Summer Begins!
The spring quarter has finally come to an end and the summer begins soon. A lot has happened in the last few weeks. Here are a few highlights:
- On Saturday, May 29th, Melissa’s brother graduated from The University of Redlands. I drove Melissa and her mom to the graduation and took a few photos.
- I finished writing another proposal for NASA.
- Gaby and I have a new collaborator who has a lot of experience with the specific tools that I’ll be using for my PhD project.
- Melissa and I hiked up to the “C” on Box Springs Mountain. It was Melissa’s first hike.
- We finally installed light-blocking curtains in the bedroom so it’s not bright in the room anymore! The curtains also help block some of the noise from outside and they help keep the bedroom from getting as hot. Thus the curtains have improved my quality of sleep in multiple ways!
- The tomatoes have started ripening at a steady pace. In the past two days I’ve picked six tomatoes. They’re delicious!
- I’ve begun writing code in GNU Octave to prototype some of the algorithms that I’ll use for my research. I should be able to finish the prototyping in another week or two, then I’ll write C or C++ code using OMP to take full advantage of my quad-core processor. I should be able to present this little project as part of my oral examination in roughly September. By the end of this year, I will have taken my last required course and advanced to candidacy.
- I got my TA assignment for the summer. I will teach the 2LB lab during the first summer session. I’ll have to teach two labs per week, which means I’ll have to grade 40 lab reports per week….this is not going to be fun.
- Melissa had a show in Suzy’s Bar in Hermosa Beach on June 6th. The owner of the bar bought one of her CDs–pretty cool!
- I won my first physics award on Friday. It was the “Robert T. Poe Memorial Graduate Scholarship Award for Outstanding Graduate Research by a Second-Year Graduate Student”. There was a nice monetary prize associated with the award. The prize will cover the ridiculous Victorville traffic fine if I’m forced to pay.
- Almost all of the equipment and software is configured so that I can begin making high fidelity YouTube videos of Melissa performing here in the apartment. I just have to buy one more cable. I hope we can record frequently enough so that she can post one video each week.
- I figured out that the plant that was making me sick is some sort of jasmine.
- Tuesday will be the one-year anniversary of Across The Universe.
Some photos from the last few weeks:
