Josh: 0, Bees: 1

I had a little run in with some bees this weekend. Elizabeth and I were walking through the woods on the northeast side of Cedar Lake yesterday morning. I was messing around down in the water and Elizabeth had walked up some wooden stairs built into the hill. All of a sudden she came running down to the water's edge yelling about bees. Before I knew it we both were getting stung. Needless to say we vacated the area at a run. The total damage: 3 stings to Elizabeth and 2 to me. All of Elizabeth's cleared up to the point that they were only a little swollen and a itchy, as did the one on my leg. The one on my arm, however is a different matter:

It's been a solid 24 hours since I was stung so hopefully the swelling starts to go down soon.

Moving Progress Update 1

Well it's been about a week and a half since we got moved into the new place. Things are getting settled and starting to feel a bit more like home. All of the rooms are pretty much settled with the exception of the basement living room and the office.

The office, where I spend the majority of my time since I work from home, is pretty functional at the moment. Next month when I have a bit more money, I need to go out and pick up a bit bigger desk. At the moment I've stolen Elizabeth's desk and have been using that which has forced her to use a table to set her computer up on. The room is really big so it can definitely accommodate two desks.

The basement living room currently has a few pieces of furniture in it but it isn't really set up. I think the cornerstone of that room will be the kegerator (which is still in Ames) and the bar I'm going to fashion when I get a few free hours. The kegerator should be coming up in the next two weeks, at which point I'll have to really set up my "man lair" down there.

I've been trying to remember to update my contact info everywhere, but if I haven't already sent you the updated info, here it is:
2617 Inglewood Ave S
St. Louis Park, MN 55416
952-681-2227

Other than that, Elizabeth and I have been cooking quite a bit. She's been off this week so we've been taking turns making lunch. Last night we went to a restaurant down the street called Tryg's for our 'date night'. I had some oak grilled salmon and Elizabeth had a shrimp, pineapple, and goat cheese flat bread. Mine was pretty tasty but Elizabeth said she's had better flatbread. It was a bit on the spendy side, and since the food wasn't out of this world, we'll likely try a few more places before we go back there. Tonight I'm going to grill some gorgonzola burgers from Whole Foods (our trip to Whole Foods is worth another blog entry).

Finally, my interview on the Java Posse came out this week. Feedback has been good so far. I was a little worried that it wouldn't go over well since it was light on Java but people found it interesting.

She said yes!

Good news, she said yes. I gave her the ring on Friday when we were at the new house. It was pretty low key. And then we spent the rest of the weekend moving stuff in. Things are no where near being done, but we're making progress. Below is a picture of the living room. It's looking really nice, I think, especially with the new TV I bought :)

PQ and Moving

Today I finished the final part in the PQ process for Antarctica. I'm officially TB-free. All that's left is to send off all of the paperwork and call it done.

In other news, tomorrow I'm starting the move up to Minneapolis. Elizabeth and I are moving into a house in St. Louis Park (south Minneapolis). I've got my car all loaded up and will be heading up tomorrow morning. I can get a surprising amount into my little Elantra. Tomorrow should also be pretty exciting for other reasons (that's foreshadowing folks :) )

More to come...

Eclipse Europa

I'm back after a particularly useful meeting in Minneapolis earlier this week. I got back just in time to download my brand new copy of the Eclipse Europa release. My first impressions is that this is the best Eclipse release yet. I'm loving the ability to remove trailing whitespace and code cleanup automatically when I save a file. And as an RCP developer, I can't wait to migrate PSICAT to the new version to take advantage of all the updates.

So a big congrats and thank you to the Eclipse community for putting together such a great product. I'm off to hack on some code and really put Eclipse through the paces.

Google Apps

Yesterday I set up Google Apps for the andrill.org domain. It was a straightforward process and I've been pretty impressed with the Google Apps. I've been using the standard GMail, Calendar, and Google Docs for quite a few months now so it wasn't much of a change for me. I created accounts for the rest of the folks in the ANDRILL Science Management Office, so we'll see if they find the apps as useful as I do.

Exciting News

Well there's a lot of exciting news to report. First, if you didn't catch my last post, I finally finished my Master's. It was a sort of mad dash towards the end, but I made it. I had given a couple of talks about the work I've done, so the defense/oral exam part was pretty easily. It also helped that I had Doug and Cinzia there lobbing me softball questions that made me look like I knew what I was doing. :)

Second, I signed on with ANDRILL to handle the IT operation for this year's drilling expedition. That means I'll be heading back to Antarctica in October for another two month stint. I'm excited at the prospect of going back and being part of all the hard work that the ANDRILL team is doing. I'm hoping to make this years expedition even more successful on the IT side of things than last years.

Third, I'm moving up to Minneapolis! Elizabeth and I are (99% sure) renting a house in St. Louis Park, about a block from Cedar Lake. This has been a long time coming, and I know both of us are looking forward to moving in together. It's a three bedroom with a nice screened in porch and a bit of a yard. I'm converting one bedroom into an office and will be working remotely for ANDRILL from there. I really like the Twin Cities area and it will get me closer to my family and friends in Minnesota.

With all of that going on, I've still managed to get a few other things done. I was out in Boston a couple of weeks ago (just before my defense) to attend the 2007 AccessData Workshop. The workshop was about bringing data representatives, software tool specialists, scientific researchers, curriculum developers, and educators together and developing educational activities. It was a really great time. I made a lot of great contacts and got some very valuable feedback on PSICAT.

I also gave a talk to the Ames Kiwanis. I didn't know what to expect going into it. The University PR department put me in touch with them about possibly giving a talk, so I figured if nothing else it would be good practice for my defense. It was a really great experience. Everyone was very interested and asked a lot of great questions. So much so that I didn't know if I was going to get out of there. On Thursday, I'm going to give a similar talk to some students participating in the REU (Research Experiences for Undergraduates) program through the Human Computer Interaction department here at ISU.

The last bit of news is that Dr. Dobbs picked up an article I wrote about PSICAT. I don't know when it will run, but when I get more info, I'll pass it along. I wanted to thank Anne for her patience during the several months it took to actually get it written. It didn't actually take me several months to write, it just kept getting preempted for higher priority things like finishing the thesis and such. So anyhow, thanks Anne, and thanks Jon from Dr. Dobbs for reading it, and thanks Bill for the edits.

I'm going to make it a point to blog more often so I don't end up with these novel-esque entries. Now that the preparations for Antarctica have begun, I should also have more to blog about. Cheers.