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!

Midway through the day we decided we’d like to try Bear peak.  We ducked out of work a bit early and after grabbing our gear and waiting a bit for Ben, we headed out around 4:30.  As we knew, this is definitely too late to head out for a hike as early/late afternoon storms have made themselves a part of Colorado life for the past few months.  Despite this, we were hopeful and tried to make a decent pace up the trail.

The first mile or so along the mesa trail isn’t so bad.  We held a pretty good pace for this section on the Mesa trail.  Apparently there are two ways to reach the top of Bear Peak: Along the Bear Canyon trail (longer and less steep) or along the Fern Canyon trail (much shorter but much steeper).  We chose the latter option.

Most of the way up the Fern Canyon trail was full of rock steps and switchbacks due to the decently steep incline we were ascending.  After multiple breaks, we made it to a decent lookout over the west side of the climb and could see some very pretty snow covered peaks and another peak to our north:

Peak north of the Bear Peak trail

Up to this point we had heard a few rumbles of thunder.  As we could see west, the building storm clouds were visible.  The combination of the continuing thunder, slight sprinkles, and occasional lightning were enough to convince us to turn back.  I’m not one who likes to mess with lightning in elevated terrain.  As we turned around to descend, a nice view of the plains just south of boulder presented itself:

View of the plains from the Bear Peak trail

Also, a picture of us descending (from right to left) Nick (fixing his shoe), Ben, Kuo, Dan, and Evan:

Descending Bear Peak

After a knee/shin jarring descent and a quick hike back down the Mesa trail towards NCAR, I snapped a quick few images of Boulder from the trail just west of the office:

Start/End of the Mesa trail just north of NCAR

By this time it was quite close to raining pretty good, so some of us hurried back to the building.  Just as Ben and I made it to the back entrance (across the bridge) it started raining.  Perfect timing!

After hiking Evan, Kate, and I headed to Southern Sun for dinner and a few beers.  Also, Evan and I decided we were sick of the weather denying us a full hike, so we are planning on leaving around 6:30 tomorrow morning to try again.  It is 11pm now, we’ll see if we actually make it.  I’m sure I’ll at least post photos if we do.

Side note: I found a Linux GUI/CLI tool called Hugin that does photo stitching very easily.  The third and fourth images of this post were made using Hugin and turned out pretty well.  I plan to make more in the future as they are much more impressive than a single image.

The day started with an almost exactly 1 hour drive down to Boulder after picking Kate up from her place.  Even at 7am, traffic wasn’t bad enough to slow us down too much.  We’ve averaged around 1 hour over the ~3 trips we’ve made down there.  I’m guessing it is now safe to say that it takes an hour to get from Fort Collins to Boulder (with our apartment or NCAR as the destination).

As we were early (we were supposed to be at NCAR at 9am), we stopped at our not-yet-paid-for apartment and found that the office was closed.  Resolving to call at lunch to get apartmenty things settled, we headed up the hill towards NCAR.

In contrast with the previous times we’d been to the NCAR campus, it was fairly windy and cold today when we arrived.  We headed in to the building and found our way to the cafeteria.  We were early (by around 30 mins) and met and talked with some of the other SiParCS interns who were also early.  Once 9am rolled around we headed to a conference room and started the day.

Most of the morning was filled with filling out forms, tours, and getting machines setup, configured, and working.  On the outside the building is really intersting, very cool architecture.  On the inside, you find that the cool architecture requires a complex layout that is initially difficult to find your way around.  Luckily I think I figured most of the useful routes out, but I’m guessing I’ll still have trouble at some point.  In terms of machine setup, I had to be the difficult one and use my personal laptop (along with one other inten).  To get access to various NCAR intranet resources, I needed to get VPN working.  However, the vpnc settings I was using weren’t working for some reason.  Later in the day we finally setup kvpnc and got VPN working with it.  (Later I figured out that I needed to specify my password each time using my recently acquired cryptocard, and got VPN working with vpnc in networkmanager, whooo!).

I ate lunch with Kate, Nick (the third intern working under John) and John in the NCAR cafeteria.  Kate and I learned that food is pretty expensive there ($20 for both of us total) and decided to shop later in the day for lunchy food and save ourselves some money.  The food is decent, just not worth $10 a meal.

After lunch I actually got started on my project, which I’ll describe in more detail at some point in a future post.  Basically right now I’m writing some Python scripts to process lookup table access traces from a run of CAM (the Community Atmospheric Model).  I’m hoping I can get some results to discuss with John by tomorrow.

