Barn Wedding

Last weekend my friends Bill and Aimee tied the knot in a quaint barn down in Jersey. The wedding itself was a lot of fun, with plenty of good food and some nice touches like a hot apple cider bar with various “adult” fixins. It also served as a great reunion for my group of friends from highschool–the only one missing was off in Africa.

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Conference in Montana

I just got back from a conference in Big Sky, Montana. The conference hotel was up in the mountains at a ski resort, and although they were starting to get their first snow of the season, the slopes weren’t quite ready yet. The scenery was quit breathtaking (especially for someone from New Jersey), but unfortunately I only got to walk around and take pictures during one of the cloudy days. The conference itself was quite interesting. It was much busier than any of the others I’ve been to. I met a number of new interesting people, and got to see a few other familiar faces which was nice.

Cape Cod – 4th of July

Megan and I went down to Cape Cod for the 4th of July weekend along with our friends Bobby and Stefan.  It was right after my proposal defense, so I had a wonderful time just relaxing and forgetting about work for a few days. We’ve been having about a month of steady rain and clouds, but amazingly the sun broke through during our first full day there. After that we had beautiful weather, a lot of fun, and good seafood. For the first time it finally felt like summer to me, as I sat outside in the sun, enjoying my fish tacos.

We spent our days relaxing on the beach, and our nights at Sweetwater Forest Campground, which had decent size camp sites that were reasonably separated. One afternoon Bobby fished in the pond near our campsite, and caught us two small sunfish… better than the guy near us who only pulled in weeds. On the Fourth we made our way through the crowds of men in muscle shirts to see the fireworks in Provincetown. Megan and I spent part of our last day biking along the Cape Cod Rail Trail, which was a very nice ride. We also zipped through some of the more hilly trails in Nickerson State Park, before returning to the more leisurely CCRT.

Proposal #2 Done!

proposalI did one sort of proposal earlier this spring, but on July 1st I defended my thesis proposal.

I won’t bore you with the details, but you can all imagine it as collection of groundbreaking work exploring how virtualization can be used to make computers more efficient, improve reliability, and generally save the world from all sorts of evil.

It’s pretty exciting, and having finished that after 4 years puts me in a good position to finish my PhD well ahead of the average in my department…

Engagement Party

This is a double post, also appearing on our wedding blog.

A few weeks ago we had an informal engagement party with our friends in Amherst. We were lucky to have a beautiful spring day perfect for a barbecue and drinks in our yard. Between the 3 grills, 35 people, 2 croquet sets, 8 pitchers of sangria, and I’m not sure how many cases of beer, everyone was kept busy and entertained!

Many thanks to everyone who helped out, plus Ilene and Gal who took all the photographs! You can find even more here and here.

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Engaged!

megandmeimg_3555Over Spring Break I proposed to Megan, and with a diamond ring as encouragement, she said yes! We haven’t figured too much out about the actual wedding other than that it probably won’t be until Spring or Summer 2010.  In the meantime, you can read about all the terrible exciting things involved with planning a wedding on our fancy new blog.

Snowshoeing by Cushman Brook

For Christmas, Megan and I got each other snowshoes. We had used them before on a cabining trip up in NH and had a great time, so we both (independently) thought it would be fun to have some of our own. We’ve been having a nice snowy winter the last few weeks, and we finally got a chance to give our new shoes a try last week.  We took a walk down along the Cushman Brook near our house. We’ve had about a foot of snow in the last two weeks, and it has stayed cool, keeping the snow very soft and powdery.

SSH Tunneling Tutorial

Note: this post is another technical one, so if you are a member of my immediate family, you probably won’t find it of much interest.  If “ports” make you think of boats (rather than the numbers 80 and 22), then why don’t you mosey on over to my christmas photos?

I frequently have trouble communicating between systems which are separated by different private LANs. This often happens when you have your computer on a home wireless network which is separated from the rest of the internet via a router and firewall.  Fortunately, SSH tunnels can be used to link these machines together, provided you know which ports need to be interfaced and you have a common server which both machines can reach. Here is how. Continue reading

Popcornfarmer.com Learning Center

I am pleased to annouce the grand opening of the Popcornfarmer.com Learning Center. There isn’t too much in there right now, and mostly it is just notes for myself.  In any case, some of it might be useful to somebody, so rather than just keeping it hidden away I figure I will share it.

Most of the information is pretty technical, so unless you are interested in doing some Bash shell scripting or need to make some regression plots in R, it may not be of much use.

Podcasts… y Espana

I have been driving by myself more often lately since I’m off doing an internship.  As a result, I’ve been listening to a lot of the radio (by that I mean NPR) and to various podcasts.

I always enjoy Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me, NPR’s news quiz show as well as Prarie Home Companion when I’m looking to be entertained. The latter option only has podcasts of Garison Keillor’s ten minute long weekly update on the News from Lake Woebegone, but it is always good. Of course another great show is This American Life, which provides a series of stories and interviews each week on some intriguing topic. One episode in the last few weeks was on the scandal of a famous southern evangelical preacher who decided that he didn’t believe in hell. He has been formally ostracized by his former colleagues and labeled a heretic, all because he thinks starving babies in africa shouldn’t have to spend eternity burning in the fires of hell.

A completely different kind of podcast that I’ve also been listening to is a series of Spanish language lessons. Coffee Break Spanish is a pretty good introductory Spanish course, although I can’t judge how useful it would be if you were starting with no knowledge of the language. There are over 70 free episodes available for download.  Most were too easy for me, but I did appreciate the review on some trickier tenses like the subjunctive. Unfortunately I could not find a good index of each episode’s contents, so it is tough to find particular topics of interest.

From the same group, Radio Lingua Network, comes Showtime Spanish, which seems to be exactly what I need. Each 20 minute episode starts with a conversation between the two hosts (in reasonably slow and well ennunciated Spanish), followed by a review and discussion of what they talked about. Most of the discussion is in Spanish as well, with English just used to clarify vocabulary. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by my ability to understand what is being said even though I haven’t had any formal training with the language in (wow!) eight years. A further bonus in this podcast is that every five episodes is a mini (audio) soap opera. I’ve always wondered whether Spanish people themselves are as in love with soap operas as Spanish language instructors seem to be…

I’m very impressed by the amount of work that clearly goes into both of these free podcasts (they also have ones for a variety of other languages, including Luxumbourgish). On the down side, both Coffee Break Spanish and Showtime Spanish feature absolutely ridiculous introductory jingles…

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