book point-by-point (though one certainly can do that with pretty minimal research). Instead, especially in the Bible study tonight, the discussion was more about the different reactions various kinds of people might have after reading the book or seeing the movie, and why they might have those reactions. One thing is for sure though, as a result of all the hoopla surrounding the Da Vinci Code in our culture these days, I've learned a fair bit about the real history of the early Church, in contrast to the distortions/mistruths that are put forth in the Dan Brown novel and the movie.

This week I'll start doing some real work on research finally. On Friday morning we had a training session on SCIPUFF, so now I have a better picture of some of the stuff I'll be doing, at least qualitatively. And progress has also been made on the office/computer front. After discussing it with Joel, I won't be moving to 627 after all, but instead will be moving to 405 either this week or next in all likelihood, which will put me very near all the other students who are involved on this huge project and are also doing things with SCIPUFF (the other students in 627 literally had nothing to do with my project, it was just an open space to put me apaprently). I'll also be nearer most of the other grad students too (yay!), as most of them are on 4th floor, with only a few being on 6th. And Joel had Dave (who had Karen) order me a computer for work on Saturday, so that might even be here by the end of the week! I'm really feeling quite a bit better about my research now that I know I'm gonna be in an office nearer people doing related research, and that I'll be getting a computer within a week or so.

So other than that I got around to installing SimCity 4 and Civiliazation III on my computer this weekend, which I toyed around with for a bit yesterday. I didn't play games this afternoon though, I actually did some real work and finally started updating/redesigning the webpage for Penn State Christian Grads. And also doing a little bit of reading. I have so many books I need to get around to...

At least two new stadiums look like they're going to be built in the Twin Cities. On Saturday the Minnesota State Legislature approved a plan for a new open-air, on-campus football stadium for the University of Minnesota, and in the wee hours of this morning they approved a plan for a $522 million, 42,000-seat, open-air stadium for the Minnesota Twins in the Warehouse District of Downtown Minneapolis, right behind the Target Center. While I certainly wish the Twins stadium could've been built with a smaller (or non-existent) contribution from taxes, I'm very glad to hear that they're finally building a stadium for the Twins. The Metrodome absolutely sucks for baseball, and I'll be glad it won't be the Twins home anymore after the 2009 season.

It's also interesting to note that 10% of Mexico's population is living in the United States (illegally), and that despite all of Mexico's protestations about any planned restrictions on illegal immigration here in the U.S., Mexico has quite severe restrictions on what jobs any non-native-born Mexican can hold. Can you say "hypocrisy"?

Congratulations to Ben & Margaret on getting married today! Fortunately the morning rain was replaced by sunshine in time for the afternoon outdoor ceremony.

Also, for what it's worth, I've finally passed 10,000 unique visits to my web page. Woooo. Though I'm sure Josh will soon leave some sort of mocking comment considering his website probably has had some ridiculous number of visits in basically the same period of time, like 50,000 (I really have no idea since he doesn't have a very visible counter on his page), and since he just generally likes to mock me whenever presented an opportunity. At any rate, thanks for reading my pointless drivel, I couldn't have made it this far without all ya'll. :-)

Posted by Jared at 11:55 PM | Comments (3)

May 18, 2006

Tuesday Night Tour

The Minnesota Twins have been wreaking havoc with my emotions lately. Prior to last week they've mostly been playing poorly, but they really started playing well heading into their series with division-leading Chicago. Last Saturday night I watched them on WGN (having to suffer through the annoying Chicago announcers) as they came from behind to beat the White Sux 8-4, making me hopeful for a 3-1 series win, or even possibly a sweep. So then on Sunday night, to celebrate the Twins being on ESPN and me actually being able to watch my team on TV, a rare occurrence out here in central PA, I had Jeff and Daniel over to my place. Talk about a strange game. The White Sox scored 3 in the top of the 1st, and would've scored more if it weren't for three Twins web gems. Then the bottom of the 1st came around, and the Twins scored 7 runs before they had their second out of the inning. And then they didn't score the rest of the game, partly aided by a White Sox triple play, the first in the majors in over a year, which allowed the Whities to win 9-7. Sigh. And now since then they've also lost their next three games. Time to get back to being a demoralized Twins fan I guess.

