The Latest

Ok, realistically I'm never going to finish the multi-part story that I started about my journey from Clemson to Florida, but I figured the least I could do was finally provide an update of general goings-on. Lets just say that I made it down here with only a minor car mishap in rural Georgia, and I've been enjoying my life, for the most part, these last 8 (almost 9, wow it goes fast) months.

Just to interrupt, I just met some Florida wildlife! I was sitting out on my porch, typing this post, and heard some crunching through the grass outside (in Florida, grass crunches). I ran to get my flashlight and started scanning the back yard for whatever was making this noise. The first thing I saw was a kind of nasty hairless tail, and I thought it was just a possum. But after I got closer and could see the rest of it it turned out to be an armadillo! I know that this is probably not exciting at all for anyone from Texas or Florida, or any other states where they are common, but for me this is exciting. The only place I've ever seen an armadillo is either stuffed or in a zoo. So anyway, here are pictures to document the experience.
Alright, back to normal. As I said, things have been going pretty well here since I moved down. Of course the first few weeks were tough. There were definitely a few days where I wondered what I had gotten myself into, and a few moments where I felt like running, but once I got settled things have gotten much better. My acclimation to the area was helped along by Justin, an engineering friend from Clemson, who just so happened to know a whole group of people down in this area. He started work down here two weeks after I did, so once he got settled in we started hanging out with what has come to be known as "the Florida Group" on weekends.

The Florida Group is made up of four couples and four single guys. Of the guys (coupled and uncoupled), all but two are Clemson grads. One of the non-Clemson guys is, strangely enough, from my hometown back in Illinois! Finally, someone else who knows about Beef-a-Roo ;). Two of the women are also Clemson alums, so you can guess who we're all cheering for during football season. Not like we ever expect to be that awesome. This is, after all, Clemson, and there's nothing that Clemson hates like winning too much. Hey, at least we've got a new coach. Anyway, back to the story...

So over these last months Justin, Phil (another Clemson guy who moved down after Justin), and I have become well integrated into the Florida Group. Most weekends we are at one of the couple's houses (they always host since they know that they can make edible food), either playing Rock Band, which is definitely a group favorite, or some board or card game. No matter what we do, there is always beer and fun is had by all.

Occasionally we do throw something crazy in for the weekend activity. For a while I, and sometimes Justin, would go play paintball on Saturdays. I even bought a used gun from the guy who hosted it, and it's definitely a good time. Not the cheapest weekend activity, but still fun and it gets me out of the house. That's fallen by the wayside a little recently, though, because the new field that they've been playing at is about a 45 minute drive from my house. It's fun, but I'm not that motivated to get out of bed every Saturday.

The other activity that comes up now and then is a rocket launch! One of the benefits of living on the east coast of Florida. Hey, if we can have mountains, or even hills, at least we get rockets. My first ever shuttle launch was a night launch, and it was pretty damn awesome. The only bummer was that we didn't actually hear anything, which was kind of strange because we weren't that far away from the pads. I've also seen two non-shuttle launches, one from the parking lot of the local civic center and one from my driveway. Yeah, yeah, you can be jealous now ;). Of course the Florida group is all engineers, or at least all the guys are, and so we are obligated to love rocket launches.

This last week was fantastic, though. There was a confluence of activities that made it extra fun. First, last weekend was our St. Patrick's Day party. That alone would be enough to make it special, but it was also the start of Clemson's spring break, and a whole bunch of Justin's friends decided to drive down for a Florida vacation. I knew a few of the people, but there were more that I didn't know, so it was fun to meet new people that, really, I should have met four years ago. Daniel, one of the Florida Group, also had his sister in town visiting, so it was fun meeting more of his family. All in all, the party was a wonderful mixture of Beth's (Daniel's wife) excellent cooking, drunkenness, entertaining stories, and Rock Band. Everything that St.Patrick's Day stands for.

To top the weekend off, and to bring my story back to a few paragraphs ago, there was also a shuttle launch! Sunday night I met Daniel, his sister, and Beth out at the beach to watch the dusk launch. Not quite as spectacular as the night launch (you don't get the whole night turned to day effect), but the sun setting made the rocket trail look awesome. See the pictures below for what I mean.

