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May 29, 2007
Thesis Draft Completed & Printed!
[On location in Walker Building]
Ugh. It's been a long time since I've been in Walker Building at 2am, and I hope that this won't happen again for a very long time. Or ever.
I spent my Memorial Day basically inside Walker Building all day long, working on finishing my thesis. Today was pretty productive, as I finished my results and conclusions chapters, in addition to writing the abstract, creating the table of contents, etc. I took a break to play some softball in an intra-squad scrimmage for church for a couple hours, but then came back to Walker. I can't get enough of this place! Anyway, I just finished printing out four copies of the draft of my thesis, three for my committee, and one for myself. The total length? 140 pages! For a Master's thesis! Mind you, this is including the signature pages, table of contents, appendix (which is 64 pages by itself) and everything, but still! I guess I'm just adding to the reputation of ridiculously long theses by grad students doing anything closely related with NWP (numerical weather prediction).
Well, I've had enough of Walker Building. Time to go home and grab some shuteye before comin back to this lovely place to start crafting my power point presentation for my defense. Oh yeah, and hand my thesis to Joel, Sue & Dr Wyngaard, so they can have their two weeks to review it before my June 11th defense. At any rate, the hardest part's over, in my opinion, woohoo!
Sometime this week I'll post a blog entry with some pictures from the last week-plus, including BASF 3. Even though I still have tons to do, I think I might be getting my life back soon!
Posted by Jared at 02:09 AM | Comments (1)
May 19, 2007
The Thesising Continues
As most of you might have surmised, there's a very good reason for me not writing a blog entry at all for the last week: my thesis. I've been awash in a sea of figures this week, taking the first part of the week to create about 400 or so figures total in SCIPUFF and TecPlot, cropping them all identically one-by-one on Wednesday, and then inserting and arranging them all into the Appendix of my thesis. I finished that yesterday (well, unless I end up adding more figures), and here's how big my Appendix chapter is: 64 pages (52 of them full of color images) and 104 MB. That'll probably end up being more pages than the "real" part of my thesis, haha. But now that I have all those images generated and printed out so that I can look at them side-by-side, I can decide which ones to put into my Results chapter. I also set my thesis defense date for Monday, June 11th at 10am, meaning that I have to have a completed draft of my thesis to my committee members by Memorial Day (or the day after), to give them two weeks to review it before my defense. With a week left to write my Results and Conclusions, I'd say I'm in pretty good shape!
Our church softball team couldn't start out the season with back-to-back wins. On Monday we hosted Oakwood Presbyterian, and we led 6-5 after 2 innings, but then the wheels fell off in a couple never-ending innings, en route to a 22-10 loss in 6 innings. I played the second half of the game at first base, and was 0-for-2 at the plate with flyouts to right-center and right field (of course, when I finally start hitting to the opposite field, I make outs), and unfortunately made the last out of the game with my second flyout. I hate making outs, but especially the last out of the game.
A bunch of us helped Amber move out of her apartment this morning. After graduation tomorrow (Kerrie, Daniel, Jonathan, Zack, Addison, Margaret & Ben are all also graduating with their M.S. in Meteorology tomorrow), she'll be moving to Cary (Raleigh) on Monday with Chris, who's been down there for a year already. And so it starts, people from my grad class finishing up and moving on...
Tonight Sue hosted a big picnic/cookout for all of her grad students, which was fun. Sue & Randy had a bocce set, which we had a fun time with. I'd never played bocce before, but I guess this wasn't quite like regular bocce (with a long, level playing surface), as we were playing on their lawn, on the cusp of a big hill. It definitely made for some interesting strategery and exciting bowls (and a lot of body English, trying to persuade the balls to stop rolling down the hillside a few times. :-) The picture is of Andrew launching his first toss really high in the air, not knowing it was supposed to stay pretty close to the ground, hehe.
That was a really exciting Preakness Stakes race today, with Curlin coming charging from behind to win by a nose, denying Street Sense a shot at the Triple Crown. I love watching the Triple Crown races, they're some of the most exciting moments in sports. I was a bit annoyed at NBC for ditching overtime of the Sabres-Senators NHL playoff game for the start of pre-Preakness coverage over an HOUR before the race actually began. I'd understand if it was ten minutes from post time, but an hour and a half? Come on... I mean, I love the actual horse races, but I could care less about all the pre-race stuff, especially when there's a playoff hockey game in overtime.
