Two Birthdays

I’d like to give a shout-out to my buddies Mike and Josh, who both have their birthdays today! I hope you both have a great day! Well, in Josh’s case, I hope he had a great day, since his birthday’s well over half done now over in Japan. But it’s only just startin’ here! And I made sure I was the first to wish Mike a happy birthday actually on his birthday, by giving him a call at midnight eastern, even though it was still only 11pm central, hehe. At any rate, it sure makes it easier to remember when two friends have the same birthday. 🙂
My camera came in the mail today! Canon fixed everything that was wrong with it, because I’m not getting all black pictures anymore, it’s not looking like I’m taking pictures of the inside of a lens cap. It’s so nice to have a working camera again, after not having had one for six weeks!
I spent most of the evening once again up in Walker Building. Daniel showed up after awhile too, and we actually got a decent amount done on the Rad Tran homework. If only we could say the same thing about the ridiculous GFD optional assignment (which isn’t so optional, considering they’re the only problems that we’ve been given since the last test, and the next test is this coming Wednesday, gulp). I guess we’re not in an uproar over the assignment itself so much as the solutions she gave us for them are either wrong, incomplete or just plain weird. I mean, seriously, who would think of setting up a left-handed coordinate system to solve a problem?
Wilma update: It’s slowed down, and it’s gonna cream the Yucatan tomorrow (Friday) and Saturday. It’s still projected to make the hook turn towards Florida, weakening along the way, though it won’t get there till Monday afternoon at least. The GFDL model (the same one that yesterday was predicting Wilma would be near Maine in five days, and then six hours later changed its mind and said it’d be near Cuba) today again did another John Kerry, it flip-flopped its five-day forecast track back to eastern Canada this morning, and at midday it was back to predicting it’d loiter around Castro’s “island paradise” for a few days. So basically, who knows what Wilma’s gonna do. The confidence in the forecasts are rather slim at this point. What we do know is that it went through an eyewall replacement cycle in the last 24 hours, and now has a pretty large eye, around 20-30 miles across, and its central pressure’s up to 923 mb. It’ll still likely regain Cat 5 status before it hits the Yucatan though (it’s a Cat 4 currently).