The rest of the week was back to work for me, but Justin took a few days off to spend time with the Clemson Contingent. They did lots of fun things that made me wish I didn't have to work, like go to the beach multiple times and generally run around and have lots of Florida-in-the-spring fun. The highlight though, at least for me, was getting out and using my telescope on Thursday night. You see, most of the Clemson Contingent are astronomy majors, so we got a fantastic tour of the heavens with our guide Ginger Bryngelson. I had never seen a binary star before! Well, at least not as two objects distinct enough that I could say "hey, that's a binary!". The week was capped off with beach volleyball (very bad, windy volleyball) and some attempts at swimming in the very rough surf with the gang, and then it was back to normal life.

So, this post has gone far longer than I expected, and if you're still reading then I applaud you! Enjoy the pictures, and I'm off to bed.

So apparently I am more dead than I thought...

Or so it seems from this site.

Most of the things in my life have changed since my last post in April. I have finished my thesis, found a job, graduated, moved to Florida, started my job, and have begun building a new social network...in that order. Of course, this is way more activity than can be covered in one, or even two, posts, so I will be working on this continuing story whenever I get a chance. So, onwards.

For anyone who has never completed a thesis, it's really an amazing process. After working on a project for the better part of two years (or 2.5 in my case), and imagining that you will never actually finish, you get the whole thing wrapped up in four week mad scramble. The reason for this is because you eventually realize that you could, literally, spend the next 30 years working on the same project, and that if you're going to finish it might as well be soon. So you throw together whatever changes to your project that you need to make it fairly presentable, and then you spend the next three weeks hammering out what is essentially a 60-page lab report full of poor grammar and syntax that no one, in all likelihood, will read. Your adviser may read the whole thing through, if he's really bored, and you will never want to read the whole thing through because, for the love of god, you just want it to be over. Maybe some day you'll show it to your kids so they can be proud to have a father who could write something that was worth binding.

Along with the written thesis there is a presentation. As with all presentations in the civilized world, it is a Power Point presentation. Your task is to distill your 60 pages of excruciating detail to 20 slides that you hope will either keep your audience awake or put them to sleep, depending on how worthwhile you think your "research" was.

Once the presentation is over and your audience has been roused from their naps, everyone is asked to leave the room and you must face your committee alone. As I neglected to mention earlier, your committee is made up of your adviser, who you desperately hope is on your side, and two committee members, who are supposed to be in related fields and who, you hope, know almost nothing about what you just presented. You hope this because then the questions they are about to ask you will be very simple and low-level, such as "what does this variable mean?", and not questions like "why did you use the Lucas-Kanade method and not the Valenzetti-Linstrom method?", at which point you will fight the urge to run and/or pass out because you have no idea what the fuck the Valenzetti-Linstrom method is or why your adviser didn't mention this earlier.

However, no matter what you seem to answer, your committee eventually decides that you did well enough for them, congradulate you, and present you with at least 50,000 new corrections to your thesis. Once these are done, however, and everyone's signature has dried on the appropriate forms, you can officially be done!

So that is what I did.

Next time, whenever that may be, I'll relate the joys of drug testing in the middle of a job interview.

I am not dead...

In spite of what my lack of activity on this site may have let you to believe, I am not, in fact, dead. I am, however, the next-best thing: trying to graduate. I think part of the process of graduate school is realizing that it is not at all what you thought it would be like when you decided to postpone outside life for another few years. I know that I had imagined it similar to undergrad, except that you get to pick a neat topic and do a really big project on it.

For those of you who are like me and occasionally need a kick in the butt - otherwise known as a "deadline" - you will understand how annoying it is to realize that you've wasted the better part of a year doing work that, under different circumstances, should have taken you a month. The key here is money. If you have an adviser that pays you, then he / she has a vested interest in getting you to do your work on time. This is usually because there is someone above him / her who is ultimately paying the bills.

If you are like me, and get no money from your adviser, then you tend to be left free to float, for as long as you like, in self-imposed research limbo. This, combined with work that pays the bills, and consequently has a more valid claim on my time, means that I'll be graduating just a little later than I had hoped. The good news is that I now have my motivation in the form of a job! I have accepted an offer to work in sunny Melbourne, Florida, starting at the end of June, so if I don't get everything done and in by then I'm screwed.

Alright, that's the update for now. It's 3:47am, and time for the sleeping.

G'night.

What Winter SHOULD Be

Update: We're having 5-7 inches of snow here today, so I ran out and took some more pictures. Too many to post here, so just check out the album.


For all you people down in sunny South Carolina, I just wanted to put up some pictures of what winter is supposed to look like ;). And not just for a day, either. This is what winter is supposed to look like until about March, at which point everything will be slushy until mid-April.


