One Smore Into The Breech

My mother is sitting on the other side of the room, trying to figure out how to save pictures from my sister's wedding last summer on her computer. I guess I know what I sound like when I curse at my computer now . . .

So yeah, I apologize for the lack of posts over the last month plus. Things got a bit . . . hectic.

The scores on my mid terms ranged from slightly below average to the ass end of the bell curve.

I had two enormous projects I had to complete after that. One was a presentation on gas absorption and the other was a numerical simulation of a multi-component reactive mass transport problem.

Then, it was time for finals. Those were more fun than you could possibly imagine.

In the end I managed to squeak by with an A- in both Thermodynamics and Fluids and a B in Mass Transfer and Mathematics and a total cumulative average for the term of 3.35. Only 0.1 point above the minimum required to keep me off of academic probation.

Blah blah, blah blah blah.

I'm sick of talking about graduate school.

Funny Coinkydink

I'm at school looking for papers in the computer lab I have access to. I go to the "MyUCDavis" web page. The page often has a word of the day feature. What was today's word? Bumbershoot. What does that word mean? It's a noun. It means, "Umbrella."

I didn't know that.

Friday Laundry Blogging

It's not that I wait until weekends to do my laundry so I an con Scottland into folding it for me. It just happens that on the weekends when he's visiting, he likes to fold it or something. In the photo above, Stromboli is shown helping Scottland fold a load fresh from the drier.

UGH.

That's the only word that describes how miserably tired I am right now. I was feeling pretty chipper last night when Scottland called me, but then I stayed up until 1 AM eating toast, drinking tea (yummm, dinner) and reading about gas absorption after I got home from campus at midnight. It's not that I'm surprised that I feel like animated garbage, I just don't particularly like it.

So yeah, school is kinda tough right now. To my legion of adoring readers, I apologize for the repetative nature of my blog. Unfortunately, the Dantean hellscape that is my first term in graduate school is literally the only thing that seems to exist in my world right now. Except, of course, when Scottland comes to visit or when I fly up to Seattle for visit.

I know that my singular fixation on graduate school is not a good thing. I need to force myself to get more sleep and eat better. Sadly, when given the choice between slaving away at the saltmine and taking care of myself, I'd rather continue slaving. Not that that seems to help me do any better in my classes. So far, I've done midling to down-right crappy on my midterms and run the very real risk of being put on academic probation next term, if not outright asked to leave. Not that I'd necessarily miss grad-school at this point.

Anyhow, I'll try and lay off the endlessly repeating "grad school sucks and I'm tired" posts. Even I'm getting bored with them.

A Picture of My Butt

I crashed my bike last Monday. Basically, I went around a traffic circle too quickly, with tires that were too bald on pavement that was too wet from a combination of fresh rainfall and summer tree sap. It was nice that a bunch of people ran over to ask if I was okay and offer assistance. It was not nice that I scraped up my left leg and bruised my hip. Here are pictures. These pictures are from Friday night, so almost five days afterwards.

A Very Stromboli Thanksgiving, Part Deux

This evening, Stromboli gorged on Turkey Feast!!! And, I've never seen her pass out so hard. Normally, she sleeps all curled up in a little ball. This time, she was just sorta splayed out like she was Bill the Cat or something. T'was funny.

Utopia Is A Moment At Your Side

That's the only thing that Scottland wrote on the little card that he sent me in the mail. :) He's arriving this evening for his Semi-Monthly visit. It'll be really nice to see him, especially since the the weather in Davis has been decidedly more winter-like the last few weeks and the lack of insulation in my house is definitely noticeable.

About a week ago, I had a dream about Olga. In the dream, she and I were playin Euchre (sp?) and she was teaching me how to play. Only, in the dream, she kept changing the rules on me in ways that were advantageous to her. It was a very frustrating dream but also mildly amusing. In the end, I accused her of simply making it so that the game was completely random and stated that there was no point in playing a game that was completely random. Only, I think in my dream I was really talking about graduate school.

Ahhh graduate school. How I love to hate thee. I ended up doing as poorly on my mathematics mid-term as I had suspected I did, although the rest of the class did better than they had expected so I ended up towards the bottom end of the grade range. I secrely fear that I had the lowest grade in the class, but I don't want to ask. The professor reviewed the midterm the next day and while some of the solutions to the problems were non-obvious it was clear that the problem with the mid-term was not it was too difficult. It was definitely a bit too long since it took the professor almost two and a half class sessions to explain the solutions. It was still obvious to me that I would have done better if I had simply been more relaxed about the test when I took it. I probably would've been able to think the problems through a bit more and would have done better.

I spoke with Professor El-Farra after we got the tests back and his attitude was very sympathetic. He said that I needed to do more practice problems because that's pretty much the only thing that helps you when your problem is simply one of problem solving speed. So, somehow I need to fit in doing a slew of practice problems.

Anyhow, there's lot's of other stuff going on right now, but I guess I'll save those for other posts when I get a chance. In the meantime, here's a cool webpage that allows you to simulate orbits around a black hole. You'll have to play with it a bit to figure out how to make it work, but it's kind of neat in that it shows how relativity causes orbits to precess around the center of mass.

Please show that the Lipschitz of the Wronskian is Non-Linear over the whole of Sixth Dimensional Translational Hyperspherical Inverse Space, In Greek

That's what some of the problem statements on my mathematics mid-term read like. I can only take solace in the apparent fact that the entire class did as badly as I did. I actually might have done a little better, since I was approaching an actual solution to the third problem when the scant 50 minutes we were allotted to prove that the universe was in fact designed by a benevolent spaghetti-monster was up.

I have a suspicion that Professor El-Farra is going to be very suprised by how poorly the class did on this mid-term. I mean, he couldn't have intended to make the test that difficult. Maybe he did, but at that point, what's the point of giving a mid-term.? He might as well have made our grade in the class subject to our willingness to allow him to take us behind the building and flog our backsides with a cat-o-nine tails. This is apparently the first course that El-Farra has ever taught, so I'm hoping he's only made the mistake of assuming that we're all as comfortable using abstract mathematical reasoning as he is.

