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December 30, 2008
Christmas Break 2008
[On location in Cumberland, Wisconsin]
It's been a fairly relaxing Christmas break so far. It's been good to see family and friends the last few days. This break I've been making a well-worn path to the Twin Cities too, that's for sure!
We had our family Christmas on Christmas Day here at my parents' place. Around mid-afternoon everyone came over, my younger brother Jake, my oldest brother Nathan & Laura and their four kids, and Eve and her two kids. As has become tradition for our family, we had a Christmas hymnsing before opening presents and whatnot. It was good to have everyone together again, but my brother Aaron's presence was definitely missed. I think it hit me harder than it did at Thanksgiving, because there were so many people at Thanksgiving, and it also was a whirlwind trip somewhere else for the day, instead of having it at my parents' place. In contrast, for Christmas it was a smaller gathering (just our family), and here in Cumberland, where we've had our family Christmas for the last decade or so. So while break has been relaxing, I've also felt a bit down, but I don't think that's surprising or unexpected. For those of you that have been praying for our family, thank you.
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On Saturday afternoon I drove down to Dave's place in Hastings, to carpool with him to the now-annual GAC Physics and Phriends Christmas break get-together. We couldn't find a date that worked for everyone, but the 27th worked for the most people, so we went for that. We all met up at Cory's dad's bar in Osseo (Dick's Bar) -- "all" being me, Dave, Cory, Seth, Carl, John, Brendan, Kate, Jill and her fiancee Andrej (Jolene, Zach, Ben and others were unfortunately unable to make it). While I didn't get a chance to talk to everyone as much as I would've liked, it was still great to see a bunch of my college friends again and hear how they're doing. Seth had to catch a bus in downtown Minneapolis early the next morning, so Carl, Dave & I all shared a hotel room with him downtown, and went out to Brit's Pub on Nicollet Mall. Good times!
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I drove back to the Twin Cities yesterday to meet up with my friend Luke for lunch at Culver's in Hudson. As a little background (because this is a cool story), Luke was my best friend way back in first grade when my family lived in Springfield, MN, and then after a few years we pretty much lost contact. Then in my freshman year at Gustavus, I saw a flyer in the music building advertising a concert with the Southwest Minnesota Orchestra over in New Ulm, featuring pianist Luke Norell. Naturally curious, I drove to New Ulm for the concert. Sure enough it was my friend Luke, and he and his family were sure surprised to see me after the concert! We've kept in contact since then, but as far as we can remember, yesterday was the first time we'd actually managed to get together since summer 2005, when he came to visit me while I was living at Aaron & Eve's. It was great to hang out with him for the afternoon and catch up, and hear how he's doing in his grad program in piano performance at Indiana University (his instructor's Andre Watts!). Hopefully it'll be much less than three and a half years before we hang out again!
I have to say, this year I'm more interested in the NFL Playoffs than I have been for the past several years. I think that has a wee bit to do with the Vikings qualifying for the playoffs for the first time since the 2004 season (and for their first home playoff game since the 1999 season). They've choked over and over again this decade, so I was rather surprised when they managed to beat the Giants 20-19 on a 50-yard game-winning field goal by Ryan Longwell as time expired (despite some horrendous clock management at the end of the game), to clinch the NFC North division title and the #3 seed in the NFC. Their reward? A home date with the red-hot Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday at 4:30pm EST/3:30pm CST on FOX. Well, red-hot if the team that beat Dallas 44-6 this week shows up, but not-so-hot if the team that lost to Washington 10-3 the week before shows up. Either way, I'm rather intrigued by the matchup, and I could easily see either team winning it. As long as Tarvaris Jackson doesn't screw up and Adrian Peterson gets over his recent case of fumble-itis (which are two rather big ifs), the Vikings are built for a deep playoff run, with their excellent rushing offense and rushing defense. And I'll be back in State College in time for the game too, so maybe I'll be able to watch the game with a friend or two who are Iggles fans. I'll be proudly wearing my Vikings gear Saturday night and Sunday out in PA! Hopefully I'll be able to wear it proudly on Monday too. :-)
After watching the Vikings game, I made some good progress on my photo reclamation project. I'd been dreading sorting through the next three directories of photos because they each had well over 6,000 files in them. I'd done an earlier pass with Adobe Bridge, sorting the files by pixel dimensions so I could delete all the thumbnails and everything, but apparently it has a hard time sorting 10,000 photos at once, because I quickly discovered that a bunch of thumbnails were still there. So after another more careful/patient pass with Bridge, I deleted close to 20,000 files (and about 15 GB of disk space) from those three directories alone (thumbnails and also full-size images that were saved on my old external hard drive), leaving just 200-300 to sort (there are a few more directories with thousands of files each to go through though). Now I think I can maybe see a glimmer of light at the end of this long tunnel. Maybe in a couple months, after finding a few more hours here and there to work on it, I'll have everything back to normal.
