The 2014 March Meeting

Dear diary,

Justin and I finally decided to make travel plans and hotel arrangements for the 2014 March Meeting.  We went onto the internet and found some very cheap airfare especially since its from the nearby airport and not LAX.  I paid for both of us (he's broke!).

Then we got another very cheap hotel room (with two beds!) that isn't too far from the conference center.  Quite a good haul, we thought!

To get reimbursed for the travel funds, I emailed Jenny, our super-duper faculty assistant.  She helped me send her the right information including the receipts from the conference registration fee, airline fare, and hotel cost.  Right now, I can only get the first two, so I'll have to make sure I save enough to get by until after March.

Return of the Super Lucas

Dear Diary,

Dr. Lucas came back today!  Just like he said he would!

I gave him a quick review of what I've managed to do over the past few days (graphs, numbers, etc.).  Afterwards, he went onto his computer, fixed the inversions, DMRG, and our local computing cluster during my lunch break with surgical precision.  The project is now way ahead!

About that computer running slowly:  There was some hullabaloo about how slowly the main computing cluster was running this morning. Detective Lucas, Ph. D. did some grade A sleuthing and found the culprit was a Matlab program not running in the queue (always queue!). We identified the original suspect since his digital fingerprints were all over the file (exposed by the 'top' command).  This guy was a former summer member of the group, but his alibi was airtight! As it turns out, it was John the whole time! Yay, Lucas!

Lucas then went over to Ms. Jenny Du with all the souvenir receipts from his trip. One thing to keep in mind if we travel, Diary, is that you can get reimbursed for the miles you drive.  So I'll have to keep a log of that (with receipts!).

Lucas lucked into a neato trick to access a file.  He had a bunch of folders in a directory with only one that had "redo" at the end of it.  He typed cd *redo and it worked!  If the folder isn't unique, then it goes to the first one on the list...Ok, so maybe that's not that interesting.  The way I originally understood the problem and solution was completely thrilling, but I didn't have it right until Lucas helped me out!