Friday night update

So it’s Friday night, it’s been 6 weeks and 2 days since my last update. Which is a bit pathetic, but I’m sure that everyone will survive without too much difficultly. Anyway, since I don’t remember most of what has happened, we’re going for list format.

  • I now have 99.5 hours of flying time (so close, yet so not 100 hours), including a bunch of flights since my last update:
    • A flight with Branden and Kyle to Taos and back in N80790 just to fly around and log me some cross country time. Branden took some pictures
    • A flight with Laura in early December to Taos for lunch (yummy Mexican) and log me some cross country time. There was still snow on the north sides of the slopes from the November snow storm, so it was really pretty.
    • A bunch of test flights in N813T, Galen’s plane. It’s a blast to fly — very responsive and very quick. The most fun I’ve ever had while flying.
    • A long (~300 nautical mile) cross country flight around Colorado in N813T, solo because it was a test flight. The entire flight was only about 2 hours, since the plane is so fast.
  • Arun, Shelece and I drove down to White Sands in December in hope that Discovery was going to land there (it was looking promising). Just as we arrived at White Sands National Monument, it was announced they were going to land at Kennedy. Good for the NASA budget, not so fun for us. But we did get to run around White Sands, which was fun. We stopped for lunch at a place along the way Arun and Shelece had read about and had one of the best green chili cheeseburgers I’ve ever eaten. Fun trip, but would have been better if there was a shuttle landing overhead.
  • I went home for Christmas break, just barely escaping the giant snow storm in Denver to get to Chicago. Getting home was delayed by yet another snow storm in Denver, but it wasn’t too bad. Just had to spend a boring New Years in South Bend. We spent Christmas afternoon in Detroit, and got to see the Barrett clan, which is always fun. Also got to see Anne while we were in Grand Rapids visiting Cathy and Dan.
  • Rich Graham (the group/team/project leader I was working for) announced that was leaving LANL for Oak Ridge. Adolfy Hoisie took over the group effective January 8th. While a bit scary for a while due to the uncertainty of change, the change should work out pretty well for Galen and I. We’ve been able to re-align what we’re working on to more match our interests (and for me, my thesis work), so that’s happy.
  • I discovered that Pete is still updating his log, so now I have another log to read when I’m wasting time. Yay Pete.
  • It’s ski season! Mary took my skis from B’ton to South Bend and I brought them back from Christmas break with me. Went skiing last Sunday at Ski Santa Fe, which is about an hour drive from my apartment in Los Alamos. My legs remembered what to do much quicker than I expected. Snow wasn’t great, but I won’t complain for such a short drive.
  • I’ve been working with Galen on getting Open MPI to operate properly on heterogeneous environments, particularly using OpenIB between Linux boxes running PowerPC and Opteron processors. This was mostly motivated by the Road Runner machine purchased by Los Alamos, which is a combination of Opteron and Cell blades, likely connected with InfiniBand. It’s been a month long process, with lots of code audits about padding, alignment, and endian swapping. I’ll write a post about the gory details really soon.
  • On Friday, January 19th, I’m moving to Albuquerque. My stuff should show up from Bloomington a week or two after that. I’ll be commuting up to Los Alamos every day in N813T. Woo. One thing this means is more compute time. Another is that I can finally get high speed internet. Working at home with dialup has been interesting and I think I’ve adopted pretty well, but I can’t wait to be able to download stuff *now*, rather than while I sleep.
  • Thesis proposal is going entirely too slowly, but I’m still working on it. Hopefully get the proposal scheduled next week, for sometime in early March. Depends on how travel falls out.