Well we don't have a whole lot to say right now, but I figured it was a good time to update people on what's been going on in our lives. Mostly small things, but still interesting (for us, anyway).

Jamie's sister Kristy arrived at 5:45 a.m. this past Saturday morning and will be staying with us for a couple of weeks. It will be interesting having two women in the apartment, but it will be a lot of fun too. She's been helping us out quite a bit (me especially, doing dishes).

Secondly, we got some more fish. Jamie may have mentioned this in an update (not sure). We got another zebrafish to make the total two along with a dojo loach (see link below this paragraph), and a couple of algae-eating catfish. The dojo loach is very fun as it looks pretty funny and has strange behavior.

http://animal-world.com/encyclo/fresh/loaches/images/DojoLoachWFLO_Ap4A.jpg

We also got a new computer! It's very exciting and brand new. I'm sure it will wear off eventually, but it's nice right now. It's a Compaq desktop with a dual-core processor and 3 GB of RAM. The hard drive is actually a little larger (320 GB) than the computer we technically ordered, but that's another story. It was a great deal as the tower, along with a 18.5" monitor cost a total of $400. We paid more money for extra warranty, but it was a great deal. We're very happy so far.

Lastly, it's not big news but it makes for an interesting picture. Jamie got a decorative item (it holds candles, but is very cool to look at even without the candles lit) to put on top of the fish tank. It's made of a bunch of wire-type metal rods and doesn't give the full effect on camera, but is still neat.

Anyway, that's our life so far.

Back by popular demand

Well, here's my first update in a while. I'm finally done with classes for the summer! I'm ecstatic to be done, as it's been since winter break of 2007/2008 that I haven't had things to do every evening. Classes that spring semester, summer, then the rest of summer was spent studying for qualifying exams, classes fall semester, more studying for the qualifying exam that I failed and had to retake, then classes in spring semester. But now all I have is research 9-5! I'm terribly excited.

One of the classes this spring was Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), where you take a certain situation and model on the computer how the fluids will interact. Below are two pictures (before and after), where there are three layers of fluid: top, middle, and bottom. The fluids then interact in those two "shear layers" (the two lines separating the fluids). The shear layers act similarly to if you took two pieces of sandpaper and rub them together - they generally will wrinkle up and twist. That's what the fluid is doing - it forms vortices at the three points you can see (dark blue and dark red). Hopefully you think it's as cool as I do

Picture 1, at time = 0.0 seconds

Picture 2, at time  = 1.2 seconds

So that's the culmination of what I learned this semester in CFD.

In other (awesome) news, two of our best friends (William and Melissa) got married a week and a half ago! Tim and Hannah came out to attend with us, and it was a beautiful ceremony and reception. They just got back a few days ago from their honeymoon in Hawaii and are very happy.

Our car recently had a leak in the gas tank. After getting it towed to a nearby repair shop on Tuesday, they managed to get the new tank in and fixed the car on Friday (this was all last week). Our car is better now, but with that scare we're thinking about needing to buy another car sometime in the future.

That's about all that's been going on. Jamie's been doing well at work; her boss is having surgery today on his shoulder (injured it moving something). He's hoping to be back at work either today or tomorrow (he's crazy, we know).

There is a website online that I visit once in a while. It contains random quotes from a chat program that people usually find funny. I'm not posting a link to this site because it's often quite vulgar and I wouldn't really recommend it to people, but some of the quotes they have are very funny. Most of the people on there are either very dumb or very geeky, so most of the funny quotes go in one of those directions. I'm posting some of the funnier quotes on here. The format may end up being somewhat confusing on xanga, but I hope you enjoy them anyway. The names in < > are the screennames of the particular user.

Anyway, hope you enjoy some of these. I thought they were pretty funny. (By the way, 10 in binary equals 2 for those who don't know, and Python is a programming language). Let me know if you enjoyed them or if I shouldn't bother posting these kinds of things anymore.

<Sonium> Someone speak Python here?
<lucky> HHHHHSSSSSHSSS
<lucky> SSSSS
<Sonium> The programming language

___________________________________________________________________________

<Patrician|Away> What does your robot do, sam?
<bovril> It collects data about the surrounding environment, then discards it and drives into walls.