My car has been fixed! Hooray! We took it over to a shop in Rice Lake, and they looked at it yesterday. We feared that it would need a new heater core, which would almost certainly mean it wouldn't be ready in time for me to drive back to Pennsylvania, since they're only open Mon-Tue this week. Instead, all they had to do was flush the radiator/coolant system, and replace a leaky radiator cap. Now it works like a charm! I'm glad I'll be able to drive my own car again when I go to Scott & Katie's to celebrate New Year's Eve tomorrow, and when Alex & I head to Valpo on Friday, and I continue on to PA on Saturday. It might be old, certain things might not work on it anymore, and it might have 226,500 miles on it, but it's my first car and I'm still attached to it!
Ever since I got up this morning, it's been heavily snowing (three stars and four stars, for the most part). Last night we were only in a winter weather advisory, with 3-6" predicted, but this morning we found ourselves in a winter storm warning, with 8-12" predicted! Shortly after 9am when I brushed 5-6" or so of snow off my car so that I could move it into the garage (before the snow became too deep to move it anywhere), I also took a pretty good spill on our driveway -- beneath all the dry, fluffy snow, our driveway's been coated in ice for days now, and the snow only makes it more slippery. Ahhh, how I've missed real winter!
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Just two more days until the Rose Bowl, featuring the Penn State Nittany Lions and the Southern Calfornia Trojans! The national media's not giving PSU much of a chance because they have a pretty big bias for USC (to put it politely). What a great matchup this should be, though! I think Penn State's underrated, and will acquit themselves very well against USC -- and I think we'll win, too. WE ARE... PENN STATE!! BEAT THE TROJANS!!
Posted by Jared at 02:33 PM | Comments (0)
December 24, 2008
Frozen Heater
[On location in Cumberland, Wisconsin]
Merry Christmas, everyone! I haven't blogged at all lately, but that's what happens with IPRs, being sick (came down with a sore throat Monday, then a cold on Thursday night, but I've been feeling better since Sunday), and traveling and everything. Anyway, I'm in Wisconsin safe and sound, and enjoying a break from driving. Today was the first day in nearly a week where I haven't been behind the wheel of a car for at least 3 hours! In fact, I haven't been in a car at all today. It's been nice to be able to be a bum and just sit around, and read a book, play a little piano, and get my gift for my brother Jake wrapped (my family decided to do the gift exchange this year after all).
My trip to Wisconsin was a bit adventurous. It was snowing some Friday morning, but by the time I loaded up my car, it had switched to a lovely heavy mix of sleet and freezing rain. I left my apartment about 10:30am Friday, and the roads were terrible until about halfway between Clearfield and DuBois, with all the +FZRA/IP. So what should've taken an hour to get that far actually took two hours. I even passed a Mustang on PA-970 (the little connector road between US-322 and I-80 just east of Clearfield) while going just 20 mph, haha. I think that has to be a first. :-) Fortunately the precip switched to plain rain a few miles after the "Appalachian Divide" on I-80, and the roads weren't slippery anymore the rest of the way. I had been starting to worry that I wouldn't make it to Valpo that day, with how long the first 60 miles took.