Monday evening I got myself up to a 15-minute run, 4 minutes longer than I was doing last week. Yay for progress. Then after making myself supper, I totally forgot that President Bush was giving an address to the nation about illegal immigration, and instead watched some Stargate SG-1. But it's probably a good thing I forgot about Bush's speech, because I likely would have thrown my dinner at the TV in response (well, probably not quite that, but you get the idea). Bush definitely blew a golden opportunity to take leadership on this issue that he's been shirking for his six years in office, but instead of actually doing something about stopping further illegal immigration, he's choosing to address the issue with symbolism, in sending a few National Guard troops down to the border, but not allowing them to do anything. And now Mexico is threatening to sue the United States -- in American courts -- if the National Guard actually does anything to stem the tide of illegal immigrants streaming across the border. That alone should be a wake-up call on the issue, but unfortunately the majority of the politicians in Washington in both parties are sound asleep.

Tuesday was wings day again, and Daniel & I were joined by Mario & Jacob, who had just finished the second day/half of the Ph.D. candidacy exam. They showed me the questions that were on the test, and while the physical meteorology portion of the exam seems potentially doable, the dynamics half of the exam is absolutely impossible. The candidacy exam as a whole frightens me, but the dynamics portion scares me to death, and is a large reason why I'm currently leaning towards entering the real world after I get my Master's next year. But then Tuesday evening, a pretty good-sized group of us meteo grad students, even several of us who didn't take the candidacy exam this week, got together to celebrate the official end of the semester for everyone. It was quite the little tour of downtown State College we had going, starting out at the Sports Cafe, then moving on to Zeno's, the Rathskeller, the Darkhorse, the Saloon, Beulah's, and finally wrapping up the evening at the Gingerbread Man. But no tour would be complete without t-shirts, so Jacob & Stephanie bought a bunch of plain white t-shirts and some markers so people could come up with their own creative sayings, such as Mario's "I'm Unconditionally Unstable," Jacob's "I Took the Meteo Candidacy Exam and all I Got Was This Shirt," and Dave's scattering/absorption radiative transfer equation. Amber & Kerrie decided to take it a slightly different route, with drawings of "Death by Dendrite" and "Death by Shear" respectively, but David had, in my opinion, the best shirt of the night: "Cyclogenesis Killed My Mom: I Demand Vengeance," complete with a low pressure center and a couple of fronts drawn on. Yes, we're nerds. Huge nerds. But if you're wondering what I put on my shirt, you're out of luck because I didn't make one. I know, I'm super lame for not further showing off my nerdiness, but I figure my GAC Physics t-shirts are nerdy enough. :-) At any rate it was a really fun evening for everyone, and I managed to stick out the tour right to the very end.

Not long after I got to Walker today I happened to get sucked into a group meeting as I was walking by in the hallway. Considering they said that some of what they were discussing was going to pertain to my future thesis, I wonder why they didn't let me know about it, you know, before the meeting or something, instead of with just 10-15 minutes left. Oh well. But then this afternoon I finally found out what office I'll be moving to, up in 627 in the anteroom to Dr Wyngaard's office, sharing space with Sanjiv and Mark, two of Dr Wyngaard's students. I am somewhat curious why I'm being moved up there, since both of them are, at best, tangentially related to the research I'm doing, especially since there are several other people who will be doing somewhat more similar stuff down on 4th floor. Since most of the other meteo grads are down on 4th floor that's where I'd prefer to have my office too, but perhaps I'll get a little more work done being on 6th floor. So Sanjiv & I spent a bit of time this afternoon swapping desks and tables of various sizes in and out of the room and constantly rearranging the room trying to make the best use of the space. We finally got it to our liking, but I still can't move up there for awhile because there's no computer for me as of yet. Apparently that little detail was somehow overlooked by my advisor, and since Joel's grant doesn't allow for the purchase of any new hardware, I'm hoping that Dr Wyngaard (or Dr Stauffer or somebody else in the group) has some money to buy me a computer so that I can actually do work. But until then I'll still be hanging out in the TA office (530), because at least I have a computer there, even though it's gotten rather lonely in that office, with Daniel having moved out last week downstairs to the tropical office, Amber basically moved out to the ozone office, Kerrie doing a lot of work from home, Fangxing not there a whole lot and Muge back home in Turkey for a couple weeks.

