Jules and I did have the Indian buffet for lunch on Tuesday, and the owner did bring me a little dish of vindaloo sauce just like old times; it was great. That afternoon I managed to finish everything I needed to do for submittal of my thesis.

There was this question of the "thesis summary" which is a 5-30 page document including graphs, etc., in the form of a journal pre-print. I hadn't written it because I had never heard of it. When I asked Clare some questions about it she just told me to forget about it. Same with the abstract rewrite. So in essence she let me waive all of the difficult remaining tasks and suddenly there wasn't all that much left to do.

The only tense moment was getting Kim to sign the thesis. This, of course, is the final moment of our mentor/student relationship. I gave him a copy of the document and then the sheet that he was supposed to sign. And he pulls out his pen... and then opens the document and starts carefully reading through it. Specifically the acknowledgements. His body language indicated that he was looking for something specific there and I wasn't sure if he was going to page through the whole document or what. I started having these nightmare visions of him making requests for changes even at this late moment. However, after about a minute he just signed the document and that was that.

A funny comparison: Professor Yip, who was also on my committee, signed my document then we talked at length about my future plans and he gave me some philosophical advice about not getting too specialized in my field and staying broadly applicable, etc. Kim just said "Sionara."

Anyway, with the signatures I needed I went and turned everything in to Clare. This constitutes my final act as a graduate student; at that point I had completed all of my requirements for graduation and am effectively a Doctor of SCIENCE!!

The remainder of the afternoon was spent getting various paperwork faxed off to LANL to get reimbursed for my tuition expenses and the personell action for my transfer to N-1 moving.

Met Evan for dinner. He is doing very well for himself financially and professionally, though he apparently has too many contracts coming in and not enough people to do the work, etc. He desperately wanted to hire me but I don't want to do software work right now.

Afterwards I got completely lost driving home through Brookline. Eventually I ended up at Jules' brother's place in Cambridge and met some of their friends. At least one of them was a former 6.270 student of mine. One of the girls there was engaged to JJ of MIT Ultimate fame, who I met while I was at Coe. Small world.

Anyway 7 of us went bowling at Boston Bowl, where they give you a free pair of ankle socks with every shoe rental. So now I have little tiny socks that say "Boston Bowl" with an American flag on them... whoot. Oh, and on the way there Jules had to stop at a gas station... and we ran out of gas about 30' from the pump and had to get out and push the minivan the rest of the way. That was exciting... Anyway, I bowled a 107 and a 119. Fun was had by all, and that was my Tuesday.

Wednesday started off with birdwatching at Auburn Cemetery with Camilla. It is an amazingly beautiful cemetary, but it was lightly raining the entire time which prevented me from using my camera and kept most of the birds away. I learned a lot about birding, regardless. Afterwards I went back to Camilla's apartment and she showed me a bunch of her identification books for plants and animals, followed by her paper models - fascinating stuff. I want to make a bunch of paper geometric models now...

Went back to campus for lunch at Anna's with Jules, and I spent the afternoon dorking around on campus. Picked up some MIT swag from the school store and put in an order to get a few copies of my thesis book-bound. Looked around the Stata Center (including the Bill Gates tower) - it is really an amazing building inside. I can't say much for the outside appearance, but inside it just seems very open and enormous and useable.

Dinner: Jules again, this time Blue Ribbon barbeque. Excellent as always. Afterwards, Zoz. Went to Senior House and hung out with Zoz and some of the denizens of his house. Stayed there very late.

Now it's Thursday. I'll probably eat Indian buffet again today, probably with Jules again. He's my defacto eating partner on this trip, apparently. Probably because neither of us have anything to do right now and thus are always free for food. Dinner is with Zoz at a location to be determined. Then I'll probably go down to Middletown and spend the rest of my time here with the Neenor.

I flew out to Boston on Saturday. Left the house at 6:00am and arrived in Boston at 5:00pm. Met Nina at the airport and we hung out all evening. Ate dinner with her family at Anna's Taqeria, food objective #1: check.

Sunday we all went to a good dim sum place in chinatown, then Nina and I went for a drive. I tried to do the Worcester county highpoint (again) but the drive-up was closed for the season (again). We weren't properly equipped for the short hike so we bailed and drove up the nearby highpoint of Hillsborough County, NH--Pack Monadnock Mountain. It's a nice state park with a $3/person entrance fee and a pleasant short drive to the summit. The clouds were pretty low and obscured most of the view, but what we could see was nice. Also stopped by Cruftlabs, which has really turned into something amazing.