Only two nights until the season finale of "24"!! I wonder how this season's gonna be resolved, and what cliffhanger they're gonna set up next season with. (I'm still not mentioning any specifics on my blog, since it's about 3-4 weeks behind down in Australia, and I have a couple friends who watch the show and check my blog now and then.) Overall, Season 6 hasn't been as consistently good as Seasons 4 or 5, but it's started to pick up again the last couple weeks. Sometime this summer I really should watch Seasons 1-3, I've heard those are really good too.
Posted by Jared at 11:41 PM | Comments (2)
May 12, 2007
It Figures I'm So Busy
My problems with SCIPUFF seem to have been temporarily solved. In testing that AJ & I did on Thursday, we seemed to isolate the problem of non-identical results coming from identical inputs to occasions when multiple SCIPUFF GUI windows are open. (As for why multiple GUIs might have an effect, we don't really know.) All our testing was done with only one GUI open at a time, and we weren't able to get any differing results. So while this isn't proof of what the problem is, it's certainly good enough for a working hypothesis, and I'm gonna operate on the assumption that avoiding multiple GUIs will prevent the problem, at least until after my thesis is done. Once I've defended my thesis, I can take a bit more time to look into all this and try to narrow down the problem a bit more.
So with the SCIPUFF problems "solved" for the time being, I spent yesterday creating all sorts of figures in SCIPUFF that will be used in my thesis and journal article. I also spent a couple hours trying to figure out how to edit/recreate some other figures in TecPlot that I made 6 months ago for the DTRA mini-IPR in December, and now need to revise a bit for my thesis. There are still a couple little details I'd like to change, but I might have to live with it. Time is getting to be of the essence. And then once I have all these SCIPUFF and TecPlot figures created, then comes the really fun and tedious part: cropping them down to the same size so that they'll look nice in papers and presentations. Ugh.
My friend Mike from church joined us at trivia last night, which was cool. He helped us out on some movie and music questions we might not otherwise have gotten, but our team, "It's a Simple Life in Jail," (reference to Paris Hilton's recent arrest), still finished in 4th place. Stupid final question about "Hello Kitty"...
Today's a really busy day. Actually, this whole weekend is, in fact. I've already done laundry and gone to the grocery store to pick up drinks for this afternoon's Penn State Christian Grads spring picnic, but I also need to practice piano at the church for a bit (I just found out yesterday what this Sunday's music is), grab lunch, maybe go to Walker for a bit to make some more figures, go to the PSCG officers meeting before the picnic, go to the PSCG picnic (4pm), go to worship team rehearsal at the church (6pm), go back to the picnic to help clean up, then maybe go back to the church to practice some more if I feel like I need it, and then maybe Walker if I still have any oomph left. And then tomorrow I'm playing in both services in the morning (and maybe practicing extra before the 8am final rehearsal too), then I've gotta go to Walker to work more on figures for a bit, then it's a meteo grads picnic up at Houserville at 4pm, then Bible study at 7, and *then* maybe I'll be able to relax for a bit. Who says summer's a time to sit around and do nothing? I'd better get to it!
Posted by Jared at 11:38 AM | Comments (0)
May 09, 2007
SCIPUFF Frustrations
Today has been a bit of a frustrating day. My plan was to get all sorts of figures made for my thesis, so that I could start writing by the weekend. Instead, in doing some testing to make sure that converting the units of concentration in SCIPUFF from kg/m3 to fL/L is working as it's supposed to, I discovered that SCIPUFF, when using identical inputs and settings, does not produce identical concentration patterns. Argh! I haven't noticed this before because until a couple days ago I was apparently looking at concentrations spanning six or seven orders of magnitude, and the concentration fields of two SCIPUFF runs with identical input/settings looked darn near identical. Now that I know how to convert that to fL/L, however, I really only need to look at concentrations spanning the top two orders of magnitude, since the rest are below the detector precision of 1 fL/L, and now I'm noticing some differences in the fine-detail structure of the concentration fields. So I spent all afternoon starting some pairs of "identical" SCIPUFF runs, and so far it looks like I'm getting quite a bit of run-to-run variability. When I told AJ about it, he got rather alarmed, because he's never seen SCIPUFF return non-identical results when using identical input/settings. I have no idea what this is going to do to my thesis, which is supposed to be done in just over two weeks. I guess I get to find out in the morning when I meet with Sue, and get to inform her of these troubling problems I've suddenly encountered. I'd like to have a few more plots when I show up in her office so we can better assess what the problem is, so tonight I'm finishing up the pairs of runs I started this afternoon, and will probably try to run a 3rd experiment on some of the stuff I did yesterday. Sitting in my office in Walker Building babysitting SCIPUFF is exactly how I wanted to spend a gorgeous 75-degree evening...
