So, I'm back in Seattle. I haven't really posted on LJ since I left three months ago. Perhaps I should just copy down all of Deke's Facebook updates for the last several weeks; that will at least cover our travels through New Zealand and Australia ( Read more... )

Sigh. My life would be simpler if the most productive hours of my day would happen between eight o'clock AM and two o'clock PM rather than the reverse.

On the plus side, I think I got my model to stop leaking mass. The chantey I wrote for our department post-seminar beer social also went over quite well, so I am counting this day as a win.

You know, back when I was still trying to decide what to study in graduate school, I remember looking at some clouds and thinking, "Gosh, water is pretty amazing. It's everywhere, in so many different forms, and it's involved in so many important processes on Earth. I'd like to study that ( Read more... )

Well, now I feel like I accomplished something today. How is it that being a graduate student involves three times as much email management as my time in corporate America ever did?

A few weeks back I read this article about the author's experiences working with Richard Feynman at a supercomputing startup. It's a good read in general, but I was particularly struck by this bit:

I had written a program that simulated the evolution of populations of sexually reproducing creatures over hundreds of thousands of generations. The ( Read more... )

Just got back from my second conference in as many weeks, the Graduate Climate Conference at Pack Forest. Pack Forest is a very summer-camp-like little venue (not that I ever went to summer camp in the traditional running-around-in-the-woods sense, but I have seen movies) and the conference is a smallish one, composed entirely of grad students ( Read more... )

I'm sure a lot of you already know this, but man, LUSH has some damned effective salesladies. I wandered in with a vague idea of buying something small and nice-smelling, and each time one person finished enthusiastically demonstrating one of their products (sparkly effervescent bath bombs that turn your bathwater indigo! solid shampoo that ( Read more... )

Yesterday I accomplished something I've wanted to do for a long time: commuted home via kayak. Well, strictly speaking, it's more that I've spent a long time saying "whoa, cool!" when I hear about people who do this on a regular basis. I don't think it had quite occurred to me to make it a personal goal until I realized that houseboatsitting for my ( Read more... )

Successful day: headed out to the garage sales around 8:30, came home with a very nice kitchen island, a wooden file cabinet, a shredder, a drafting table, a beat-up designer chair and a few other useful odds and ends for under sixty bucks. Had lunch at Tutta Bella; I have decided I really like sitting at the bar there, because you can watch them ( Read more... )

Hm. I guess it hasn't quite been two months since I last posted. It's been a pretty entertaining time, all told, hanging out with my family and warezdude in Alaska and then taking the Alaska Marine Highway ferry down the coast. There are pictures, both from Glacier Summer Camp in McCarthy:


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