I got to Valparaiso a bit after 9pm. If I had gotten there a bit earlier and not been exhausted from my cold, we might've gone to the ice skating rink with another of Alex's friends, but as it was we hung out in his dorm for a bit, before Alex & I walked to one of his favorite hangouts in downtown Valparaiso, a classy pub called Pass Times. We had a really fun evening hanging out and celebrating Alex finishing his semester. Good times. $4 Long Islands also were a plus. ;-)
And then on Saturday, Alex & I weren't able to leave Valparaiso until 2:30pm because he had RA responsibilities, with closing up the dorm for Christmas break and whatnot. It had already started snowing when we left, and had to drive slower most of the way. What should've been an 8-hour drive in good weather wound up taking almost 12 -- we got to my parents' house at 2:15am. Sometime around Madison my heater also stopped working. I really noticed it when Alex asked at some point, "Say, are you cold?" I guess my coolant didn't have a high enough proportion of antifreeze (or so my dad suspected initially), so it was only rated to 0 or -10 degrees or something, which meant that my expansion box turned into a block of ice. Fun! Most of the time in Wisconsin that night it was around -10 degrees with a 20 mph wind, gusting to 30-35 mph (meaning the windchill was maybe in the -30s and -40s), so there was plenty of blowing snow too. We were very glad finally to arrive at my parents' house and warm up. :-) And can I add that I really hate it when I'm stuck behind a snowplow, that whenever you try to pass it it suddenly kicks up so much snow that you can't even see the front of the car (or the bright flashing lights of the snowplow that's right next to you)? After a couple attempts I decided it wasn't worth it to try again, especially since we were on US-53 and not too far from home at that point.
Alex & I went with my parents to my oldest brother Nathan's house on Sunday for house church, and then I drove him back to his family's place in Mahtomedi, had dinner with them and played a card game of Scat with Alex and his youngest brother Nicholas (seems to be one of Nicholas's favorite games). After that I drove back up to Cumberland for the night.
I went back to Minnesota on Monday again, but before I even made it to Turtle Lake, my car's heater went on the fritz again. That means that making antifreeze be a higher proportion of the coolant didn't do the trick, and that something more serious is wrong with it. Sigh. So I turned around and drove all the way to Chetek to trade cars with my dad, so that I could have a car with a working heater. I hope my car can be fixed, and that I haven't driven my Mazda for the last time... Anyway, Monday evening I drove out west of the Cities to Lester Prairie to have dinner with Naomi and her family (from my brother Aaron & Eve's church), which was enjoyable. Because I didn't want to drive the full three hours back to my house (especially if it snowed, which it did), I spent the night at Alex's house. It's been so fun to have a chance to spend lots of time with my best friend again the last few days (and there'll be more coming up at the end of break, and then again in mid-January at AMS in Phoenix!). I'm continually hoping and praying that he'll be admitted to Penn State and that we can be roommates in a few months! We're both looking forward to it so much! :-D
I know that we're constantly bombarded with stories on the news about how bad the economy is and how stores are suffering with the lack of shoppers and shopping going on. I know this is just anecdotal, but when I was doing some shopping in Roseville on Tuesday afternoon, all the roads and parking lots around all the shopping centers were jam-packed. It may not be the same everywhere else, but at least in Roseville, Minnesota on Tuesday, retailers seemed to be getting a lot of business.
In my last blog post I mentioned that the Christmas party and white elephant gift exchange for Penn State Christian Grads was happening back on the 14th. And guess who was ultimately the lucky recipient of my white elephant gift, a 1987 book by someone named 
Roger Yepsen entitled "How to Increase Your Brainpower"? If you guessed that I got it back, you guessed right. Is that the sign of a truly great white elephant gift, that it's so undesirable that it gets traded away multiple times and eventually traded back to the giver? :-)
Tomorrow my parents are hosting our family Christmas, with Eve and her kids and Nathan & Laura and their kids and Jake all getting here sometime after lunch. I should probably get to bed before too much longer here, since I have to help my parents do a fair bit of cleaning around the house in the morning before everyone arrives.
Merry Christmas! Our Saviour is born!
Posted by Jared at 11:45 PM | Comments (0)
December 13, 2008
Greatest Volleyball Team Ever?
