alan.lamielle.net

I’ve pointed a few people at it already, but it hasn’t been ‘official’ until now.  My image gallery is finally up (click that link or the link on the right side of the page).  For those of you interested, it uses the Gallery 2 PHP image gallery application.  I currently have some more of my recent sets of pictures from hikes and during my SIParCS internship at NCAR in Boulder.  I have a decent backlog of other older pictures I’ll be adding to the gallery soon as well as new pictures I take from the vacations I have planned in the near future.

Wednesday night a group of SIParCS interns gathered for a night of sushi making and eating.  The group consisted of Evan, Kuo, Nick, Dan, Kate, and myself.  After work Evan stopped by Whole Foods and picked up some supplies, including sushi grade fish, rice, vinegar, wasabi powder, soy sauce, and vegetables.  It turns out someone just cleaned out most of the sushi-grade fish just before Evan.  We ended up with a small amount of tuna and around a pound of salmon.

Surprisingly, making a roll that tastes good was quite easy.  Not surprisingly, making a roll that looked good was very hard.  I can definitely understand why people can study sushi making their whole lives and never master the art.  There are so many interesting tastes, ingredients, and techniques to explore–the variations are so numerous!  I’m definitely going to have to make more of this type of cuisine in the future.

Following the sushi making/eating and beer drinking, we headed out (around 10pm) to play ‘bocce ball’ around Evan’s apartment complex.  I put it in quotes because, despite knowing the exact rules of the real game, I doubt we were actually following them at all.  Mostly we just made up a game using the ceramic balls from the bocce ball set Evan had purchased a few days before.  It reminded me of when I was much younger and we would make up games on our own and play for hours.  Apparently it takes late nights, sushi, and beer to do this now.  Regardless, it was lots of fun!

While working at NCAR, I stumbled into a situation where I needed to use Git over an sshfs mounted directory.  After beating on git and looking at its source code and not making much progress, I finally found a very simple solution related to how I mount the sshfs directory.

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A group of SiParCS interns (and one full time employee) decided to attempt to climb Bear Peak today.  This is probably the highest peak so close to NCAR, so it is a good one to do right after work.  The group included Nick, Kuo, Evan, Dan, Ben, and myself.  Unfortunately due to the crazy weather we’ve been having here in boulder recently, we didn’t make it to the top, but we will soon!

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Today was the start of my internship in Boulder, CO at NCAR (The National Center for Atmospheric Research) in the SiParCS 2009 summer internship program.  It was mostly filled with administrative and logistical stuff, but I did get a few hours of working on my project in.

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SiParCS starts tomorrow… crazy!  I’m packing and gathering things up for tomorrow.  I’m actually really excited.  This should be a fun and challenging 10 weeks.  Wish me luck!

SiParCS 2009 starts Monday June 1, 2009.  That’s two days away.  Over the past week or so I’ve been getting emails concerning logistical issues and I’ve been taking care of these things.  Two weeks ago Kate and I dropped off a form that was needed and we met with John and had lunch.  A while before that Kate and I took care of apartment details and got things squared away in this area.

As I won’t be in town and working in the CS department every day, I’ve been trying to get a few last minute things squared away with IEGen and ready for Michelle.  We’re trying to get a journal paper finished and submitted (as we have been for ~6 months now…).  As I won’t be working for her directly anymore (thought I will be working on IEGen in the evenings) I’m trying to get certain things finished up so she doesn’t have to do as much learning of various pieces of my code.  I’m almost where I want to be, but I still need to get a few things finished up and ready before Monday.

Things are falling into place to get started working Monday at NCAR.  I’m really excited!  This should be a fun 10 weeks.

Kate and I took a second trip down to Boulder today to finish up the temporary apartment logistics and turn in some paperwork at NCAR.  We timed the trip again, this time with some decent traffic, and it looks like it is safe to say it takes very close to an hour from Kate’s apartment to the NCAR lab at the top of the mesa.  This is definitely longer than I want to drive twice a day, so I’m glad we decided to take the temporary apartment route.  I think 10 hours a week is more than I’m willing to put into commuting…

After we finished up signing all of the apartment paperwork we had about 30 mins to kill.  We stopped by Caffe Sole for a coffee and snack.  This may be the place I hang out if/when I’m not at the lab working.

We met with John around 11.  We chatted for a bit, got a brief tour of the building, found our future (though hopefully too needed) cubes, saw some big (though in the grand scheme of things not that big) machines that they use to run some simulations on, and had a (free!) lunch.  I really like the atmosphere (no pun intended!) there, it is very open, everyone is friendly and seems very approachable, and I immediately felt included and a part of the lab.  After lunch we chatted with most of the CS researchers there.  Every time I meet a new person or group of people that work in my field (or something close) I always seem to get along instantly with them.  I suppose it is the thinking alike thing that causes this…  Regardless, everyone seemed really nice, smart, and will be great to work with.

After another hour drive back, I met briefly with Michelle about the status of IEGen and her progress with the related full space tiling work.  Things are going well and I may actually be able to run some experiments soon!

Finally, we ended the day at Jim’s Wings on Elizabeth St, very close to Adam’s (soon to be) old apartment.  Hot wings go great with a few pints of beer.  We also discovered a small local ice cream shop where we enjoyed some tasty treats before I headed home on my bike.

I’m tired, it’s time for bed.

Over the past weekend I took part in a few exciting events.  It started off with a 6 person ride around Fort Collins hitting up the local breweries on Friday.  Adam, Eric (networking post-doc), Doug, Kate, Jesh, and myself took part.  We started off by stopping by New Belgium but it was a bit too busy for our tastes.  We skipped out there and headed straight to Odell’s.  We had a few interesting conversations over a few beers (Nukes!) and then headed off to Fort Collins Brewery.  Again, as is usual with our group, interesting conversations ensued.  We ended the touring at Coopersmith’s with food and more beer.  The night wound down at Adam’s by playing a telephone-like game that uses small drawings/descriptions on post-it notes.  Adam’s crazy (but cool) neighbor stopped by and played some songs on guitar for us.  It was a good start to what turned out to be a great weekend.

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Quick update concerning SiParCS: At the FRACTAL Spring 2009 conference I ran into two engineers/scientists who work at NCAR: Ben Mayer and Nathan Hearn. It turns out that they are two members of the group Kate Ericson and I will be working with (under John Dennis) for the SiParCS 2009 internship this summer. We chatted at lunch for about 30 minutes about some interesting topics. It was nice to meet a few of the people I will probably be interacting with for at least two months this summer. It was also interesting that I ran into them at the conference: small world!