The Hoosier Diaspora

It’s time once again for the annual migration to faraway lands for the summer. My buddy Goat (Travis) flew in from Indiana and we took a nice road trip out to Livermore California. The major stops along the trip were:

• Vail
• Capitol Reef national park
• Bryce Canyon national park
• Zion national park
• Las Vegas
• Sequoia national park

Vail was kind of a ghost town; it’s too late for skiing and too early for mountain biking, so mostly we just wandered around the town checking stuff out. We made good time that day, going through Capitol Reef national park and ending up in Torrey Utah for the night.

The next day we went through two other major national parks in Utah: Bryce Canyon and Zion. We mostly drove around the major roads checking things out and taking a lot of pictures. I personally like Zion the best since it seems to have the best views and is a really nice drive. We made it to Vegas that night and checked into the Luxor hotel.

Vegas is a lot of fun, but neither one of us was really a gambler or a party animal so mostly we just walked, drank, and people-watched. We tried to play miniature golf but the “adventuredome” at Circus Circus (maximum creepiness) was only open on weekends (of course this minor detail wasn’t on any of the ads). Vegas is an expensive place, that’s for sure. The seafood buffet at the rio was $38 each and though it was good there’s no way it was worth it financially. I don’t regret going, but it’s certainly a special event. I don’t know that I’m a vegas kind of guy. The rampant wastefulness of the place bothers me at a pretty fundamental level. I’m just not much into the glorious hedonism the place represents, so I guess it’s not really for me.

The next day or so was spent checking out Sequoia national park, which is always a favorite of mine. I’m a big fan of trees anyway, but there’s just something about being in the midst of trees that predate Christianity that really gives a sense of perspective and serenity. I recommend anybody that gets the chance should go there.

We finally made it to Livermore and wasted no time heading out the First Street Alehouse, probably my favorite spot in Livermore. When I got there I was pretty blown away: they moved next door, tripled their space, and cleaned the place up really well. The new spot is super nice and I’m looking forward to spending a… respectable… amount of time there.

The trip was a lot of fun and we saw some awesome stuff along the way. As always, there are some pics in the Flickr gallery.

Next Monday I’m headed back to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for another summer. I really enjoyed my time there last summer, and there were a few groups that were interested in working with me this summer (they seem to really like me there). I’m going to be working on a more open-ended research project that will hopefully evolve into my thesis. I’m hoping to have the makings of a proposal this coming Fall.

The trip out should be fun. My buddy Goat (Travis) is flying out from Indiana and we’re taking a nice meandering road trip out to CA. I’m looking forward to it and have a rough itinerary of things to see on the way out.

It looks like once again I’m the recipient of the “Outstanding TA Award” in Computer Science. I believe it’s based on my student evaluations and a letter from the professor I TA for. This is the third time I’ve won this so I’m pretty proud / excited that fortune has smiled on me once again. I enjoy doing the senior project and have a good rapport with most of my students, so it’s good that they think so as well.

I decided to go with a trunk rack because:

1. I’m fairly absent-minded and would probably drive into a parking garage with my bike on the car.
2. It’s cheaper

I looked up some reviews online and saw that the Yakima King Joe 2 seemed like a good one based on the reviews. I stopped by REI last Saturday to pick one up and discovered that the REI garage sale was just winding down. Lo and Behold, they had one of these at the garage sale. I got there just as the sale items were slashed another 50%, so I ended up getting the rack for about $34. Awesome. It looks in good shape and has all the parts. A nice REI lady opened up one of these in the box so we could check that all the parts were there, then she made me a copy of the instructions. I should be all set for taking my bike out to CA.

I took an incomplete in the PDEs course I was taking last year (first time ever taking an incomplete). I was just too busy that semester: I was taking two other courses, full TA load, I taught the PDEs course for a week (on parallel programming, using supercomputers, and software libraries for numerical analysis), and I took my prelim that semester (two High Passes, yaay). All that combined meant that I just didn’t have the time (or the energy, after the prelim) to finish up the PDEs work, so I took my first incomplete. After about a year of procrastination I finally sat down to do it and enjoyed working on a concrete problem again. I won’t say I learned terribly much doing it, since I was pretty familiar with everything I needed to do for the two projects in the course (I taught the class for a week, after all), but it was fun actually building something from scratch. Programming really is my first love.