Monday, I went in to MIT early and got all the technical details of my defense sorted out. When 10:00am rolled around, the only person who had arrived was Chris. The rest of the committee was late and there was apparently no one else coming. Nina's dad came in along with the rest of the committee at about 10:05 and one student joined in about 10 minutes into the talk. So a total audience of 6, one more than I was expecting.

The talk went well, there were a few background questions early on that I fumbled a bit but otherwise the questions were easy and on-topic. Basically a cake walk. When they kicked us out to deliberate on my future, I talked with Nina's dad about the political goings-on at the lab. After five minutes, they invited me back in and congratulated me and that was that.

The committee rapidly dispersed and no one ate any of the cookies or champaign that Nina's mom had sent along. We packed it back up and took it home for future use. I spent the rest of the day doing legwork gathering signatures and printing out the various what-nots that are required to actually graduate.

Now it's Tuesday and I'm doing the same thing. We'll see how long all of this takes. At this point the real bottleneck is going to be finding Molvig so he can sign my cover sheets. But first I have to print and bind a copy of the thesis for him, which I am waiting for now.

At noon, I eat at Border India -- all you can eat (food objective #2). Dinner tonight is with my old roommate Evan.

Done.

Anyone know their stuff with Flash enough to be able to extract the video from this flash app? The flash app itself seems to grab it from somewhere else so just downloading the flash doesn't achieve my goal of getting this video local.

But come on, Transformers + breakdancing? Can anyone work kung fu and porn into this to make it the greatest video ever made?

I'm going to be in the Boston area from the evening of Saturday, April 23rd, to approximately lunchtime on Friday, April 29th. I'm there to defend my thesis and to take care of the end-of-graduate-career logistics. However, this will be my only chance to hang out with various MIT folks that I haven't seen in a long time. Anyone who reads this and wants to have breakfast, lunch, or dinner with me during this time please comment here or email me. In particular, I'd like to eat some of the following:

* Lunch at Border India (all-you-can-eat aw yeah!) on Main St.
* Lunch at Anna's (supreme buritto, how will it compare to NM?)
* Dinner at the Blue Ribbon (BBQ yum) in Arlington.

I'm up for suggestions beyond that. Anyone who wants to join me or do whatever, make yourself heard. I'm forward-dating this post so it will stay at the top until I leave for Boston.

Yesterday afternoon I showed Molvig a final draft of my defense presentation and he gave it the thumbs up with only a minor change which has already been done. I never did get any comments on the last revision of the thesis itself, but I take that to mean he's happy with where it's at.

He left for Boston this morning and Chris is already there. So I'm basically done with the thesis and the preparations for the defense.

There was some nonsense where apparently the department requires the defending student to provide food for everyone at the defense, which no one told me about until this week, but one of the admins at MIT agreed to take care of it for me. Nice of them to stick one more pointless burden on what is sure to be stressed out and overloaded students. Insult to injury, sorta.

Anyway, at this point I'm just packing up my office, backing up my files, and printing out my slides. It's a nice day off. Tomorrow, I fly to Boston!

I decommissioned my secure computer here, which involves *shredding* the hard drives. The remaining shell will go into storage and if someone in the group wants to us a dual G4, they can put new drives in it and off they go. The 23" flat screen, on the other hand, now sits nicely next to its twin on my open computer.

That's right, a dual-headed dual-processor G4 with an effective resolution of 3840 x 1200. This makes it even more difficult to use the 15" flatscreen I have at home (maximum resolution 1024x768).

I was talking to Dan about his recent speech class finale and how it reminded me of high school. Basically I had a policy in high school of not doing any work for a class outside of the class itself. There were very few exceptions. Most classes at my high school required very little effort to excel at, so I just did the homework on the day it was due during the class itself. For the most part, listening to what was being taught was not really a requirement.

The other rather embarassing aspect of my high school experience that I remember clearly was my ceramics class. It was one of those electives that people took because it was an easy A, the teacher was generally out of the room and thus you could smoke during class, and there was no homework or tests of any kind. I think I took it because I was running out of electives to take. The school had a requirement that you *had* to take a study hall if you weren't enrolled in a language class (wha??), so most people took no language and then were forced to not take an elective in its place. I was enrolled in Chinese throughout my highschool career, so I had the option to take electives every term and I did. Unfortunately, because so few people were taking electives, there weren't all that many offered and in the end I had taken the bulk of what was available.

