Fall 2005

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27 December 2005

I'd been reading about a video game titled Katamari Damacy for quite a while now, and it seemed pretty interesting and totally bizarre. However, I don't have a PlayStation (neither 1 nor 2, nor do I plan on getting either of them, nor the third installment -- I prefer Nintendo and I'll get the Revolution when it comes out), therefore I didn't get the game. But, as it happens, John has a PS2, and his brother, Fletcher, has one too. So I got the game this weekend and we've been playing it non-stop in Fletcher's PS2. When we leave, John will take the game with him and then I'll play in his PS2 when I go visit him. And in about a year and a half, that won't even be an issue :-) Anyhoo, the concept of the game is so simple and so weird, and it's so fun to play too. The King of all Cosmos got drunk one night and accidentally destroyed all the stars. So he sends the Prince (the player) to fix the mess. The King is a gigantic larger-than-life man, and the Prince is a tiny little weird green thingie. And how does the Prince get the stars, you ask? Well, you are given a "katamari" which is a ball -- a sticky ball. Anything that is of a smaller volume than the ball will stick to it. You roll it around and grab stuff that sticks to the katamari, thus making it grow. When the katamari reaches a certain size, it can become a star. Easy, huh? It becomes challenging because the levels have time limits and target sizes that can be very hard to achieve. And there's so many weird things that you can pick up with the katamari! Oh man, and it can grow to such a big size that in the last level you can even pick up islands and mountains and clouds and rain and tornados. Fletcher got his last level katamari up to about 850 meters in diameter. Anyway, it's a really cool game and it has now officially been added to my list of Favorite Games Ever, right next to Super Mario 64 (and DS version).

25 December 2005

Feliz Navidad! Merry Christmas!

21 December 2005

Happy Winter Solstice! And appropriately enough, I'm back in State College, where a ton of snow has already accumulated. And I'm almost done writing up the Semester Project section of the Syllabus for my Astro 11 section that I'll be teaching next semester. And I have a ton of boxes in the floor in my room that I have to unpack at some point in time before the semester begins (John and I drive off to Ohio tomorrow to spend Christmas with his parents, so we probably won't unpack today... or tomorrow). Anyhoo... Happy Winter Solstice!

15 December 2005: 11:20pm

I stayed home today because the combination of snow, ice and freezing rain scared me. Snow alone is not too bad, but icy roads are slippery, and I didn't want to be sliding all over the place. I was able to re-schedule the meeting I had today for tomorrow, so that was fine. Tomorrow is going to be my last day in Goddard, and this meeting will be to put in order the paperwork required to establish my leave status. I'm really going to miss being here. For the first time in my life I feel like a grownup. I live on my own, in an apartment with no roomates. I go to work in a place where there are no classrooms and I have to wear a badge. And I really enjoy my work environment too. And I had tons of progress in my research... Next week I'll go back to State College, because next semester I will be back in Penn State. I enjoy being there, don't get me wrong. It's just that it's a very different experience from being here. The two cannot really be compared side-by-side, to be totally honest... I will be teaching Astro 11 next semester, as I've mentioned probably a gillion times before. I am now working on preparing the syllabus for my two sections, and along the way I am also gonna put some content on that "Teaching" page that up til now has only been a placeholder. And you know what I've realized, for the umpteenth time? That my HTML/CSS coding is a mess. Yes, yes it is. Now, here's the thing: you wouldn't know it from just looking at the website. I've gotten a great deal of compliments about this website from people I know and also from total strangers. I've received emails from random people out there on these here InterWebs who have stumbled upon my humble cyber-abode and enjoy my web design so much that they actually take the time out of their busy schedules to email me and let me know that they find my website to be very well organized and informative and many other pleasing adjectives. And this is very nice to hear, and it makes me very happy to know that there are people out there who enjoy it because I sure have put a lot of work into coding up the design. But dangit, I'm a perfectionist. Every time I realize there's something cumbersome or clunky in the code, something that could be made better, I start thinking of ways to improve it. And then I can't stop thinking about it until I actually do it. When I started the website it was easy to make these changes, but by now I have many, many files to alter, and in spite of having a master CSS file, it is hard because I can't have SSI scripts anyway (and these, btw, would make things oh-so-much easier because that way I wouldn't have to paste text that repeats on each page, such as the navigation bar)... Then there's the issue of this Update Archive that I want to turn into an actual blog so that I don't have to do the archiving by hand, as I've been doing for the past two years... BUT, for now, the page looks well and organized when you browse through it. And really, this turned into a rant, and I should be working on that Astro 11 syllabus that I probably should have written a few days ago, so yeah, I'm gonna go back to doing that...

14 December 2005: 11am

It is 11am. It is 19°F. I'm sitting in my living room where it is a nice and comfy 75°F. I don't wanna go outside! It's cold outside. *whine* ... However, given that it's my third-to-last day in Goddard, I have to leave the apartment and go to the office and clean out my desk. And tomorrow? Well, tomorrow there's gonna be a wintry mix, and that's the most annoying winter precipitation to drive in, but I have to go to Goddard because I have a meeting with the Coop coordinator. So, I can't really take a day off to just relax before my last day... Oh well... I guess I should get dressed and go to work then, in the frickin cold outside. I mean, come on. Nineteen degrees?! It's almost noon! And this is the Washington DC area! It's not supposed to be this cold here... or so I'd been told...

10 December 2005: 1:30pm

It has now been a week since I started taking Topamax (migraine prevention medicine), and I haven't had a single migraine. A whole week without a migraine! Yipee! *happy dance* I have, however, had a whole bunch of weird side-effects, the weirdest of which was the other day when I became zombified and the rest of the world went by in slow motion. I've also noticed that my feet feel pins and needles a lot more frequently than the occasional moment when I sit on my foot and it falls asleep. Most unfortunate of all is the fact that soda is tasting different to me now. As everyone that knows me knows, soda to me is like water, in particular Coca-Cola and Pepsi. And now they taste weird. At first I brushed it off thinking that maybe the one I was drinking was going bad or something, but no. Every soda I've had this week has tasted weird. Therefore, it must be related to the migraine prevention pill. Dammit... But hey, no migraines!

9 December 2005: 6pm

It snowed last night and this morning, so I decided to come to work in the afternoon. No biggie, since all I needed to do was finish the last details on my AAS poster. I'm doing the poster really early because today is Cole's last day in Goddard for the semester. He's going to a conference in Sweden and then it's off for the holidays, so the next time I see him will be at AAS, and well, it would probably be a bad idea to wait until the actual meeting to prepare the poster :-P hehehe. My poster is now finished. It looks all pretty and stuff. I'll double-check that it has no typos on Monday (won't do any work this weekend, hehe), and then I'll print it. Ahh, it feels so good to do a poster well before the deadline -- unlike for the APS meeting in April in which my poster was printed the day before I flew to Tampa... And now Cole is gone. Off to Sweden to not freeze because he's a polar bear who likes ridiculously cold temperatures. I'm gonna miss him, he's a great advisor. Well, it's not like I'll never see him again; he's still gonna be my advisor, after all, but I'm gonna be in Penn State and he in Goddard. And when I come back to Goddard, he'll be in UMD, so the dynamics are gonna be different. No longer will I be able to walk across the hall and bug him every time I have a question, and no longer will I be reminded to not procrastinate from across the hall, hehe. But I'm sure I'll get emails reminding me to stop procrastinating anyway ;-) hehehe... Enjoy Sweden Cole! And may the FSM bring you much pasta and cover you with marinara sauce this holiday season :-) hee heee hee hee hee. And now I'm going home, because it's 6pm and it's Friday and there's no advisor around and I've already finished what I needed to do today :-)

8 December 2005: 9am

Still feeling a little weird, not as weird as yesterday at least, but still weird nonetheless... Anyhoo, Cole sent me a link to this op-ed column on USA Today about intelligent design. Oh dear. There's so many things there that make me want to jump out and give the authors a middle-school science book (but, of course, I'd try to find one from outside the States) and slap them on the head with it. No scientists ever thought the universe was shrinking, dumbass! Geez! Ok, ok, *deep breath*... Anyway, I have to go get ready to go to work, so I won't comment on the article any further (at least for now), but still. It is very infuriating to see just how uninformed some people are and then how they can get up on their soapbox and then proclaim that they're all for scientific equality, when it's clear they don't even know what the words"scientific theory" mean.

7 December 2005: 4:30pm

I just found out [albeit a few hours ago] that Cole reads my webpage. Hi Cole! *waves hand* I'm not procrastinating :-) Anyway, here's the thing today: I've been feeling slooowwww and tiiiired all day, as if the rest of the world is going by in slow motion... Could this be a side-effect from the Topamax, finally kicking in? I hope not...

6 December 2005: 9am

Adventures in Procrastination: waking up in the morning and realizing that you have no more clean sweaters because they're all sitting in a pile of dirty clothes on the floor. Hehe, thus, I have to do laundry now, in the morning, before going to work :-P ... And in unrelated matters, it snowed some three or four inches in Beltsville, and it looks really pretty, at least from the inside of my apartment's balcony. The snow didn't stick to the road (not even the parking lot), which I'm guessing it's due to the salt treatment the night before. But it does look really pretty on the grass and the trees and the parked cars. I wonder if the lakes are frozen (there's a couple of artificial lakes on the grounds of my apartment complex). I bet they'd look pretty...

5 December 2005: 2:30pm

Gasp! Flurries! I gotta admit, the snow does look pretty when it's falling...

5 December 2005: 9am

Damn, it's gonna snow. Not that I mind, it's just that driving in it is annoying, and I'm concerned about the DC drivers around me. I've heard Beltway drivers aren't the most graceful snow drivers in the world, ya know. I guess today will be a Beltway Avoidance Day for me... My friend Julián (Puertorrican, who's only seen snow once and it was just a little bit) is all excited about the 3-5 inches of snow that are expected today. Me? Not so much. Meh. I just don't want to drive in it, but I have to. If I didn't have to, I'd be happier about the impending winter wonderland. And if I knew people here drove carefully during snow, I wouldn't be so worried. Granted, I've never actually been here during a snowfall, but I've heard stories. They sound very different from stories of driving in the snow in State College, where everyone knows how to deal with tons of snow... Have I become a northerner already? Am I looking down on the "snow rookies" and the "weather wussies"? I don't think so. I think it's just my normal, whiny, complain-y nature. And hey, it's gonna be cold all day, my whininess is gonna be on high. Oh well, time to get ready to go to work and face the day. Hopefully it won't start snowing heavily until late at night after I've come home from work and I'm comfortably sitting in my sofa watching TV and reading blogs.

3 December 2005: 4:45pm

Why, why, why, why do people slow down to 40mph (on an interstate, where the speed limit is 65) when they see a police car in the distance? Why? Why? Why?

3 December 2005

Just found a really funny Flash cartoon: Become Republican. It's hilarious (and, sadly, it's also so true).