Tonight for the PSCG men's group we decided to play a board game, and Monopoly sounded good (at least better than Tim's idea of scaling the walls of certain buildings), as none of us had played it in years. I really don't recall games of Monopoly taking only two hours before, but that's all the longer that this one lasted. Steve really didn't need much time to vanquish Tim, Ben, myself and South African Daniel, but it was still a fun activity, especially when I was able to follow it up with the South Park episode about hippies congregating for a music festival, an absolute classic!

Transferring music and other media is now legal in Australia, though internet piracy is being pursued and punished even more aggressively. I guess even taping a show off the TV was illegal until now Down Under.

Now this is a classic headline: Missing Manure Mystifies Middlefield. Yes, someone called the cops on a manure thief. It's really gonna hit the fan if they catch this person...

Apparently candidates from the Democratic Party for the State of Alabama Attorney General need not believe that the Holocaust actually happened.

A couple of columnists for ESPN have their own ideas for what a new baseball stadium for the Minnesota Twins should look like. I really like the lake in right field and the cornfield in straight-away center.

Visitors to a Danish zoo got an up close and personal look at nature in action. The CNN headline says it all: Bears eat monkey, visitors shocked. I'm surprised this kind of thing doesn't happen more often, but needless to say the zoo is moving the monkeys to a different area.

It seems that the new movie "The Da Vinci Code" isn't as good as it has been billed, as it just got panned by movie critics in Cannes who saw it last night in a sneak preview before wide release. All reports say that the moviegoers actually laughed aloud at one of the key dramatic moments in the film, and that there wasn't even scattered applause once the credits started rolling, only silence from most and a few scattered whistles (boos) from others. I wonder how this news will affect the box office draw of the film.

Apparently a judge in New York thinks that an airplane is a boat with wings, in declaring it subject to maritime laws. Uhhh, ok.

In West Virginia various agencies bickered for three weeks whose responsibility it was to remove a decaying cow from a local river, while the stench became more and more unbearable for area residents, until finally a joint effort removed the rotting cow.

Kudos to Dave F. for sending me the link to a video of a wacky weatherguy in Charlotte. Seriously, this guy has issues. And it isn't made up, this is a real TV meteorologist, only now he's working at a station in Colorado. I haven't yet been able to figure out if he's still "performing" like he did in Charlotte. I seriously can't believe the Charlotte station let this guy do half the stuff he did. Just watch and you'll see what I mean.

Posted by Jared at 01:14 AM | Comments (1)

May 13, 2006

Grey Skies Ahead

Who would've thought that the most interesting thing I did for work this past week would have been going through the first 2-3 chapters of an online FORTRAN 90 tutorial? I haven't yet coded anything in FORTRAN, but I think I'm picking up quite a bit from reading through the tutorial, so at least I feel like I learned something this past week to prepare me for research. So the first couple days of next week I'll probably continue with that, and then Wednesday there'll likely be a SCIPUFF training session for a bunch of us students (grad & undergrad) who are relatively new to the projects that Joel, Sue Ellen and others are heading up. I expect once that's done that my summer research will be starting in earnest.

I've found another tasty place for lunch, Viet Thai, which is actually right across Atherton from Walker. The last time I'd been there was for dinner way back early in fall semester before one of our evening Rad Tran classes with a bunch of other people, and it was kinda expensive then. But Daniel & I went there for lunch on Thursday, and it's not too expensive for lunch. The chicken pad thai and pork green curry were both quite good. There are so many good places to eat here in State College, about the only thing that's lacking is a good Mexican restaurant. Apparently the only good Mexican place in the area is way down in Altoona, about 45 minutes away.

Wednesday evening Daniel & I just hung out at his place, relaxing and watching some stuff on the tele. There were just too many good shows on to watch a movie instead, like the South Park rerun of the episode with the killer whale and MASA, the Mexican version of NASA. :-) Then on Thursday evening we met up with Kerrie & Aviva at Champs to watch the Red Sox-Yankees game, as Kerrie & Aviva are both huge Red Sox fans. We got a table in the room with the huge screen, but each table also had a little TV screen, so when it came to be 9:30 Daniel & I flipped it to "The Office" season finale, and tried to crowd up close to it so that we could try to hear the show over the background din of the restaurant and the game, to the great amusement of Kerrie & Aviva, who were just paying attention to the game on the big screen. I'm happy the Yankees lost that one, but that game was sooooooo long, it was ridiculous, about four hours. For a regular season game in May. Unless the game's 12-10 or something high-scoring, there's no reason for it to take that long.