But yeah, every time I have an experience like this you should all visualize another piece of furniture being loaded onto the moving truck that's pointed towards the NW. It's not that my patience is wearing thin, but my patience is certainly thinner than it was at the beginning of the year. I suppose I'm mostly being petulant but I'm just sort of pissed about the whole graduate school situation right now. Hopefully the predictions that things will be "better" and more "meaningful" once I've got this term under my belt will turn out to be true. That being said, if they don't, I really won't have a lot of difficulty terminating my graduate school career. My experience at Neah taught me the folly of tolerating a bad situation in the hopes that it will eventually "get better."

So yeah. Blah. The upside is that the 1st year class is going to be meeting tonight somewhere downtown in order to commiserate. Should be fun.

Midterm : First Blood

I had my statistical thermodynamics mid-term today. It wasn't as easy as I had been hoping, but I still think I did reasonably well. There were a grand total of 8 problems, and I totally choked on problems 3 and 4. Basically, I had to do this funky integral and failed to make a couple of logical connections regarding simplification, and also didn't notice that he had placed the solution to the most complicated piece of the intergral at the bottom of the test. *sigh* It didn't help that when I first tried to do the integral and ran into problems, I started to panic. My hands started shaking and I could literally feel the blood draining out of my face. It was nasty. So I skipped to the last three problems and did them quickly and easily enough that I started to calm down. I never did figure out how to do the integral but I figure I'll get some partial credit on those two problems since I think I showed that I knew how to solve the problem. Still, I was so annoyed once I had time to sit down after the test and go over the integral. At that point, I figured it out in about a minute.

So, the lesson learned here is that I need to not freak out on tests. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that my test-taking skills are going to need a bit of sharpening considering that I haven't taken a test since 1998, with the exception of the GRE.

Idle Hands Are The Devil's Playthings

So, I'm so not the Devil's Plaything right now, or something. As you can see, there's been a pretty significant drop in the frequency of my posting. Why? Because I'm ridiculously busy with schoolwork. Tomorrow is my first mid-term and it'll be in Statistical Thermodynamics. I think I'll do fairly well on this one. The mid-term the day after, I'm less sure about. That one's advanced engineering mathematics.

I was in Seattle last weekend for the big Halloween Party at the HOF. It was great. Everyone had a good time. I stayed completely sober. Scottland was so cute in his Scooby-Doo outfit. Pictures can be seen here.

That is all for now. Perhaps I'll post more regularly once midterms are done in another week and a half. But I dunno, there's always the omnipresent threat of homework.

Happy Black Sabbath!!!

No, I'm not converting to Satanism.

Stromboli slept off her overindulgence and by this morning was feeling rather feisty. We engaged in bit of play fighting and chase and I eventually got her so worked up that she started doing the weird sideways charge/razorback cat thing she does. It's always so cute and I need to get a picture of it. She'd probably be embarresed if she could understood that I thought it was cute, as I suspect I'm supposed to be intimidated.

I started thinking about the music that I've been listening to and it occured to me that, oddly enough, I really like guitar music. Only, it has to be actual guitar music that isn't just endlessly repeated power cords. It sort of explains why I appear to simultaneously enjoy Black Sabbath, Dick Dale and old Pink Floyd. So yeah, weird.

Now if only I could explain why I like those types of music AND some of the more melodic forms of electronic music. My suspicion is that what I'm grooving on is the complexity in the song. I don't like guitar when it's just power chords, though I can like songs that have lot's of power chords if there's something else that's holding the song together. I like techno, but I don't like it when it's too fast and the overall beat of the song starts overwhelming other aspects.

So yeah, good music needs to be complicated but still simple enough to have some kind of a rhythm. For example, I don't seem to like Opera and as near as I can tell, Opera is usually pretty light on the rhythm.

A Very Stromboli Thanksgiving

Basically, I went to the store today and bought treats for myself and the cat. She got wet cat food and I got some wine and ice cream. Yes, it's been a long weekend of studying so far. I gave her a can of the "Gourmet Chicken Feast" and she proceeded to gorge herself on the food. So now, I have a very sleepy cat spawled out on the carpet near the door to my room. Heh heh. I wonder what'll happen when I feed her the "Gourmet Turkey Feast?"

Friday Picture Blogging

Sorry about the derth of posting lately, folks. I've been swamped with homework and studying. Graduate school is insane. One of these days I'll post something interesting, I swear. Until then, here's a picture of Stromboli that I'm sure you'll get a kick out of. Thanks to Scottland for taking it. :)

Scottland and the Rollercoaster of Doom

Scottland's visit last week was fantastic. More on that below.

Everything not related to his visit? Ugh. I'm really getting hammered by the homework monster right now. I sorta think I'm getting most of the material, but I feel very frazzled at the edges. I even had my first grad school nightmare last night. Thankfully, it was relatively straightforward in terms of interpretation. Basically, I'm in some random class being taught by some random dykish looking female professor. I feel like I'm understanding the material, but I don't want to ask any questions because she's really mean to the other students that ask 'dumb' questions. Then, towards the end of class, I freak out when I look at my notes and realize that what I thought was comprehensible writing was actually just random bits of swirly chicken scratch in weird spiral patterns. Yes, it was like a scene out of "A Beautiful Mind." Things then get even weirder when the dyke-prof.. demands that we all walk over to a piano and start praying and singing hymns. We all sort of shuffle over to the piano, but when I realize that the professor is serious, I balk and angrily retort that "you can't demand that we sing hymns and pray at a public university." The professor angrily glares at me with this sort of "you're right about that and I'm going to flunk you for contradicting me" look and then starts banging away at the keyboard as all the other students start belting out the Lord's Prayer. And then I wake up.

So yeah, graduate school is starting to get to me, I think. I'm just glad this is most likely a one term thing. Once it's over and I haven't failed out of school, I probably won't get this stressed out again until maybe my general exam or when I have to defend.

The visit with Scottland was very, very good. Everytime he visits, I'm more at ease about the whole long distance dating thing. It's just going very well, as near as I can tell. The weekend was generally uneventful, although Friday was Scottland's 36th birthday (which we celebrated with a custom built ice-cream cake and Saturday saw us going to the Six Flags park near San Francisco for some crazy giant rollercoasting fun.

Now mind you, I've never been on a "real" rollercoaster before. I've been on those silly little things that you sometimes see at state fairs and the like, but I've never been on an honest to goodness giant rollercoasters that are bolted to the ground.