Anyway, the teacher clearly couldn't care less about the actual instruction of the students or whether or not we gained anything from the class. He graded on a points system, where each project you successfully completed was given a "grade" between 1 and 5 points. Your grade in the class was based on your total accumulated points. So, while each project was graded for quality, the end grade in the class was essentially based on quantity of output. If you got 40+ points during the term, you would get an A, even if each of your projects was a worthless zero-effort piece of crap. There was no zero point option in the grading system.

And everyone knew this going in. My understanding is that occasionally someone would come through the system who actually was interested in sculpture and they would make interesting projects and do well. Everyone else just cranked out 40 identical bowls with generic glaze and no thought to them at all.

I got so pissed off about the complete worthlessness of the class that I started making kiln-bombs. These were baseball-sized solid spheres of clay which I would cut in half with a wire, use my thumb to put a large dimple in the center, then re-seal the sphere together. Essentially, it was a thick-walled spherical shell with a big hollow center. I'd dress the outside to look like the Death Star or a Beholder or whatnot, but that was just to get it past the instructor's inspection and allowed into the kiln.

Of course, air bubbles in clay cause the project to explode when heated... and the thicker the walls the more powerful the result.

Sadly, the Death Star was destroyed in the Kiln Wars just as it was in the movie. And it took the entire rebel fleet of shitty half-assed bowls with it. No one really cared; I made certain that there wasn't actually anything interesting in the kiln before I did this, and for the most part the rest of the people in the class thought it was great fun anyway. They already had their 40 points as well.

What a joke.

Today's post is brought to you by Dan and his AIM link dumps.

Uhh... no comment on this one.

The NUGE is prepared to defend himself with full auto. Note the last paragraph. Summary: "The constitution is crap, I should be able to enforce rules as I see fit with an assault rifle as persuasion," to which the NRA erupts in chearing. Way to go, NUGE. Or, as Dan says, "Bye-bye, Nuge. Let us know how the deep end is."

Moving from a pure theory/simulation group into a largely experimental group has certain training requirements associated with it. In my current job, the only ways for me to hurt myself involve non-ergonomic chairs.

Before I can start doing real work over at N-1, I'll have to take some safety courses. I received a *preliminary* list this morning:

* Nuclear Material Handling
* Sealed Source Handling
* Radiation Worker II
* Lead Awareness
* Chemical HazCom
* Cryogenic Fluids Safety
* Electrical Injury Mechanisms
* LANL Electrical Safety Program
* R&D Electrical Worker

Still might hurt my back on my chair, too. Have to remember that while attaching lead at high voltage to my cryogenic uranium.

On Sunday I took a short hike down in Bandelier National Monument, during which I heard the distinct sound of a male Broad Tailed Hummingbird in flight. Never saw it, but heard it at least twice.

The following morning I set out my two hummingbird feeders and by that evening I had already seen two male broadtails drinking from the one in the backyard. Haven't noticed any females yet, but they don't seem to make the loud whistling sound when they fly so it's harder to know when to look at the feeders.

Last year I got some good closeup photos with my 28mm lens while standing within a meter of the feeders (for some reason they don't seem to be bothered by my presence as long as I don't move). Now I have the vastly superior 100mm macro lens which should allow for some extreme closeups (though the macro is a bit slow when focused in really close, so who knows). Stay tuned.

So today I handed in my thesis to a "derivative classifier" which means that they read it and determine if anything in the thesis is classified. It's required for anything published from the laboratory. Naturally, if the verdict came back "classified" I would be in deep doo-doo. But, as expected, I got a clean bill of thesis health. It's good to get that out of the way. I wasn't really worried, but it was still hovering there ahead of me anyway.

I also deposited my mucho bling loan from Rob to cover my tuition expenses for this term. Despite going by the self-imposed moniker "Evil Rob," he's actually a pretty swell guy to have as a friend. The reimbursement form got turned in, though it needs my receipt from the bursar's office indicating I actually paid my tuition and an email from Kim indicating that I've finished my academic responsibilities for this term.

Just after defending, I'll go pay off my bursar's bill with my newfound $$$ and fax the receipt off to LANL to start that paperwork rolling. Once I submit the thesis and all of that is taken care of, I get the department to write a letter to HR at the lab indicating that I have effectively graduated, and that gets the other major paperwork machine in motion - getting me transfered to my postdoc at N-1.

...so close...

For some reason, between 03:30 and 04:50 this morning, my journal received approximately 140 spam comments for 13 different URLs. Of course MT-blacklist only operates on a single regex at a time (or at least my version does), so I had to go through the cycle 13 times. Way less annoying than removing 140 messages manually, but still. ugh.

