October 13, 2008

traviscj lives!

I finally got my blog running again. I don’t have the old data… oops. Forgot it at home. But in the mean time, at least I’m hosted again!

August 24, 2008

Mugged!

Friday started off a pretty decent day in Brazil. I finally got comfortable enough with my phrase book to start busting out phrases to the Taxi driver and it ended up making our taxi rides a fair bit more comfortable, quicker, and cheaper. So, there’s one place that Portuguese is coming in really handy, even if it is even just a tiny bit of it. It’s getting a lot more comfortable interacting with the native Brazilians here, probably for all of us, but it was pretty pronounced today, and I was feeling pretty good about it.

August 22, 2008

More Updates from Rio

Sorry for not getting this updated a little bit sooner, but it has been an eventful week sortof. Apparently it’s been almost a week! Time flies, apparently. Wednesday was pretty standard. More classes, more modeling, more cool climate stuff. IMPA has pretty good coffee for free on supply until 4pm, and all of us Seattlites are pretty much living on it, and on the verge of staging a coup when they try to shut it down.

August 20, 2008

First Couple of Days in Rio

So Monday morning was really lazy. Some people went to get a volleyball, a bunch went down to the beach again, and I let my sunburn cool off. It was also really warm and sunny, which is a nice change from Seattle! We left for IMPA around 2, got on taxis to get over there, and eventually made it. The taxi drivers are apparently pretty vicious. We took 5 cabs, 3 got charged around 15, one around 20, and one 25.

August 18, 2008

IN BRAZIL

I finally made it to Brazil. It was a very long and tiring flight, but I was seated next to a couple of very nice locals that fed me all sorts of useful information. I ended up pre-buying a ticket from the Taxi company, but apparently this is sortof a bad call, because they way overcharge if you don’t have them use the meter. Anyways, not too big of a deal.

August 17, 2008

In Atlanta

Well, I made it at least as far as Atlanta. The Boeing 757 we flew in had touchscreens in each monitor that told me I’ve traveled 2326 miles so far. Landing was pretty smooth, and the flight was relatively easy. A bit longer than I’d expected, and a little bit more restless than I’d hoped. I stopped to get some food immediately on arriving, somewhere called Krystal Hamburger. They have a Sausage Scramble Combo, a cup full of scrambled eggs, sausage, and grits!

August 7, 2008

Whack it with an X squared!

David and I were working on our Math381 model, and I was getting frustrated because the data we collected and the results from the simulation were not lining up properly, which was quite frustrating. We were hoping to see something like this: Number of Logins from Data Instead, we were getting stuff distributed like this: Simulated Number of Logins I realized that we needed some function to force a bunch of this junk further left.

August 5, 2008

iPhone 2.0 - Impressions and Favorites

I know that about every other iPhone owner has posted to their blog about this and almost a month ago already, but I’ll throw my own take into the mix. I originally planned on waiting a while before installing the second major revision of the iPhone software, but Sharvil tried it almost immediately and told me that I needed to give it a shot. So, I finally upgraded it, and have not been disappointed.

August 4, 2008

Johnson vs Acronis, Pt 2

Some more ways Acronis fails, just for the record: Completely useless log files. Error messages are crucial in applications. Acronis says ‘Error creating file’. This could mean: I couldn’t resolve the FTP server’s hostname I could resolve the hostname, but could not connect to the FTP port I could resolve the hostname and connect, but I could not authenticate. I could resolve, connect, authenticate, but I could not create a new file.

August 3, 2008

Final Pre-trip Brazil Updates

I have been meaning to write for almost two weeks that I’ve got my Visa back from the Brazilian Consulate in San Francisco, which is pretty cool. I saw a picture of it and it looks really sweet. I’m slowly turning into a world traveler! It took about a week inside the consulate, then they FedEx Next Day Air’d it to Memphis, then Spokane, then the Tri-Cities, then Prosser. They dropped it off with Mom.