The first coaster I went on was actually something along the lines of a magnetic rail gun for people. Basically, powerful electromagnets propel you up this corkscrewed incline. When you stop moving forward you start falling backwards, and the electromagnets kick in again at the bottom to push you even faster in the back direction. It's sorta like a kid sticking out and pulling in his legs on a swing. You go up this crazy upside-down vertical pole at the back end of the thing. Since I was in the first seat the first time I did this, I was literally sitting in seat such that my face was parallel to the ground, although there was about one hundred feet of open air between me and SPLAT!!

The next coaster I went on (Roar) was a traditional wooden coaster. Suzanne and Scottland had both warned me that the ride on a wooden coaster was pretty rough, and boy they weren't kidding. Still, setting the exceedingly bouncy ride aside, the whole thing was really cool. The coaster was a pretty "tight" design, so you were constantly going down insanely steep slopes and then straight back up weirdly tilted inclines. Very cool.

After that, we went on Kong. Kong was my first experience with a modern steel track design. It's much smoother than a wooden coaster because the structure of the thing doesn't vibrate as much and the joints between connections are much smoother. As a result, you're ride is simply more "smooth." The coaster is an "inverted floorless" design, which means that your seat hangs from a track and there's no floor beneath you. So, inversions mean that you're above the coaster and upside down. The picture I included shows you what I mean. It's too bad that the stupid palm tree was in the way, or it would've been a much better picture. So, Kong was fun, but kinda short and oddly unimpressive. I think that as Scottland pointed out, the thing is really tight, which means you don't have many really sharp drops towards the ground and you spend so much time inverted that you sorta just get used to it. Inversions are definitely best when used sparingly.

After Kong, we went on this silly 3D haunted museum ride. It was fun, but kinda corny. Basically you sat in a hydraulic chair wearing 3D glasses and "rode" through a haunted mine. It felt sorta realistic at times, but the ride was too long and the charm wore off with about 20 seconds to go. Still, it was better than the Stargate ride that would've normally been playing.

After the Haunted Mine Ride, it was time for Medusa. Medusa was by far and away the best ride at the park. The drop from the top was 150 feet all the way to the ground. I guess we got up to about 70 mph at that point. You go through a number of inversions and near inversions, but they're placed strategically so that you only have a short time (long enough to freak out) to see them coming before you're in them, but when you aren't in them, you really can't see them. So yeah, this was the ride where I found myself getting really excited. At first I was scared, but then I just thought it was cool.

We rode Medusa four or five more times after that, went to some haunted houses where I got to watch Scottland jump and scream a number of times and then went home. It was a good day and Scottland is already starting to talk about where our next Rollercoaster trip is going to be.

Friday Rollercoaster Bloggin

This is the Top Thrill rollercoaster ride at Cedar Point amusement park near Sandusky, Ohio. This beast is the second highest and fastest ride in the world.


On this ride, you're magnetically accelerated to 120 mph in about four seconds. You shoot down the track and then straight up 420' into the air while doing a couple of twists in the air. Then you crest over the apex and plummet 400 feet straight down at a ninety degree angle while doing a 270 degree rotation. Then the ride ends.

My Yin And Yang

In the exciting world of Yang today, I realized that my idea to dye my curtains orange was a good one. Yes, I really did dye my curtains. You see, when I moved in the windows in my room were these dirty, broken down dog hair (and maybe cat hair) covered monstrosities. I think they were supposed to be roman curtains, but if so they were definitely curtains from the period AFTER Rome was sacked by the Vandals.

A couple of days after I moved in, I took them down, washed them and "re-strung" them. They were perfectly serviceable after that, if nothing fancy. While in the middle of this I hit on the idea of using that RIT dye you can buy at the craft store to dye my curtains and give my room a little bit of color. Like most rentals, the place I live in suffers from the "Tyranny of White." So, I went out and bought myself a couple of boxes of orange dye and dyed the suckers. I wasn't sure if I had made the right choice in terms of colors at first, but now that I've had time to get used to it, I know that I did. My room looks COOL when I wake up in the morning and when I get home in the late afternoon. Sunlight that filters through my windows when the curtains are closed makes my room glow orange. It's really neat.

In a funny bit of serendipity, I was thinking about how I hadn't talked to Marty Durham since right before I moved to California. Oddly enough, a package arrives from him today containing exciting new D&D stuff. He sent me two new books (Magic of Ebberon and Heroes of Horror) and a pile of miniatures. I definitely have to call him. I now have so many Ebberon source books that I think I definitely need to run an Ebberon game at some point. Strangely, my Ebberon book about the city Sharn is missing. I have no idea where it is. I must've left it behind during the move.

So yeah, that's the world of Yang today. In the world of Yin, I'm seriously working hard to stay ahead on the homework. I've actually made the effort to figure out the ratio of homework problems to days until due so that I can prioritize a bit in terms of what to do when I have time to study. Of course, sometimes it's hard to gauge how long it will take you to do any given problem.

For example, take my most recent mass transfer problem. I started in on Sunday. I just finished it. Normally homework problems don't take me this long. Believe me. It was "teh suck." And you know what's worse? This was technically an EASY problem to solve. Part of what made the problem so difficult was that I had literally never been taught anything on how one goes about solving a linear second order partial differential equation. To make it all the more frustrating, when some of the students queried him about the problem, the professor acted as if it was something we should have been taught how to solve during out undergraduate years, preferably in our Sophomore year of school.

Personally, I think he's bullshitting us. I have it on good authority (Suzanne's) that a problem similar to this is handed out to graduate schools all across the country during the first weeks of the first term. It's sort of a "wake-up" call to new graduate students that the world of straightforward homework assignments was dead and gone. Of course, I think she's making a rather large generalization using a relatively small set of data, but I'd rather believe her theory than the theory that I'm undereducated when compared to "average" graduate students. Besides, I did some checking and none of the grad students in my class that I talked to remembered ever being taught how to solve something like this. I also looked at my old undergraduate textbooks and saw that they also didn't contain any relevant solutions. So yeah. I think is was a set-up. But whatever, CUZ I SOLVED THAT BITCH!!! It's pretty. If you're lucky I'll scan it in and you can see it.