I finished up both projects: (warning: technical details) Project 1 was basically solving a time-dependent PDE using a finite difference discretization and forward/backward Euler timestepping methods, with a Conjugate Gradient solver for the implicit method, all written as a parallel application using MPI (had a really good time with this one since I like parallel programming so much). Project 2 was writing parallel solvers in PETSc for a few PDEs, with a focus on domain decomposition methods and preconditioning.

I finished up both projects late last week and turned in my writeup. It’s a hell of a relief to have that out from over my head, though of course I thought of ten things I did wrong or should have done as soon as I turned it in, but we’ll see how it goes. It was fun to work on, but I’m glad my last course-related obligation is done for my school career. 11 years after I started college, and my last homework is done. It’s a weird feeling.

Dani and I watched Food, Inc. this past weekend (well, most of it; still have to finish it) and it was a pretty powerful movie. I’ve been moving away from processed foods and meat for a while now, though I still eat whatever when I’m at a dinner party or other event. I guess I eat less of this sort of thing rather than none. I credit works by Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, Walter Willett (Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy), and Super Size Me with a lot of this and consequently the movie didn’t tell me a whole lot I didn’t already know. That being said, I think it’s something everyone should see and at least be aware of what’s going on behind the scenes with the food we eat. I’ve made some changes in my life and feel a lot better in many ways.

Other than movie watching, I’ve been fixing a lot of mediterranean diet kind of foods: whole wheat pasta, vegetables, olive oil, and pasta sauce, with mixed nuts and greek yogurt for snacks. It’s a good mix and I’m happy with how good, easy, cheap, and healthy it is. I fixed some pasta and vegetables with tofu for Dani Friday night and was pretty happy with how it turned out. I’m trying to cook more to save money and lose weight, and it’s going well so far. I’m gradually becoming a competent cook I think.

Saturday night we had our dinner club gathering with Dani, Matthew, Phong, Monica, and Matt over at Matthew and Phong’s place. They put together an awesome spread of make your own spring rolls, egg rolls, and a bunch of other great stuff. I brought wine and beer (naturally). Dani and I made an asian salad her friends made for us recently and it turned out pretty well. Monica and Matt made really good meatballs with peanut sauce as well as a nice homemade kiwi ice cream. I spend a lot of time over at M&P’s place so it’s always fun to hang out there. A good time was had by all.

Sunday Dani and I took a nice walk, then headed out with Jeff and Khara for dinner, drinks, and hanging out at their place. I really liked the fries at Islands, and the food at Mod Market was great (they even put the calorie counts on the receipt!). We’ll have to go back there sometime. J&K have a cute new puppy with a lot of energy so that was fun.

This week I’m going to chain myself to my desk in the lab. It’s spring break so as a grad student that means I get real work done that week. Hopefully I can crawl out from under this pile of TODO items I’ve been accumulating.

Snowy cabin

Originally uploaded by khob

Danielle has some friends with a cabin in Winter Park, so we headed up there this weekend for a gathering of the couples. All told we had lawyers, a physician, and a philosophy professor so we had a great time talking and hanging out.

We spent the time drinking, playing board games, snowshoeing (while most of the other folks went skiing), video games, tubing (ridiculously fun), and in general just hanging out and talking. A great weekend that hopefully we can do again sometime. The cabin and the people were great.

I’m surprised how fun tubing was. I hadn’t done it in a long time so I had forgotten what it was like. I want to do it again sometime so if anybody wants to plan a weekend I’d love to go.

As always, some pics are in the Flickr gallery.

Added a Flickr widget to the sidebar, but I’m not too happy about how it integrates with the theme. If anybody knows of a better one let me know

It takes quite a bit of gymnastics to get an independently hosted Wordpress site (namely, tyrdrop.net) to post to Google Buzz. Hope this works.