Bean and Jules have decided that I have an evil twin walking among us. And that person is... Bronson Arroyo. The resemblance is weak at best, this image is probably the closest likeness.

Not being a baseball fan, I've never heard of this person. But can that name really be for real? It sounds like some kind of bizarre latino porn name. Anyone with the first or last name "Bronson" is automatically tough though. But that's just another reason why he can't really be my evil twin. Unless it's like he got all the tough and I got all the nerd...

The following is an email I just sent to the entire Nuclear Science and Engineering Department at MIT. If you are allergic to boredom, please do not read this abstract without wearing the special safety goggles.

I am pleased to announce my thesis defense, which will take place on Monday, April 25th at 10:00am in NW17-218. Everyone is welcome to attend.

Cheers,
-mouser

Title: Adaptive Multigroup Radiation Diffusion

Thesis Author: Richard Williams
Thesis Advisor: Prof. Kim Molvig
Thesis Reader: Prof. Sidney Yip

Abstract:

This thesis describes the development and implementation of an algorithm for dramatically increasing the accuracy and reliability of multigroup radiation diffusion simulations at low group counts. This is achieved by allowing the energy group boundaries to move in energy space as the simulation evolves. This adaption in energy space effectively removes the sensitivity of multigroup diffusion to group boundary placement and makes the technique a viable option for large, computationally expensive computer simulations.

Traditional multigroup radiation diffusion solvers break down at small group counts because of the coarse discretization of highly nonlinear material opacity. Small changes in the group boundary energies can lead to wildly different mean opacities and therefore significant changes in simulation output. This sensitivity has rendered the technique unpredictable and it is generally considered to be not worth the added computational expense.

Unfortunately, multigroup diffusion is the only method available for adding frequency dependence to the radiation field in a standard diffusion solver. When attempting to model a system that includes a non-equilibrium radiation field, frequency-dependent effects become important. While running multigroup simulations with large numbers of groups is a reliable method for obtaining increased accuracy over grey diffusion, the computational expense scales linearly with the number of groups. For large simulations, running multigroup diffusion with increased group counts is infeasible and running with small group counts is unreliable. This has led to a tendency to use grey diffusion even in environments where the radiation field is known to be out of equilibrium with the material.

This thesis includes a new derivation of the diffusion equation and an overview of traditional ``static'' multigroup radiation diffusion along with an analysis of its shortcomings. The sensitivity due to group boundary placement for small numbers of groups is shown. Data are presented which demonstrate that small group count multigroup calculations can actually provide a worse answer than grey diffusion.

A system is developed and implemented for allowing the multigroup energy boundaries to ``adapt,'' or move in energy space, as the simulation evolves as well as a method for determining where increased energy resolution is needed for an arbitrary set of material opacities. By adapting in energy space, the sensitivity of multigroup diffusion to group boundary placement is ameliorated.

Data are presented that demonstrate a reliable increase in accuracy for adaptive multigroup diffusion as the number of groups is increased - even at very small group counts. Furthermore, the data show that the level of accuracy obtained with the adaptive multigroup approach is equivalent to or better than the best-case data obtained with the static multigroup approach.

This result is more profound than a simple increase in accuracy - the increased reliability makes multigroup radiation diffusion a viable tool for large non-equilibrium simulations. Users are no longer forced to use the grey diffusion method which is known to be physically inadequate. Furthermore, users are finally free to incorporate a frequency-dependent treatment of radiation without the accuracy ambiguities of standard multigroup diffusion.

Last fall, I was blathering on about PDA/phone convergance and how I'd like to have all of my small portable electronic gadgets together in one device. A sort of PDA/cellphone/mp3 player/GPS/voice recorder/pager/camera/etc.

I was sort of waiting to see where they put my office over at N-1 before biting the bullet and buying a Treo 650. Unfortunately, they put me in the one building that is behind the fence, so I can't have a cellphone (or most of that other stuff) while I'm in my office. This fact dramatically diminishes my desire to have the phone to the point where the enormous price tag makes it not worth it.

As it stands, I already have stand-alone versions of the cellphone, GPS, pager, and camera (and if you count my ancient Palm III that I never use, then technically I have a PDA too). What I don't have is an MP3 player or a voice recorder. I don't really need a voice recorder, but it would be nice for taking quick notes at random times and jotting them down later. The fact that I won't be buying a Treo any time soon has made my desire for a cheap stand-alone MP3 player somewhat accentuated.