On the plus side, the air conditioning has been working properly in Walker Building since Monday or so. OPP made us close all our windows last Wednesday because they were going to turn on the A/C, but it didn't really kick in until Monday. During that time my office was warm (78-80 degrees) and stuffy, but I'm on the cool side of the building -- Vic's office hit the century mark last week, which is ridiculous. It's also very bad for computers, but since OPP doesn't pay the bills to fix/replace heat-damaged computers, they're not all that inclined to try to fix the problem. This building was constructed so shoddily back in the 70s; like I've mentioned before, it's the worst climate-controlled building on campus.
My final exam in Atmospheric Dispersion was yesterday morning (it went pretty well, I thought), so now I'm officially DONE with my fourth semester of graduate school! It definitely doesn't feel like I've been at Penn State four semesters already... With all of my class obligations now finished until fall, I can focus on research and my thesis.
To celebrate the end of the semester, I went to lunch with Mike & Chris from church, and one of Mike's friends, at Cozy Thai Bistro. I hadn't ever been there before, mostly because it's at the complete other end of College Ave from our side of campus, but it was really good. I'd definitely rate it better than Viet Thai, the place right across Atherton St from Walker Building. I'll definitely be back! Mmmmm, panang curry... 
And it was such a gorgeous day outside, I couldn't help but take a few pictures of the spring scenes around campus on my walk back to Walker. :-) To top off the end of semester celebration, a few of us from meteo went to Mad Mex for a couple "happy hora" drinks, and then after stopping back at Walker to do a couple more SCIPUFF runs, I went over to Jacob's to take in the Twins-White Sux game, which the Twins came from behind to win 7-4 in extras on Morneau's monster shot. It's always a good day when you can beat the White Trash. :-)
The church softball season got off to a great start on Monday. We (SC E-Free) knocked off Penns Valley Community Church 7-2 in a pretty good defensive game. I think our team only had one or two errors, and PVCC only had two or three as well, which is a pretty low total for amateur softball, in my experience. We had 19 players, so I only played the first half of the game (Ben was the only one to play the entire game), and hit a weak groundout to the pitcher in my only plate appearance. Argh. On the plus side, though, I caught both fly balls that came my way out in left field (both from the same hitter, incidentally), so at least I was able to contribute in a good way. Since I earned the reputation of being a utility player last year, Adam wants to have a game where he has me play at least seven positions, haha! I'm lookin forward to that, and I really don't care where I play as long as I can play.
I had to do a double-take when I checked the scores from last weekend's Aussie rules football games, and saw that my Geelong Cats had annihilated the hapless Richmond Tigers by a tally of 222-65. In the three years I've been following the AFL now, I don't believe I've ever seen a team top 200 points. We'll see if the Cats can keep it up this weekend against the undefeated West Coast Eagles.
I wonder if Caren's new cat will be like this one...
Posted by Jared at 10:10 PM | Comments (1)
May 06, 2007
Another Semester in the Books
It still doesn't really feel like I'm done with my fourth semester of graduate school (wow...). The last day of classes for me was on Thursday, and the best part of this semester being done is that I don't have to sit through another lecture in my Numerical PDEs class ever again, woohoo! There's a final project due for that class, but as per the discussion I had with Dr Du shortly after spring break, I'm not doing it because I don't have the necessary time to devote to it. So that means the only thing I have left to do this semester is a final exam for Atmospheric Dispersion on Tuesday morning. I'm not terribly worried about it, but I'll still do some studying tomorrow.
In my previous post I was complaining about the lottery system that Penn State had announced it was switching to for the distribution of football student season tickets. I had also mentioned that the new lottery plan had caused quite an uproar amongst the student body. Well, apparently the uproar was loud enough that on Wednesday morning the university announced that they were reversing their decision, and going back to the old system of first-come, first-served. That made all of us very happy, because now most of us who want tickets will in fact be able to get them. You can bet I'll be online and ready to buy tickets when they become available over the internet at 9am on June 7th! (Unless that's the time slot in which I'm defending my thesis, that is!)
Progress report on my thesis: First draft of Chapter 3 (methods & procedures) done, as of Friday afternoon. Only results & conclusions left to go! Well, first I have quite a few results left to get, but you get my drift.