So most of this break has been doing Christmas and family stuff. My parent's waited to get a tree and do most of the decorating until I got back, so it's been busy. Plus, we went into Chicago for a night and attended the live recording of "Wait, wait...don't tell me", which is a quiz show in NPR. Very funny, so if you're ever in Chicago on a Thursday night and looking for a cheap date, give it a try.

I was happy when I flew in because there was plenty of snow on the ground. However, since then it's rained, then snowed, then rained again, and so right now there's slightly less snow on the ground than in these pictures, but I'm hoping it will snow again before I have to head back south. From the picture on the right, you can see that we had a few days of ice fog which made driving extra fun, but did allow my nephew, Matt, to run around the tree farm pretending he was in "The Mist".

Now that Robbie's up in Rockford things should be more fun. We've already tried, unsuccessfully so far, so build a replacement Wii sensor bar, since he left his in Peoria, but I think I've tracked down the problem. Once that's fixed there will be plenty of Wii fun to be had.

With that, I will leave everyone to their Christmas-y fun. I hope everyone had a great break and I'll see you all in 2008!

Finally

After many months, I've finally managed to get a short story up on Robbie's blog, Wordy Me. I've been trying to write a long story for a while but, failing at that, a short story will have to do. This one was inspired by some interesting piano/violin music I heard on Echoes (with John Diliberto). For anyone interested, the artist is Ludovico Einaudi and the CD is called Divenire. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the story, and be sure to read Robbie's stuff while you're over there. If there's one thing that I will never be good at it's poetry, and he's got some good stuff over there. So enjoy and have a good holiday!

The Latest

So yeah, it's been a long time since I've written here, so I feel somewhat compelled to give those who do occasionally look at this site something new to read. Actually, read is about all I've been doing lately...aside from the usual cycle of research and procrastination that is the spice of graduate student life.

The first book I breezed through was Rich Dad/Poor Dad, by Robert T. Kiyosaki. This book continues the line of non-fiction that I have been reading lately. Although the subject of this book is investing and wealth-creation, Mr. Kiyosaky goes about getting his points across in a different way. Rather than give the reader a how-to in each chapter, he relates his experiences as a child growing up with "two" fathers - one rich and one poor - and what he learned from them regarding money. Mostly, this focuses on the rich dad (actually his best friend's father) and how he taught a young Robert how to think about money properly. This narrative takes up a good part of the beginning of the book, with the last half consisting of Mr. Kiyosaki's discussion of how he currently operates and things about investing and wealth-management, as well as a few hints/tips for people interested in getting started or who are trying to teach these skills to their children.
Overall, this is an excellent motivational book. After reading it, I really wanted to start doing everything the book said. Mr. Kiyosaki focuses his attention on the real-estate market, but that is because that's what he knows. The thought processes in the book could be applied to a vast array of markets. However, this is not a book for the motivated person who is now looking for a how-to guide. But, as consolation, the author provides a list of recommended reading in the back of the book to cover this. All in all, a great read for anyone out there interested in developing wealth-building skills who just needs some motivation.

The second series that I've gotten into is the "His Dark Materials" series - a trilogy by Philip Pullman. The new movie, "The Golden Compass", is adapted from the first book in the series, and the trailer for that movie was what convinced me to pick up the book.
For those unfamiliar with the story, it follows the adventures of 11-year-old Lyra and her daemon, Pantalaimon (in her world, which is a parallel of ours, everyone has a daemon...essentially a part of their soul in animal form that travels with them at all times). Her earth is identical to ours in most respects, but they are at a 19th century/steampunk level of technology, and there are far more strange creatures and people than we have in reality. It is an adventure/quest story, not unlike the Lord of the Rings (although quite a bit shorter and you don't have to hear about Sam and Frodo for half a book), and although it was obviously written for children and teenagers, it's still a good, quick, exciting read.

Well, that pretty much sums it up - at least as far as reading material. Time to head to bed and dream of the end of the semester!

Mmmmmm....cake

For anyone who hasn't played the new Valve game "Portals", you should play it. It's short (approx. 4 hours) but awesome. The best part, other than some awesome portal-jumping action, is the computer and her dry, dark sense of humor. The computer also sings you a song at the end, which has been stuck in my head since I finished the game two days ago. So go, play it, or at least listen to the song, and delight in the glow of Portals! And remember, keep trying till you run out of cake.
~TheStoph