So today I bought an iRiver iFP-799. It's a very small 1GB flash MP3/OGG player with a recorder feature (built in mic and line-in) and an FM radio tuner to boot. At 1 gig of flash, it is at the high end of solid-state MP3 players. Not as much space as a HDD-based design, but the no moving parts factor plays heavily for me as I expect to use it while mountaineering and cycling, which could subject it to some strong shocks. The reviews mention that you need an optional firmware upgrade to let the device function as a generic USB storage device, and that without that you can't download anything from the device to the computer. I'm not sure what this will mean for the voice recorder. It'll require some futzing when it shows up next week.

But the feature set kicks the pants off of the iPod shuffle (and, aside from the smaller storage capacity, most HDD MP3 players as well). I've heard great things about iRiver as a manufacturer.

This thing is going to make airline flights so much more enjoyable, and by the looks of things I might be spending a lot of time in the air this summer. Mountaineering should also benefit greatly as the music will distract me from the small agonies of climbing. Same for biking. Robin insists that this is a Bad Idea™, though others I've talked to around here say that they do it all the time because the traffic outside of town is minimal.

While it is true that I'll be all done by the evening of the 29th of April, there are certain major deadlines between now and then. The first of those deadlines is tomorrow evening, by when I have to have the thesis document done. Not done done, but more than rough draft done. Friday Molvig returns from his obligations to help me polish it and I want to maximize the time I have to deal with his suggestions (all of which I'm sure I will love). So by tomorrow I've tasked myself to have the thesis complete to the point where I'd pass it if I were him.

I just finished off the two sections that were incomplete, so now I have tomorrow to do a full read-through (191 pages GAH!!) and any polishing I can think of. This puts me in good shape for this first big deadline.

The next major deadline is Friday, April 22. This is the last day before I leave for Cambridge, so I have to have my presentation done and a draft printout of the thesis made. It'll be the last day that I can create any data (I can't run the code from MIT). There is a ton of logistical crap that I have to take care of before this date as well, as I intend to be working for a different group the day I come back. But I'll worry about this after tomorrow.

So some CalTech folks showed up at MIT prefrosh weekend and hacked us. They put up a website describing their effort and a good-natured request for a hacking rivalry. Some of the hacks were somewhat half-assed, but of course these people were on foreign territory and probably had little time to organize anything more impressive. The laser thing was very cool, and the banner (while executed rather poorly) was inspired.

I like the idea of there being an actual rivalry between tech schools with good-natured fun like this instead of the pathetic one-way "rivalries" that exist now. For some reason MIT has a complex about Harvard, CIT about MIT, Harvey Mudd about CIT, etc. At least Harvard and Yale actually pay attention to each other...

I'm really impressed that the CalTech people flew across the country on their own dime for this. What I'm not impressed with is the response. MIT's general hacking mailing list exploded into a huge display of asshatitude. Then the whole thing got Slashdotted and complete tools on both coasts chimed in on the biggest nerd dick-waving event I have ever witnessed. How pathetic.

It could have been something cool, but people took it personally and couldn't put their egos aside.

So Jason recently posted a review of how his fundraising drive went. Apparently he did quite well and I'm happy for him. I hope his adventure in audience-supported blogging succeeds, and I'm glad to be a contributor.

Jason's a pretty modest guy, and despire what I'm sure was a lot of pressure by the unseen masses to reveal the absolute magnitude of his fundraising income, he chose instead to provide us with the following graph:

Now he explicitly indicates that this plot is not to scale and was not generated from actual data, so much of the following commentary is largely irrelevant...
but I wanted to share something about this graph that just give me the giggles.

It appears that the comfort zone has a maximum! Apparently, beyond 1/2 of his previous salary would give him the willies. Though it is not labeled, I like to think of the region extending above the blue area as The Uncomfortable Zone.

Basically, the entire "content" of this plot can be reduced to: "I made most of my money early-on, with diminishing returns as time progressed. I didn't quite make my goal but was close enough." Everything else is meaningless eye candy. SCIENCE!! Guides-to-the-eye overlayed on actual data are frowned upon as it is; a non-scaled trendline with no data? tsk-tsk, physics degree-holding Jason... I'm telling Feller!

This coming week is the last week I have to polish up my thesis. After tonight's contributions to the document, I am down to just fleshing out two sections: the Compton scattering contribution to the diffusion equation and my simulation results. Everything else is written in a form that I feel is acceptable for submittal. I wrote my acknowledgements and conclusion tonight and sorted through the various missing references and multiply-defined labels. It's pretty tight.