2 December 2005

Last night I was freaking out, thinking about the blood test I'd be having this morning. Thinking about that rubber band thing squeezing my arm, then the technician rubbing the alcohol-soaked cotton ball on the spot where they'd be inserting the needle, and then the enormous pain associated with skin, muscle and blood vessel being pierced with a metal pointy thing, and then the feeling of having my blood sucked out through a hole, and finally feeling as if my entire circulatory system is being tugged on as the needle gets pulled out of the spot... You have to understand, someone who is phobic of needles will be accutely aware of the entire situation, and it is impossible to look away and ignore it. The same way that when I'm close to a bee or wasp (I'm phobic of those two insects also, btw), it is impossible for me to ignore it -- I have to scream, run away, and look for it at all times to make sure that it's not anywhere near me. Phobias might be defined as "irrational fears", but trust me, to someone who has a phobia, the fear is pretty real and reasonable... So, what happened this morning? Nothing. Yesterday afternoon I started getting a migraine around 6 or 7pm, and this migraine lasted all through the night and into the morning, and it started to go away around noon. Therefore, I wasn't able to leave the house and get my blood taken out of me. I'm thinking the migraine was triggered by my own enourmous fear of getting blood drawn. I called my doctor, and she said that I can start taking the migraine prevention medicine before I get the test results, so as soon as the annoying dizziness I'm experiencing goes away (Maxalt makes me dizzy after the migraine is gone), I'll go to CVS and get my Topamax prescription filled. Hopefully my migraines will decrease and be under control once I start the new medication, because I am just sick and tired of them.

1 December 2005

Today I went to a doctor during my lunch break. Well, my *extended* lunch break, since I had to leave work at 11am and returned at 2:30pm (what with all the waiting in the doctor's office and the filling of the paperwork and whatnot). She prescribed Topamax, which is a migraine prevention medicine. The medication should not be used by people who have high blood pressure, heart dissease, and a plethora of other blood-related conditions. Now, I'm pretty sure I don't have any of those, but some do show up in my family's medical history. Which is why the doctor told me to... get... a... blood... test... *hyperventilate* ... The people who know me know how much I hate needles of all kinds, so when she said "blood test" I immediately pictured an enourmous pointy needle ripping through the skin on the inside of my elbow and piercing the blood vessels that run through my arm and then sucking all the blood from me like a hungry vampire. Therefore, upon hearing "blood test", I squealed and begged her to please not make me do this. After laughing a little bit at my irrational fear of needles, the doctor told me that it is necessary to have a blood analysis because the medication could potentially have serious side-effects if I have any heart condition or something like that. Then she uttered those dreadful words: "It's for your own good". Ugh, so, tomorrow morning at 8am I have to be at the lab in Bowie and get blood taken out of me. Why tomorrow morning? Because I can't eat anything for 6 to 8 hours before taking blood out of me. Then, after I scream bloody murder and cry my eyes out when they poke me with the needle and suck my blood out, I'll go someplace to get some breakfast and then drive to work. Which means, I guess, that I'll be at work really early tomorrow, under the condition that I don't have to wait long to get my blood taken out of me and that traffic isn't too bad... I'm hoping that the results of the blood test are good and that I can go ahead and start treatment with the migraine prevention medicine. And I really, really, really, really, really, really, really hope that they use a small needle on my arm and that it doesn't hurt too much... And in a totally unrelated subject, this blog post is hilarious, so go check it out.

30 November 2005: 3pm

I HAVE A MERGER TREE!!!!! WHOO-HOO!!!!!! *happy dance* ... Ahem... A week or two before my comps exam I obtained merger rates of halos, and I was happy. However, there was one thing that I was trying to do that I wasn't able to, and that is a merger tree. A merger tree tells us information about halo mergers *and* merger times. The method I used to obtain rates didn't have time information. Ergo, a merger tree was necessary to do. However, it involves a recursive calculation that Fortran 77 can't handle. Fortran 90 can handle recursion, but at the time we didn't have a Fortran 90 compiler. Now we do. So, the first order of business after comps was to get the merger tree to work using Fortran 90. I started trying yesterday and I got a bad tree, with NaN's all over the place. After much fiddling with the code, we've been able to finally produce a merger tree! And I couldn't be happier. Yay to that :-) And now it's time for me to study some statistics, because the next step after the merger tree is the generation of synthetic data, and I know almost nothing about statistics and data analysis... But anyway, I HAVE A MERGER TREE!!! WHOO-HOO!!!!!

30 November 2005: 10:30am

Welcome to Maryland's Worst Drivers, Episode 347. I'm driving to work this morning. Soil Conservation Road has the speed limit at 40mph. The guy in the red car in front of me is going 25mph, i.e., very slow. Ok, whatever, I'm late for work anyway, so what's a few more minutes, right? Slow, slow, slow... Then we approach a traffic light. The light is red, which means *stop*, right? Well, slowpoke in front of me decides to accelerate as he approaches the traffic light, which is red. A Goddard Police SUV is making a left turn onto Soil Conservation Road (the light is green for them, after all). As I'm slowing down because I see the light is red, I wonder if the dude in front of me is going to stop, because it doesn't seem like he will. And no, he didn't stop. He went right through the light, finally stopping in the middle of the intersection, just a few feet before hitting the SUV. Oh, how I wished those Goddard cops could have given him a ticket. But no, we weren't on Goddard grounds, so they just moved right along. Red car guy is still frozen in the middle of the intersection. The light turns green. Red car guy stays in the middle of the intersection, not moving. I honk my horn for two seconds. Red car guy still doesn't move. I get annoyed and honk the horn for 5 seconds. Red car guy moves, this time at probably 10mph. After what seemed like forever, we have finally reached the next traffic light, where I will make a right turn into Goddard. The light is green, which means that red car guy can go right ahead and cross the intersection since it doesn't seem like he will be making a turn into Goddard. And what does red car guy do? He stops. Yes, he stopped. At the green light. Yeah. He ran a red, and stopped at a green. For a second I wondered if he was colorblind, but then I realized that even if that were so, he would have to realize that the light on the top means stop and the light on the bottom means go. I went through security and never saw the guy again, but I'm hoping that he didn't run through the next light if he found it to be red, because the next light would be the intersection with MD-193, and it's a rather big intersection. Tsk tsk tsk...

29 November 2005

Gasp! There is an error in the "Friends" Season 10 DVD Box! In the little description for the episode titled "The One With The Birth Mother", it says that Chandler and Monica travel to Texas to meet with a pregnant girl who is considering them to adopt her baby. See, I got Season 10 today (it was in the post office waiting for me), and the first thing I do before watching the episodes that have commentary is read the entire box. When I read this episode's summary, my immediate reaction is "No they didn't. They went to Ohio". I cannot possibly have forgotten a detail from a Friends episode. So I pop in the DVD, and lo and behold, Chandler and Monica did go to Ohio, not Texas, to meet with the pregnant woman. Aha! There's an error in the box! Tsk tsk tsk. I'm sure other die-hard fans like me will probably notice the mistake too... Hmm, I wonder if they'll realize the mistake and correct it when they make more copies of the set... Maybe... Anyway, onto watching episodes with commentary!

28 November 2005

Ok, I am officially sick and tired of having migraines. Once every other week is annoying, once a week is more annoying, two per week is almost unbearable, but they've just gone too far. Last Saturday I started getting a migraine, and it didn't go away until Sunday night. I brushed that off as stress over the comps on Monday. I had another migraine all day Tuesday. In the "morning" (and I use the term loosely, since I woke up around 1pm), I brushed it off as a mini-hangover, since I'd had two glasses of wine and a mixed drink the night before in celebration of passing comps, but this "mini-hangover" lasted all day. By the end of the day it had turned into a migraine, a very painful one. Then I had another migraine on Thursday afternoon, and that one was very painful too. The sheer amount of migraine pills that I had consumed up to that point resulted in a very upset stomach on Friday morning, and this was not pleasant at all. Then Friday night I had a bad headache that threatened to become a migraine but fortunately didn't. And today? Well, today I woke up at 8am with another migraine. I had to take a migraine pill, email Cole to let him know I wouldn't make it to work today, and hide under a blanket because the sunlight flitering through the blinds was too painful on my eyes. I can't take it anymore! I hate migraines. They're painful, they paralyze my whole day, and the medication hurts my stomach. I have three weeks left here in the DC area, so I'm gonna try to find a neurologist or a migraine specialist or some other doctor that can prescribe me some preventive medication, because this is just getting ridiculous.

27 November 2005: 9:24pm

OMG, the funniest thing just happened on Family Guy. Peter had a physical exam and the doctor told him he's fat. Peter doesn't think he's fat, of course. Brian is trying to convince him that he is, in fact, fat, but Peter refuses to acknowledge it. Then the funny thing happened: Brian took an apple, and tossed it towards Peter. Then the apple went into orbit around Peter. HAAAAA HAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHA HAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHHAHAHA HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Then Brian explained that Peter is so fat, he has his own gravitational pull, and started putting other things in orbit around Peter. Oh man, so funny. Especially that he first put an apple in orbit, because well, you know... apple, orbit, gravity. Trust me, it was hilarious.

26 November 2005

Internet! Dear, dear internet, how I've missed you... I'm back from Thanksgiving break. I spent a few really fun days in Tennessee with my John and his (extended) family. But there was no internet. I had IWS --Internet Withdrawal Syndrome-- since Wednesday, and today's Saturday, so that's ... too long :-P I met John's parents and brother and sister and nieces and aunts and a whole other bunch of relatives. They seemed to like me, so that's good :-) Surprisingly, I didn't take a single picture -- but no fear, John took some video with his brand-new digital camcorder that I got him as a birthday present, and when he uploads the video he can take some screenshots and those will become pictures that will find their way to my Photo Gallery at some point before the decade is over (I have a *lot* of pictures that I've been meaning to post for a while but haven't had time to do so yet). And now I'm back in Maryland. After spending a whole week with John, now I'm John-less and missing him way too much. Yes, I know it's cheesy but I can't help it, I miss him... And now I'm on the home-stretch for my coop in Goddard. My last day is in approximately three weeks (December 16), and then I move out of here and back to State College. John will come over to help me move, and then we'll drive to Cincinnati to spend christmas with John's parents. Then it's off to Puerto Rico for New Year's and Three Kings Day, and then back to DC for the AAS meeting. And then John goes back to Cali and I go back to State College, where I'll be TEACHING! Yup, I'm teaching two sections of Astro 11 (an introductory astronomy lab for non-science majors), and I'm totally psyched and nervous about that, since I've never TA'd before. You know what this means, right? That link over on the left that says "Teaching" will finally lead to a page with actual information on it. Cool, huh? Ok, now I must catch up on email and blog-reading, because it's been too long since I last read email and blogs.

