It has been a relatively easier week so far - the most important thing to happen was the Engg. Physics Qualifiers. Since then, it has been cruise control, sort of. The presentation, in my personal opionion, went on lot better than I expected and this, as far as I can remember, is the only one in which I have answered most questions in a satisfactory way. Talking to people and getting their suggestions (quite a few people helped me with this - Dave Bezotte, Dr. P, Ralph, Dr. Jaszczak, Wil Slough, Paul Schou, Dave Kraus, Jim Hoel, Pat Krogel …) definitely played a vital role in making the presentation understandable to a general audience. Practicing a few times helped me get the timing right, to just about 45 minutes. One of the suggestions that members of the advisory committe offered was to keep the answer (it) simple and short. In other words, they asked me to learn to KISS and KISS properly. Well, what were you perverts thinking from the moment you read the title? Grow up, guys, grow up….

Amongst other things, I compiled another program, called SIESTA. Package name is an acronym for Spanish Initiative for Electronic Simulations with Thousands of Atoms, and for general public, it can mean that researchers can take a nap (SIESTA, a Spanish tradition) while program does the work Funny part about compilation was the following: when I explicitly specify the full path to the Intel Fortran compiler (ifort), compilation quits. When I just specify ifort, I get the executable perfectly fine. Compiling another program meant that I had to edit some scripts and guides to reflect the change. As a part of the Department tradition, we had Pizza Party in Ambassador, to celebrate Lior’s successful Ph. D thesis defense. During LUG meeting, list of people who will be participating in PenguiCon (Livonia, MI) was also finalized and couple hours after the meeting with Paul Schou were pretty fruitful - he showed me how to write a PERL script to get disk usage report. As I was (and still am) not very comfortable with PERL, I wrote one by myself in BASH. This one turned out to be lot simpler and generic than the first one I had written, but Pat Krogel (CEC) wrote (and explained) a cute PERL script. It’s not only simple, but very elegant and efficient. If you are interested and looking for something similar, feel free to browse through scripts.html (file name is du-mail.pl).

I recently got a 8GB Compact Flash II card for my camera and at 9MP Fine resolution, I can take about 1700 pictures. I guess almost all the required work (but for slides and presentations) for APS meeting in Baltimore is done, atleast the planning. GSC Travel Grants were announced sometime last week and my name, not surpriingly, was not amongst the ones that got picked. This is a good thing in my opinion because it keeps me from casinos and gambling (if my name doesn’t come up when there are just 40 odd people, what chance do I have when there are millions? Probability and Statistics don’t lie…) This weekend, I have a few things planned — attend (not just attend, shout, cheer and make lot of noise too) the Tech basketball games against Northern Michigan University in Marquette on Saturday, compile Atomistix Tool Kit on Räma, update the manuals, update group publications, start 100 more calculations for the last base, get quotes for ATK slave licenses and so on… Hopefully, I will get them all done.