Brunch on Sunday

I apologize, this post is quite late. I've been pretty busy for the last week or so. But now that my presentation is done, I can update the blog again.
We had a brunch/lunch at our place on Sunday, the day before John left for California. It was also a birthday celebration, although John made three quiches himself. And they were so good! We also had cheese, bread, fruit salad, pancakes, bacon, cheesecake, and carrot cake. Thats a lot of food. And Kim brought up her super duper instant coffee machine which was very impressive (very similar to the one at Carol and Loren's house, but a different brand).

Happy Birthday John!!!

Have a great day, John, and thanks for helping me pick up equipment at the Thompson School!

This is a picture of John, first thing in the morning on his birthday. He got up early to help me pick up survey equipment and even carried the super heavy box of GPS equipment for me. What a guy!

Stephan's Thesis

Stephan is finishing up his thesis really soon and has been getting people to try out his software. It's very cool, you put on some special glasses and you can see an ocean current visualization in 3-D on the screen. There's a 3-D mouse/pen for moving around on the screen. The software includes 5 different types of virtual sensors (such as dye pots and streamers) to choose from to help you see and understand the flow speed and volume at different depths. And as a bonus, the glasses are very flattering, as you can see from the photo.

Easter Potluck

Val and Alice hosted an Easter potluck at their house last night. It was a blast, we got to eat lots o' food, and then we dyed eggs! Here's a picture of everyone before the meal, doesn't it look yummy? Val and Alice made paella, John and I brought John's special black bean/cilantro salad, Lynn brought delicious devilled (sp?) eggs, kurt brought 2 pies, and Nathan and Alyssa brought blueberry/apple crisp. We all had a good time, and Kokua supervised the entire operation. Because she loves us.

Another snow day

It snowed a lot last night. I think classes are all cancelled. There were hardly any people around campus, and there are only a couple of people here at CCOM. Although I have to admit, now that I'm only taking 2 classes, having a snow day doesn't really affect me so much. But for some reason, I still get really excited when I hear that school is cancelled. Then it's sort of fun to walk in to CCOM through the terrible blizzard conditions, and pretend like I'm some kind of brave and adventurous soul. And of course since it's a snow day, I feel completely justified in leaving as early as I like to go do fun stuff like jumping in snowbanks. And by jumping in snowbanks I definitely mean pushing John into snowbanks. hahaha! (yeah, it's funny now, until John reads this and pushes me into a snowbank later)

Beam patterns

Last week Tom tried to get Val and I to come up with the beam pattern for a curved hydrophone array. Val did his on Friday afternoon and it worked great. It gave results that led to conclusions and further recommendations, and an overall benefit to the harbour tracking project as a whole. I did mine in Matlab using the BFI method (brute force and ignorance - plenty of both) and came up with the above plot - the colors represent decibel levels. I have no idea what happened. And since I have no idea what happened, what better to do than to randomly change parameters in the code in hopes of coming up with a nice desktop background. So I changed the radius of curvature, took the absolute value, and came up with this one:

Mystery Tree

John, Kurt, Val, and I went to check out the greenhouse at the Thompson school on Saturday morning. It was really fun, and while I was there I picked up what I thought was a cool looking plant/tree. A guy that worked there said it was a coffee tree, but I can't find any info on it on google, and an image search doesn't really bring up anything that looks like what I have. If anyone can identify this plant, please let me know. If you're curious, click on the image above to link to my greenhouse album on picasa where you'll find more photos of the mystery tree. If you can tell me what it is, I'll buy you an ice cream!! Note to Andrea: the picasa album has a picture of Trogdor!!