Also, the cool pictures (at least I think they're cool) were found at a site where some geeky academic posted pictures he'd made with his Scanning Tunneling Microscope. Some of them you may have seen before. Basically, those little mountains you see are ATOMS and the little waves are fluctuations in the electron density of the material that the atoms are deposited on. To make these pictures, you use the STM probe tip to literally drag atoms across a surface one by one. Pretty cool, huh?

Nothing New To Report, Really

Seriously. It's why I haven't posted much lately. It's still sunny and warm down here. What's it like where you are? We still have to water the lawn three times a week to keep it from dying. Stromboli doesn't hiss at the dogs anymore and my terrarium has appeared to survived the insect infestation I discovered and treated about two weeks ago.

The play by post D&D game that I'm playing in started today. The one I'm thinking about running is going to have to wait until I've got a feel for how one handles PbP games. If you're curious, you can find the game here. Read all you want, but please don't post. That'd be a social faux pas or something.

School is going well although my classes are definitely starting to ramp up. I'm still ahead of schedule and such, but the work-load is definitely getting heavier. Luckily, mid-terms aren't for another month.

So yeah, not a lot going on. For those of you who might not yet know, I'll be visiting Seattle the last weekend in October. I'm going to be staying at Scottland's and attending the HOF Halloween party, assuming there is one. I should call Olga and ask her about that tonight. Oh yeah, and Scottland is visiting me this weekend. We're going to go to the Six Flags park near San Francisco. I'm going to ride a real rollercoaster for the first time ever.

Oh, and I still owe Suzanne a post on slide-rules. I haven't forgotten about it.

Friday Picture Blogging

Meet Retardo.



He's saying, 'My God...it's every color in the known universe all at once...and music...and, look, there's Wavy Gravy...'

Statistical Thermo Is FUN!!!

Well, maybe not fun, but it's certainly the class I'm enjoying the most. It very much reminds me of the quantum mechanics course I took during my junior year of school. Then and now, the thing I'm really digging about the material is the level of abstraction and the fact that despite this abstraction, the material actually relates to the real world. I'm not learning how to prove some centuries old theorem using bizarre multi-dimensional mathematics, I'm learning how to calculate fundamental properties of physical systems based on a set of very basic assumptions.

Now granted, it's not like I'm going to have some simple equation that allows me to perform these calculations. My understanding is that the mathematics for handling these types of calculations for real world problems is immensely complex and inevitably requires a lot of computer power if you want to do something useful with the concepts. That's fine. Ultimately, what really turns me on is that I'm getting a better understanding of how the world really works from first principles. Obviously, that window into the "real reality" is still very fuzzy and very small, but it's still a window that allows occasional glimpses of the deeper "truth" that we generally don't perceive as we go about our daily lives.

I also think that Professor Faller's lecturing style jives pretty well with my style of learning. The accent and the bad handwriting were tough the first few days, but adaptation to that has been pretty quick. A big help was learning that characters that look like upside-down v's are actually the number 1. I also like how he's easily able to work interesting anecdotes about material into the lecture, usually in response to questions. For example, today he briefly touched on the concept of what are called "periodic boundary conditions." I'm not going to bore you with a further explanation of what those are, but suffice it to say I had encountered them once before while visiting RPI earlier this year. This created an interesting quandary in my head which I'll explain later. To resolve this quandary I asked Professor Faller how recent of a technique "PBC's" are. Apparently they're fairly recent, in that they were definitely used by Edward Teller to solve some problems in the 50's and were also probably used by a guy named H. Ising in the 20's. So yeah, I like that I can ask the Professor a question like that in class and get an interesting answer that involves Edward Teller or in an earlier case, Laplace's Demon. I'm not really sure how exactly to describe why this is different and cool, but it genuinely is. Even though he tends to focus on computer simulations (which I've never thought of as interesting) I'm probably going to talk to Professor Faller about his research.

Now here's the skinny about the earlier mention of PBC's and RPI. I was talking to Suzanne on the phone last night, and the issue of bullshit came up. My experiences with Neah Power and the WTC have generally made me a more cynical person and drove me to the conclusion that there are a lot of people out there that are "full of shit." So, one interesting question I'm going to be answering while I get my PhD is "are the proportion of people in academia that are full of shit greater, less than or equal to the proportion of people in corporate-world and government-world?" The answer to this question will probably do a lot in determining what type of positions I apply for when I'm almost done with my PhD.


What was interesting about my experience with "PBC's" at RPI was that I had been led to believe that the use of "PBC's" was in some way very new and had in fact been invented by the professor that was using them in one of his molecular simulations. It was never directly stated that the professor "invented" them, but it was strongly implied that using them in a molecular simulation was somehow very novel and non-obvious. In my brain, that means "invented". Too bad it was neither. Apparently, using PBC's is very very common and as Professor Faller stated, nearly 99% of these types of problems assume them. So, I get the impression that the grad student I was talking to was trying to impress me by correctly guessing that I didn't know what PBC's were and then implying that his Research Advisor had invented them. In other words, this guy was probably "full of shit."

So, I guess I need to start keeping a tally of number of graduate students and professors met, and the number that bullshit excessively.

One Other Thing

For those of you who had to register to comment on my Blog, I have fixed that. I had an inappropriate box checked in my settings. That's been fixed. So now, you can comment anonymously.

Oi Vey

Yes, my new life as a graduate student has started in earnest. Six hours of class on Monday. Three hours on Tuesday. Five hours on Wednesday. Two hours on Thursday and a whole HOUR on Friday. Yes, I'm being oppressed by the 17 hour work-week. For those of you who think that's nothing, let me just explain that my brain HURTS at the end of the day on Monday.

But still, life is grand.

I absolutely LOVE the weather in Davis. Last week it was in the high 90's. I mean, the high on Wednesday, September 28th was 97 DEGREES. I walked outside during the part of the day when the temperature is at its maximum and thought, "Hmmm, it's kind of warm today." Biking between classes on campus in the sun is just "the bomb."

I also find myself walking through buildings on campus and thinking, "I wonder if this is where I would be attacked by vampires if this were Sunnydale."

School has definitely been a challenge, but it's a challenge I'm fairly confident I'm up to. The small amount of studying that I did before school started has really paid off. I just need to make sure that I maintain my lead on the material, except in the rare cases where it actually works better to read the text AFTER the class. Statistical Thermodynamics is like that. Professor Faller (the guy teaching it) is personable enough, but his notation sometimes literally looks like a flock of birds and he's not teaching the material in the manner that I would. But then, he's a professor and I'm not, so maybe my notation IS supposed to look like it's going to fly south for the winter.