Friday afternoon was the time set for the annual Hussey Lecture for the Department of Meteorology. The lecture's a big deal for the department, but we usually dread it because the speakers invariably talk for an hour about "integrated, innovative global business solutions" or some such nonsense, and yet manage to say absolutely nothing of substance. So, following on the heels of the Seminar Bingo cards that appeared recently in PhD Comics, we made our own Hussey Bingo cards. Several people contributed to the list of 40 or so phrases or events that we figured would likely happen, and Jacob wrote a script that randomly chose and arranged 25 of them on a sheet (click here a couple times to get a sample!). And true to form, this was another talk during which absolutely nothing was said, but at least we were all able to stay awake (mostly) and pay attention by playing bingo. I got pretty close to having at least a couple of bingos, but I think Amber was the only one to win.
In honor of the Hussey Lecture, our team name at trivia this week was "Integrated, Innovative Global Business Solutions with Gravitas" (that last part was added to our name by Trivia Steve). We were in first place most of the night due to a really good team effort, but wound up in second, oh well. Stephanie came along to trivia, too, and after that she & I met up with John, Ruth, Tracy & Daniel from PSCG to go see "Spider-Man 3." 
The theater right next door to G-Man was sold out, so instead we went over to the new College 9 theater that just recently opened up over by Lowe's (it's really nice too, very comfy seats that even recline!). I know the movie has gotten some poor reviews, but I thought it was pretty good. Sure, it may have been cheesy, as superhero movies are wont to be, but I rather enjoyed it. It's definitely worth a view, I recommend it. And I haven't even seen "Spider-Man 2" yet, but I didn't feel like I was missing out on key elements of the story. But that was a nice send-off for Stephanie, as she got on a plane back to South Africa today. We'll definitely miss having her around, but again, hopefully she comes back to Penn State for some Ph.D. work!
Yesterday was far too nice to sit inside doing whatever, so I decided to join Walter, Petters, Frame, Amber & Chris on their trip to Williamsport to go disc-golfing. It was the first time I'd been to a real disc-golf course (the 3-hole joke of a course here in State College at Circleville Park doesn't count), and it was pretty fun, even though I only beat Frame with my 33 over par (Chris won with 13-over). I still prefer ultimate frisbee though, and I think I might join in a weekly Friday afternoon game on the HUB lawn with some grad students from the English department one of these weeks. Or maybe I could get a game going sometime with some of the other college students from church.
Speaking of games and church, the season opener for church softball league is tomorrow! Can't wait!
Posted by Jared at 11:39 PM | Comments (1)
May 02, 2007
The Lottery's a Loser
I've now started writing Chapter 3 of my thesis. Everything seems to be moving right along.
Softball practice on Monday night was quite fun. We had enough people to split into two squads for a scrimmage, and the team I was on won 14-11. I went 3-for-3 with a walk, 2 RBI and 3 runs. A good tune-up for the regular season opener on Monday!
Congrats to Frame for passing his oral comps on Tuesday!
With summer literally just around the corner, both Jacob and I decided to get MLB.tv for the month to try it out. Prior to last weekend I had been listening to Twins games for free over the internet last year and so far this year from a couple of radio stations in Minnesota that hadn't shut off their webcasts during Twins games, but those loopholes got closed for good last Friday, much to my disappointment. Sigh. But MLB.tv is pretty cheap, especially on a monthly basis, so we'll see if I decide it's worth keeping around the rest of the summer.
I don't have all that much else to say this time 'round, except that I wanted to pass on a few interesting links:
This judge should be disbarred for trying to sue the pants off three people for a frivolous lawsuit. He should be taken to the cleaners and forced to pay the defendants' legal fees too!
Surely people aren't ridiculous enough to worship horses. Especially in America. Right?
As if the RIAA hasn't screwed over musicians or consumers enough already...
Could someone please tell me how the new lottery system for Penn State football student season tickets is going to be an improvement over the previous first-come, first-served method (which, by the way, has worked rather well the last several years)? While a lottery is maybe fine for bowl tickets, I really hate the idea of a lottery for football season tickets. Now it's going to be quite unlikely that all of us meteo grads who really wanted to get season tickets for next year will be able to get them. That is, unless we get several other people to enter the lottery as well, with the understanding that we'd purchase their tickets from them if they get selected by the lottery. I'll be pretty upset if I miss out on season tickets this year because of the stupid lottery, because you can bet I would've called to order tickets almost right away after they are made available (unlike last year, when I missed out by hours because I waited two weeks to call). This new lottery is definitely causing a lot of controversy here at Penn State, and I wish they'd go back to the old system.
Posted by Jared at 11:59 PM | Comments (4)