21 November 2005: 5:30pm

I PASSED! I PASSED! I PASSED! I just came out of my comprehensive exam. It lasted two and a half hours, with a five-minute break in the middle. Then my committee kicked me out of the room and talked for the longest 15 minutes of my life, and then came out and told me that I passed!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I am now a post-comps student, and therefore officially old. And now it's time to go celebrate... I PASSED!!!!!!!!!! WHOO-HOO!!!!!! *happy dance*

19 November 2005

Feliz Cumpleaños, Glorieli! And Happy Birthday, John! My cutie turned 26 today, therefore he has entered the late-20s :-D (tho he says he's still in mid-20s). It's T minus 2 days until the comps, and I have a migraine right now, so I'm gonna finish this post quickly and go get a migraine pill... Tomorrow we (John and I, he's here, by the way) drive to State College and I'll be doing my final practicing for comps... Ok, time for a migraine pill...

18 November 2005: 12pm

Hehe, I just got interviewed. I'd never been interviewed before. It was really interesting. Videotape and everything --ugh, and my hair is a total mess today! Anyhoo, I got interviewed for a study about women in science in NASA. Joan Centrella (my advisor) was being interviewed and she told Johanna (the interviewer) to talk to me also because I could give the perspective of a young woman in NASA science. Cool :-) It was a weird feeling, being videotaped while answering questions about how I got interested in science and how I arrived at NASA, but it was fun too. I was asked about my experience of being a woman and a minority studying and working in a hard science, and about my experience here in Goddard, and my opinions on what should be done to encourage more young people to get interested in science. I feel all important and stuff now, what with the being interviewed thing and all (not that this is gonna be published anywhere outside of NASA probably)... And now I must go back to reality, and that reality is that in T minus 3 days I have to prove to my committee that I am worthy of doing research for a doctoral dissertation. And that cannot be accomplished on an empty stomach. Lunch time!

17 November 2005: 12:30pm

After three consecutive sleep-deprived nights, I woke up yesterday with a migraine which stayed with me through the entire day. At night I took another migraine pill, and I finally found a good use to the usual knock-out side-effect that the pill has: I slept all night and woke up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at 7am. I'm just finishing my lunch break now, and since the comps is 4 days away, I'm in final training. Cole has been throwing tons of questions at me, and fortunately I've been able to answer about half. And the ones I didn't know? Well, I know them now, and that's what matters. At 3pm I will have a firing squad practice session in which Joan Centrella, John Baker and Cole will be ripping me to shreds after I do my presentation for them. Boy, won't that be fun... In other news, winter has arrived in Maryland. It was 37°F when I left my apartment at 8:30am and since then the temperature has risen a staggering two degrees to 39. At least there's no snow here yet... Finally, I was going through astro-ph and found something that made me smile. A while back there was a paper there, physics/0510102, titled "Message in the Sky" which dealt with the oh-so *ahem* "scientific" scenario of having an encripted message in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) left there by the creator of the Universe. Well of course when I saw this I was not pleased one little bit, what with the crackpot theories infiltrating the holy arXiv where we get our daily dose of astrophysical information. I showed a few people, had a chuckle, commented about the crackpot nature of the paper, and then forgot about it. Well, today I found something else on the arXiv that totally made me smile and giggle and be merry all over. There's a short paper, physics/0511135, titled "The Real Message in the Sky", which is a two-page rebuttal to the crackpotty paper from a while back. This little paper is nothing but a piece of art. I mean, seriously, it's awesome. Right from the get-go, you read in the abstract that they refer to the creator the other paper talks about as "she", and then proceeds to prove why any message encoded in the CMB would be totally dependent on the observer and not on any creator. It's a very good exercise in logic and good scientific reasoning, and it's written in a very witty language that I just adored. My favorite quote from the paper: "Hence a 'message in the sky' is no better than a signal hidden in the human genome, or indeed a billboard picture of a plate of spaghetti that a particular set of drivers pass on a specific set of days". Hahaha!!! Spaghetti! Priceless :-)

16 November 2005: 12am

In light of the fact that I am now five days away from my research comps, I have prepared a little description of my research. I will eventually move this short research description to its proper location within the Research Page, but for now I just wanted to make a quick post about my research project. Do check it out -- it looks all professional and stuff, and I think that's due to the ridiculously plain and simple look it has: black text on white background. It serves its purpose for the time being, so I don't mind the lack of style.

15 November 2005: 11am

I'm not a big fan of insomnia -- though to be fair, I don't think anyone is. Sunday night I slept for two hours. Actually, to be precise, it wasn't much Sunday night as it was Monday morning already. But this was because I was writing my comps paper after suffering from a severe case of writer's block coupled with mild procrastination all through the weekend (at least I had all the necessary data beforehand and made all the plots during the week, so I didn't have to worry about that while writing). So of course, since I'd only slept two hours, I assumed that I would collapse and sleep like a log on Monday night. Well, didn't happen. I fell asleep on the couch while watching "Friends" and woke up when "Family Guy" was on, thus sleeping for about an hour. At this point I turned off the lights and went to bed... only to stare at the ceiling. Then I got a craving for Krispy Kreme donuts and complained about it here (see below). After being on the phone with John for a while, I thought I could go to sleep finally, so I went to bed... to stare at the ceiling again. Ugh. I wound up falling asleep around 4-ish. And now I'm at work, with heavy eyelids, trying to study for comps and prepare the talk I have to give, and trying very hard not to fall alseep. Hopefully tonight will be different and I'll sleep all through the night...

14 November 2005: 10:45pm

I have an annoying craving for some Krispy Kreme donuts. But dammit, the closest one is in Dupont Circle in DC and I don't wanna go to DC to get donuts. The next closest ones are in Columbia and Glen Burnie, which are 12 and 20 miles north of here, respectively. Gah, I want Krispy Kreme! I shall have to take a little trip north of here soon. But not now. Sometime later this week...

14 November 2005: 5:30pm

Well, a few things. First of all, I've just realized that I have lost all right and privilege of complaining about how cold central Pennsylvania is (or for that matter, any other place) when talking with Robert. Dude, you win. I mean, South Pole. Geez. Just reading about all the extreme cold weather gear that he has to wear gave me the heebie-jeebies. Second, I will never again utter the words "heebie-jeebies", so nevermind about that... Third, it is not T minus 7 days until my research comprehensive exam. I sent a copy of my research report to my committee earlier today, and starting tomorrow I will work on the presentation. I must say, it felt *really* good when Cole reviewed my paper and said it was "excellently written", that he was "impressed" with my writing, and that the second paragraph of my Future Work section is "a fine work of art". I feel really happy about my research right about now. I've had a lot of progress in the last couple of months, I have good results to present in my exam, and we have a plan for the next steps to be taken in the project. I'm starting to feel like a true researcher. It feels good. And fourth, John flies over here in 4 days and we get to spend an entire week together, so yay to that. Lastly, I've had quite a number of ideas on how to improve the look and feel of this website, but I've had no time to do anything about it. I think I might be able to start something definite during winter break, but I'm not sure. This new makeover will involve the addition of new sections, some slight reorganization, updates to my Research page, and turning the Update Archive into an actual blog -- albeit one without commenting capabilities... Anyhoo, I will now sit back and relax for a while, read some blogs, watch TV, and go to bed early because tomorrow I'll be at Goddard bright and early to prepare the presentation and engage in other comps-related activities.

10 November 2005:P 10:34pm

I just learned that my dear friend Robert is on his way, right now as I'm writing this, to the South Pole to spend the [Southern Hemisphere] summer there as part of his research. Rob, if you read this, have fun in the South Pole, and keep warm!!!

10 November 2005

So, even though the Kansas school board decided to march on back to the Middle Ages, the people of Dover PA voted to get all those intelligent design supporters out of their school board. This is very good news for those of us who value the importance of science. The Discovery Institute (who btw, are major creationis... er... intelligent design supporters), didn't say diddly-squat about the Dover thing, but the Kansas thing? They shouted it from the rooftops. This is typical of the ID crowd, to publicize whatever favors them and remain silent about things that don't. Well, not all anti-science crazies are that "discreet". I just read in an article on CNN (found out about this from both Pharyngula and Shakespeare's Sister before checking my CNN newsfeed), that Pat Robertson has warned the people of Dover PA that god is going to punish them with disaster for voting against ID in schools. My reaction: OH COME ON!!!! Oooo, religious bullying. How very third-grade of him.

7 November 2005: 7:10am

Yes, it is 7:10 in the morning, and I am at work, in my office in Goddard. Why? Well, because I dropped John off at Dulles Airport for his 7am flight and came straight to work afterwards. I could have gone home to nap, but there's only 14 days left until comps, plus I have to lead a discussion on a paper today in our Gravitational Waves meeting today at 3pm, and I haven't finished reading the paper (I'm 3/5 done right now)... John and I had a fun little weekend. I picked him up in the airport really early Saturday morning, and then we went home to nap. Then we woke up around 10:30 and went to DC. I got a haircut in a cool salon in Dupont Circle (pictures will come eventually), then we ate lunch in a nearby restaurant, and then we went to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. Fun stuff :-) We left DC after the museum closed, and John cooked some angel hair pasta and garlic bread. On Sunday we did laundry and stayed in the house. John installed the Mac OS-X update in his laptop and I ran some simulations to get some merger rates with varying input parameters while reading part of the paper I have to discuss today. In the afternoon I cooked some empanadillas and tostones, which took quite a while, and then at night we watched the Sunday night Fox cartoons (Simpsons et al). Then I went back to reading the paper while John fiddled with the settings in his computer, and then we went to sleep around 1:30am. Got up today at 4:30 to go to the airport, and now I'm here. In two weeks, John will come back here, turn 26, go with me to Penn State for moral support during comps, then we fly out to Tennessee for Thanksgiving. And now I have to start working. I'm gonna have a really long and productive day today... And yes, Cole was already here when I got in. Dammit, I thought I'd get here before him :-P but he'd been here since 6:30am (ugh, so early), hehe.

4 November 2005

Feliz Cumpleaños, Vanessa!

2 November 2005: 2:00pm

YES!!! I HAVE MERGER RATES!!!!!!!! Aaaaand, I just met Charles Misner, the M in MTW, and that was frickin cool :-) Cygwin still won't download/install correctly, but I've managed to work remotely on a computer in Davey, and I got merger rates, so yay to that. I HAVE MERGER RATES!!!! Whoo-hooo!!!

2 November 2005: 8:00am

Wow. Just barely 8am and I'm at work already. This is what happens when you get frustrated with your frequently-crashing computer and go to sleep ridiculously early, thus waking up at ungodly hours the next morning and getting to work at a time when there's just a handful of cars in the parking lot :-P

1 November 2005: 8:57pm

Ok, I've calmed down by now. I'm seriously contemplating the possibility of maybe probably perhaps getting a new laptop, since my dear Phoebe (that's the name of my laptop, btw) seems to be getting sick with old age and the stupid trojan/spyware/whatever crap that it got last week. If I did get a new laptop, it'd be for work. I think Phoebe can still function for entertainment purposes, but I need a stable, powerful, non-corruptible computer for work, one that doesn't crash too much or too severely. Gah, *mumble mumble*, I like my laptop, I don't wanna let it go ... *deep breath* ...