I'm thinking about starting a play by post D&D game on ENworld.org. Apparently, those types of games take ten hours to resolve a single round of combat and I could see myself having time for that. Those of you who read my blog and are interested should let me know. It'd probably be something simple to start with, to see if it's worth doing.

Friday Dog Blogging

This is Chance. He's one of my roommate Carolyn's three dogs. Here he is playing Dance Dance Revolution. Also, when he pees, he does a "handstand." IE, he lifts both his back legs off the ground and balances on his front legs. Yes, I think it's really weird too. I'll try and get a picture of it. Chance also likes to sit and stare at Stromboli for hours at a time. Carolyn says he's just "herding" my cat, but I wonder.

I am not a number! I am a free man!

I want to send a heartfelt thanks out to one of my six or seven readers, Charles Morley of Port Angeles, Washington. As he realized and pointed out to me, I'm apparently living in The Village. I can't believe that I didn't think of this myself. And to think I consider The Prisoner one of my top ten favorite TV shows. I'm ashamed.

This Post Decorated By The City Of Davis

Now this blog entry looks like the city of Davis. Various versions of this thing are plastered EVERYWHERE. On buildings, as sculptures, on stationary, I think it's even on a water-tower. Personally, I'm surprised that the town is not shaped like the damn thing.

But seriously, that's all irrelevant because I have a fancy modern hybrid bike. I bought it for $60 off of craig's list and it came with two special stickers thrown in for free. One reads, "This Country Needs A Regime Change" and the other reads something along the lines of "Vegetarians of the World Unite." A list of what the bike DID NOT come with is quite extensive. It includes the mandated by city ordinance front light, a bike lock, a comfortable seat, a helmet, fenders for when it gets wet and tires that aren't close to disintegrating into rubbers shavings.

So, today I went to one of Davis' 17 bike shops (yes, a town of 40,000 people needs that many bike shops) and purchased a new "comfy" seat, phancy detachable fenders that I only need to put on when it's the "rainy season" and a snazzy new helmet that's guarenteed to make me look 50% more ridiculous than I look now. Sadly, I was unable to afford a bike seat with what is apparently called the "love groove." Yes, that's a groove in your bike saddle where your nards are supposed to go. I seriously hope I don't get erectile dysfunction because of my cheapness.

Installing the detachable fenders was pretty easy but putting in the new seat was a real pain in the butt. There's basically this clamp that attaches to the post that comes up out of your bike frame. This clamp also has two connectors that fit around these two rails that connect to the bottom of the bike saddle. It took quite a bit of doing getting the clamp and the two connector assembley between those two rails as the whole thing was a teeny bit wider than the space between the rails on my new saddle. And then, once I did have the assembley between the two rails, I discovered that doing that had compressed the clamp to the point where it no longer easily fit onto the central post. To get the stupid thing on, I basically had to flip my bike upside down and pound the post into the clamp.

But, in the end I got it to work. I can't wait until I have to change the tires. The nice lady that helped me at the bike shop said that I shouldn't bother changing them until I get a flat. Of course, she said I'd probably be experiencing a flat pretty soon, consider that we're about to enter Thorn Season. Yes, Davis has a THORN SEASON!! What next, Acne Season? Motion Sickness Season? Mildly Annoying Itch Season?

But anyhow, my bike is all decked out now. All that needs to be done is to remove those fracking stickers. Either that or spell out something snarky by blacking out all but certain choice letters. Perhaps, "OLD TIMEY BIKES SUCK."

Scottland's Visit

He visited me again last weekend.

It was fantastic weekend and also very laid back. We had no specific plans other than to visit some friends on his in Sacramento on Saturday night.

We ate dinner on Friday at Del Taco, which is my favorite new fast food restaurant. There's just something wonderful about a place that serves both burritos and french fries. They serve burgers too, but I haven't had one those yet. After that, we went back to my place and watched the two episodes of BSG between Home, Part Deux and Pegasus. All in all, pretty good episodes. As was the case with Dr. Farley, I enjoyed Flight of the Phoenix a lot more than I was expecting to. Any episode where someone points a gun at Tigh's head is a good episode in my book. I still haven't seen Pegasus, but will probably see it in the near future when Scottland mails me a video tape with the episode on it.

One of the big things that we've needed to figure out w/r/t to the long distance relationship thing is whether or not it's going to work to have weekends where I spend a significant fraction of my time studying while he's reading, writing or out doing something in Sac/Davis. We did that on Saturday afternoon and it worked out just fine. We went to campus, (ostensibily to study at the library but found out it was closed on Sundays until the term starts) sat on the grass and had about two hours of rarely interrupted quiet time. He wrote and I studied. So, it looks like that's one thing I'm not going to have to worry about.

Later that evening, we went to a pretty good mexican place in downtown Sac called "Zocalos." As I said that night, "The food is good, the drinks are good, the way the restaurant looks is great but the music sucks." Basically, after about 8PM, very pretty people started sitting at and standing around the bar. At about the same time, the music got a lot louder and turned all thumpy-bass-techno on us. That made it sort of hard to talk. But, like I said, the food and drinks were really good so I didn't mind too much.

Fred and Tom (Scottland's friends that we met for dinner) showed us the various gay bars after that. There are apparently five of them and the onese we saw all sorta reminded me of changes on 45th. We didn't see the "bear bar" that was located further away, so maybe that one won't be quite so . . . sketchy. But whatever, I hate gay bars anyway. Oddly, we saw one guy at one of the bars that I saw at a coffee shop in Davis. The only reason I really remembered him is becase he has this thing implanted into the side of his head. My suspicion is that the's had brain surgery recently and the "implant" is a way for surgeons to re-enter and tinker with his gray matter without having to complete detach the skull again. But, I don't really know. Scottland and I agreed that, minus the implant, the guy was pretty foxxy.

After we checked out the gay bars, we went back to Tom and Fred's (they've been living together for something like 18 years now and yet are not dating) and watched The Incredibles on their SUPER FANCY HIGH DEFINITION WIDE SCREEN FLAT PLASMA DISPLAY. I kid you not, it was like watching the movie in the theatre in terms of picture clarity. Needless to say, Scottland and I are now both lusting after a consumer electronics item. Personally, I feel kinda dirty about my lustful feelings as I'm generally pretty asexual when it comes to shiny stuff like that.

