I woke up a little later today, at around 7:50, showered, breakfasted and was off to catch the 8:31 78 bus (my Microsoft Connector bus hasn’t activated yet, pretty much every permission takes days to propagate through their system).
I still had to write my reflection for CompBio (I’d totally forgot) and I did that on the 78 and on my transfer, the 541. I felt on the top of my game :D I submitted it on some random Microsoft Campus, and rolled into Building 112 just a little bit after 9:30.
I caught up with Adam, made a list of things to ask John, then met him for my 10:00 meeting, which was only about 5 minutes today. Then I went back to a configuration grind that lasted all day. Different versions of Python are a nightmare.
Had a quick lunch with Adam and the downstairs cafeteria, which, although described by John as “sad”, was quite remarkable. I got bibimbab for $10 (subsidized, my ***) but then noticed a footlong sandwich for $6. Decided to try that next time. Talked a bit about Adam’s research in quantum algorithms and device modeling (he’s leaning towards the latter) and how he met John in university, plus about his parents and spouse, who all live in the same town in Wisconsin (Madison?).
Got back to the config. I somehow managed to break my numpy install to the point where I was getting a Python “comparing different types” exception, so reinstalled everything.
I scrambled to catch up with Adam and got to this FreeCAD demo, which had a bug in one of the macros that John had written. Since our cluster access hadn’t propagated through the system yet, we had nothing to do but to take a stab at the bug. As a side effect, I got a chance to look at some of John’s code.
I did one more thing, realized I’d have to install Python on Windows as well. John handed me a beefy book on finite element solving with the FEniCS package, and I finished out the day by reading through the first chapter. It was really interesting. Transforming differential equations to variational problems, discretizing their function spaces… :D
I packed and bussed home. It hit me that I was now entirely free for the evening–how strange! and I took a leisurely walk to Din Tai Fung where I met Winnie. We had to wait and chatted about our days on a bench.
Din Tai Fung was absolutely amazing. It was a little pricey but with a terrific Swiss aura of quality around it. (I still think that the quality could be achieved for a lower price, but..) We ordered two steamer dishes of pork bao, some shrimp bao, fried rice. The steamer boxes arrived. Everything was piping hot and lovingly arranged in the wood steamer boxes. Winnie and I talked about bad code, the difficulties of playing a support role in an academic environmment and how credit is given, summer plans…
After we finished we went to Molly Moon’s!! We got a sundae to share with 4 flavors and a smorgasbord of toppings. Nommmm…
Then a Safeway run! We decided to make curry tomorrow and bought most of the ingredients.
Finally, we went back to Laurelhurst. I took a shower while Winnie called her folks. Winnie and I had a great cuddle session. Then we watched a hilarious Rick and Morty and hit the hay.