As soon as I finished my class on Thursday morning (okay, as soon as I finished my IPR presentation dry run just after noon on Thursday), my brain definitely went "on break." Even with the IPR yet to come, I have no more academic responsibilities this semester, so I'm practically on Christmas break already. At least mentally. :-)
In addition to being the end of my seventh semester of grad school, this week was the end of an era for the PSU Department of Meteorology -- Jeff Frame packed up and moved away. He's been a grad student in the department since Fall 2001, so he's pretty much been an institution here. But he finished his Ph.D. and got a job at Hobart & William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY, so it was time for him to move, which he did on Saturday morning. So on Friday afternoon I helped Mario, Kent, Petters & Bob to load up Jeff's moving truck. And I just have to say kudos to Jeff for making that one of the easiest, smoothest moves that I've ever helped with. 
Everything was all boxed up, and it only took 45 minutes to load up the truck! Hooray for easy moves. In the evening a bunch of us went out to G-Man for team trivia. And appropriately for Jeff's final trivia as a State College resident, Trivia Steve was there to emcee, so that was really cool. He's definitely our favorite trivia guy, of the ones that have done team trivia here in State College over the years. And we also made sure to send Jeff out on the right foot by winning first place, scoring just 3 points short of the maximum, and by going "all in" on the final question. It won't be the same without Jeff at trivia from now on, but somehow we'll manage to continue the meteo team trivia tradition.
This afternoon I went into campus to go to the NCAA women's volleyball tournament Elite Eight matchup between nationally #1-ranked Penn State and #8-ranked California. As a little bit of background, Penn State won national championships last academic year in both women's and men's volleyball, so in addition to being a football school, I guess you could say we're now a volleyball school too. Anyway, the women's volleyball team has simply been demolishing opponents all year long. Not only did they win all 30 matches they played in the regular season this year, they also didn't lose even a single set in the regular season(!!). I'll let that sink in for a minute... That trend has continued in the NCAA tournament so far, and in the Sweet Sixteen matchup yesterday with Western Michigan, Penn State broke the NCAA record for consecutive sets won, at 106 (Florida held the old record at 105 in the 2003 season). That's right, dating back to the fifth and deciding set of last year's national championship victory over Stanford, the Nittany Lions have won every single set they've played. There is talk about this year's Penn State team potentially being the greatest college women's volleyball team ever.
So today when Penn State fell into a deep hole early in the first set vs Cal, their consecutive sets streak looked to be in serious jeopardy. The Golden Bears led by scores of 7-1, 13-6 and 19-13 in the first set, before the Nittany Lions stormed back to take the set 25-21, the furious rally igniting the raucous crowd of over 4,000 in Rec Hall. PSU would never trail in a set again the rest of the afternoon. Like in the first set, they were still a bit shaky and error-prone in the second set, but prevailed 25-21 heading into intermission. 
In the third set the Nittany Lions turned up the quality of their play a notch, and dispatched of California 25-17 to close out the match in straight sets! Not only is Penn State's consecutive-sets streak now at 109, but they've earned a berth in the Final Four next weekend in Omaha, where they will attempt to win a second consecutive national championship! Let's Go State!! Even with all the errors, it was a pretty exciting match, especially with the big rally in the first set. I'm definitely glad I went, even though I wound up going alone. Though I did end up running into Dr Nese, so he sat and watched the first two sets with me before he had to go. It was good chatting with him again.
I took videos at the end of all three sets, but here's the end of the third set, which I've posted to YouTube. For some reason it doesn't seem like the quality of this video is as good as other videos I've posted to YouTube from my camera, oh well. The actual file is very high quality. Enjoy!
And tomorrow evening we have our PSCG Christmas party, complete with a white-elephant gift exchange! Who will be the lucky person to get what I'm wrapping up? Hehehe, we shall see! :-)
Posted by Jared at 11:45 PM | Comments (1)
December 10, 2008
Possible New PhD Topic
I've discovered today that it's really fun to get new ideas about my research, and to decide to move in a new direction. During today's research group meeting, when I was giving an overview of my presentation for the upcoming IPR, Dave raised an excellent point that really resonated with me, and which Sue agreed with as well. I'm pretty sure I would've arrived at the same conclusion eventually myself, but it was good to get a nudge anyway. I'm not entirely sure what precisely I want to do, but I do know that I'm now planning to move away from using the CAPTEX-83 (1983 Cross-Appalachian Tracer Experiment) field study. I've been using CAPTEX in all my research in grad school until now, and I just think it's kind of overused and that our group has milked this enough that it'd be hard for me to make this a substantial part of my Ph.D. project.