Sunday, we just slept in and then had breakfast at Cindy's. Scottland was freaked out by his overly orange orange juice that didn't taste like orange juice until I pointed out that it was probably "extra orange" and different tasting because the waitress was squeezing it from REAL oranges at the counter. Then he realized it was orange juice that tasted like actual oranges, which makes me wonder why orange juice from the store apparently neither looks nor tastes like REAL orange juice. Needless to say, far too much thought for a Sunday morning breakfast in Davis. The much vaunted cinnamon rolls were adequate, but I can certainly cook better. Still, I liked it more than Baker's Square, which is the California version of Sharis except with more pies.

So yeah, it was a good weekend. Not super exciting, but good. I'm a simple guy, so I was just pleased to see Scottland . . . and the high definition television.

On a side note, when I got back from campus today (where I was getting my new student ID that looks NOTHING like me thanks to the weird angle my head was at when it was taken) a lady was delivering a dozen red roses to yours truly. Yet again, Scottland ROCKS.

Friday Hurricane Blogging

This is Typhoon Tip . . .

Ranks number 1 as the most intense tropical cyclone on record. Tip was located in the northwest Pacific Ocean, which on October 12, 1979 had winds gusting as high as 190 mph (306 km/h) and a central pressure of 870 mb (25.69"Hg). The size of the circulation around Typhoon Tip was approximately 1350 miles (2174 km) across. If placed over the continental U.S., it would almost cover the western half of the country. -NOAA

Highway Robery At UC Davis

In other words, I purchased my textbooks today. Here's what I bought.

Analysis of Transport Phenomena cost me $84. It's for my mass transport class and maybe my fluids class.


Applied Mathematical Methods for Chemical Engineers cost me $100. It's for my advanced mathematics for engineering class.

Introduction to Modern Statistical Mechanics cost me $31. It's for my statistical thermodynamics class.

I have no idea what textbook my fourth class requires as the professor has not told the bookstore what book he wants.

The First, Second and Third Circles of Hell

Also known as where I'll be attending my classes this term. I don't really think of them as being a form of hell, but I couldn't think of a better title that was incredibly dry. I suppose that by the time I get to my first set of mid-terms, it's possible that I will consider these buildings to truly be layers of hell. Click on the picture to see a larger image with better resolution. By the way, most of the pictures posted to my blog are like that.



In Bainer Hall, I'll be attending Seminar and my Advanced Mass Transfer class. In Wellman Hall I'll be attending my Advanced Fluid Mechanics and Engineering Math classes. In the Physics-Geology building I'll be attending my Statistical Thermodynamics class.

The house I'm living in is located just beyong the northeastern (upper right) corner of the map.

Razorback Kat

I was pleased when Stromboli came off the drugs with no signs of a dependency issue. I was very concerned that I was going to have to find the feline equivalent for the Betty Ford Clinic after the move to Davis was complete. Instead, she was back to normal the day after her last dose of tranquilizers.

By normal, I mean running from one window in my room to the other at until 2:30 in the morning to stare at something outside and occasionally stopping to swat at the houseplant on my night stand. After that, she would go to her normal sleeping place in between my legs, alternating between under the cover and on top of the covers.

She was less afraid of her new surroundings after this move than she was the first time when she went from my old apartment to Suzannes. Within a day or two, she showed extreme interest in the world outside of my room. Basically, this manifested in one of two behaviors. Either should would lay at my door and scratch at it when I was in the room, or she would sit at the door and try to bolt out when I was entering through the room. This continued until Thursday, when I started the introduction to the three resident dogs.

These dogs are Jenna, Chance and Ross. Jenna and Chance are both border collies, like Scottland's dog, only of the short haired variety. Ross is a big, late adult german Sheppard looking thing. He's what we call a "Large Dog." It's clear that Ross has issues that probably stem from mishandling when he was a puppy. Of all the dogs, I was the most worried about the interaction between Ross and Stromboli. So, the reason why she was cloistered in my room for two weeks is because I wanted to get to know the dogs first.

After about two weeks, I had sufficiently convinced myself that while Stromboli may be freaked out by the dogs, she was not likely to be attacked or hurt by them. So, we began the controlled interactions and nighttime visits. For a couple of hours each night, I would allow her to roam the house and explore. Carolyn (the owner of the dogs) sleeps in her room with the dogs and keeps the door to her room shut. She certainly enjoyed being able to do this, but it also seriously increased her desire to leave my room, and the scratching at the door greatly increased. During the controlled interactions, I would hold Stromboli and pet her while sitting in my room while Carolyn sat outside the door of my room with her dogs.

After a couple of these sessions it came time for the first interaction. Essentially, Carolyn and I sat like we did in the controlled interactions but let the animals act as they would. Carolyn has trained her dogs to never go in the rooms of the other roommates and they generally obey. So, everything was pretty much up to Stromboli. Apparently, she is remarkably brave. Either that or she's so curious she's gonna wind up killed one of these days. She went right up to Jenna and started sniffing noses. Then she headed into Carolyn's room to sniff around. That's where she met Chance for the first time. She was pretty apprehensive about the whole thing and moved VERY slowly. Chance just sort of stood there and sniffed her while she looked around.

Stromboli's exposure to Ross was a bit more dicey. It was pretty clear from the controlled interactions that she was far more afraid of Ross because of his size (Ross is a large sized dog) than anything. Anytime she saw Ross, she would puff up to twice her size and become, as I affectionately called her, Razorback the Kat. If Ross came too close, she would hiss at him. If Ross started to come in my room (which he occasionally does when he forgets he's not supposed to be in there) she'll hulk out, hiss and start growling at him. Ross doesn't really react to this, although one time he growled at her when she came into Carolyn's room. Apparently, Ross doesn't like it when cats get near his food bowl.

So, Stromboli is acclimating pretty well to a household that has dogs. All in all, she's far more frightened of the vacuum cleaner than of the canines. That makes me pretty happy. Now if I could just get her to stop running from window to window at 2:30 in the morning.

Friday Picture Blogging

I believe I've just succesfully sneak attacked my cat. What else could explain the look of shock and surprise?

