The Hoosier Diaspora

One of my favorites - 
Originally uploaded by khob

Dani and I took off on Black Friday to Ft. Collins for a tour of Odell brewing company and dinner at Charco Broiler. There were a couple of setbacks but we had a good time. The tour was already full so we had a sampler and hung out for a bit. I bought a growler of Isolation Ale (awesome), some coasters, and a pint glass. Later, we headed out for a shopping gauntlet (it was Black Friday, after all). Shopping wasn’t as busy as I thought; kind of a depressing statement about our economy I guess. As always, pics in the flickr gallery.

View from DMNS - 
Originally uploaded by khob

Dani took her cousin Zach and me to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science during a recent free day. Because it was a free day it was pandemonium, but we made it through at least half of the museum before Zach ran out of steam. I’d like to go back sometime soon, maybe even become a member so we can go more often.

After a lot of bouncing around, I’ve settled on Henry Tufo as an advisor. I’ve been going around and around for the last year or so trying to decide what I want to do in grad school and where I’d like to be in my career. Supercomputing cleared up a lot of confusion for me, because being immersed in all the possible research and career paths that I’m interested in for a week told me a lot about what my options are.

I’m interested in too many things, which has always been my problem. It makes it tough to focus, and being a generalist is not the easiest road to a PhD. That being said, I’m most interested in high-performance scientific computing, whether that’s in the management tools for supercomputing resources or in making a numerical method / simulation package operational. After evaluating my options I realized that all roads in that direction led to Henry.

I spent two years with Cai and learned a great deal, but he is much more of an applied math person and all of his other students are applied math. I enjoyed numerical analysis, but after two years I realize that the concerns and interests I have are similar but distinctly different than those of an applied mathematician. I switched to Liz Jessup for a couple of months and that was a positive switch, but ultimately the project I was going to be working on wasn’t quite pointed in the same direction as my interests so I wanted to make the switch before too much of her time (or more importantly, any of her money) was wasted.

I have funding secured (TA for the CS senior project) until summer, which puts me in a good position to find a good place for me in Henry’s group. I’m very optimistic about this path because I’m good friends with most of his group and feel a bit like a kid in a candy store with the interesting resources and work they are doing. I’ll also get to spend more time at NCAR, which is a place I find fascinating (Henry has a split appointment between NCAR and CU). It will be a real growth experience for me, as I’ll get a lot of practical experience in many areas if I’m willing to work for it. Here’s to hoping I’m up to the challenge.

Gloomy Portland - 
Originally uploaded by khob

I’m recently back from Portland Oregon for the SC09 supercomputing conference, which was one of the best weeks of my life.
I loved Portland, both the culture and the weather. It was about 40 degrees and raining the whole time, which is actually my favorite kind of weather. I was surprised by the quantity and insanity of the homeless people there, but otherwise the people were great. The coffee, food, and beer were excellent and it seemed like a nice mix of an outdoorsy place and a “stay inside and read” place, which I like. There are a lot of pictures in the flickr gallery since I tried to stay busy all week, both doing conference stuff and checking things off my “cool things to do” list, which was pretty extensive.
Speaking of the conference, that was great too. It seemed like every big name and important company or government institution was there. I had a great time going to talks, tutorials, and walking the show floor. The quality of the talks wasn’t as good as I would have expected, but talking shop with the folks on the show floor was very enlightening. I came away with about a suitcase full of swag and a brain full of information, so it was a great week. Insane, but great. It also cleared up a lot of confusion I’ve been having over what direction I’d like to go in for my PhD and my subsequent career.

I’m headed to Portland Saturday for a conference (Supercomputing ‘09) and I couldn’t be more excited. I’ve always wanted to see Portland and the Pacific Northwest, so I’m really looking forward to wandering around the city and conference. I wish I had time to take the train to Seattle so that I could 1) see Seattle and 2) ride on a passenger train, two things I’ve really wanted to do for a long time.

Leaving on a jet plane…

I decided to take a nice extended vacation back to IN for Christmas. I’ll be back in Southern Indiana from December 16th – January 4th. I plan on spending the time camped out at the houses of family and friends. Folks back home: if you have a spare couch and are needin’ some Cobb, let me know.

I have to admit that I’m finding Twitter to be really handy. There are a lot of small events that happen throughout the day that aren’t quite big enough to make a blog post out of, so I’ve been doing a lot of tweets on them. I haven’t felt much like investing in social media lately (facebook, blogging, etc) so Twitter fills that gap nicely till I feel like there’s something big enough to contribute as a blog post. I’ve been trying to keep my flickr gallery updated for the most part though. I think it’s mostly laziness.

Danielle got tickets to the Broncos / Steelers game Monday, so we went and had a great time. Things didn’t go so well for the Broncos, but it was fun to watch. I have to admit that I think sporting events for the most part are too long. They’re a lot of fun to me for about the first 2/3 of the game, then I just lose interest. Danielle and I ended up wandering around from halftime on, so I feel like we might be on the same page on this one.