1 November 2005: 7:20pm

Sea la madre'e la gente c*br*n* que va a 40mph en el Beltway y de los j*d**s h*j* 'e p*t* en SUVs grandotas que se creen que son los dueños de la carretera y que se pueden meter en cualquier carril cuando se les pegue la real gana sin mirar y ni cuenta se dan de que ya hay un carro donde ellos quieren meterse ... #%$&*#%$*#&%# ... Yes I've had a stressful afternoon, what with all the computer crashings and coding bugs and all, and bad drivers on the way home don't exactly make me feel better.

1 November 2005: 6:35pm

Crap! My computer just crashed spectacularly. Oh man, I've never been more scared in my entire life. When it "recovered" it couldn't recognize the path to My Documents and the desktop icons didn't show up. I had to restart several times before things came back to normal. Crap, crap, crap. I hope it doesn't get worse :-/

1 November 2005: 5:04pm

I have been downloading Cygwin since I got to work this morning, and it's still downloading. It's at 37% right now. GAH! Is it ever gonna finish?!?!? I'm forced to work on my codes remotely on a machine in Davey, and this is most annoying since I don't have Xwindows (I used to have Exceed, but I had to uninstall it at some point in this whole trojan/Cygwin/Xwindows ordeal). And now, now that I have a merger rate program working, now that I can match my results against Cole's and they differ only ever so slightly, now that I think I'm finally done with the coding and can start doing some astrophysics, I find a glitch in my table of halo mass and variance. GAH! A tiny little glitch that makes a monotonically decreasing function have a little spike that goes *blip* and screws up pretty much everything. At low resolutions there's no problem, but if I increase the resolution I get merger rates that are NaN's. Argh, grrr, *mumble mumble*. Now I have to go through my codes and find where this &?#% error is being produced...

1 November 2005: 10:55am

Gah, Cygwin hates me. I still haven't been able to successfully download and install it, let alone make Xwindows work... Totally unrelated, but my drive to work today was remarkably beautiful. I take 212 to get to work in the mornings, and this is kind of a back road, but not tiny either. I'd say semi-major road, but it's very country-like, with lots of trees and nature and stuff. Most of the trees are showing bright shades of reds and oranges and yellows, and they look ever-so-pretty... Ok, back to reality: must make Cygwin work. T minus 20 days until comps...

31 October 2005: 10:30pm

Still haven't figured out how to get Xwindows working again with Cygwin. Mike the sysadmin suggested that I run some anti-spyware programs to make sure I clean out every possible icky thing from my computer, then wipe out Cygwin entirely and try to install it again from scratch. Or, he said, I could also try to do a Windows Restore, back to a point when everything was working fine. I wouldn't lose any data, just installed programs. I think I'm gonna leave that as a last resort. I'm in the process of doing the cleanout of every icky thing, then I'll try to reinstall Cygwin for the gillionth time in four days... In more cheerful news, I am the queen of Super Mario 64 DS :-) Yes, I have collected all 150 stars in the game, thus beating the game a heck of a lot faster than the original (though, back then I didn't know there were 120 stars total, and this time I did know that I was shooting for 150). So yeah, yay to me and a woot woot. If only my mad Mario skillz applied to Cygwin and Xwindows...

31 October 2005: 11:14am

Well, Cywgin finally works. No celebration, though. Xwindows refuses to start. Gah, the problems never end... Wah, I wanna do research! I need my Xwindows *sniff* ...

31 October 2005: 10:42am

Gah! I still can't get Cygwin to work *mumble mumble*...

30 October 2005: a couple of hours later

Uninstalled Cygwin. Downloaded new version. I'm installing now... In other news, I think there is some kind of global gadget conspiracy against me. A few weeks ago, my toaster oven decided that it could no longer go on living a double life, and the toasting function stopped working. I could still toast stuff, but I had to stay there, keeping the "toast" button pressed, which was annoying to say the least. Well now, I'm waiting for Cygwin to install, which takes quite some time (a few hours). I get hungry, so I decide to make myself a sandwich. After preparing it, I put it in the toaster oven and pushed the button. As I'm standing there pushing the button, I suddenly heard a sizzling sound. I look at the toaster oven, and I realize that there's fire inside it. Yeah, it caught on fire. Luckily it was a tiny fire and it didn't spread. It went away when I let go of the toast button. I unplugged the toaster oven and when I opened it, a big batch of burnt smell came out. Ugh. My sandwich somehow survived, and it was quite tasty, by the way. But now I'm totally afraid of using the toaster oven again...

30 October 2005

Well, my computer problems continue. Now Cygwin/X won't start, which means I can't do anything even remotely related with research. And I'm pretty sure this has something to do with that whole trojan or whatever it was that it somehow caught a few days ago and took me forever to get rid of. Ugh, computers hate me. I tried a buncha stuff that I thought would help things along, but nothing worked. Then I called John and he suggested a few more things, none of which worked either. So now I'm faced with the last possible option: uninstall cygwin and re-install it, hoping that whatever's wrong will go away during the uninstalling process. I'm gonna backup my .cshrc and .Xdefaults files first, along with any other config files I notice along the way, then uninstall cygwin and re-install it. Ugh, and I spent so much time making sure all the configs were just the way I like them. Now I'm most likely gonna lose *some* configs, even if I backup some of the files, because I'm sure I'll forget some... Ok, time to uninstall... Wish me luck...

28 October 2005: 10pm

My laptop (Dell Inspiron 8500, Pentium 4-M 2.6GHz, 512MB RAM, 60GB hard drive, running Windows XP Pro) is about two years old now. It has slowly started to show some signs of aging, but really no major problems though. I bought a network card so I don't need to use its faulty ethernet port, a piece of clear tape has turned out to be surprisingly strong enough to hold together a small-ish crack in the case just under the screen, and the hard drive is about 50% full, but yeah, those aren't really that big of a deal. I'm not complaining; it is a good computer, and it serves me well for work and fun. When it starts being slow I just run the disk defragmenter and that usually does the trick. And I have a good antivirus that detects trojans and deletes them immediately... Yesterday, the computer started being veeeeeery slow. I ran the defragmenter, but it said that the drive didn't need defragmenting. Huh, interesting. Then, at one point when I'm Googling for some Fortran hints, I get a pop-up window telling me to install "WinFixr". I click cancel, over and over again, and eventually it goes away. Now, this is interesting, because I was in Goddard at the time. I would assume that the Goddard wireless network is somehow protected against this kind of spyware. And I also have a firewall, so yeah, it was interesting to say the least. The WinFxr thing kept popping up every now and then throughout the rest of the day. It happened again today, and this time it slowed down the computer a lot more. Then my antivirus popped up and said there was a "Potentially Unwanted Program" called tuvtr.dll. I told it to clean the program, but it couldn't. Huh. I looked for the file but I couldn't find it. I was IMing with my John at the time, so he Googled the file, and found out it is some kind of trojan adware. He found a webpage that gives some instructions on how to get rid of it. It's a long procress that required me to download some programs I didn't have, and I had to do the process while the computer was in Safe Mode, something I'd never done before. I was a little worried that something might go wrong and I'd lose all my data, but it seems like I have finally deleted the offending file. My computer is working fine now, working really fast and with no annoying pop-ups. So now I've decided that it's time to backup all the important stuff I have in My Documents, ya know, just in case. And I haven't backed-up since March, so a backup is long overdue. Problem is, my CD writer is acting up, and won't recognize blank CDs at times. This is very annoying. So far, if I just restart the computer and try again it works fine, but still, annoying. I think this one has to do with those little signs of aging that I mentioned earlier... Well, at least I no longer have any spyware in the computer, which means that it's back to fast performance and no pop-ups, so I'm happy :-)

27 October 2005

Gah, I have *way* too many bookmarks. I'm trying to organize them so that I can finally put them up on the Links page, but it's very insanely hard to organize them quickly. See, as you may or may not know already, I like categorizing stuff. Ergo, I have to categorize all my bookmarks before I can put them on the website. I'm hoping to be done with this sometime before the decade ends... In other news, remember that merger tree I was making? Well, turns out that Fortran 77 doesn't allow for recursion. Yeah, annoying, I know. Cole and I tried to trick the compiler into doing some pseudo-recursion, but we weren't very successful. So, I am putting the merger tree on hold, and instead I'm calculating merger rates in small redshift intervals (dz's), beause I've already written a code that work well at obtaining parent halos in small dz's, and then integrating the merger rates over all redshifts of interest, and ta-da, merger rates. After comps (t minus 24 days), when there's no pressing time constrains, I'll go back to the merger tree and try to make it work, most likely by switching over to Fortran 90 or 95, which do support recursive programming. It should be easier to do that than to re-learn C or C++ and translate everything all over again...

26 October 2005

Happy Birthday, Justin!

26 October 2005

I hate migraines. I really, really, really hate migraines. They're painful, annoying, and inconvenient. They pretty much paralyze my life, sometimes for an entire day or longer. The most severe ones make me nauseous, dizzy, and very sensitive to light and sound. When I move my head I feel as if my brain is banging against the inside of my skull. I hate migraines. I wish they'd just go away.

25 October 2005: 3:36pm

I think I'm getting good at this coding-and-debugging business :-)

25 October 2005: 9:30am

Well, it's not exactly the crack of dawn, but I'm at work and it's early enough, so it's all good. BTW, brrr! Today is the first seriously cold day here. Right now it's 43°F, and I'm wishing I had brought my big heavy coat with me from State College. Silly me, I assumed that since Goddard is some 1000 feet lower in elevation than State College, not surrounded by mountains, a couple of degrees lower in latitude, and no Great Lakes nearby, it wouldn't really get too cold here anytime before December. Although, it's really not that bad. I'm not freezing. I have a semi-heavy coat, and I did bring gloves and a scarf. And I can always layer up. But still, I'm always gonna complain about the cold on the first really cold day of the season. And since comps are 27 days away, I'll just bring one of my big coats back with me when I go to Penn State. So yeah, everything I just said is just me complaining about the cold, which everyone who reads this page should be used to by now :-P ... And in a totally unrelated topic, there is a Reggaeton radio station in the SF Bay Area. Reggaeton, for those who don't know, is a musical genre which originated in Puerto Rico sometime in the late 80s or early 90s. It's like a hybrid between reggae and hip-hop, with some Latin beats (salsa and merengue sounds) tossed into the mix too. When I was in middle school, it was almost entirely underground, and it was somewhat taboo to listen to it. By the time I was in high school, it was more accepted and starting to become mainstream in Puerto Rico. Sometime during my college years, it became the one thing that most high schoolers liked to listen. By now it is *so* severly mainstream in PR that even my parents know and enjoy some songs. I've never been a hardcore fan, but I like some of the songs and artists, like Ivy Queen (who I've always liked, ever since I first heard her songs in 8th grade I think) and more recently Tego Calderón. Anyway, the point is that this is an inherently Puertorrican music genre, and it seems like it is starting to infiltrate the US market. Some Reggaeton artists are Nuyorican (of Puertorrican origin, but born in NYC), and their songs express a fusion of PR and US cultures. Spanglish is very abundant in the genre, something that I enjoy quite a bit. So, if I were to discover a Reggaeton radio station in NYC, I wouldn't be surprised. Nor would I be surprised to find one in Miami, for example, where the Latino population is quite large. But to find one in San Francisco, *that* was suprising. There are Latinos there, but it's mostly Mexicans, and I had no idea that Mexicans enjoyed Reggaeton. It feels really good to know that at least that little snippet of PR culture has made its way through 4000 miles and found an audience. Now we need to get the rest of the country to learn more about our culture, and about Puerto Rico in general, so that we don't get asked questions like "Is Puerto Rico part of Cuba?" and "People there only speak Spanish, right?".