So at this nascent stage I'm pretty sure that what I would like to do for my PhD project is to set out to develop a configuration of an NWP (numerical weather prediction) ensemble that, when used to drive an AT&D (atmospheric transport & dispersion) model like SCIPUFF, will result in a larger spread in concentration predictions than would result from some operational NWP ensemble, which we suspect is configured with obtaining spread in QPF (quantitative precipitation forecasts) as a goal instead. By comparing my new to-be-developed ensemble configuration with an operational ensemble over several cases, I can maybe have a leg to stand on down the road in my Ph.D. defense (or in my oral comprehensive exams, for that matter, or my pre-defense) if I try to claim that my ensemble configuration is better for AT&D applications than other ensembles already in operational use. I still have to figure out pretty much all of the details of how I want to accomplish that (what regions, dates, synoptic/mesoscale regimes, etc. to use for my case studies), but right now I'm actually kind of excited about where my research might be going in the new year!
In other research-related news, my first journal article, "Improving SCIPUFF Forecasts with NWP Ensembles," on which I'm the lead author, was finally submitted to the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology yesterday!! It's basically my entire M.S. project, and we submitted an earlier version of this manuscript to Atmospheric Environment last October, only to have it rejected by the editor at the beginning of January this year. Ever since then we've all been putting a lot of work into this, and it really is a significantly better paper now than it was then. I'm just so glad to have that submitted at long last! It'll be awhile before I can officially say I have an article published in the literature though, because JAMC (and all the AMS journals, for that matter) tends to take a long, long time. As in, it will probably be 2010 before this article actually gets published. But hey, at least it's finally submitted!
Switching gears, can I lodge an official protest at the weather? I think it's ridiculous that I should ever have to use my umbrella in mid-December. Isn't this the time of year it's supposed to snow? And speaking of that, last night I got my hopes up when the State College NWS issued a Winter Storm Watch for the region from Thu night through Fri morning, that we might at long last get perhaps 4-6 inches of snow. But now it looks like it'll be primarily a rain and freezing rain event. :-( Winter without snow is lame!!
And congratulations to Rob C. for passing his Ph.D. defense today, and to Jacob for passing his comprehensive exams today! Good job, guys!
Well, I should probably get to bed soon. My last 8am class is tomorrow! I can only hope it's my last 8am class EVER. I've enjoyed the class (Forecasting Practicum), but not the 8am aspect of it. It's hard to believe that by 10am tomorrow I will have completed my seventh semester of graduate school(!). Have I really been here that long already?
Posted by Jared at 11:50 PM | Comments (0)
December 07, 2008
Can You Hear Me Now? Good.
I got back to State College a week ago from Thanksgiving break, but in less than two weeks I'll be leaving again for Christmas break! I'm definitely looking forward to that, and it'll be here before I know it.
I had a good end to Thanksgiving break a week ago. Last Friday afternoon Alex drove up to Cumberland to pick me up and drive me back down to Mahtomedi, to have dinner with his family. After dinner Alex & I played "Scat" (also known as "31," a card game we'd learned from David D. this summer out here) with his younger brothers Patrick and Nicholas, and then following the conclusion of that game Alex & I met up with some of Alex's good high school friends to play some "Cranium." It was definitely fun to get to meet his family and friends! I'm glad that Alex had to leave early for Thanksgiving break, causing me to change my plans and fly instead, because we wouldn't have been able to hang out as much as we did, or get to know each other's families a little bit. It all worked out great! :-)
Alex dropped me off at the Minneapolis-Saint Paul airport at 4:45am Saturday morning so that I could catch my 6am flight (now we've each given each other rides to the airport for 6am flights, ha). Thing is, even though we made sure I got to the airport in what should have been plenty of time, I still almost missed my flight. First, United Airlines didn't have a separate check-in line for those not checking any luggage, so everyone had to go through the same line. Second, the line was crawling at such a pace that there must've been a whole bunch of people who had no idea how to use the check-in kiosks. Seriously, it took me nearly 45 minutes just to get through the check-in line. After waiting through the security line for awhile, I was allowed to jump ahead to the front, and then even with that, I still almost missed the flight to IAD -- I was just about the last person to board, but at least I made it. And then I nearly missed my flight from PHL to SCE too. I made sure to get to the gate a half hour before the departure time, and while I was reading my book, never heard a call for the State College flight (I heard calls for plenty of other flights though). So then I went up to the gate agent 15 minutes before departure and asked if they were boarding the State College flight yet, to which he responded, "no, not yet." So I went back and sat down, and just two minutes later I was paged by name to go to the gate (the first time I've ever had that happen to me). It turns out that I was the last person they were waiting for, because as soon as I boarded the plane and sat down, they closed the door. I just found it curious that they said they hadn't started boarding yet, when everyone but me had already boarded. Oh well.
