Hi guys, sorry for not posting this morning. I didn't have time because I was leisuring over my breakfast for so long. :-) Usually when I leisure over breakfast I'm also leisuring over the blog, so it's taking some getting used to.
My first day was great! We had a lot of seminars - lasting from 8:30am until almost 6pm. We had a 2 hour break for lunch, though. Many of the seminars were quite challenging to comprehend and there is so much that is new to me!!! It's really fun, though, and I just want to learn everything immediately. It's instilling me with such an exciting new desire to become good at a new skill - that skill being the mathematical modelling side of what I do now. Yesterday evening the founder and chief mathematician of MathWorks came and gave a history of how he founded the company back in the 70's. He's and old guy now, so hearing his story is truly incredible. He got his degree in computer science back in the 60's. He wrote the software Matlab as a tool for a class he needed to teach to undergraduate computer science majors at Stanford in the late 70's. In the mid-80's, he and a friend bought a Compaq "portable" computer with their own pocket money and wrote the first iteration of Matlab (now their signature software off which everything else is based), in an A-frame near Palo Alto in California. There was no venture capital, no investors, no employees. Now MathWorks has thousands of employees and brings in almost a billion annually. His pictures were hilarious - the computers were ridiculously cumbersome and the guys were so nerdly-looking! (Hopefully my future children will not look back on my pictures like that). MathWorks also programs things like anti-lock brakes for Chevrolet, to weapons, to energy applications, to aviation - it's pretty cool. When he was done with his history, he gave us a tutorial on Matlab (which many of us use already - including myself). The cool part was, that he gave the tutorial on this ANCIENT version of Matlab - the original version he wrote for his Stanford undergrads in the 60's. It's not very user-friendly but it has some funny quirks that he included for laughs. For instance, something I never knew was that if you type the prompt "WHY," the terminal gives you arbitrary, random, and hilarious answers to un-asked questions.
The food here is great - yesterday for lunch I had corn tamales with green chiles, salsa, and rice. For dinner I had a gianormous salad with all the veggie fixings. We stayed up out on the balcony drinking beer from approximately 7:30-midnight. It was awesome getting to know everybody and make connections. Everyone is nice & fun & brings a little something different to the table. For instance, we have chemists, biologists, mathematicians, physicists, and computer scientists here so every conversation is new and fresh.
This morning I got up again at 6, went on a 4 mile walk (I really did not have it in my to run after 5 hours of beer the night prior). I stretched for awhile in the field above and watched the sunrise. Then I went and had my coffee & peanut butter toast at the cafeteria. This afternoon I had jasmine rice with curried vegetables and a rice krispy treat. No dishes + No prep + No cleanup + No planning + healthy + vegetarian = GLORIOUS. Well, time for me to head back for my afternoon session.
Have a great day!!!!
peace,
J
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