Last night at Sports Cafe we didn't have a few of the trivia regulars, but we still managed to win first place again, this time with the team name "Hideki Matsui's Wrist." The Sports Cafe was a little sparse though, since last night and today are graduation ceremonies for all the various colleges and departments here at Penn State. We grad students will rule this town soon! After trivia we went down to Zeno's for a little while too, though it would've been better had there been places to sit, oh well. All in all it was a fun night (made even better when Zach texted me that the Twins had beaten the White Sox 10-1, woohoo!!), though accidentally dropping my camera on the floor wasn't my smoothest move ever. Fortunately it still works, though not all the panels and joints quite line up and lock quite as nicely as they used to. And I don't know how this happened, but Caren was actually caught on camera with a smile. That almost never happens, haha.

Animals have been in the news a bit lately, with a hybrid polar-grizzly bear found in Nunavut (a northern Canadian province, formerly part of the Northwest Territories), and an alligator attacking and killing a jogger in Florida. Freaky. And in another interesting article I read, apparently one lone juror prevented Zacarias Moussaoui from receiving the death penalty in his recent trial. Apparently that juror never spoke up during deliberations either, to the great frustration of the other jurors, because then they were unable to address and discuss that person's objections. It's always interesting to hear what goes on in the jury deliberations in high-profile cases like this. And finally, a little while ago Josh sent me a link to a very cool picture of one of the Blue Angels planes flying at Mach 1 a mere 30 feet above the ocean. It's always so cool when you can actually see a sonic boom. :-)

I really haven't accomplished a whole lot so far today. I'm contemplating possibly going out for a run this afternoon, especially since I haven't since Tuesday, or perhaps working on some more of my photo albums or even starting to redesign/update the PSCG webpage.

The next week or so is gonna be pretty rainy and cool around here, thanks to a powerful cut-off low (which after looking at it on visible satellite imagery on Thursday we all started calling the "Michigan Hurricane") that's going to continue SLOWLY drifting our way. That same storm's been hammering the Great Lakes and Upper Midwest for several days now with cold, wind and rain. Areas in northern Wisconsin even got 6-8 inches of snow overnight on Thursday night! Talk about crazy May weather. I hate cut-off lows... We've been rather spoiled by gorgeous weather around here the past month or so, so I guess it's time we have some rain. The rain will help ease the drought warnings and watches that are in force around the area though, so that'll be good.

Posted by Jared at 03:58 PM | Comments (5)

May 10, 2006

Manuals are Boring

I think my body is starting to get re-acquainted with the concept of exercise. After not really engaging in much physical activity at all since last August when I'd go jogging at my brother Aaron & Eve's place near Lake Minnetonka in the Twin Cities (apart from some flag football last fall, of course), I decided it was high time to make at least a wee bit of an effort to get back into shape. Sunday afternoon I decided to head down the gravel bike path that leads from my apartment complex and goes along the edge of the White Golf Course for aways and by some marshes, through some woods and over a couple bridges. I hadn't ever been down there before, so it was kinda fun discovering some new areas. My only goal on Sunday was to run for 10-12 minutes, since it was the first time I'd gone on a run since August and I wanted to kinda ease myself back into this whole working out thing. So when I'd been running for 11 minutes (probably somewhere around a mile and a half, but who knows) by the time I got back to White Course I figured that was good enough. Mission accomplished. But oh boy was I sore for the next couple days, my body was definitely not used to running really at all.

I've been rather bored in Walker this week, trying to plug through at least a few chapters of the mind-numbing SCIPUFF manual. I don't know how much I'm getting out of reading this, or how much I'm supposed to get out of it, other than perhaps becoming vaguely aware of the existence of certain functions and capabilities of the program. As a result of being bored I've been finding other things to do, like going on a 2-hour lunch with Daniel to Green Bowl (neither of us had been there before, but it's an awesome create-your-own-stirfry restaurant with more than 20 different sauces -- Daniel was in heaven) on Monday, going to Sports Cafe for wings yesterday for lunch for an hour and a half with Daniel & Jeff, going home early yesterday afternoon and listening to the Twins game on the radio while uploading a few new picture albums (from my East Coast road trip in Spring '05 with Josh, Zach, John & Ben) to my Photos page this afternoon (I'm planning on trying to get caught up with all those this summer, especially since I've been at PSU for 9 months now and I still don't have any Penn State albums on my site). I figure once Joel gets back into town next week he'll actually give me something slightly more productive to do. Maybe tomorrow I'll try looking at how to code some FORTRAN 90 for a change of pace.