I've been annoyed by how finnicky my cell phone has been to charge for several months now. It often took a bit of fiddling to get the cord put in the phone just right so that it'd charge, and to be able to set it down and still have it charge. It was a process. Anyway, because of how annoying that was, and because my phone was over three and a half years old (and the first cell phone I ever owned in America as well, incidentally), I finally got motivated enough to drag my butt to the store to get a new phone. I did my research on the internet on Monday night, picked out a phone and decided to make the switch from AT&T to Verizon (most of my friends now are on Verizon, so unlimited calls and texts to/from them will go a long way!). Then on Tuesday night I went down to the Verizon store, picked out the phone I wanted (the Motorola VU204), but had to run home to get my most recent Penn State pay stub. It turns out that there's a Penn State employee discount with Verizon, which was enough to get me the phone for free (instead of $70 with a 2-yr contract), and 18% off my monthly bill, woot! I also bought a car charger and a bluetooth headset, so I'll be all set on the long car drives I take every so often (like in just over a week and a half!). Hooray for discounts and new toys! Oh, and I still have my same number, I was able to have it ported over from AT&T to Verizon.
On Friday evening this week, Ash & Heather took all of us on the PSCG Leadership Team (me, Tracy, Ashley G., Brendaly, Chad & Rachel) out to dinner to celebrate the semester. We initially decided to go to La Bella Trattoria up in Bellefonte, but found out a couple days earlier that it had closed, unfortunately. So instead we went to High Street Pub, also in Bellefonte. I hadn't ever heard of the place before, but it was awesome! I might have to explore Victorian Bellefonte a bit more, to see what other hidden gems (well, hidden to me) that cool town holds! And then after dinner Ash & I went to see the new James Bond movie, "Quantum of Solace." It's always fun when environmentalists are the villains, haha. I know some people don't really like Daniel Craig as James Bond, but I've really liked the two Bond movies he's been in so far (way better than any of the four Pierce Brosnan films, for sure). One thing I've noticed and appreciated about the two Daniel Craig films is that the sex scenes and Bond's notorious womanizing have been very much reduced and de-emphasized, compared to the other Bond films I remember. In my opinion anyway, it makes the movies better, and really works with the character development. I'd say it's definitely worth seeing "Quantum of Solace" in the theater. Just be sure you don't miss the very very beginning, or else you'll miss a sweet car chase!
And if you look closely in the picture above, you might notice that yes, my goatee is back, after a four-year absence. I just felt like growing one again. :-) I don't think I'll keep this one for over a year and a half like I did my previous one, though. We'll see.
This is going to be a very busy week coming up, getting ready for next week's IPR (interim/annual project review for our sponsors from DTRA). Yep, it's that time of year again. At least this year I don't have a final exam to worry about during the IPR! I have a 20-minute presentation to get ready for next Tuesday, but need to have a pretty good draft put together by Wednesday this week. There'll be some of the same material as was in my CBD conference talk in New Orleans a couple weeks ago, but DTRA of course doesn't want to see the same talk again. So even though there's not much time between presentations, we'll see what new stuff I can put in there for the IPR. Thankfully I'll be able to pull material entirely from my CBD and IPR talks for my 12-minute talk at the AMS conference in Phoenix in January, since it'll be a completely new audience!
Time to get ready for Bible study, since I'm leading one of the small groups tonight. And prayers for Alex, as he's taking the GRE tomorrow!! It'll be one step closer to Alex hopefully being admitted to Penn State for next year!
Posted by Jared at 05:42 PM | Comments (0)