Summer 2010, Phase II
My teaching duties for the summer are coming to an end this Friday. On Sunday I will be traveling to Santa Cruz for the “2010 UC-HIPACC International Summer School on Astro-Computing: Galaxy Simulations”. I’ll be there for three weeks.
I haven’t had much time to work on research for the last few weeks, but I have managed to translate my code from GNU Octave to C++ and add a few new features. I seem to be on course to complete my qualifier project sometime in September–especially if I have some free time while I’m in Santa Cruz. I could have been much closer to completing the project at this point, but I’ve spent some time working on writing my own gravitational tree solver so I can increase the number of particles in the simulations (and to have the experience of writing the tree solver).
Last Friday, Melissa and I celebrated the six-month anniversary of our first date by returning to the scene of the crime: The El Mirage Dry Lake. We camped on the edge of the lake and took some night photos. I finally had a chance to try out my new lens! The resulting photos were rather nice:
Friday was a major day for another reason as well: Melissa lost her job. She was presented with two unpleasant options: 1) follow an order which would prevent her from doing her job effectively, or 2) be fired for insubordination. She chose the latter. The company she worked for reminded me of the timeshare resale company where I worked after I graduated from college; many of the employees are related, the owners and managers are incompetent, and they spend most of their time in meetings talking about what they want to do rather than actually implementing plans.
A few months ago, My car started having problems starting. The problem escalated over the last several weeks to the point where I was afraid that the starting system would stop working altogether. Yesterday I finally drove the car to the Toyota dealership in Riverside to be diagnosed and fixed. The problem was apparently an electrical short in one of the components in the starter assembly–perhaps the solenoid. That’s what they said anyway. They didn’t show me the actual faulty piece of hardware. I’ll find out if it’s really fixed in the next few days of use. They also did some routine maintenance and took care of an oil leak that was getting worse. After taxes, the repair and maintenance bill was over $1200. That’s a ridiculous price, but it seems that every automobile repair shop around here is equally ridiculous. Unfortunately I don’t have the time or equipment to fix things here, so I’m stuck with either not having things repaired or losing large chunks of my savings.
I went to the court in Victorville to pick up papers requesting a trial by written declaration. Hopefully the judge who reads the written defense will be reasonable, but I doubt it. It’s pretty clear that Victorville uses its traffic cameras as a source of income rather than a tool to improve public safety.