At the PSCG Bible study Sunday evening, we watched the second half of the movie "The Gospel of John." I didn't see the first half the week before because of studying for finals, but I thought the film was very well done. The dialogue was 100% from the Gospel of John, with nothing added and nothing omitted, making it hard for them to stray too far away theologically. :-) I think I may go out and purchase that film sometime, I enjoyed it.

Monday evening after work I went down to the Sports Cafe with Jacob to catch the Twins-Rangers game on ESPN, as it was the first Twins game that had been shown on national TV so far this year. So we put on our Twins gear and sat at the bar in front of the big screen, while playing some trivia. Our team name was "Torii Hunter for President," which drew a lot of confused comments like "who's that?" Sigh. Anyway, we did fairly well in the first half, but then fell from 3rd to 7th before the final question, which went all in for but lost. The sad thing is that if we'd just bet nothing we would've wound up in third place, le sigh. After the game, which the Twins lost 6-4, I went up to Jeff & Vic's place to watch "24," which they had recorded on TiVo. Yes, I'm so hooked that I can't miss an episode for any reason. Especially not now that there are only three episodes left this season. And everything went to hell in a handbasket this week too, aaargh!! Stupid Miles.

Yesterday afternoon, even though I was still sore from Sunday's run, I decided to go out for another jog. Still trying to ease myself back into shape, I only did the same exact run as Sunday, and also in 11 minutes again. And oddly enough I'm not sore anymore since I did that, so that's a plus. I'm gonna try to go jogging/running 3-4 times a week, and get back to the point where I can do 3-5 miles without stopping. A fairly modest goal, but we'll see how long my motivation lasts. :-)

Last night I also conducted a grand experiment in the kitchen, or at least it was for me. A couple months ago I saw my roommate Emre making something easy and tasty, so I tried to reproduce it as best as I could from my memory, and it actually turned out pretty well. I just sauteed some mushrooms and a pound and a half of chicken breast cut into small pieces, and combined them with some spicy orange sauce from Wegmans and put it over rice. Pretty easy and pretty tasty, if I do say so myself. I think a reasonable goal for this summer is also to get a bit more adventurous in cooking, and learning how to do more stuff. I'm finding that when I'm not feeling horribly pressured time-wise that I actually enjoy cooking, especially new things with no recipe that miraculously turn out fine, haha.

Last night I found this pretty good article on populism by Jonah Goldberg. I especially love his comment describing democracy with an analogy to cornflakes somewhere in the middle there, he's hilarious. :-)

Well, who knows what I'll be up to tonight. Perhaps hangin out with Daniel watchin a movie and South Park and whatnot, we'll see. There was supposed to be a few people playing trivia down at the G-Man, but I guess they decided on poker instead, oh well. Peace out.

Posted by Jared at 06:01 PM | Comments (3)

May 07, 2006

First Year's Over!

My first year of grad school is officially in the books! After spending a good deal of time studying on Wednesday I was actually semi-prepared for the Mesoscale final, or at least far more prepared than I was for the midterm in that class a couple months ago, that's for sure (who would've thunk it that a few more hours of studying could help so significantly?). I haven't gotten it back yet, but I'm pretty confident I at least got a respectable grade on the final and the paper to rescue my grade. It feels so good to be done, especially after how stressful the last three weeks or so have been. I think it's only now starting to sink in that the semester's actually done, and that we don't have any other papers, assignments or tests lurking on the horizon.

After Daniel & I played a little Chinese football in the TA office to unwind (I forget how many years it'd been since I last played that...), I went to pick up some stuff for the evening's BBQ over at Dave's house, and I was thrilled to find out that Nittany Beverage right next door actually carries some Leinenkugel's (like the Honey Weiss that Jacob's holding at right). It's not every day that you can actually find good Wisconsin beer (i.e., not Miller fill-in-the-blank) in a totally different part of the country. I know that my friend Betsy down at UNC-Chapel Hill is jealous that they don't yet have Leinie's south of the Mason-Dixon line. Someone's really gotta work on that, that's a travesty in my book. At any rate the picnic was a blast, a whole bunch of people were there. Even though the majority of the Meteo grads were done on Tuesday after the Dynamics final, those of us in Mesoscale were finally able to relax and have fun for a change, which was very welcome. There were some great games of telephone, twilight frisbee and Dave got out his awesome homemade telescope to take a look at Jupiter, Saturn and the Moon, it was great. Afterward Daniel, Jacob, Chris & Caren came over to my place to play some Apples to Apples, which was entertaining as always, though not quite as entertaining as Chris's run-in with a curb on the way over. :-)

