A Busy Week

It seems like life has been moving very quickly latley. Software, training, travel, and houses. I don't think I've had a moment to sit still in a long time.

Liz's cousins, Aren and Erin, moved out Wednesday and we went looking at houses Thursday. I'll be moving to the windward side soon (Kailua/Kaneohe). It was interesting to get to look at how different people lived, what it costs, and what potentials there are. There were some older rent-machines, architectural oddities (walk through the bathroom to get into the house?), and awesome but expensive places. More to come in the next week(s).

In addition to the software and houses, I'm training for the Dec 2nd BJJ tourney. I think I'm out of the running for this year's triple-crown since I missed the August competition, and I've got zero chance of medaling in the No-Gi division since I'm in the advanced bracket now. The crown is won by number of medals in a given belt/weight class. I got gold/silver in the first tourney in gi/no-gi, but if anyone who medaled in the first tourney went and medaled in the second, we're tied going in to the third with me having basically no chance in the no-gi division. Anyways, lots of running, reading, etc to do.

I've been writing a lot of code to produce plots like this:

There's a ton of processing that still needs to be written into my "reduction pipeline" before I start arguing about disks around stars. It's nice that I'm going to Maui so much though - I've actually got a lot of things working over there and I've got a pile of data for my thesis. The short story is that after a bunch of optical and mechanical fixes, I get about 4 times more light per picture than I did before. This means that I can do the same science in a 1 minute exposure now as opposed to a 4 minute exposure before. That's huge. It's like the difference between using the 8-10m scopes (biggest in the world) and AEOS. I can't believe what a bit of sweat and agony (mentally anyways) can do for an instrument. There's still a ton to do to make it better (fix CCD, tip/tilt corrector, etc) but at this point, I'm stoked. Totally stoked. I'll just be flying over here for 5 days or so, every other week, till April or so.... Oh well right.