Friday, Kim returns from his XDRC obligations and we spend the following week making sure that he thinks its tight too. Also, I have to update my thesis defense presentation to include all of the upgrades, new data, and what-not that has occured since my pre-defense defense.

I fly to Boston on the 23rd and defend on the morning of Monday, April 25th. The remainder of that week is spent franticly jumping through whatever logistical hoops MIT requires of me. If all goes well, I will be done with everything by Friday, April 29th. My thesis will be approved and submitted, I will have the necessary paperwork for getting reimbursed by the lab for my tuition expenses, and I will have the necessary paperwork for convincing the lab that I am done so that N-1 can initiate my transfer to my post-doc which I am eagerly awaiting.

This is the home stretch, and it's looking good. Two months ago I would have told you this outcome was impossible.

I bought an APC UPS back in the summer of 1998 for my power conditioning needs. It has finally crapped out. It died in a relatively humorous way... It became really sensitive to power fluctuations, kicking over to battery on transients caused by such monumental events as the microwave or TV being turned on. When the battery finally decayed to the point where it couldn't support my computer for the duration of these tiny transients, the result was... pathetic.

I'd turn on the TV and the computer would immediately shut off. When I took the UPS out of the system, everything worked great - but of course I had no surge protection or any backup for actual brown/black outs. Spring in Los Alamos includes more than its fair share of lightning and I have a bigass ham antenna on my roof. And besides, the power here isn't really all that reliable anyway. So I want a UPC. I went out and bought a new APC unit and it is finally installed. Now I can watch TV without shutting down my computer, and I can microwave stuff too. What a deal.

A friend asked why I didn't just replace the battery in the old one. For starters, it wasn't a unit that was designed for that so it might have been rather technical, but it was also over-reacting with small transients. The new UPS doesn't switch over when the TV comes up to speed, so I think there was actually something wrong with the controller in the old UPS.

As a side note... both UPS's have red lights on the back that light up if your 3-prong outlets aren't correctly wired. And since 1998 I have yet to find an outlet in any place I've lived which was wired correctly. In my last apartment I determined empirically that the ground pin was actually not connected to anything. Someone had just gone through and replaced the original 2-prong outlets with 3-prongers without actually changing the wiring. Great. Not sure about the current place, but it wouldn't surprise me.

Dad: the same is true of your basement outlets. :)

So at 4:00pm today there was a annular solar eclipse. Here in Los Alamos, we got approximately 5% maximum coverage. One of the big astronomy buffs in the group brought in a safe-viewing filter. We went outside of the building briefly to take turns looking at the unmagnified disc of the sun with a tiny notch taken out of the edge.

As eclipses go, it was hardly worth mentioning. But there was something fun and silly about making an effort to look at it. This was my fourth solar eclipse.

I guess it's good I got some astronomy in today, as high winds and possibly clouds have cancelled tonight's star party.

UPDATE: Here is a picture of the eclipse taken from nearby Tijeras, NM, by Becky Ramotowski. That's as much coverage as we got around here. :)

Robin is leaving town on Saturday morning to begin his postdoc at CalTech. The major events in our friendship always seem to be accompanied by large quantities of steak (usually mountaineering post-climb food fests). So we thought it would be appropriate to fire up the barbeque and make really top notch steaks before he left.

We splurged for a three-pound tenderloin (effectively a giant fillet mignon sans bacon) which cost roughly $30. Robin trimmed it down to ultra-lean while I made mashed potatoes. This was my first try at mashed potatoes, and it came out really well. Four large potatoes, a half cup of cream, a stick of butter, a teaspoon of salt, a teaspoon of garlic powder, and a tablespoon of freshly ground black pepper.

The goal was to make Robin's infamous ultra-pepper steak which basically has a solid crust of coarsely crushed black pepper on both sides, so I set about crushing several tablespoons of peppercorns in a makeshift mortar/pestle setup. This took awhile, but so did Robin's meticulous preparation of the steaks.

Once the slabs-o-meat were ready, they were salted generously and then the pepper was pressed into the surfaces. These were then thrown on the grill to sear. We both like our steaks rare, and the result was perfect. I took lots of pictures of the process, I'll upload them when I get a chance.

Best steak I've had in a long time. I'd say it was in the top 3 steaks I've ever had. And between the steaks and mashsed potatoes, I ate a lot. Neither of us wanted to move, so we watched a movie (Sideways) and chatted about our future mountaineering goals. Hopefully one or both of us will be able to travel to climb with the other in the future.