24 October 2005

This weekend was really fun. I flew out on Friday night to visit my John and came back early this morning. On Saturday we got lunch at a Mexican restaurant (which was playing really bad music in the jukebox, the kind of annoying music that my parents' neighbor plays really loudly almost all the time), and then we went mini-golfing and go-karting. I, of course, sucked at the mini-golf, but I did manage to get one hole-in-one, which was a very proud moment. John loved the go-karts, and he made the best times at the track. I was a little hesitant during my first lap, so I went really slow. If there weren't so many turns I woulda gone faster ;-) I did get more comfortable by my final lap, so I managed to make it in under 90 seconds (for reference, John's best time was around half of that, so from that you can get a feel for how slow I was going... or how fast *he* was going, hehehe). After that we went to Borders, the point being that I wanted to buy the book The Republican War on Science, and of course, we wound up spending three hours there, looking at Spanish books (I got one with short stories by Puertorrican writers and a PR cookbook), and a really cool Atlas. When we walked by the Physics/Astronomy aisle, I almost cried, because there were *so many* books, but we had to leave if we wanted to make it to dinner before they closed the restaurant, so we weren't able to look around that aisle for a few hours like I woulda wanted. Oh well, next time ;-) Sunday was a sit-back-and-relax day, and we watched all three hours of the PBS documentary The Elegant Universe (based on the book by Brian Greene). John had it on his Netflix queue, and it had arrived just in time for us to watch it together :-) Sunday night we went to another Mexican restaurant (where they were also playing cheesy old-style Puertorrican music, unfortunately) where I had the best chicken quesadilla I've ever had in my life, and then it was straight to the airport. I slept about one hour during my red-eye flight, so I came home straight from the airport and napped for three hours. Then I went to work, but I called it a day around 5pm because I was way too tired. I'll go to sleep early tonight, and then get to work "at the crack of dawn" like Cole said, hehe, or at least as close to it as I can. Cole, btw, is Cole Miller, from the Astronomy Department at the University of Maryland, with whom I've been working here in Goddard (he's here on sabbatical), and he's one of the coolest, most awesomest advisors I've ever had. And he's a morning person. And I am not. And he always gets to Goddard like four hours before me, even when I get there early... Speaking of which, my research seems to be going really well now, and I'll be creating a merger tree soon enough (as in, tomorrow). I already have a "sapling" code, which will turn into a shrub tomorrow, and then into some kind of tree, like an oak or a willow or something. But not a sequoia, because that would take too much computational time and resources... Anyhoo, two weeks from now, John will come visit me, and by then I'll probably have some results and I'll be thinking about which way to go with my research, and then two weeks after that a lot of stuff will happen! First, John will turn 26 and thus officially enter the late-20s while I'm still technically in my early 20s (hehehe, he's gonna go "GRRR!!!" when he reads this *giggle*), and on that day he flies over here. Then two days after that I'll be taking my research comps back in Penn State, which I hope to pass. That night we'll go out and celebrate if I pass, then drive back to Beltsville on Tuesday, and fly out to Tennessee (damn, that's hard to spell) on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. We'll be spending that holiday with his family, which means I'll be meeting John's parents for the first time (I hope they like me!). Then after Thanksgiving, I come back to Beltsville and John goes back to Redwood City. And three weeks after that, I'll be done with my coop, and John will come over to help me move out of here and back to State College. Then we'll spend Christmas with his parents in Ohio, New Year's with my parents in Puerto Rico, and then it's AAS in DC. I'm really happy about all the time we've been able to spend together recently, and all the time we'll be able to spend together in the near future, in spite of the 3k miles of separation. But if all goes well, he'll be graduating in about a year and a half, and then we'll get to spend *waaay* more time together :-D :-D :-D Ok, I'll stop the rant now. It's just that I miss him already, and thinking about the time we get to spend together makes me happy :-) And now I'll finish reading blogs, then feed my two Nintendogs (Manifold the Labrador and Faraday the Golden Retriever -- what? I like those names for pets!), IM a little bit with John, and then go to sleep. Good night, Internet!

21 October 2005: 7:30am

I just woke up from having a variation of one of my most horrible recurring nightmares. No, not the one about being underwater or running away from a tidal wave or other water-related situation in which I can't swim or breathe or run away. This time it was the bees and wasps. I can't remember all the details about the dream, but it all boils down to me being in an enclosed area and there are many, many bees and wasps buzzing around everywhere and I can't get away from them. I keep yelling "Kill them! Kill them!" to the other people in the room, but no one listens to me. The bees start to swarm. The wasps get closer to me. I start hyperventilating. I try to run away, but there is no space in the room that isn't populated with the buzzing insects. Then I wake up, with a loud gasp, sweating, scared, with my heart beating faster than a hummingbird's. Gah, I hate bees and wasps. And as much as I hate dreaming about them, I hate them about a gillion times more in real life. Ugh... And now that I'm up early thanks to this horrible nightmare, I'll get ready to go to work. And tonight I fly to San Fran to visit my cutie John for the weekend, so at least if I have any nightmares this weekend, he'll be there to calm me down :-)

20 October 2005

I've just discovered another awesome new "religion" which is just as good as Flying Spaghetti Monsterism. It's very different and at the same time very similar to FSMism. It's the Church of Reality. Check it out, it looks good :-) hehe ;-)

19 October 2005

I've said it twice before, but I have to say it one more time. Holy frickin crap, we have one more ridiculously strong hurricane. Wilma, the first "W" hurricane in who knows how long, has winds of 175mph and pressure of 882mb. Katrina was strong. Rita was stronger. But this one, oh man, this one is another record-breaker. It is the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic. Strongest ever. That's right. Damn. At least the strongest winds are enclosed in a fairly small area. But still. Damn. Wow. Damn. This hurricane season has been insane. Damn.

17 October 2005: 11:24pm

OMG! I just saw a commercial on Cartoon Network about the first season of He-Man (the 80s cartoon) coming out on DVD. OMG, OMG, OMG. I *loved* that show when I was little. I wonder if they'll put She-Ra out on DVD too. I loved She-Ra even more than I loved He-Man. I even dressed up like She-Ra for Halloween when I was in Kindergarten. Anyway, I wish I'd been paying attention to the TV instead of listening to it in the background while I do my daily blog-reading, 'cuz I wanna know when that DVD is coming out. Not gonna buy it, but at least go to Blockbuster or something and watch the episodes and see if I notice any subtle details that you never notice when you're a kid watching a cartoon show but that if you watch it 20 years later you'd definitely notice something. You know what I mean ;-)

14 October 2005: 5:02pm

GAAHHHH!!! Stupid, stupid, stupid! *bangs head on desk* I wanna cry! I wrote a new Fortran code to do some general cosmological calculations, so that my codes will work regardless of the cosmological model used, and also to get a table of redshift, time and scale factor that I can use to look up the values without having to recalculate them in every code. I'm writing my code, writing my code, writing my code. Then after I'm done writing, I saved it. Then I compile it. To compile, I typed: "f77 -o cosmology.f cosmology.f -O4". See what I did right there? I didn't see it. I named the executable with the same name as the source. And I didn't notice. So I run the executable, and I get an error message that I didn't declare a subfunction correctly. I then try to edit my source, which is still sitting in an emacs window in my desktop, and emacs complains that I can't edit the buffer. "Odd", I think. So I close emacs and then try to open the file again. Well, guess what. The file "cosmology.f" is now an executable, so it looks like complete garbage in emacs. Ok, don't panic, you have a backup, the last saved version. Sure enough, there is a "cosmology.f˜" in the directory. So I delete this cosmology.f executable and rename the cosmology.f˜ to cosmology.f now. And what do I notice when I open this supposed backup? I notice that I hadn't saved at all ever since I started to write the program. GAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!! So now I'm sitting here, staring at the emacs window that just says "PROGRAM COSMOLOGY" and a blinking cursor, and I want to cry. WAAAHHHHHH!!! :'( Now I have to write the code all over again. I feel SOOO stupid. GAH! How is it possible that I didn't save anything?!?!?!?! *sniff* :'( ... Ok, gotta go write that code, again, thanks to my stupidity. Gah!

13 October 2005

Ya know, I'm really starting to like Fortran. I'm serious! It's a quite strong programming language, very useful. Yes, it *is* very annoying to look for a cookbook routine in "Numerical Recipes for Fortran 77" and find a cryptic little snippet of code with three goto statements which I wouldn't be caught dead coding on my own, but aside from that, I'm enjoying this whole Fortran coding thing quite a bit. No goto statements in my codes. Just plain, simple and elegant flow of control. Ahhh, so nice. [end dorky rant]

12 October 2005: 6:50am

I just got home from taking John to the airport. This time he flew from BWI, so it was considerably closer than Dulles. His flight is most likely taking off right now. We left my apartment at 5am, and got to BWI at 5:35am, and didn't find all that much traffic on I-95. I still hate I-95 though. Why did we take I-95 if I hate it so much? Well, because it's the shortest route to get from here to BWI. Getting there was no big deal, and BWI has a very awesome parking policy: it's free for the first hour. This means that I got free parking :-) John went through security around 6:10ish, so that's when I left. Driving down 95 from 195 (the road to BWI) was fine for the most part. Traffic was not too heavy, and it was flowing easily at 70mph on average... Then we approached the 495 junction. Damn that I-95/Beltway combination. Right around the Laurel exit (33), the speed of traffic went down from 70 to about 40, and there were lots more cars by then. This is the exit right before mine, so I was dreading the thought of getting stuck for a long time on stupid 95 while being just four miles away from my exit. Fortunately traffic didn't stop completely. About two miles away from my exit, the speed went down from 40ish to about 10. Some lanes were totally stopped. Then I got to my exit (29), and I could see that the traffic ahead on 95 was almost entirely stopped. See, right after my exit lies the junction with the Beltway, so there's people going from the leftmost lane to the rightmost lane because they have to go west, and people getting from the right lane over to the left because they need to go east, and there's six lanes to cross, and about a gillion trucks too because it's early in the morning. When I saw the total gridlock I couldn't help but laugh, knowing that all those cars will probably be stuck there for quite some time, while I just swiftly took my exit and within five minutes I was home. I know, I know, it's mean to laugh at all the people stuck in traffic, but hey, I've been stuck in traffic on 95 and the Beltway, and it sucks, and I know that there's people laughing when I'm stuck in traffic, so why can't I laugh too when other people are stuck there? It's only fair :-P ... On the other hand, I wasn't laughing too much because I miss John already. Saying goodbye gets harder each time. But, in two weeks I'm going over to visit him, so at least it won't be long until the next time we see each other. And now I must either go back to bed and take (at least) a one hour nap, or shower and have breakfast and get ready for work. Hmmm, tough call... Seriously. I would love to go to work right now, but I'll be falling asleep by 3pm if I do that... Ok, it's decided. I'm taking a nap, then getting up at 8am to hopefully be at work by 9 or 9:30. That sounds like a good plan.

