Poker

I had some guys over the other night to play some poker, and it was excellent. We all put in $10, and I got back $13. Not bad, I think. Also, I excuse about $3 lost to Dustin as a freakish hand. I had a straight, 10-A, but there were two aces showing. I should have backed out anyway, because I was pretty sure he had a full house, but then he threw down the other two aces. Four aces is a difficult hand to beat. Oh well.

Science Friday

There is a good segment on NPR right now with Maggie Turnbull, who is a Post Doc at Carnegie with me. Tune in.

New Google Widgets

There are some cool new widgets from Google announced today at Google's official blog. I am actually posting this blog from my dashboard right now, instead of the familiar web interface. It is nice to see Google making something for the Mac crowd, especially since google pages doesn't work with safari. I was beginning to feel left out.

Technical junk

OK, so this is not so interesting, but I think there is a limit to the number of nested while loops I can put into a C shell script (at least in my OS X implementation of C shell). I am writing a script to run my simulations, and when I put three nested while loops into a fourth, my code would run without incident, but when it got to the end of the largest loop, it would only run once. I double checked everything, and then I wrote a little code that only looped and incremented four variables. Lo and behold, the same thing happened, and the largest loop only happened once. I haven't found any documentation online, so it could be limited to my particular setup, or it could be a general C shell limit. To fix it, I changed the largest loop to a if statement with a goto command to head up to the top of the other loops. If anyone has any information about this, let me know.

Syriana

Courtney, Tommy and I headed out to watch Syriana on Thursday night. What a terrific movie. Of course, I have no real understanding of the truthfulness of the events or even the premise of the film. It seems to me like it could be plausible enough, but I just don't know. I mean, I know that some of the events in the movie are false, but how close are they to things that have really happened, or could happen? If you haven't seen it, yet, make a point of seeing it.

Grant Cox?

Hey, I am looking for a guy named Grant Cox. I can't find him on Google. And I don't know where else to look. What happened before we could ask google things? Must have been like the dark ages. Oh well, I think he might be in Law school in Little Rock. I suppose I could call.

Astronomy talk

I gave a talk this morning to the astronomy group. I had 14 slides, and our group is sort of talkative, so I figured that it would take about 30 minutes. You know, usually one minute a slide but two because of so many questions. Well, I finished after an hour and five minutes. I was running against lunch at noon, and I started at 11. There were some great comments, and I was not certain about some of the questions, but over all it was a good experience. I need to head to IDL now to make some more explanatory plots to put in the paper and any future talk.

Nap time?

It will be if you want to read my astronomy paper. However, if you have the mind to, then please be my guest. For those on the edge, it describes some software we have developed to simulate an extrasolar planetary atmosphere. I have just started it, so there are only a couple of pages. I will update it continuously, and hopefully it will be in a pretty good state by the end of February.

Awesome Casino Party

We had quite the party on Saturday night. Only a couple of people couldn't make it because of the snow. Most people were on the metro, and it worked out just fine. We had about 22 people here, I guess. We didn't have much roulette action, but the poker room was always full, as well as the black jack table. Most of the night someone was also at the craps table, especially after Tommy showed up to tell us how to play it. The auction at the end of the night was hella fun, and nearly everyone went home with a prize (except poor Dave). We are already planning on doing it next year.

It's Alive!

OK, so since I linked to it from my main webpage, I guess my wedding website is now live. For all of you guys who are interested, head over to bourtney.com to see our wedding website. Most of the pages are up, but if you find anything missing, then don't hesitate to send me an e-mail, so that I can fix it.

Crock pot

Mom bought me a crock pot/fryer/steamer for my birthday. It might not sound cool to you guys, but it does to me. Courtney and I have already made a huge pot of chilli the other day, and only finished it last night. This morning we through all the stuff in for chicken cacciatore. It should be finished when we get home today, ready for our meal with Kelly & Brandon tonight.

Bad weekend

The weekend could have been better. The only good thing about it was when Courtney finally got back from Scotland on Sunday. We spent some time when she got back setting up for this weekend's party. We bought some martini glasses and some other cool stuff for gambling. Everybody practice, because we are going to take your money. I am headed over to the fruit stand tonight. The only night this week, which is nice. I need to get my paper finished.

New webpage

I just got iWeb, the new application in Apple's new iLife '06, and I used it to make a new website for myself. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Happy Ground Hogs Day!

To all you guys out there waiting with baited breath for the ground hog, I salute you!
In other news, I worked last night at the fruit stand. I did alright, but the best find was some cardboard boxes that we were tossing. I grabbed a few, because we don't yet have enough tables for Casino Night. I am going to put a few together with cardboard and the felt table clothes that came in the casino set. Then set them on trunks or something. I know it sounds ghetto, but it is going to be ghreat.