Unfettered

 Today's the day! In fact I'm writing this from LAX so one flight down one to go. My Covid test yesterday came back negative in the early afternoon (rather than right at the 7pm guarantee) which relieved considerable anxiety and made it easier to enjoy the evening with my family. My brother  came over for our traditional weekend family salmon dinner. I'm very lucky my nuclear family all live so close and it will be strange not being able to see them every week (or every day). Another perk is that my parents are willing to drive me to the airport. We woke up early this morning to have plenty of time to get to SFO. All together my luggage weighs more than I do, so thankfully my parents parked rather than dropping me off at the curb. There were no luggage carts in the parking structure so I had to go in to the baggage claim area to rent one since transporting my bags without it would have been impossible. The employee helping out at the United kiosk did ask to see my test resu...

 As mentioned in my previous post traveling these days is not particularly easy. After getting my Visa, the next challenge was booking flights. After the direct flight from SFO was cancelled twice, once in January once in February, I resigned myself to connecting. Lucky the direct flights from LAX were more reliable so I booked the SFO-> LAX -> MUC route. However connecting did make Covid Testing more of a challenge. Germany requires  a negative covid test administered within 48 hours of scheduled arrival but you need the results before boarding the flight. There are places in the Bay area which offer test results by 2pm the next day which would have worked for my a flight. Unfortunately I did not get a straight answer on if I would need my test results before the SFO to LAX leg of my journey. Assuming I would need the negative test to board my first flight I had to find a same day Covid test location that was open on weekends. Thankfully I was able to book a test which ...

 Welcome Back! After a 10 year hiatus I am once again doing something interesting enough to warrant keeping a blog. Specifically I'm moving to Munich at, what I hope is, the tail end of a global pandemic . This move has been over 9 months in the making ever since I switched teams at work and started the relocation process. Follow along here to see what I'm up to, no promises as to content quality or update frequency. Moving to Munich After living a few years in San Francisco I was ready for a change of scenery and a change of teams at work. In March I found an opportunity with a Team in Munich which I transferred too. However due to the pandemic physical relocation was not quite as simple. It took until September to get the correct Visa which then didn't become valid until January. Due to holiday lockdowns and the lack of direct flights I opted to wait until February to officially start. That also gave me time to figure pack, figure out housing, etc.  What's happened si...

Last week was the final week of EISI, certainly a bittersweet time, also exceedingly busy. Everyone in the program had papers to finish, conclusions to draw, and presentations to rehearse. Still we all got through it and I saw some very interesting results. During all this chaos three other students and I drove to Albany (Oregon, not California or New York) to eat at a Hungarian restaurant. I first saw a sign weeks earlier, driving up 5 to a field site and I knew I had to go. After all I'd just spent a semester in Budapest and I couldn't find a Hungarian restaurant in the entire Bay Area. The place is called Novak's and ended up being a little fancier than I expected. Still everyone was game and we had a great time. I had the shepard's platter which had all the typical Hungarian food, paprikás csirke, töltött káposzta, kolbász, and pörkölt (chicken paprika, stuffed cabbage, sausage, and goulash for those who don't speak Hungarian). The food was quite good though no...

I doubt anyone is still reading this, but I need a break from Mathematica so I thought I'd try writing some plain English for a change. We've been in Corvallis now for 4 weeks, and aside from one trip back to Quartz Creek I've been doing my work here, either in the library or memorial union. Earlier this week the other two members of my group Will and Ginger went out to Crab-Tree Creek on the Santiam to finish the last of our data gathering. I opted not to go for two main reasons, one the StreamPro (The ADCP actually designed for shallow water) can be easily operated by two people, and two I already had plenty of work to do. For the last 4 weeks I've been using Mathematica to visualize and analyze our data. It may not be the best tool for the job, but I know how to use it. Essentially what I do is read in text files of data from WinRiver (the program that comes with the ADCP), process them into a usable format, then use them to make pretty pictures. Aside from work I...

Now that it is the second half of the summer we have transitioned from working in the Andrews Experimental forest to working on the OSU campus. Last Thursday we packed up and cleaned up and permanently moved all our belongings into the dorms. Though living in the woods is always a great time Corvallis is a nice town so its not too bad. Plus it is nice being within walking distance of grocery stores, movie theaters, and other modern conveniences. Being in Corvallis does not however mean we are done with field work, just this Monday my group scouted our second site and developed a rough game plan for next few weeks. This week is data analysis week, which is what I've been doing the past couple days, while next week we get to try some different equipment at our original site. That's really about it for work, since I doubt anyone wants to hear about my battles with Mathematica. This past weekend I explored the town, went berry picking at a farm owned by the school, and played some ...

This has been rather busy as evidenced by the lack of posts. On Monday we drove around with a forest service guy named Ray. He showed us a bunch of log jams on the McKenzie and some side tributaries. Its amazing how well he knows the area and all the log jams. He kept coming up with sites to look at, we ended up driving back and forth over the basin. We found a couple of cool snorkel sites to look at fish behavior but none of the sites were really suitable for our instruments. Today we went back to Quartz creek (our main site) and took some more data. This time Jorge our math mentor came along and helped us try to come up with a way to create a grid of data. Suffice it to say it was a long and complicated process and only data analysis will tell if it works. We did get to use a total station to survey the points where we took data, which was pretty cool. This weekend I went to the Oregon Country Fair , which was quite a spectacle and tons of fun! I'm not really sure how to descri...