Three Sisters Uplift

As requested by Suzanne (I believe she requested this, anyhow) here's more information on the uplift you may or may not have heard about in the national media recently.

Firstly, I'm not sure why this is such a big deal. I've known about this for several years now and I'm quite confident it's been reported on in the MSM before. Why it's suddenly news worthy of being repeated in multiple major news outlets, I don't know.

So, where is all the excitement located? The Three Sisters are located in central western Oregon and are essentially due west of Eugene. They are part of the Cascade Range. This is the mountain range that Mt. Hood, Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Rainier are all part of. All volcanic activity in this range is a result of the subduction of the Juan De Fuca plate underneath the North American plate.

The area around the Three Sisters is different from the many of the other peaks of the Cascade Range in that there are a large number of distinct volcanic features such as cinder cones, eruptive lava flows and craters, in addition to the three main peaks, in a fairly small area. The three peaks themselves are an anomaly in that they are literally three distinct stratovolcanoes within very close proximity. Normally, hundreds of miles separate the major stratovolcanoes of the Cascades. So, there may be or may have been something different about the magma and crust underneath the Three Sisters, but no one really knows. While the area has been very volcanically active in the past, it's rather quiet now when compared to some of the other Cascade peaks. It's difficult to learn about a volcano when there's nothing really going on.

The uplift that's occurring in the area near the three sisters was only detected recently because of the development of a new technique that allowed them to see very small uplift like this. Uplift is being tracked at other volcanoes around the world such as Mauna Loa, but uplift like that occurring in Hawaii is easier to see by virtue of it occurring in an area where one would expect to see it, and thus is more easily detected using older conventional methods. At least, that's my understanding. This new technique (InSar) essentially uses two separate batches of radar data (in this case one from 1996 and the other from 2000) to create an interference pattern that indicates the height difference between the two time periods. How this technique works, I don't really understand beyond this.

When geologists first discovered that the uplift had happened, they were unclear on whether or not it was a single event or something that continues to occur. Data gathered since 2000 indicates that the uplift has continued and that the total height increase is about 10 inches at this time. Although the news release seen in the MSM said that this uplift could be caused by water or magma, it seems more likely that it's occurring because of the intrusion of a small amount of magma. I say this not because I'm personally an expert on what's going on in the area, but I do know that the gelogists studying the uplift have performed some isotopic analysis of the gasses coming out of the ground in the area, and the isotopes of carbon and helium being encountered are those typically found in conjunction with magma.

By "a small amount of magma" they mean about 40 million cubic meters. That would be a cube approximately 342 meters (1122 ft) on a side. As has been reported, the pool of "fluid" is about a mile across and 65 feet deep or so. Of course, when magma does reach the surface and erupt as lava, the volatiles previously trapped in the fluid by the high pressures encountered underground are free to expand and the volume of material greatly increases. Still, during an eruption, it's rare that a magma chamber or pool is substantially emptied out.

In march of 2004 the area near the uplift (which is normally pretty quiet by Cascade standards) experienced a small swarm of earthquakes. This swarm of earthquakes could have presaged the beginning of a volcanic eruption, but didn't. It's more likely that stress induced in the surround rock from the uplift (try imagining the amount of force necessary to squirt hot toothpaste into basalt) was being relieved by the fracture and shift of rocks around it. This is, of course, how hot rising magma manages to force it's way to the surface. It's interesting though, to compare the increased seismic activity from this uplift in the Three Sisters area with the normal seismic activity occurring at a dormant volcano like Mt. Rainier.

In the end, it's possible that the uplift may result in a volcanic eruption. Or, the intrusion of magma may stop and the hot material will simply sit there four miles underground and slowly cool off. With volcanoes, it's very difficult to predict what will happen over long periods of time, except in the sense of very long term trends. Even if there is an eruption, it's unlikely to be particularly large. After all, 40 million cubic feet is apparently a small amount of magma. Since there are very few people living in that area and the warning signs of an iminent eruption will be obvious for months before hand, it's not likely to be dangerous to anyone.

One Good Thing

I just wanted to say that for all its faults, California has one good thing going for it. You can buy liquor in the grocery store. I'm enjoying a tasty margarita as I type out a bigger post on my blog.

Comment Spam Sucks

FYI . . . I've turned on word verification for comments. The comment spam is relatively annoying and that's a good way to get rid of it short of requiring people to log in to view my blog. So, sorry for the inconvenience.

Moveable Moneypit and A Mountain of Paperwork

Sometimes, moving to California is a real pain in the ass. And I mean that in the negative sense. I had a bunch of work done on my car before I left, which is to be expected considering that it has nearly 200,000 miles on it. One of the things that was replaced was the timing belt. In order to get my car registered, I need to have a "Smog Check" done. This is very similiar to the emissions tests performed in both Oregon and Washington, only much more comprehensive.

My car barely passed the emissions test but failed on another arcane part of the test. Yes, the timing belt synchronization was slightly off. Apparently, California law (or is it regulation) stipulates that the difference between where the belt is and should be can be no more than 5 degrees, and mine was off by 10 degrees. The guys that owned the place I took the car to for the Smog Check said they could adjust the timing belt for an additional $35 dollars (and the Smog Check costs $60) but the adjustment would likely put my cars hydrocarbon output above the maximum allowed. He suggested the problem might be something like bad spark plugs, but since those were replaced recently, that's unlikely. What is more likely is that my catalytic converter needs to be replaced. So, I'm driving my car to a place in Woodland tomorrow to have the converter looked at. I'm not sure how much a new catalytic converter would cost, but I imagine it won't be cheap.

In other exciting car related news, getting my California driver's liscence hit a snag when I found out that the birth certificate that I've used for the last 31 years of my life is not an "official" certificate. So, I had to pay another $32 to have an "official" certificate mailed to me from Oregon. I'll get it in 10 - 14 days.

So yeah, no I remember why I hate dealing with stuff like this. Every time you turn around someone's taking a $20 to $30 dollar bite out of your savings to cover some fee for some piece of paperwork that you need.

Feed Me!!!

I fed my Venus Fly Traps today. I can't believe how quickly those little leaves can close. My babies must be hungry. I'm really curious as to whether or not the sudden infusion of nitrogen containing nutrients (which is why carnivorous plants need to eat) will spur a growth spurt in my plants. That'd be cool, as long as they don't start chasing after Stromboli.

