Matthew's Journal

I ran across something today that you don't see very often. Today's GOES-12 satellite imagery captured five named tropical cyclones in a single image.

I played ping-pong today with some of my fellow graduate students. I won my three matches which was nice. I got some vengeance by beating Ben, who beats me at tennis every time we play singles. I haven't played ping-pong in years and it was a lot of fun to play again. I used to play all the time at church growing up, but since I've moved to Raleigh for college I haven't had much opportunity to play. I enjoyed myself and I suspect that as it gets too cold for tennis, I'll be playing ping-pong even more.

I just found a great Olympics article on Yahoo! about some Olympians competing in the rifle competition who have apparently found love. However, that's not the catching point of the article. This article's gem is its opening paragraph. It's as follows:

Warning: the following item makes no mention of Michael Phelps, men's or women's gymnastics, Michael Phelps, USA Basketball, Michael Phelps, beach volleyball, or international scandals, contrived or otherwise (or Michael Phelps).

I just laughed out loud. Apparently its hard to write an Olympics article without mentioning Michael Phelps winning eleventy billion medals or that fact that the Chinese female gymnasts are all 13.

[Link to full article]

Happy Birthday to me! I'm 26 today! Thanks to everyone who's already sent well wishes. I appreciate them.

For anyone who's curious as to what I'm doing for my birthday, I'm doing the following:

1. Working
2. Going to dinner with my wife, Christina

I know, it's an action-packed birthday full of fun and adventure. What can I say? I'm a thrill seeker.

"Sleep is God. Go Worship!"

Jim Butcher

Death Masks - Book Five of the Dresden Files Series

Recently, we've been have a lot of trouble with servers in my lab. We've had a lot of frustrations with computer hardware and configuring the Linux operating systems to work the way we want. My adviser, Dr. Yuter, was complaining to one of her colleagues, Dr. Rob Fovell, about our troubles in configuring a new Linux based server. He had the following humorous quote regarding the large amount of time we had put into fighting with Linux and getting our computers back in working order:

Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing.
-Dr. Rob Fovell

Update: I have since learned that this quote can be attributed to Jamie Zawinski.

I'd like to wish my friend Justin a happy 25th birthday.

I received some new information about the VOCALS research cruise I'll be going on in the fall. It looks like we'll be leaving from Charleston, SC on September 29th instead of Miami or Key West, Florida the 1st or 2nd of October.