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July 03, 2010
Working Holiday Weekend
Happy Independence Day, everyone! While I'm sure most of you will be spending the weekend enjoying yourselves at a lake, or at least someplace not thinking about work, I'll be needing to spend a fair amount of time in the office this weekend. Feel pity for me. :-) I'll also need to put in a full day of work on Monday, which is technically a holiday. (A sign in my apartment complex said, "The rental office will be closed on July 5th in observance of July 4th." Just an odd way of putting it!) And in case you're wondering why I'm blogging while writing about how much I still have to work, well, it's because the Germany v Argentina World Cup quarterfinal is on ABC right now. I figure I may as well be productive while watching the soccer, haha. If it were on ESPN, then it would be shown live online on ESPN3.com, and I'd have it on while working at the office.
I've been putting in a lot of long days at work the last few weeks (big chunks of that has been debugging code with Walter). 10-12 hour days have not been uncommon. I'm trying to get tons of research done before the George Mason University Conference on Atmospheric Transport & Dispersion Modeling in just a week and a half. I usually go to the GMU conference every year, and I'm lead author on a presentation again this year. But instead of going to GMU, Tyler will be giving my talk there and I'll be going to Colorado and NCAR (Nat'l Center for Atmospheric Research) for a week. Boulder >> Fairfax. No question about that statement! I just bought my plane tickets on Monday, and yesterday secured a room in a house near NCAR for the week.
I'll be going to Boulder to work with some people for a few days who are developers of DART, the Data Assimilation Research Testbed, which is a tool that I'm using in my research. For that visit I need to put together a presentation about how I'm using DART, what I'd like to accomplish with it, and difficulties that I'm having with it. Then they'll work with me, and give me suggestions of what to try or do differently and all that. It should be a valuable experience. But I've set aside DART for the last couple months, after all the trouble I had with getting it to work properly, so now I have to quick set up an experiment or two with it and analyze the results before I fly out on Friday afternoon. That's why I need to spend some time in the office this weekend. Hopefully it won't take me too long to get stuff set up, so that I can just let the jobs run on the cluster while I'm enjoying the fireworks tomorrow night. So much to do, but I think I might just barely get everything done that I need to...
The other bonus of going out to Boulder for a week is that Alex is out there this summer! I'll be renting out a bedroom in a house, which, as it turns out, is only a block away from the house where Alex is renting a room. I'll get there Friday night, and then on Saturday we'll be doing a lot of hiking somewhere in the mountains and then camping for the night. I'm really looking forward to that. I've been to Boulder a couple times, but I've never been west of Boulder before, and therefore I've never been in the Rockies before! Hooray mountains! Only a few more days of hard work before I'll get that scenic and fun weekend break as a reward!
And as an appetizer for tomorrow night's fireworks at the Central PA 4th Fest (they'll shoot off more than 15,700 shells!!), here's a video I took of the last few minutes of last year's show:
I'll be posting photos and videos of the fireworks when I get a chance. Hopefully it won't be too long a delay. Happy Independence Day, everyone!
Posted by Jared at July 3, 2010 11:05 AM