There’s a problem that New Orleanians often encounter when trying to encourage people to come for the Mardi Gras (said, “da Mawdi Graw”) — namely, they think it’s all about flashing (boobs for beads!).
With that in mind, I took some pictures this year to highlight the fact that it’s only that way in the French Quarter. And I’ve never been to the French Quarter during Mardi Gras, because I’m not insane. Here are some of the pictures.
I’ve been totally absent from most of my life the last week as a result of some problems we had with our code on the cluster. My jobs kept dying, taking down compute nodes in the process, for no apparent reason. After a while I narrowed it down to the time when restart files (from a previous simulation) are read. It turns out that the way the files were read (and that way for a good reason) was really brutal on the network. It involved way too much communication. This was okay for smaller models, but I currently have the largest model we’ve ever run in the lab.
After a conversation with our current programmer and one with our former programmer, and about 6 hours of coding last night, the restart files are now read in a less naughty way, and my jobs are reliably running.
—–
Tomorrow I am leaving for about two and a half weeks in New Orleans and Mandeville! I have an early flight, preceded by an even earlier train ride to the airport. I should be hooked up to the “tubes” and (New Year’s resolution here I come) updating the blog more often with the blow-by-blow as I try to get enough data for a Heart Rhythm conference abstract in time for the deadline, despite all of the sundry delays with the cluster.
*gasps for breath*
—–
Also, Penguin liked my cluster video so much that they put it on their front page.
I find myself this evening at the end of a very long day — one that started yesterday. I had a red-eye flight from Seattle to Baltimore via Detroit, that left at 22:00 PST and arrived at 08:15 EST. Perhaps I should back up a bit.
My day started around 08:00 PST yesterday, as I woke up, saw Amanda off to the first day of her sub-internship, and set to work coding and analyzing data. Between rain and the season, it got dark at around 16:30. In the evening, everyone came home, I packed, dinner came and went, and Amanda drove me to the Seattle airport. You might think that my day would have ended sometime shortly thereafter.
What actually happened was that I caught about two hours of sleep on the three-hour flight, and was booted out of my cozy seat into the sleepy mid-field terminal in Detroit. I had only ever been in that terminal when it was a bustling hub of travelers. Normally, giant (50-foot?) screens show CNN for you to watch ten gates away, with speakers dispersed everywhere, hundreds of people walk by in a few minutes, and restaurants and stores beckon you in. Lately, I pass my time there by watching this fountain.
At 04:15, hardly anyone is there. The screens and speakers are mercifully off, and all of the restaurants and shops except McDonald’s are closed. It is surreal. Slowly, as I wandered through this foreign place, things came to life. Most of the shops and restaurants opened at 05:00. I acquired breakfast. By 05:45, I was sitting at the gate, watching “Jay and Slient Bob Strike Back” on my laptop. A sudden assault on my senses began — a quick look at a clock confirmed my suspicion that it all turned on at precisely 06:00 EST. The drive-in theater sized screens sprang to life. The CNN Crawl snaked(snook?) across the bottoms of the screens in foot-high letters. The endless stream of inane talking-head babble was forced into my ears, past my in-ear headphones.
Shortly thereafter, I boarded the plane and had a cup of coffee. I had given up on creating any lasting separation between the days. They were separated by a mere two hours of intermittent sleep, which were quickly forgotten. Only now, 32 hours after I woke up, do I feel like the true end of yesterday is arriving. Hopefully, tomorrow things will feel a bit more uh, … correct.
I’m working in New Orleans today at Amanda’s apartment while she’s off at class. I usually do this in the dining room, since there’s a nice big table.
You probably know the feeling: you slide your card key in the door, it beeps, you walk in to your hotel room.
Your things aren’t where you left them. The bed is made. It looks like you never used the bathroom — the used towels are gone and the rack is full of fresh ones.
Some people might love this. How nice to have someone clean up after you! It bothers me. I don’t really want some stranger in my hotel room. I don’t think I need fresh towels every day, or to have someone else make my bed. I’m not really all that keen on having people do everything for me.
Just about every hotel room I’ve been in comes with an easy solution: the “Do Not Disturb” door hanger. I’ve now made it my default practice to hang it on the door when I first enter the room, and to take it off only as I’m on my way to check out. This saves me the weirdness of having people in my room going through my stuff (genuine espionage excepted, probably), it saves the housekeeping people time, and it saves water, detergent, electricity and more.
Surely other people must do this. Do you?