Just paid The Man™. Actually, I should not bitch... I'm owed refunds by both State and Federal. If I'm lucky, the refund will get deposited before I pay off MIT's monster tuition bill (~$16k).

TurboTax's online filing is nice, though to file electronically I needed to have my 2003 forms which I can't find for the life of me. I thought I knew where they were, but for some reason only my 2002 forms were there. No idea what happened to last year's forms. So the end result was I had to print out the forms as generated by TT and mail them in. No worries.

This is the first year since I've been doing my own taxes that all of my income came from a single state (this year I wasn't getting RA funding from MIT, so I made no money in Massachusetts - never thought that would be a good thing!), so I only had one state form to fill out. The NM state folks also have a nice online system, which also requires that I reference my 2003 forms... so I had to print thiers out and do it by hand as well. But since the NM state form is only a single page, that was no big deal.

Done! They're in the mail. Woo! See ya next year, taxes.

Since setting up the CCD camera on the finch nest in the carport on Sunday afternoon, I hadn't seen a single finch at the nest or on the webcam . I was thinking maybe I scared them off with the camera being so close, or perhaps they just abandoned the nest for reasons I didn't understand. But today when I came home from work I saw a finch fly out from the nest. Cool!

So I went to the webcam computer and started going through the archive of saved images looking for evidence of past visitation. And there was quite a bit!

Click on the above image to see the gallery of highlights from the past four days. Also, if you want excruciating detail and every frame that includes birds, try this link. The frequency of bird visits to the nest has increased steadily over the past three days, and I suspect that they are very close to egg-laying time.

This makes sense, naturally, because it means that I will be out of town (defending my thesis woo!) when the eggs hatch. Oh well. I'm going to turn up the frequency of cam updates tomorrow.

Like everyone else in the universe, I've been having fun today with Google Maps' new satellite imagery feature. I can't remember where I saw it mentioned first, but it's everywhere by now. I love how Google doesn't have to make product announcements; they have a huge grass-roots advertising department made up of all the nerds in the world that appreciate good interfaces and high usability.

Anyway, so I'm looking at the Google Maps satellite view of the white house (pull the zoom slider all the way to the top for this) and I notice some interesting things.

Examine the (brownish) roof of the white house and the two near-identical greenish-roofed buildings to the either side of it. They are totally featureless and monotone. Compare with the roof of any other building nearby. These images have clearly been edited to remove the content of these three roofs.

Also, check out the interior courtyards of the two greenish-roofed buildings. Look a little pixellated to you? Me too. Apparently there's something there that is both visible at this resolution and worth concealing from the general public. I imagine the Secret Service has their hands in this, exerting some influence on any company (in the US, at least) that has the technical capability to produce satellite images of Washington.

So feel free to speculate on both the content of the wiped roofs as well as the courtyards. Personally I like to think that the presidential escape pod, in the shape of a Big Boy™, is in one of the courtyards.

Now I'm hunting around Washington for assorted other touched-up images. Join in the fun.

* The entire national capital and assorted nearby buildings are pixellated out...

* No idea what this is... (though it is just east of the Russian Embassy...) Update: It's the US Naval Observatory, ostensibly where the Vice President lives. I guess that's why it is blurred out. Or may be it's all those ATOMS in that clock messing with the satellite...

* Well here you have it. Looks like I got them all. Woo...

While waiting for a simulation to run just now, I started paging through my Colorado Fourteeners guidebook, which I am now allowed to do as it appears I will have some quantity of free weekends this summer and fall. Last year I successfully climbed ~13 14ers. This summer I think I will have fewer free weekends for climbing, my standard climbing partner is moving away next week, and I've knocked off a bunch of the really easy 14ers already... so I expect to get fewer this year. But I made a list of the ones that I'm likely to attempt this summer given time. For the most part, this list consists of the remaining somewhat easy ones (I am very very out of shape, as yesterday's very very short bike ride indicated).

Quandary and Sherman - nearby each other, both easy, both could be done with spring snow on the ground.

Sneffels - Challenging with snow, easy otherwise. A nice weekend trip. County highpoint.

Princeton - A nice single peak for a short weekend trip.

Castle, Conundrum - A sort-of double, easy, long drive though... Double county highpoint.

Handies, Redcloud, and Sunshine - all nearby, could be done on a 3-day weekend comfortably.

Huron, Missori, and La Plata - all nearby, another 3-day weekend trip.