I tried somewhat unsuccessfully to sleep in a bit on Friday, but I figured I may as well get up anyway. I had a meeting mid-afternoon with my advisor Joel, where he started introducing me to some of the stuff I'll be doing research on, and trying to familiarize me at least a little bit with what's going on. Needless to say my head's still spinning from trying to absorb all that info, but basically my assignment for next week is just to read the manual for SCIPUFF, a computer program I'll be working with quite a bit, and maybe try to pick up a little bit of FORTRAN 90. That manual's not gonna be fun, especially after Joel billed it is an incredibly dense, terse book. I'll give it a go though. I think research will be a nice break from the daily grind and pressure of classes and assignments.

Trivia made its triumphant return to the Sports Cafe on Cinco de Mayo after a three-week absence (boo Flyers!). Several of us went down there a bit early in hopes of getting a table outside, but that wasn't to be. It'll be nice after PSU has graduation and everything, because then we grad students will truly rule the town, and there won't be undergrads everywhere as far as the eye can see filling up our favourite establishments. ;-) Trivia actually went really well, we nabbed first place on an almost-perfect game, as we only missed one two-point question along the way. At least we won't have to pay for our food next week, that was getting rather tiresome. Though on Friday night I really should've listened to my own advice about not ever getting any food from the Sports Cafe other than wings (and maybe fries). I ordered a meatball sub, but because they were out of sub rolls they gave me this tiny little sandwich but no money back. Highly lame.

Yesterday was the spring picnic for Penn State Christian Grads down at Sunset Park, so I went down there for awhile. It was nice to toss around a frisbee for awhile again, trying to thread the needle through patches of trees and having Ed show us his massive ups in leaping for all those frisbees. ;-) I got home in time to catch the Kentucky Derby, and then it was time to head over to Ben's place for a Mel Brooks movie night, along with Daniel, Jacob, Chris, Kerrie & Mario. On the docket for the evening was "Blazing Saddles," "Robin Hood: Men in Tights," and "Spaceballs." "Spaceballs" was the only one I'd ever seen before, though it was so long ago I'd forgotten almost all of it. While I'm not ready to put any of those among my all-time favourite movies, I did enjoy them. And somehow I don't think anyone could make a film quite like "Blazing Saddles" nowadays. So offensive but so funny. :-)

As for today, Daniel & I went to church in the morning as usual. And then earlier this afternoon I went out with Chris, Vic, Steve, Mario, Walter & Petters for a little bit of disc golf. It was the first time I'd ever played frisbee golf, and since the discs are different than the ones used for ultimate frisbee, my throws weren't all that great. I'll probably go disc golfing again, but I really miss ultimate frisbee, I much prefer that, there's a lot more excitement and exercise to it. The downside is that hardly anyone out here in PA plays ultimate, that's one of the things I really miss from going to college in the Midwest, where everyone played ultimate.

I fell in the Sweet 16 of the WxChallenge forecasting tournament, bummer. I lost to another grad student from the University of Oklahoma by just three-tenths of a point, meaning if I'd actually forecasted .01" of rain (instead of nothing), one knot lower on my wind speed, one degree lower on my high temp or one degree higher on my low temp -- if I'd done any one of those things I would've advanced. Oh well. At least I gave it a good run.

I suppose I'll get around to going for a run or cleaning my room later today. Sean & I worked a bit on starting to clean up the apartment yesterday, it desperately needed it and there's still a fair bit of work to be done. I do appear to have caught the spring cleaning bug, at least temporarily. Now that I have time I can actually think about doing some cleaning, it's nice. Perhaps I'll also get some work in on getting more photo albums made and put on my website. Or read a book. Or play some Civ III. Or go on a run so I can try to get back in shape. Ahhhh, free time, how I've missed thee!