Rice-A-Roni, The San Francisco Treat

Scottland and I found ourselves wondering if Rice-A-Roni really was a San Francisco treat, as we sat in afternoon traffic while trying to cut across the city from Coit Tower to Golden Gate Park. We had arrived in 'Frisco several hour earlier, having driven all the way there from Davis. The drive was much shorter than I realized. Davis is 73.7 miles from downtown San Francisco. It's a pretty short drive, as long as you don't get stuck in traffic. Even if you do get stuck in traffic (like we did while going over the Bay Bridge) the drive isn't bad.

Our first stop in San Francisco was the SOMA/Castro area. We met up with Steve, a friend of Scottland's from Canada. Steve was visiting SF while his partner Andrew was in Monterey giving a talk at a conference on language related topics. Scottland, Steve, Steve's friend Joe and myself got lunch at a place in Castro named Harvey's. I'm guessing it was named after Harvey Milk. The food was all right, but the restaurant (like much of the rest of the Castro) was kind of dirty. We wandered around the area for a bit after that. Like the first time I saw it, I found the Castro kind of disappointing. It's supposed to be the center of the gay universe, and I simply found it dirty, run-down, seedy and thought the people all generally looked a bit on the haggard side. If the Castro is emblematic of what it means to be The Gay, then I think I'm pretty happy to not be tightly dialed into The Lifestyle.

After our sojourn in The Castro, Steve and Joe parted ways and Scottland and I had the exquisite pleasure of attempting to drive through down-town San Francisco. It was INSANE. The streets were completely full of traffic and everyone was honking, weaving and dodging, stopping in intersections and generally being hyper-aggressive. Oddly, it didn't bother me one bit. Although I can appreciate the staid and placid nature of Seattle drivers, sometimes the extreme level of niceness gets on my nerves. I'm generally a lot more willing to be an asshole while driving than other Seattlites. San Francisco, while not pleasant to drive in, felt like it was more up to my speed. Scottland thought I committed myself well, as I was able to weave and dodge in and out of the best spots in traffic with the best of them, once I understood what was expected of me.

I had wanted to visit Coit Tower the first time I visited San Francisco, but couldn't as I was stuck using public transportation and couldn't figure out for the life of me which bus I needed to take to get up there. This time, things went much better and eventually, we managed to meander our way to the 2nd (the 1st being the Golden Gate Bridge) coolest depression era public works project in the city. It's pretty obvious where it's located considering that it sticks straight up into the sky, but the actual path there is much less obvious. All the roads there are steep and narrow, and cars are parked every which way. Scottland was my navigator and he performed admirably. Once we got within a few blocks of the spot, signs led us the rest of the way. We decided to park on a street near the tower, instead of trying to go up to the lot. So, we had a nice little walk along the path the winds up around the hill to the tower.

At the tower, we paid to take an elevator to the observation tower. The tower is 210 feet high, so only around 40% of the height of the Space Needle. However, it's on a steep hill in the middle of the city, so the views from the Tower are nearly as good as the views from the Needle. Scottland was obviously quite disturbed when we first got to the observation deck, but he calmed down after a bit and started taking a bunch of photos with his camera. After we had our fill of panoramic views of San Francisco and the surrounding areas, we took the elevator down and took a look at the really interesting murals in the large room surrounding the tower gift shop. These murals were all done in the early 30's and can be quite socialist in content at time. They're very interesting to look at, as there are a lot of little details that start popping out at you after you look at them for a while. The picture I've included here is an abstract portion of the mural that sits right over the entrance to the central elevator waiting area.

After Coit Tower, Scottland and I again braved city traffic to make our way to Golden Gate Park. The driving this time wasn't as bad, once we got out out of the area immediately surrounding the downtown core of the city. Of course, once we got to the park we discovered that there had been some sort of Reggae festival at the park, and the main boulevard through the park was closed down. So, we parked the car and walked around for a bit. Once we were done parking and after I took a phone call from Ron (who had a great time at Burning Man, apparently) we got back into the car and drove to the west end of the park through one of the non-blocked roads. I wanted to see the beach.

I think it's odd how the west side of San Francisco fronts on the Pacific Ocean, and yet that part of the city is something that's hardly even mentioned. I suppose it has something to do with the beach in these parts resembling the beaches in Oregon, IE not very warm and kind of windy. I still thought it was beautiful. The part that we were on was the location where the main road through the park connects to the Great Highway near the Cliff House and where the Sutro Baths used to be. It was cold and windy, but the sun was going down and the whole scene was quite pretty. We looked into getting dinner at a restaurant that was right next to the beach with a beautiful view of the setting sun. Unfortunately, the wait was 45 minutes and we kind of wanted to get back onto the road.

After that, we wandered through the southwestern parts of the city a bit in order to get back onto I-80. Scottland thought that this part of the city was very nice, and he wouldn't mind living there if he had to. He wouldn't want to live in the other parts of the city, though. I sort of don't blame him. It seemed pretty ran down, considering how astronomically high property values and monthly rents are. I guess that part of the city is also where all the good restaurants are, which is important to know. Eventually, we found ourselves on the Bay Bridge, and made our way home from there.

If you'd like to see all the pics from our trip to San Francisco, look at the following link.

This Weekend

Scottland was here this weekend, and left for the airport about an hour and a half ago. It was a good weekend, all in all. We went to San Francisco on Saturday and I'll put up a post about that trip once he uploads the pictures from his digital camera. In the meantime, here's a couple of interesting tidbits for your enjoyment.

This is the Davis Wiki. It's basically an open source encyclopedia about Davis. It's been a very useful resource for me in the last week, as it's helped me figure out where a lot of stuff in town is. I'll probably highlight interesting portions of it from time to time.

Bob recently posted a link on his BLOG to the following short movie. It's a recruitment video for the Japanese Navy and is 100% hilarious. Don't bother to download the japanese language enhancement unless you care about being able to read japanese characters.

Thirdly, this is a website that is used to archive pictures from the SOHO and other solar observatories. In particular, this is a movie of a rather recent solar x-ray burst that occured on September 1st. It's interesting to watch.

Friday Picture Blogging (Since I won't always be posting pictures of cats)

Unpacking the cat after the move . . .