Kate, Nick, and I decided to attend a welcoming reception and left around 3:30.  Nick headed straight there while Kate and I went and took care of apartmenty things first.  After paying rent and dropping off our stuff in our newly claimed apartment, we headed to the reception.  We were enticed by free food, expecting some sort of BBQ or something, but it turned out to be a more fancy-pants snacky event.  We grabbed some of the food (including coconut chicken on a stick!), listened to some speeches, chatted with Kuo, Nick, Even and Kate (all SiParcS interns) and decided we needed some real food.  We headed to our new favorite brewery, Southern Sun.

Southern Sun is a local Boulder brewery just across from our apartment.  We headed there for food, and ended up getting more than we could handle.  I ordered the Blackberry Wheat beer they had on tap (super tasty!) and Kate ordered a Belgium tripel (also super tasty!).  For food, we had an interesting soup that tasted exactly like a grilled cheese sandwich, very nice!  On top of that, we ordered the chicken nachos, and realized after it came out we had made a mistake:

Massive stack of nachos at Southern Sun Brewery

Needless to say, we didn’t manage to finish them, but what we did have was delicious.

After dropping Kuo off at home, Kate and I headed to our apartment and chilled for the evening and went to bed.  It was a long day and I’m pretty tired.  This is looking to be quite a fun summer.  I’m excited to get to work tomorrow on my project!

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.

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.

Saturday Kate and I made a trip down to Boulder to check out potential apartments and visit the NCAR Mesa campus.  What we learned was that this summer is going to be sweet!  Once we got to boulder, we headed up the mesa that the campus is located on.  We noticed a few things:

1. The building’s architecture is quite unique, and looks really cool.
2. The campus is essentially on the top of a hill in the middle of a natural area.
3. The views from the top (and from within the building) are really great.

It turns out that the NCAR Mesa lab is at the top of a mesa (who would have thought!), is the trailhead for some really nice trails, and is utilized quite heavily on the weekend by hikers.

After looking around quickly, we headed back down the hill to start apartment hunting.  We had done some looking around on Craig’s list and found a few potential places, but one was clearly the best fit for us.  Unfortunately at this point we hadn’t heard from the girl that was sub-leasing the place, so we were somewhat stuck.  To pass some time waiting for contact from her, we looked around for potential places using the more analog drive-your-car-around-neighborhoods-and-see-what-you-can-find method.  This was much more difficult than we’d thought.  Not much came from this.  We did, however, find the location of our potential apartment and realized we had to have it.

Across from the place we were hoping for we discovered a treasure-trove of stores and shopping options.  This includes a Chase bank, Papa Murphys take and bake pizza, King Soopers (for all of our shopping needs), a backpacking store and many more.  Best of all, the Mountain Sun brewery is also in this shopping center.  We ate lunch at Mountain Sun, made contact with the Liz (the girl sub-leasing the apartment we wanted), then looked for some more stores to shop at while we waited to meet with her.  We found a shoe store that was moving and had most of their remaining inventory at 50% off.  I found a nice pair of Asics running shoes for $50 rather than $100.  Good find!

After shoe shopping it was time to meet with Liz and checkout the apartment.  We really only need a small place, which is good because the place Liz has is only a one bedroom, but it’s a decent price, in a perfect location (across from the afore mentioned shopping-plaza-of-amazingness), and the dates fit our schedule.  We basically said we’d take it and that was that.

With apartment hunting all but taken care of, we headed back up the hill to do a little hiking.  There is a ‘weather trail’ that starts right outside of the office that leads to some other really nice trails further down.  Kate and I decided to head out and see what we could find.  We discovered some really nice views and got even more excited that we’d be working here for 10 weeks this summer.    The hike produced a few nice pictures, taken from my phone:

NCAR Mesa Lab from behind, notice the robot faces (4 of them!):

NCAR Architecture from the back looking East

My favorite, looking up a sun speckled trail:

Up the canyon trail

Finally, Sunday arrived.  We headed down to Denver and the Buell Theatre to see the final showing of Spamalot!, the monty python broadway production.  It was quite nice, full of laughs and monty-python-ish plot lines.  My only complaint was that they forced too many of the well known jokes from Holy Grail.  I found myself laughing more at the new material rather than the expected suff.  Nevertheless, it was a good show and we were both quite glad we made it.  After the show we stopped by Ling and Louie’s for dinner and had Wango Mango Chicken and jewled beef:

Wango Mango Chicken and Jewled Beef at Ling and Louie's

Overall, it was a great few days.  A good call before the work-intense week of this week.  Only 1.5 weeks left before SiParCS starts and I still have lots to do on IEGen and the journal paper…