Posted by Jared at 04:23 PM | Comments (2)

May 02, 2006

Tussey Mtn Wildfire

Wow, that Dynamics final was nearly as pleasant as a root canal. Not that I really thought it'd be a whole lot better than that, but any exam that's that crappy is still not fun to endure. I think I may have pulled out enough partial credit to do kinda okay, we'll just have to see how nice Sukyoung is with this. I'm just glad that I got over my nearly hour-long brain fart and finally remembered the two equations for the geostrophic wind (which were actually staring me in the face), which allowed me to do one of the kinda-more-doable problems. I was the last one in the room taking the exam, but I didn't want to give up, especially since it was something as simple as the geostrophic wind that I wasn't remembering and was keeping me from doing the problem. That was sooooo frustrating... But at least it's over at last. Dynamics is done!!!! And the Cloud Physics final yesterday was a little tougher than I thought it would be, but I still think I did okay on it. Now I only have Mesoscale left, that one's Thursday morning at 10. Only 36 hours to freedom!

Today was a really long day. I had to get up really early so that I could be over in the Forum to help Dr Nese proctor the Meteo 003 final exam at 8am. That meant that I was a bit more tired than usual all day while doing my futile studying for Dynamics, oh well. That didn't stop me from going to get some wings from Sports Cafe with Frame. I wasn't feeling too well most of the rest of the afternoon, but I think that had just as much to do with being really nervous about the exam as it did the wings themselves. After the exam most of us went down to the Sports Cafe to get a beer and unwind (Shannon and a couple others wanted to watch the Sabres-Flyers hockey game), but for whatever reason they wouldn't let Anke in, they didn't like her German passport or whatever ID she showed them, which is rather strange. So everyone else left and went to some other place with Anke, but Daniel & I stayed put outside at Sports Cafe for awhile. We were just both really tired and worn out from the exam, and we only wanted one beer anyway before we knew we had to leave and get back to studying for Mesoscale, so we didn't feel like walking who knows how much longer until they found a place to go.

Sunday I didn't actually get any studying done for either Cloud Physics or Dynamics. Instead I got all the figures put into my Mesoscale paper, pushing it to 18 pages in length. I would've had one more figure, but I decided to axe it after Word would always add in hundreds of blank or duplicated pages into the middle of my paper. I'm not exaggerating, one time it added more than 700 pages, it was so weird. It wouldn't let me undo it either, since it was something that the computer was doing on its own, it wasn't anything I was doing. And since it happened every time I tried to text-wrap and right-justify that one figure, I decided it just wasn't worth the trouble and canned it. So odd. I spent the whole rest of the afternoon and evening doing all my grading for Meteo 003. I had to get that last round of labs graded at some point before Thursday anyway, meaning I'd have to take time out from studying for one of my exams at some point, so I just wanted to get it all done and over with. But just think of it -- I'm forever DONE with being a TA and grading stuff for Meteo 003! I don't know what I'm gonna do with all this extra time... But I took a break from grading to go up on the roof of Walker (which for some odd reason was open) to take a peek at a gorgeous sunset. Note the bright sundog on the right side of the image, that's part of what made the sunset really cool.

Monday we had some good breaks from studying for the Cloud Physics final, thanks to a wildfire that broke out on nearby Tussey Mountain, about 5-7 miles east of campus near Boalsburg, with flames 80-100 feet high at times. There was a steady stream of gawkers from the Meteo department heading up to the roof of Walker to peer at the smoke billowing from an area along Tussey Ridge. Apparently by this morning they had it contained, but it's now partly out of control again this evening, and has charred well over 400 acres so far. In the early hours after the fire started the low-level winds in the boundary layer were blowing the smoke back towards State College (while the winds aloft were blowing from the west), making the air extremely hazy and reeking of woodsmoke. In the picture I showed above and to the left, you can see the smoke starting to "loop" (undulate), which is actually a really cool phenomenon to see happening, as the smoke is oscillating vertically right around the boundary between an unstable layer of air closer to the ground and a stable layer above. I've seen it in diagrams in textbooks before, but it's still always cooler actually to see it in real life. The smoke plume from the wildfire even showed up (albeit fanitly) on the visible satellite yesterday afternoon. By this morning though, the winds had switched around and were blowing it back off to the east like normal.

Well, time to get to bed. I've given up on studying for tonight I think.

Posted by Jared at 11:58 PM | Comments (0)