Category Archives: Personal

Basilica Block Party

Music, Personal

Yesterday evening I attended the Basilica Block Party, which is a big outdoor concert in downtown Minneapolis. It’s on the grounds of a Basilica and is sponsored by the church, but it’s really just a big rock concert. I ended up hearing the Olympic Hopefuls, Carbon Leaf, and the Wallflowers. I’d been wanting to hear the Olympic Hopefuls since I missed their visit to Carleton, and I’m glad I caught them yesterday. The singer had a few intonation problems, but the songs were good and the band was clearly enthused. Carbon Leaf is a group from Virginia that I’m not really familiar with. The lead singer was pretty good and the crowd seemed pleased, but their song writing didn’t quite match their performance – the best songs they played were covers. The Wallflowers were clearly the big draw of the evening, and the crowd was very large and enthusiastic. They sounded very polished and had a few good songs, but most of them sounded pretty much the same. I think the live setting drowned out some of the vocal nuances, but that may be a bit generous. Still, it was a fun evening.

Work has been a bit hectic lately. Some days I’ve felt overwhelmed by work I need to do, but other days I’ve spent waiting for emails from my collaborators to give me some idea of what to do. I think I’ve finally got a specific objective, but unfortunately I don’t really know how to accomplish it yet. I need to learn enough OpenGL to visualize the results of a wavelet transform. Whatever, I’m sure I’ll figure it out.

Minneapolis Update

Personal

Work has been kind of strange this week. I’ve been working on a Java applet front in for a web service that does wavelet transformations. Basic it’s just been Java interface programming, which is tedius but doable. Unfortunately, the computer that has been hosting the web service stopped accepting network connections on Wednesday. I’ll spare you the gory details, but suffice it to say that it was rather difficult to test my code, and I ended up spending a lot longer working on the gui than I otherwise would have. After much work by a collaborator in Montreal, we finally got the machine back up and running today, which means I should be able to finish up the wavelet service next week.

It’s also been a strange week because lots of people are leading. Ben, Dave’s (the professor) right hand man, is leaving for Boulder tomorrow where he’s going to grad school. Veronica, whose been visiting from Switzerland, is also leaving, and Dave himself is going to China until the middle of July. The office will be quiet next week.

In other news, I ordered a laptop today! I will soon be the owner of a brand new 12-inch Powerbook G4. I was debating between the iBook and the Powerbook, but the current iBook revision is getting a bit long in the tooth. Besides, the excellent Apple Student Developer discount brought it to almost the same price. I should get it in plenty of time to set it up to my liking before leaving for Budapest.

The Dark Knight at the Mall

Movies, Personal

I went to the Mall of America yesterday. Usually I’m not a fan of the place, but I enjoyed myself this time. Part of the excitment was riding the new light rail line to get there. It’s kind of a long walk to get to the nearest stop from my dorm, but it was worh it. I’m a sucker for mass transit, and this didn’t disappoint. There’s something about a train car occupied by so many different kinds of people that always makes me feel more connected to a city. Next weekend I think I’ll take the train the other way and explore downtown.

I saw Batman Begins at the movie theatre in the mall. I enjoyed it quite a bit, though I’m not sure it transcended the summer action flick genre. I also admit that I’m not a Batman expert, so I may have missed some of the references, and I certainly missed whatever liberties the movie took with the mythology. I watched the animated series when I was younger, but I’ve never seen the other live action stuff. In any case, I’d recommend seeing this film. It may not make you smarter, but it’s certainly a fun ride.

Minneapolis

Personal

So as some of you may have noticed, I missed that Carleton update after all. Suffice it to say that the year went and I’ve emerged relatively unscathed on the other side. There were some high points and some low points, but all-in-all things turned out okay, and I’m confident that the next years will be even better. I’m currently at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis working as an intern at the University of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute . I’m here through August 12th, at which point I will return to Omaha for a few days and then head off to Budapest for fall term.

I really can’t get over the size of the Univeresity here. It’s like they took the buildings at Carleton, magnified them, and then scattered them over an area half the size of Northfield. I will post some pictures once I free up some webspace, but suffice it to say that the student center has a bowling alley, a 400 person movie theatre, a foodcourt, and bookstore the size of Barnes and Nobles – and it’s only one of the two student centers!

The facilites at MSI (the Supercomputing Institute) are pretty amazing.
They have several super computers, and very nice labs full of Suns, SGIs, and high end Macs and PCs. More directly significant to me is our our research group’s office. We’ve got about 5 computers, including two Macs with 23 inch displays! Editing with vi never looked so good :). Again I’ll post some pictures soon.

The project itself seems pretty interesting. I’m actually working for a Geophysics professor who’s doing visualition of very large geological datasets. I’m not working on the visualization per say, but one of the goals is to make these visualiation tools available through the web in a standardized way. At this point I’m still learning the tools and frameworks we’re using (gSOAP for web services and NaradaBrokering as a GRID enabled middleware system). The other people who have worked on my particular part of the project are currently in Germany and Florida, so I’ve had to learn a lot on my own, but I think I’m starting to get a hold of things.

As a whole, the research group seems pretty close, and it’s kind of cool to be part of a group like that. There’s currently a visitor from Poland helping out, another intern from Oberlin, and several from the University of Minnesota.

I’m still figuring things out, but I think it’s going to be okay. I’ll post pictures soon.

Summer Classes

Math, Personal

I just registered for Differential Equations and Contemporary Moral Problems at UNO over the summer. Not exactly the most thrilling plans, but it should keep me busy after I get back from WWDC. Nothing like a little math in the morning to spice up the summer. Or something.