<Begin Plug> I have been using a website called mapmyrun.com to record my runs (I increment the distance approximately once per week). You can see my history and all my runs here. You can also look up other peoples runs in your area. <End Plug>

I buy jalapeños to put on my sandwiches and omelets (egg white omelets that is) every week, and they are usually pretty tame. However, this week I went to Earth Fare and got some of them. About 10 seconds after biting into my sandwich at lunch I was in physical pain. Sweat was beading on my face, my tongue was numb, and my sinuses were gushing – i.e. a bit embarrassing. Note to self: organic jalapeños are much hotter than Kroger jalapeños . . .

Since I have nothing to do at my apartment (and the people at the lab are mostly anti-social scientists), I have been taking weekly group dancing lessons in Knoxville. So far, I have ‘learned’ (and by learned I mean learned the basic steps of) the foxtrot, basic swing, and waltz. Learning to dance well is one of my life goals, and, like finishing a marathon, I am trying to do something about this summer. Besides, the ratio of girls to guys at these classes is generally 4-1. Every Friday night, the studio has a dance party for the join purpose of having fun and practicing. Tomorrow I will go for the first time, since I think I might actually not embarrass myself too badly after four lessons.

I finally got one piece of forwarded mail from Berkeley. It was a Time Magazine from May 26^th. If this 2 month delay keeps up, my mail from July in Berkeley should come to Oak Ridge in mid-Septemeber – a month after I leave… I am not sure I can use the Postal Service as an example of something the government doesn’t screw up to the “Fair Tax” people anymore.

I am going hiking in the Smokey Mountain National Park on Saturday.

Thursday: 3.1 Miles – 27 Minutes

Below are some pictures of my apartment and cubicle:

Over the last few week, I have been spending most of my time coding in an attempt to improve and add new features to our groups’ codes.  I had almost forgotten how fun and satisfying coding can be, even if it is in Fortran.  We recently moved to an SVN programming environment, which has drastically improved our code organization.  Additionally, it turns out the courses I was required to take as part of the CSGF actually are directly relevant to my research.  I solved a nasty hidden bug in our MPI implementation the other day, that I’d have never have figured out without my CS courses.  Doesn’t it always feel more satisfying when you solve a problem with some complicated obscure knowledge that you struggled to gain?  Usually, the next day, you find out that you could have solved  the problem using a fifth graders’ knowledge anyway; which is why you should never think about a problem again after solving it   Anyway, hopefully all this will also lead to some new papers sometime relatively soon…

We were technically number one in the country for 15 minutes . . . Ah well . . .

In other news, I built a bunch of a new computers for my group this week. Then, I built a beowulf cluster out of the old ones. It is pretty awesome – my own personal supercomputer next to my desk It was actually rather easy using the RocksClusters Linux distro.

I finished listening to the LOTR at night. It was a bit exhausting to be honest, because I had to keep getting up and going to wikipedia to look up all the names. It is amazing what a huge and complete world Tolkein created that is only touched upon in the movies. It is pretty incredible and perhaps the best part of his stories; however, I stand by my earlier statement that this is the one case where the movies are actually more enjoyable than the books.

Ooh, and next week Fedora 8 is released – dances around anxiously.

I’m back, and I have pictures. Here are some notable ones:

My New Nephew

My Old Nephew

Notice the License Plate

Uncut

WW2 Memorial

As you can probably tell, I didn’t get a chance to go the Holocaust museum since I only had about 2 hours of spare time. Instead, on Tuesday, I walked to the WW2 memorial which I hadn’t seen before.  It is easily the nicest memorial in DC. I particularly like all the metal castings (is that the right word?) depicting scenes from the homefront and battlefront. I took a bunch of pictures of them. Take a look – here.

The conference was very nice. I met a lot of people who do relatively similar research, although the most interesting talks I heard were on origami and image recognition (i.e. how programs could identify the subject of a picture without human input).

I got an LG vx8600 after dropping my old phone with an already dying battery in the pool (you might remember that this was a replacement for one I left in a cab in Denver). The new one is quite nice in that it is very slim and can play mp3s, take video etc… It actually stores everything on a 2 GB micro SD card which makes it extremely easy to sync with linux (i.e. ignoring included crapware). Good work LG on not being evil.