Backlog

As I'm a bit behind on posting, I'm going to do posts within a post.

Sunday, July 22
At the close...

Tonight I finished the final Harry Potter book. I will not comment on the end for those who are still reading but will simply say that the book is good. Right now I'm sad that the series is over. There will be no more new books to read. I know it's just a book, but these are also the only books I've ever bought the day they came out. Even going to the midnight releases three times. But at least she tied up the loose ends, so that I can think about the characters and be satisfied.

Wednesday, July 25

Post-softball game party on the lake. Living on a lake is a great thing. Late night swims in the lake are nice Running into a patch of seaweed in the dark not so nice.

Thursday, July 26

More Q-exam review.

Friday-Sunday

Great weekend. Had sandgria, got my house plants repotted, met my new roommate's family, had cocktails and wine, biked 25+ miles, began packing for the upcoming move.
The past couple weeks have got me addicted to biking. It helps that upstate NY is a beautiful place to bike. There's enough elevation for spectaular views of valleys and Cayuga of course, but also flat enough for corn fields. The corn's getting pretty tall around here.

Today

Going to be a hot week. One week from today I move into my new apartment. Looking forward to the new place.
Otherwise work has been driving me absolutely mad the past week or so. I'm stuck and everthing I try to do to figure out what I'm doing wrong brings me farther from results that makes sense. Good thing there's no window in my little lab, or something would go flying.

Harry Potter weekend

Friday 11:00 pm - Arrive at Barnes & Noble. Become one of the excited people mulling around the store.
Friday 11:50 pm - While reading a book about the Harry Potter world I realize that "Sirius Black" means "Black Dog". Feel embarassed that as an astronomer I hadn't made that connection before. There's a reason I didn't become an English major.
Friday 11:59 pm - Count down to midnight...20, 19, 18....3, 2, 1. Something like New Years in July but with fewer kisses and no champaign.
Saturday 12:40 am - Became the 286th happy owner of Harry Potter 7 to walk out of the book store.
Saturday 4:36 pm - About 200 pages into it. 500 some-odd more to go. :-)

Round and round

Here I sit waiting for my program to finish synthesizing. My designs are now getting large enough that it takes a good 20 minutes for it to complete. During which I manage to waste all sorts of time. Perhaps I should use these 30 minute breaks to study for my Q-exam that's coming up in August. Hmmmmmmm. It's too bad I don't have a window.
So life's been ok this past week. The 4th sucked. It rained all day long, and I couldn't find sparklers. As far as I'm concerned a 4th without sparklers is no 4th at all. Sparklers are key to my 4th. For one because that was one of the few things we could have in Iowa as far as fireworks went, so they were there every year as far back as I remember. This was reinforced while spending the 4th in Germany (twice) because it was the only connection to normal 4th of July traditions I could find there. (Though last year they came out after a rather depressing soccer game that shall not be named!) In addition to all this sappy, sentimental stuff, they're just cool. Wrigint my name in smoke or pretending to conduct Ode to Joy really never gets old. Not to say that I tried particularly hard to find them in NY, but in Iowa they're pretty much everywhere and didn't anticipate it being complicated.
This weekend on the other hand was much better. I met up with Marcy and Shane for a long weekend of camping in Allegany State Park. Allegany is out in western NY and NY's largest state park. Large it was and quite beautiful. We wore ourselves out exploring many of the nice hiking trails and staying up way to late waiting for the bread or stew to bake in the dutch oven. But really there's nothing better than spending hours staring at a campfire. The only downside to the whole weekend were the noisy neighboors at some of the other sites. One in particular got a kick out of loudly yelling Ohio (after seeing Marcy's licence plates) and making rapter noises. Thankfully we had the park almost to ourselves on Sunday night. Well us, the porcupine and one very brave racoon.

Waiting in SFO

So by the time I get this posted I should be back home and out of airport purgatory. The day took a sudden change for the worse when I walked up to the US Airways ticket counter to an excruciatingly long line. After lots of confusion and switching lines, I end up passing the check-in time limit and getting an additional 9 hours in the San Fransisco airport. The whole experience is rather frustrating considering it all would've been avoided if I'd just jumped line to one of the open self-check in Kiosks. The moral of this trip. Don't be so damn nice. Cut in line if it means making your flight as long as it doesn't screw up someone else.
Anyho! Otherwise I'm still very pleased about how the workshop went. I now have two good ideas for projects that both interest me and result in me building (really designing and slogging through the FPGA programming) an instrument and collaborations with people all over. The perfect recipe for a PhD thesis. If nothing else I've made a lot of interesting people.
Just for fun here a few of the photos I took in Berkeley. Here's a photo of the bay from the roof of Berkeley's astronomy department. It's pretty hard to see through the haze, but you could actually make out the golden gate bridge.



This is a parking sign on campus. The "NL" stands for Nobel Lauriates. Apparently if you win a Nobel Prize, there's a parking spot on campus for you. Though not a single one was filled when I walked by. I don't know if that means once you get your prize you stop showing up to work. In any case I found it rather amusing.