Holy Cross - A tougher one, but an excellent overnight stay at 13,000'. Would make a great end-of-season finale. County highpoint.

Capitol - Another option for an end-of-season finale. Backpacking trip, challenging fourth-class knife edge at summit.

So that's 13.5 peaks (Conundrum doesn't really count), which should occupy me for the entire climbing season. I'll deviate from this list if other people are organizing trips, but otherwise look for me to start pecking these off in May (assuming I'm not on travel).

So sometime while I was at work today my torrent client successfully downloaded the last of the MAME 0.92 CHDs. For the first time in years, I have a complete set. Unfortuantely, in the time it took me to get all the missing CHDs they've come out with several new versions of MAME (they're on 0.95 now). I'm also irritated that the complete collection of all ROMs and CHDs comes out to exactly 8.06 DVDs full.

Anyway, keeping up to date should be a lot easier now, as the number of CHDs released per update is generally very small and the ROMs are available in bundles.

What does being up-to-date do for me, you ask? Well it ensures that I have every single mahjong game known to man, including the weird Japanese manga/mahjong hybrids, which I find very disturbing.

While on the subject... could there be two less-suited topics than mahjong and cartoon erotica? The current production philosophy in Japanese arcade games seems to be:

* Take a relatively bland game that people like
* Add cartoons of semi-nude and highly unrealistic women
* PROFIT!!!

Yes, Step 2 has finally been revealed.

But seriously. Manga Pachinko?? Manga Mahjong? What's next, Manga Algebra?

Quadratic Formula Sexy Reaction, from Namco

Once again, the house finches have prepared a nest in my carport. And, just like last year, I've put a night-vision CCD camera on it. I will periodically take full-color images of the nest contents and post them to the gallery. Here is the first image, showing a completed but as-of-yet eggless nest:

For higher resolution, check the full-sized version in the gallery here. In the meantime, feel free to enjoy a "live" view of the nest on

This is a 400lpi B&W CCD camera with six IR LED illuminators to enable you to catch all the birdy action 24/7. The image is updated once a minute.

So for the first year of my graduate career I was signed up as a Masters student. In the fall of 1999, the class ring people made the rounds and said that now was the time to buy your ring if you are receiving your degree in the spring of 2000. So I went ahead and bought one.

It was my intention at the time to continue on for a PhD, but the ring company, Jostens, said that they would upgrade my masters ring to a PhD ring when I got the new degree, no charge. Seemed like a good idea at the time... I wasn't really sure if I would be able to pass my general exams, which would have left me with just a masters degree anyway... and the upgrade was easy.

However, before the end of fall '99, Molvig decided to transfer me over directly to the PhD track without doing a masters along the way. So there I was with a class ring for a degree I don't have. A little weird, but either I'd be getting a PhD and upgrading the ring, or I'd fail my quals and get the masters anyway.

Fast forward to now, when it is clear that I will be getting my PhD this spring. I went to the graduate student council's webpage about the new graduate student brass rat, and what do I see? They've changed vendors.

Jostens is no longer making the rings, and Balfour has taken over. My arguments about price fixing in the class ring business aside, this invalidates the promise made earlier by Jostens to upgrade my ring for free. So now I will have to shell out an additional $300+ for a second ring, and I'll be left with this masters degree ring that A) I don't deserve and B) I don't need.

SO. I have several grams of 10k gold that I don't know what to do with. I don't feel right pawning it and I don't really want to keep it in its current form. What I'm thinking is maybe devising a cool way to melt it or otherwise change its form into something more interesting/useful.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Oh yeah, and the new design is so much better than the one I have now. In particular, there is a special icon for the department you received your degree from. My department, Course 22 (aka Nuclear Science and Engineering, the department formerly known as Nuclear Engineering - now with SCIENCE!!), gets a sweet radiation trefoil.

I managed to sell my first-edition copy of Uranometria 2000.0 Volume II to a fellow astronomer in my group at the lab, and went ahead and purchased the second-edition for myself. It arrived yesterday so now I have a complete set that is self-consistent.

My Jetboil also arrived, though the fuel had to ship separately so I can't test it out. But it sure is light...

Also arriving was the lightning detector electronics for my weather-station-to-be.

I ordered some accessories for my 100mm macro lens in late December; apparently they finally shipped yesterday. wtf?? Nice work, Adorama...

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In other news, I watched "Touching the Void" last night - what a story. Hard to believe it's all true. Then Mikki made lasagna to celebrate her graduate school acceptance. Then I fell asleep, for 11 hours. Aaaahh