11 October 2005

Highlights of this weekend: my cutie John came over to visit me, and he's still here (but he's leaving tomorrow :'( *pouty*); John and I went to a Puertorrican restaurant in DC (Banana Cafe) with my friends Lisa and Scott, and the food was delicious; and I got a Nintendogs game for my Nintendo DS, and by now my puppy can do a whole bunch of tricks. And right now I'm at work, coding away at an extended Press-Schechter thingamajiggy to do a merger tree of dark matter halos. This is very good, I'm doing a lot of progress in my project, and hopefully I'll have some good results to present in my research comps. Oh yeah, 'cuz now I have a date for my research comps. Monday, 21 November, 2005, that's gonna be the date of my research comps. I don't have a room reserved yet, but I'm thinking 2:30pm in Davey 541. So, if I take comps on Monday and pass, that means that Monday night I can go out to celebrate, then I have all day Tuesday to recover from the celebration, and then Wednesday me and John can fly to Tennessee (man, that was hard to spell) to spend Thanksgiving weekend with his family, and I'll be totally relaxed and happy because I passed comps. This is, of course, assuming that I pass. Because if I don't pass, then I'll be totally bummed out and depressed all weekend. But I'm expecting to pass. I think I will... Or at least I hope so... So yeah ... there's only 41 days left until comps... Forty one days... YIKES!!! Ok, I gotta get back to work.

4 October 2005: 1:23pm

Waiting for a program to run... program's taking forever... been running for at least 20 minutes already... it's only a little bit more than halfway through right now... I am soooo tempted to play some Mario DS while the program runs... it's gonna take at least 15 more minutes, so it's not like I'd be playing instead of working... But no! I must watch the program... I must babysit it, making sure that the output doesn't become Inf or NaN or any other weird stuff... but it's soooo tempting...

4 October 2005

I got my pink Nintendo DS! *happy dance* I was gonna write this yesterday, but I couldn't tear myself away from playing Super Mario 64 DS. I already have 26 stars, beat the first Bowser, unlocked Mario (in this version of the game, you start playing as Yoshi and have to unlock Mario, Luigi and Wario), and captured 5 Mips bunnies, which gave me keys to unlock five minigames. The game is sooo much fun. It's not all that different from the original N64-based Super Mario game, but it has been updated and redesigned enough that you can tell it's not the same game. The controls are a little tricky though, because they are not the same as in the N64, especially regarding the analog stick (which the DS lacks). The minigames are played with the stylus on the touchpad, and they are oh-so-much fun! And my DS is piiiiink! Thanks to my cutie John who ordered it online from a store in California that imports games from Japan. It is so much fun! Too bad I can't play during the day, because I'm at work ;-) hehehe. Now I'm waiting for the Nintendogs game to be delivered (had to order it online because the game is so popular that it was sold out pretty much everywhere)... Yay, Nintendo DS!

3 October 2005: 8:45am

Well, I'm feeling better now. No more sneezing every two seconds. Thank you, Robitussin... I got up really early today, and drove to work at a time that I'm not used to driving to work, so I encountered something that I hadn't seen before: early morning traffic. It was particularly bad around the I-95 ramp, with tons of people getting on and off the interstate. It took me 35 minutes to get to work, when it usually takes me 20. But anyway, this means that I'll go home early today, and hopefully (cross fingers, knock on wood), I'll get home before the UPS guy does. My Nintendo DS is scheduled for delivery today, so if I'm lucky, it'll be delivered after I get home around six-ish. Yeah, I know, more likely than not the UPS guy will come by at like 1pm and leave one of those sticky notes telling me that he'll try to deliver again tomorrow, and I'll either have to wait a day or two more for my DS, or drive to the UPS place to pick it up myself. But I'm hoping I get home before the delivery dude, even if I know it's likely that it won't happen... Oh, and I saw a very cute commercial this morning on the Weather Channel. There's this guy dressed in a Sun costume, and he's making breakfast. And there's a little girl in the kitchen with him, telling him that that's not the way mommy makes breakfast. The guy then says that he likes making breakfast this way, even if it's different than the way mommy makes it. Then the girl goes "Why?", and the guy says "Because I like making breakfast this way", and the girl goes "Why?", and the guy goes "Because it's very rarely that I get to make breakfast, so when I do it I like making it my way". Then, of course, the girl goes "Why?", again, and the guy is starting to look annoyed and says "Because I have to go to work very early, so I don't get to make breakfast too often", and the girl, once more, goes "Why?", and then the guy, in a very annoyed voice, says "Because I have to light and heat up the Earth", and then the girl shuts up. Hehehe, it's cute when you realize that the guy is in a Sun costume, so it's like the girl's daddy is the Sun and that's why he doesn't get to make breakfast all that often, because he's at work very early each morning, hehehehe. Really, it's a cute commercial... Ok, enough procrastinating. I got to work early for a reason, and that is to get a lot of work done today. All right, worky time for me...

30 September 2005

Ugh, I feel sick, again. My nose is runny, I'm sneezing up a storm, my throat is a little sore, and my head feels like a balloon. I think I might be catching a cold or the flu or something. Waah, I hate being sick.

29 September 2005

Today has been a good day, even though it's the first somewhat cold-ish day of the season. First of all, I no longer feel like I am going to die. I'm sneezy and have a runny nose, which were pretty much the only things I didn't have yesteday, but in spite of that I feel better today. And, very importantly, I finally have some good results in my research! I finally have a Fortran code that gives a Press-Schechter distribution, and it works fine. After all this time, after all the trials and errors, after the many codes I've discarded, I finally have one that works. Whoo-hoo!!!

28 September 2005

Waahh, I feel horrible! I don't want to get sick :'( *sniff*

27 September 2005: 11:10pm

I couldn't take the back pain and had to leave work at noon. I went to the Goddard clinic, where they gave me two Motrin 400 pills and told me to go home, eat lunch and then take the pills. Oh, and they said I'd get a little drowsy. Well, a "little" drowsy was that I got home and ate lunch and then took the pills around 1:30 or 2pm, and then I fell asleep and slept like a log for four and a half hours. My back hurts less now, but it still hurts a bit. At least I can sit down without the blinding pain I had this morning... And I still don't know where the pain came from... My throat feels a little sore too, and about a half hour ago I got an insanely sharp pain in my left ear, as if my eardrum was being hit with an iron hammer and pulled down at the same time. It was *very* weird, since I've never had ear pain in my life, ever. I can't help but wonder if the back pain, ear pain and sore throat are all related, but I'm really hoping they're not, because I don't want to get sick. I hate being sick. And I don't want to miss work either... In totally unrelated news, tonight I watched the premier episode of Commander in Chief, a new series on ABC. The premise of the series is that the President dies suddenly, and so the Vice-President should become president, right? Well, the VP is a woman, and pretty much the entire party and presidential cabinet get an icky feeling about having a woman president. Many people quit their jobs in the White House when she takes command, and her husband is having a hard time adjusting to being First "Lady". The series seems very promising, and addresses some very interesting questions that would arise if a woman were to become President. And of course, there's some bad guys two who are keen on sabotaging her every move, in particular the Speaker of the House, who wanted her to resign when the President died so that he could become President. Very good series indeed. I highly recommend watching it.

27 September 2005: 11:34am

Holy carpal tunnel, Batman! Oh dear god, my back hurts SO much... And I'm so close to finishing the Press-Schechter code! The code works, and I get a good PS function, finally, but I need to do some double checks, which are giving me a hard time. And the hard time is getting actually harder because MY BACK HURTS SO MUCH! Waaah :'(

27 September 2005

Feliz Cumpleaños, Angélica!

26 September 2005

I got lots of stuff to talk about, but don't worry, I'll try to keep this short. First off, don't you just hate it when your most favorite jeans ever start tearing? I have one super-duper favorite pair of jeans, and every time I do laundry I find a new tear in them. This is very sad, because I just love these jeans. Meh, I'll keep wearing them anyway, at least until they're almost totally ripped, and then I probably won't throw them away because I love them too much... I've recently noticed a lot of leaves on the ground, but I haven't seen any trees with no leaves yet, so that makes me wonder, where do those leaves come from? Some trees are starting to show hints of color-changing. I can't wait to see them in peak fall colors, especially in Goddard since there's so many trees here... With my research, I've been *this close* to getting results for about a month now. I've given myself a deadline for Wednesday at noon. If I don't get this code to work the way I want it to work by that time, then, uhh, I dunno, I have to do something different or something, because I'm getting sick of being *this close* and not really getting something good... The new Family Guy DVD movie just shipped out today, so hopefully I'll have it sometime this week or early next week (delivery estimate is for September 30 - October 3) if the UPS guy decides to deliver it after around 7pm, which is when I'd actually be home to receive a package. I'm totally excited about this! The movie promises to be *very* good... Along with the movie, I'll be getting my newest stuffed animal, an orange kitty that I don't know what I'll name but I'll have to think of an interesting name because that will probably be the name I give to my orange kitty when I get a real-live one sometime within the next year or two. Yes, I want an orange kitty. John's cats are so cute and cuddly that they made me want a kitty of my own. Though I'll probably wait until John and I are living together to get the kitty, because that way he'll help me take care of it. Hey, I've never had any pets other than goldfish, I don't know how to take care of a kitty, so it's good if I have someone around who does. Besides, that way my orange kitty will have feline companions that will teach him stuff like how to use his paw to open a cabinet door... Another thing that should be arriving either late this week or early next week is the Nintendo DS that John bought me. It's not just *any* Nintendo DS either; it is a pink Nintendo DS that he got from Japan on eBay. See, pink Nintendo DS's were available in Japan but not in the States, because apparently the only girl-gamers who like pink live in Japan. However, I read this weekend that there will be a promotional thingie for the holiday season in which a limited number of pink Nintendo DS's will be available in the States, bundled with a limited edition of the game Nintendogs. However, I can't wait for the end of October to get a pink Nintendo DS, so John got me one and right now it's on its way over here! Sometime this week I'm going to Best Buy to get me some games, particularly Super Mario 64 DS and Nintendogs. I wonder how long it will take me this time to get all the stars in the Mario game, hehe. And I am SO getting the Nintendogs edition that has the Golden Retrievers. I've always liked those dogs, and I want to have one sometime in my life, probably when I have a house with a big yard for the dog to run around in, but for now a dog would be a bad idea, especially a big dog like this one. But the Nintendogs game lets me have a lil virtual puppy who reacts to voice commands and can learn tricks and all of the fun stuff without having to actually scoop its poop or have a dog-smelling apartment. And all of this suits me just fine. I even have a name picked out for the dog already, which is the name I would give a real-live Golden Retriever puppy when I actually do have one. So yeah, it's gonna be really fun playing with my new pink Nintendo DS when it gets here... It's still two more weeks until John comes to visit me for the Columbus Day weekend. I miss him way too much, it's been two weeks since I last saw him. But I see his pictures every day here in my desk, and I chat with him every night on IM, and every time I look at my cute shiny little anniversary present I'm reminded of him too, so it's not like he's entirely far away from me... And I just realized that I had promised to keep this short, and it's already really long, so I'll shut up now and get back to work...

