Greetings from Berkeley

Hi from sunny, cool Berkeley, CA.
I'm here for five days at a radio astronomy signal processing conference. The goal of this group is to develop reconfigurable, scalable, multi-purpose hardware for radio telescopes. The conference is relatively small, maybe 40 attendees, from observatories all over the world. I'm learning a lot and making some great connections. Importantly for me, I may have a lead on a project. Now I need to take it back home and see what my adviser says.
I haven't seen much of Berkeley, but it seems like a nice place. The weather is pretty much sunny and 65 degrees all year round, which right now actually makes it a little chilly for me. It's a pretty town. Really green and all. Today we went up to the top of a large building where we could see the Bay and the Golden Gate bridge.
Tomorrow's the last day of the conference, and then I head back East. But for now it's time to head back to the hotel and think about something other than FFT's, latency and block RAM.

Thoughts on airports

Airports are curious places existing simultaneously in static and dynamic states. The same numbered counters greet passengers day to day. The same generic chairs stay forever fixed as travelers sit, pass by and leave. Time has a curiously static quality as well. Some how unconnected with the real world, time only has meaning as numbers slowly increasing to the particular set that allows you to finally come out of stasis and join the flow of people whose trajectories happen to cross at this particular moment.
But within this static world is highly dynamic core. Human particles comprise an anthropomorphic fluid that flows to and from, left and right, and ultimately, up and down.
This superposition of complimentary states conspire to create excellent people watching. Here musing over my fellow traveling particles bounce around with the randomness of my mind.

The family that was playing cards in the food court.

(Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose...)

A guy picking his teeth with a $10 bill.

(Wish my laptop battery lasted longer.)

Little girl in a cute gypsy costume.

(Will Leah really stay with Dee? Who are the last five?)

Guy in blue cap with an iPod. :-)

(Workshop begins tomorrow. Am I over my head?)

Time to board.

Trip to DC

So I took a long weekend and drove down to visit Andy in DC.
After work on Thursday I grabbed an iced tea and sub, jumped in the car and headed south. It was a beautiful sunny, summer, which in my opinion are the best days for long car trips. I think Pennsylvania has become one of my favorite states to drive through because it's just hilly and curvy enough to make it interesting but not so hilly and curvy that I get motion sick as I speed along with traffic. Maryland on the other hand is not my favorite state to drive in. The drivers are rude, and I seem to miss a lot of turnoffs in what not.
Friday Andy had to work, so I was on my own until he got off work. I began at the National Museum of American Indians, which is a new museum on the Mall. First off the building is beautiful:



The museum is divided into three permanent galleries and one for traveling exhibits. For the permanent galleries the museum curators worked directly with several tribes to create the displays. That means the information came from the tribe directly and not through some anthropologist. This was particularly successful in the section on tribal religions and world view.
Next I went to the Air and Space museum. Some how I just wouldn't feel right about spending four days in DC without seeing the A&S museum. The hightlights for me here were seeing objects from the Apollo missions and looking at things which have been to the moon and back. The other thing which blew me away was seeing a model of the Hubble Space telescope. The thing is huge:



Maybe I'm just not used to large optical telescopes, but the thing is as tall as the huge gallery. There was also a gallery set up with items from the American History museum, which is currently closed for renovation. There were some pretty amazing items displayed such as the hat Lincoln wore when he was shot, one of Einstein's pipes and Louis Armstrong's cornet. Craziness.
After seeing most of the air and space stuff, I met up with Andy for dinner at a sushi place.
In the evening we took a long walking tour of the monuments and memorials on the mall. We started at the Washington monument and then went to the World War II memorial, Signers of the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln, Korean War, FDR and finally Jefferson. It was a lot of walking, and a lot of tourists.
Saturday began by visiting the National Cathedral. The cathedral is an interesting mix of religion and national pride. The cathedral's patriotic components are both tasteful and respectful and is largely represented in the beautiful stained glass windows. One window commemorates Lewis and Clark and the natural beauty of the country:



In this window you can see pine trees, mountains, lakes, fish and tepees. Several other windows commemorate prominent people in US history as well as veterans of several wars. The most famous window, and my favorite, is the so called "space window" which honors the Apollo 11 mission and apparently even contains a moon rock.
Here's a photo taken from the rear of the cathedral looking toward the front:



After exploring the cathedral we went to the National Zoo. We were lucky to see see the newest panda bear out wondering and eating:



After a brief visit at the zoo it was time to head to dinner, which ended up being something of a public transportation adventure. But in the end there was tasty beer, so we were satsified.
Sunday was another museum day. We decided to go to the Natural History Museum, which was swamped because of Father's Day. The place is of course huge and something of a sensory overload after a couple hours. But I did learn some interesting things and saw some really big gemstones and meteorites.
After dinner we took a short stroll around the White House. Considering what my favorite non-sci fi show is, I couldn't go to DC without seeing the White House up close. Or at least as close as one can with the huge fence around.



And just for fun, a photo of the capital looking down Pennsylvania Ave:

Time flies when you're having fun

So it's hard to believe that I'm already into week four of summer. But as they say, time flies when you're having fun. I think one side affect of living somewhere with a cold, gray, depressing winter is the summer feels just that much better.
So I've been keeping myself pretty busy. Work's been basically a continuation of what I was doing in Germany. I spent the better part of half a week fighting with Linux while trying to get everything set up. Now I'm happily programming my little FPGA with some success.
The highlight of the non-working activities was a camping trip to the Adirondack's last weekend with three of my fellow astro grads. Saturday night we camped at Forked Lake on our own island. That's right. We had our very own island, which we traveled to by canoe. I was very excited. Here's a photo of the lake:



On Sunday morning we climbed straight up (as in now switchbacks) to the top of Blue Mountain. It was only a 2 mile hike, and the view from the top was amazing:



The excitement continues. Tomorrow I head to Washington DC for a long weekend to visit Andy. The last weekend in June I'm going to a workshop in Berkeley, which I'm really excited about.
That's all for now.
Cheers!