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<kow`> "There are 10 types of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't."
<SpaceRain> That's only 2 types of people, kow.
<SpaceRain> STUPID

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<DragonflyBlade21> A woman has a close male friend. This means that he is probably interested in her, which is why he hangs around so much. She sees him strictly as a friend. This always starts out with, you're a great guy, but I don't like you in that way. This is roughly the equivalent for the guy of going to a job interview and the company saying, You have a great resume, you have all the qualifications we are looking for, but we're not going to hire you. We will, however, use your resume as the basis for comparison for all other applicants. But, we're going to hire somebody who is far less qualified and is probably an alcoholic. And if he doesn't work out, we'll hire somebody else, but still not you. In fact, we will never hire you. But we will call you from time to time to complain about the person that we hired.

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<Guo_Si> Hey, you know what sucks?
<TheXPhial> Vaccuums
<Guo_Si> Hey, you know what sucks in a metaphorical sense?
<TheXPhial> Black holes
<Guo_Si> Hey, you know what just isn't cool?
<TheXPhial> Lava?

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<Zybl0re> get up
<Zybl0re> get on up
<Zybl0re> get up
<Zybl0re> get on up
<phxl|paper> and DANCE
* nmp3bot dances :D-<
* nmp3bot dances :D|-<
* nmp3bot dances :D/-<
<[SA]HatfulOfHollow> I'm going to become rich and famous after I invent a device that allows you to stab people in the face over the internet.

<Sui88> 67% of girls are stupid
<V-girl> i belong with the other 13%

<BronsonTheBeef> So we were supposed to have a guest speaker in one of my classes to talk about diversity and racism today. Prof's never met him. In walks this super black gangsta ghetto dude, he's got a 'pimp' chain around his neck, wearing FUBU everything. He has a gold watch and a ring on each finger, smells like pot and beer. He even had a do-rag on and a cigarrette tucked behind his ear. He walks in in true rapper style flashing his crazy ghetto signs at us. The prof's like..."Are you... Jeff?" He goes, 'True dat, ho' and says 'You all my niggaz!' and he turns in a circle, waving his arms in the air singing about 'niggaz in 'da house' or some junk. So she tells him to give his speech on diversity, and he starts talkin about 'the man' and how 'white folk be dissin.' Then like a minute later this other black dude runs in dressed in a suit, and says "Sorry I'm late." It turns out the first black dude was just baked. He doesn't even go to college; he just wanted to buy weed in the dorms.

Here's an article from ESPN that I really enjoyed, and I thought maybe you all would like it too:

It's a nice break from the usual complaining I do. My next rant may have something to do with how annoying webpage ads are. I'm fine as long as they don't get in the way of me viewing a webpage...like how they cover the ENTIRE PAGE if my mouse simply runs over them. And of course, they always have a tiny little "x" somewhere that I have to find to close the darned thing.

Anyway...I have another link to share. It's an interesting trailer on a movie coming out this summer entitled "The Taking of Pelham 123." It has John Travolta and Denzel Washington, and looks pretty good (though not earth-shattering). Hope you enjoy:

http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi707330841/

It almost looks like a variation on the movie Collateral, imo.

A new xanga entry has been overdue for a little while. I found out from my professor this week that I passed my fluids qualifying exam; this time I had the 2nd highest score! So the qualifying exams are done with. As long as I keep making progress on my research, the next thing should be my preliminaries (where I present my thesis topic to my advisory board for approval), which will probably be in the summer of 2010 or so.

Also, we got our Bala Sharks today! There were only three of the small ones, so we got all three and we're still trying to figure out what to name them. Already they've been jumping quite a bit though, and Jamie's worried (surprise) that they're going to hurt themselves. I said that if they hurt themselves, then they'll stop jumping. There was actually one MONSTER Bala Shark at Aquarium World when we went today. It was between 10-12 inches long and about 6 inches tall! We definitely didn't get that one...the guy there said the 55 gallon tank was too small for it.

Well, most everyone knows how poorly the Buffalo Bills did this past year. Unfortunately, they decided to keep their head coach. Problem with that is that a lot of the players don't want to sign with Buffalo (free agency just started this past Friday) mainly because it's probable that the head coach will be fired soon. So they've only got two players signed so far when they need a lot more. One important player will decide today between Miami and Buffalo, so keep your fingers crossed. It's been pretty rough so far.

For the most part, they've made decent decisions, but the worst decision was to sign the head coach to a new contract after only 4 or 5 games last season. They did well (went 5-1), but then went 2-9 over the last 11 games, including 0-6 in the division. They definitely should have waited to sign the head coach to an extension, because that's probably the main reason they kept him on.

Anyway, we're doing well. My classes are getting busier, but I'm really looking forward to the summer when all I have to do each day is research.