24 September 2005

Congratulations to Angélica and Miguel on their engagement!!! Best wishes to the happy couple! OMG, I'm so happy for you guys! :')

23 September 2005

So, I'm thinking of adding a "Puerto Rico FAQ" to the website. You know, to answer all those questions that people keep asking me that make me roll my eyes and breathe deeply. Like, "Are there mountains in Puerto Rico?", "So are you a state or not?" and stuff like that. I'm recruiting help from my friends from UPR Mayagüez because I know they must get asked the same questions, or maybe even worse ones. And yes, I know there is such a thing as a legitimate question, but you know, most of the questions I get are of the eye-rolling variety. I'll probably add the FAQ after I re-design the website, so don't hold your breath 'cuz it will be quite a while before it's ready.

22 September 2005

Happy Autumnal Equinox!

21 September 2005: 11:09pm

Holy freakin crap! I thought Katrina was a big, strong scary Cat 5 hurricane when it was in the Gulf. But Rita, oh man, Rita's even stronger. Right now it has winds of 175mph, which I think it's the same as the fastest sustained winds Katrina ever got. BUT! Rita's central pressure is -you ready? sit down- 897mb. Yup, that's right, 897mb. That's stronger than Katrina's lowest pressure ever. It is currently the third most intense hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic. This is insane. It's heading for Texas, so people should get the hell outta there if they can. True, it's not nearly as huge and strong as Typhoon Tip, which is the biggest, strongest ever tropical cyclone on record. This one happened in 1979 (before my time, you know), hit Japan, had maximum sustained winds of 190mph and lowest central pressure of 870mb, and its diameter was about 1300 miles. Seriously, this thing was almost as big as half of the United States. But yeah, back on topic, Rita. It's big. It's strong. It's all round and symmetric, and oh-so pretty on satellite! But yeah, pretty big threat to the Gulf coast. Huge storm. Wow. And we're just starting to get out of the peak of the hurricane season, with a couple more months left, and we're running out of names. This season has been insane. Wow.

20 September 2005

The Grads' Web Resources Page is now up and running! It's got a ton of cool and useful info for the grads in the PSU Astronomy department, and also for prospective grad students. I've gotten good feedback about the site and the design of the page (thank you, thank you, and btw, John made the cool banner), and I've also received really good suggestions for improving it even more. So, sometime sooner or later, the page will have even more nifty stuff, like info about health insurance, grad housing, and even the weather in State College. So, keep an eye out for updates!

19 September 2005

Yarrr, me mateys! Tis be Talk Like A Pirate Day, shiver me timbers! Yarrr! No Sea Captain episode in the Simpsons on Fox5 DC today though :-P Anyhoo, I found a hilarious little story in The New Yorker (via Pharyngula), titled Intelligent Design. Really, it's funny. Do go there and read the whole thing. Very funny :-)

18 September 2005

New page in the Update Archive: Fall 2005. Yeah, I know, it's about time I added that page. The main page was getting waay too long already. Gah, this process is tedious. You know, with the adding of the links, and the copying and the pasting and the scp'ing to the server and whatnot. I think I am most likely going to turn these updates into a blog, with automated software. I know, I know, I've always been very anal and adamant about hand-coding the entire contents of my website, but updating and maintaining the Update Archives gets to be a real pain in the ass when there's a lot of pages to update. Let's see how soon I'll be able to turn it into a blog. I won't be doing Blogger or LiveJournal or any of the other free online blogging thingies. I'm gonna use Thingamablog, the same software that I use for my [private] research blog. It doesn't have capabilities for comments, but that's fine 'cuz I don't think I'd want to add comments anyway. Dunno, maybe I'll change my mind later and install HaloScan or something. But yeah, at some point I'll get around to bloggyfying my Update Archive. Soon enough. Eventually, really. Maybe before 2005 is over? Or perhaps before the first decade of this century is done ;-)

17 September 2005

OH MY GOD!!! I soooo want this!!! They just unveiled what the controller for the Nintendo Revolution will look like. The console will probably come out in late 2006, I'd guess around christmas time. Anyway, the controller looks like a remote control, it's designed to be used with one hand, and it's motion-sensitive! Motion-sensitive, people! That means that what you've been doing all these years of playing video games, you know, moving the controller around as if that actually helped you in the game, well that will actually be used in the Nintendo Revolution! Sword fighting game? Move the controller like a sword. Fishing? Use the controller like a fishing pole. Wanna jump? Zoom in? Turn left? Move the controller! Check out this video to see how cool it looks and handles. Hot damn, I want this thing! I am SO getting one when it comes out. I want one even more now that I also found out that they're gonna make a new Mario game for the Revolution, and that it will probably be called Super Mario 128, and given my enourmous love of Mario games, this little detail makes me want a Revolution even more. Aside from all the coolness I just talked about, the Revolution will be backwards-compatible with the GameCube, both games and controllers. And, it is believed that it will have the ability to play all older Nintendo games (from N64, SNES and NES), probably emulated, by downloading them into the system. That is just so totally way frickin cool. If you look carefully, the new controller looks exactly like the classic NES controller when it is turned sideways, so right there is a hint of what they can do with this thing. There's also an analog stick controller thingie that can be attached to the Revolution controller, and that hints at N64 games (or at least that's what I think it hints at), aside from having some more functions for games that will be designed specifically for this console. All in all, this Nintento Revolution is gonna be frickin sweet. Oh man, I am sooo getting one when it comes out. Me wanty, me wanty!

16 September 2005: 4:35pm

Gah! It is a very frustrating moment when you realize that you are doing the research equivalent of trying to squeeze orange juice from an apple.

15 September 2005

Holy crap, there was a tornado in Mayagüez! (thanks, Angélica, for the link). Well, not really a tornado; it was over the water, so it was really a water spout ("tromba marina"). But still! Those things are rare in Puerto Rico, let alone Mayagüez. I'd only seen pictures of one from like 5 or 10 years ago that my undergrad advisor took from his balcony, but it was tiny (it was really just a funnel cloud) and it never touched the ground (or water for that matter). That link that Angélica sent me is from a UPRM website, as the water spout was clearly visble from the UPR Mayagüez Campus. The building seen in those pictures is, if memory serves me right, the Electrical and Computer Engineering Building (Edificio Stefani). Damn. I woulda been mega scared if I saw something like that while walking on campus, even if it turned out to be hovering over the Mayagüez Bay and dissolved in 5 minutes, thus not even going over land and causing no harm to anyone or anyplace. Damn... There was also an article about it on El Nuevo Día (article in Spanish). Still... Damn... And I also found a link in the Atmospheric Science page of the UPRM Physics Department with info about the water spout. BTW, I just noticed that the UPRM Physics Department website is totally brand-spanking new and it's all pretty and organized. It's about time! So yay to that, but still, damn, a water spout. Damn...

14 September 2005: 11:30pm

John just IM'd me the cutest, dorkiest comment I've seen in a while. Scene: John's new place. Situation: wireless signal going on and off. What could be causing this? One possibility: cats are walking around, sometimes in between the computer and the direction from which the wireless signal is coming... His comment: "I think the kitties are optically thick to wireless signals". HAHAHAHA!!!

14 September 2005

Feliz Cumpleaños, Carlos!

13 September 2005

Feliz Cumpleaños, Javier!

13 September 2005: 6:45am

I just got home from dropping off John at the Dulles Airport. I drove home almost in tears from missing him so much and wishing for a late sunrise, because I was driving east. I beat the sunrise :-) I got home before it got too annoying. The sky was just starting to light up, and there was a pretty pink layer hovering over the eastern horizon... But now I miss John. I miss him more every time... This weekend was really good, though. I picked him up Friday night at the airport and then we went to dinner at Chevys in Greenbelt. Then we came home and watched TV. Saturday was a lazy day during the first half of the day, and then in the evening we went out to dinner to a really fancy restaurant in DC. This was our first anniversary dinner, and it was wonderful. The restaurant was i Ricchi, a very nice and totally fancy (and expensive) Italian restaurant just south of Dupont Circle on 19th Street, for which we had reservations thanks to John's dad (and the concierge service that he has access to and contacted to help us find a nice place and get reservations). The place even had valet parking and everything. I don't think I've ever been to a fancier restaurant than this one. Everything was so nice, and the food was delicious. We first had Carabaccia, which is "grilled Tuscan garlic bread topped with braised vegetables and grilled shrimp, laced with olive oil and parmigiano". Of course, I gave John the shrimp on mine ;-) but people who know me would be very proud of me because I actually ate the vegetables :-) Then John had Trancia di Salmone Sulla Brace, which was a "fresh grilled salmon fillet with olive oil, rosemary and breadcrumbs", and I had Costolette D'Agnello a Scottadito, which were "grilled baby lamb chops marinated in lemon and rosemary". The food was delicious. We each had a glass of red wine (Chianti), and yay they didn't ask to see my ID :-P For dessert John had a strawberry and vanilla cake and I had a wonderful homemade cheesecake. The whole evening was excellent, and the food couldn't have been better... Sunday was another semi-lazy day. We watched TV for a long time, and then in the afternoon we went to Montgomery Mall in Bethesda (or is it in Rockville? Hmmm, no, no, it's Bethesda). We went to the Apple store there and took a first-hand look at the new iPod nano. That thing is tiiiiiiiiiiiny. It looks so delicate I was afraid I'd break it. But yeah, me and John have iPod minis, and we like them. His is green and mine is pink, and they're pretty cool as they are, even though they've been discontinued. After looking at the nanos and John wandering around the Apple store for a while looking at all the Apple gadgets he so loves, we walked around the mall looking for anniversary gifts for each other. We got each other matching gifts which were really nice, but all I'm gonna say about them here is that they can be considered either very romantic or very cheesy, depending on your point of view ;-) Then we went to College Park because my friend Mia wanted to meet John, and then we got some food and came home to eat while watching the season premiers of The Simpsons and Family Guy... Yesterday John went to Goddard with me. I signed him in as a one-day visitor, and showed him around the Goddard campus and introduced him to a bunch of people. And we even got a little work done! We left work early (at like 6pm) and then went grocery shopping, then to Ikea (I needed a floor lamp, among other things), and then Target and then a car wash (because my car hadn't been washed in about 8 months). Then we came home, and while John put together my new floor lamp, I cooked us a nice Puertorrican dinner: arroz blanco con gandules verdes, chuletas asadas, tostones and amarillitos maduros. Mmmm. John loved it :-) so yay to that! Then he packed and we went to sleep. Well, actually we took a nap, since we had to get up at 3:30am to go to the airport. His flight was at 6:30am, and I live about an hour away from Dulles... And we're back to where I started this post. I'm back home, John is flying back to California, and I miss him. And now I'm going to take a nap, because I am *not* going to work at seven in the morning after having slept just three hours during the night. Nighty-night, internet...

10 September 2005

Warning: this is a very cheesy update. If you have an aversion towards cheesiness, please read no more. You have been warned. Proceed at your own risk... One year ago was the start of the best time of my life. The year went by and my life got better as each day passed. Today it's been a whole year, and I couldn't ask for anything better. I love you, John. Our first year together has been the best time of my life, and even better times are to come as we continue our lives together. The three thousand miles of physical separation is nothing compared to the closeness that we have in our hearts. I can't wait til we can be together all the time, a time when we can be in the same general spacetime coordinates and call this place "home". I love you, hunny.

8 September 2005

A couple links: one important, one funny. First off, the arXiv e-print service is going to get reorganized in the next few months, and among the changes, astro-ph will get divided in four sections. This is important for all astro and physics people out there that use the arXiv to get papers for their research, so I'm reporting it here in case people read this page and didn't know about the changes. And for the funny link, Bitch, PhD has a *hilarious* story about a close encounter she had with a frat guy who was handing out flyers for a party, made a snide remark at her, and later discovered that he was in one of her classes. After laughing out loud, my thoughts were "Beer, alcohol and party supplies: $200. Photocopying flyers: $30. The look on a frat boy's face when he realizes he's taking a class taught by a professor he mistook for a college girl a week before and made a snide remark at her: priceless". Hee hee!

7 September 2005: late afternoon

So, on the way home from work, the song "Minha galera" by Manu Chao came on the iPod. The song is in Portuguese, I think (at least that's what it sounds like to me). Anyway, the word "minha" is repeated many times (no idea what it means though, so don't ask), and it sounds like "miña". This, in turn, sounds like "minga" in the particular way that he says it. So I'm hearing "minga" over and over again, and then my brain jumps from "minga" to "petraca". And then a mental giggle when the thought jumps from "petraca" to the word "escriquillá" and then to "goyet, goyet, goyet", with the corresponding arm movements. Then, of course, the thought goes to "man, that was a funny show, I wonder if it still exists", and not much later I find myself laughing out loud while remembering "The Adventures of Queco Jones" and when Jailene thought she could sing and decided to launch a singing career (bachata, no less, yuck), and other similar and related things, hehehe. And anyone reading this who is not Puertorrican most likely didn't understand a single word, but the Puertorricans out there know what I'm talking about, and will most likely start laughing too once they read this. And as I'm writing this, thinking of the many things typical to Puertorrican culture that people in the States can't really understand, I can't help but to think "Se me chispoteó", and "Chusma, chusma, pffft!", and "Se aprovechan de mi nobleza", and now I'm laughing even more and all I wanna do is watch El Chavo :-P ;-) hehehehe...

7 September 2005

There's a lake (well, actually two) within the grounds of the apartment complex where I live in Beltsville. These lakes are home to many ducks, geese and swans. They're totally cute when they waddle and quack and cross the street right under the "Duck X-ing" sign, and even cuter when there's a mamma duck waddling along with a bunch of ducklings... These ducks also like to sit in the shade of the trees that border the street. These shadows are cast mostly in the morning, right around the time I'm leaving to go to work. So pretty much every morning I have to swerve around the gillion ducks that are sitting there like they own the street. There's been moments when there's so many ducks (like today, for example) that you just can't drive around them because there's no "around" to drive in. You either have to sit there and wait for them to move (which can take forever), or get out of your car and shoo them away, both options being very annoying. Luckily, every now and then there's a maintenance person that just happens to be around (again, today, for example) and they ever-so-kindly shoo the ducks away so that you and the three cars behind you can go on your merry way... Ya know, when you think about it that way, the ducks ain't so cute after all...

6 September 2005

Ahh, I just had a great weekend. I flew to Sacramento on Friday night. My cutie John drove the two hours from Redwood City to go pick me up there because JetBlue doesn't fly to San Francisco and the flight to Oakland was really expensive. The trip didn't start out too well though, because I started getting a bad migraine on my way to Dulles Airport (while driving, thank you very much). The airport had the longest line I've ever seen for the security screening (thank you, Labor Day weekend), the walkway to terminal B didn't work (so I had to actually *walk* all the way there), and the metal curtain thing at the end of the walkway had a broken motor or something because it closed shut and people were just stranded there, underground, for about ten minutes (me included) while they fixed it. My plane was departing from the last gate all the way at the end of the terminal, so I had to walk all the way down there too. While eating a slice of pizza in front of my gate, the migraine started getting worse. Like, a hell of a lot worse. I took a migraine pill, but of course it doesn't start working immediately. The migraine was so bad that my vision actually got blurred and I felt totally dizzy. Once I got on the plane I either fell half asleep or I half passed out, because the first three hours of the flight are a blur to me. I opened my eyes and the screen in front of me showed that we were flying over Kansas. My migraine hadn't gone away yet. It wasn't as bad as it was before I boarded the plane, but my head still hurt pretty bad. Aside from that, I remember from the flight that there were very comfy leather seats in a subtle gray-ish color (unlike the bright blue of Independence Air), and there was a TV for each person, with 36 channels of DirecTV, which I would have enjoyed more if my head didn't hurt so bad. I did watch Mind of Mencia on Comedy Central. Dude is seriously funny... Anyhoo, I arrived at Sacramento, where John was waiting for me. We got into LAMY ("look-at-me-yellow", which is what I like to call his car *giggle* because of its very distinctive yellow color -- hey, my Mom calls it "amarillo pollito", so LAMY isn't that bad either, hehehe), and drove to his new place in Redwood City. I don't really remember much of the drive there, aside from the blinding pain on the right side of my head and me talking incoherently. I woke up around 5am PDT on Saturday and I was woozy and hungry. John prepared us breakfast, and we ate and then went back to sleep. We woke up again at like 11am and my migraine was gone, finally. I was then able to take a look around John's new apartment. It's a nice little cottage in Redwood City. It's small, but it's the perfect size for one person, and he has a yard so the kitties can run around and explore :-) After that, I was able to actually start enjoying my weekend :-) John and I did so many fun things on Saturday and Sunday! Saturday, after waking up and getting ready, we went to a taquería for lunch. John had tamales and I had a quesadilla. And this place had *the* best tortilla chips I've ever had in my life. The mariachi music on the jukebox was a bit loud though, but at least it wasn't bachata ;-) After lunch we went to see a movie (The 40 Year Old Virgin, very funny movie), and then we went to an empty parking lot where I practiced some stick-shift driving. Some seven years ago, my Dad started teaching me to drive his Jeep, which has a manual transmission. I took lessons every weekend for a while, and then stopped. The last time I drove his Jeep was probably like three years ago, so I had pretty much given up on the possibility of driving a stick-shift. John let me drive his car, and gave me some really good pointers too. After about an hour he said that I had improved a lot, so yay! I was actually able to start without stalling, and I was able to shift from 1st to 2nd smoothly :-) After driving, we went to Macaroni Grill for dinner and then we went home and relaxed. On Sunday we went to lunch to a Puertorrican restaurant in the Mission District of San Francisco, Frutilandia, and the food was sooooo good. After that we drove around the city for a while and went to Chinatown. I got a red-and-gold silky Chinese dress, the kind that my sixth grade English teacher used to wear from time to time and that I always thought looked so very cool. We walked around for a while and then left. We went to Ikea to get John some things he needed (a dining table, some chairs, and an underbed storage drawer thingie), and ate some Ikea cinnamon buns (mmmm, so good). Then we went home. We were gonna go ride some go-karts and play mini-golf, but by then (around 8:30pm) we were so tired (Ikea is a *big* place, ya know), that we decided to just go home and chill. We'll do the go-karting and mini-golfing next time I go to visit him :-) As for Monday, we spent the whole day watching TV. He has *two* Nickelodeon channels, and Nick was having a movie marathon! Jimmy Neutron, Fairly Oddparents, Danny Phantom, All Grown Up, etc etc etc. Very awesome :-) At 6pm we left his place and headed for the airport. We drove through the valley, where I saw lots of windmills that were very cool-looking. We ate some dinner at Rubio's (a Mexican grill place) after unsuccessfully searching for a non-existent Quiznos that Google SMS said existed there. We got to the airport about an hour before my flight and I was informed of the fact that I had been selected randomly for extra security screening, so I had to say good-bye to my John early :-( I felt my heart sink as I went up the escalator away from him... The flight back was good. I slept about two hours, which is the same amount I slept the last time I had a red-eye flight. I must say, JetBlue was really nice. Independence Air has better pillows and blankets, but JetBlue has the free DirecTV. And 4 movie channels, but you have to pay for the movies, except on flights to Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, which is just *awesome*, considering that JetBlue flies to Ponce now! I'll just say that I have two favorite airlines now, with JetBlue leading above Independence Air thanks to the DirecTV. If an airline existed which merged each company's best qualities, it would be totally kick-ass. Something like Independence Jet, or FlyBlue, or something like that, hehe. After arriving in Dulles, I took the bus to the parking lot and drove home. Eastward. At seven in the morning. Needless to say, the sun was annoyingly shining straight into my eyes. I slept about two or three hours at home, and then went to work in the afternoon. Then I came home around 6pm. Driving westward. With the sun shining annoyingly straight into my eyes once more. And now I'm just relaxing while I watch Sex and the City. And I'm missing John way too much. The good thing is that he's coming here on Friday! Our one-year anniversary is on Saturday, and we'll be going out to dinner to an as-of-yet-undetermined fancy restaurant in the city