I was contacted earlier this week by a system administrator back at UIUC about Proteus, my old workstation. Proteus is still hosting my old site, another former graduate student’s website, and the UIUC SIAM Chapter’s website.

The system administrator wants to take Proteus out of service. Since I have this website it is not such a big deal, but I have a couple concerns. First, the web-based Geneagrapher is still running there (although it probably should not be). This will force me to let it go or to implement a solution for this site. Second, I am not sure how much losing that site will affect the page rank here. Big deal, I suppose.

Welcome to the year of the ox. Enjoy!

I have, while speaking to some of you on the phone, mentioned the yellowish haze often hovering over Denver. The photo below is an attempt to capture what I am talking about and was taken on December 10, 2008, which was a worse-than-average day in terms of appearance. It was not, however, the only time I have seen it so bad.

Downtown is to the left of the scene captured (the buildings at the left edge of the photo obstruct the view of downtown).

Enjoy that fresh mountain air!

For some reason the following quote from today’s strip in Dinosaur Comics really resonates with me right now.

Every day each of us says the dumbest thing we are going to say that day.

I want to wish my (three or four) readers a happy new year. Thank you for your continued support.

In response to my earlier post about traveling home, I am happy to report that I made it this year. The trip was not without setbacks, though.

We had some early trouble with loading the plane with the luggage, which was interesting to observe, if anything.

At the other end, however, it was a little frustrating. I was at the destination airport for two hours before going home for a couple reasons. By far the biggest factor was that my (and a couple dozen other peoples’) carry-on luggage was missing. We were the people that had to drop our carry-on luggage on the jetway, which is not something I normally do, but it seems innocuous enough. I will spare you the details, but a number of people were getting pretty upset.

The return flight earlier this week happened without incident.

It seems that there was a lot of lost and misdirected luggage this year (maybe every year?). My brother had two checked bags lost for a while. One showed up three or four days after flying. The other bag (the one with his clothes) reached Iowa six days after flying, which was the day before he was leaving.

I am just happy that I was able to get home, and with relatively little inconvenience. Also, I got a few through-the-window turkey and deer photos that I will share in a future post, if they look decent enough.

The plan is to go home to Iowa tomorrow to spend Christmas plus a little more time with my family. Of course, as always, the weather is playing a factor, and I may get to experience a less extraordinary repeat of last year’s attempt to get home.

You may recall that last year I had a flight on December 21 to Cedar Rapids. That flight was canceled ten hours early due to “weather” (keep in mind it is a less-than-two-hour flight). That cancellation led to a next-day rebooking, and that day’s flight was not canceled until I was at the gate, leading to another flight the following day, which was not canceled until I was on the plane. The good news, of course, was that the airline sent my luggage to Cedar Rapids the day after that. I ended up getting a refund, staying in Colorado, and video conferencing home for Christmas.

In a moment of desperation, there is always the option to jump on the train if the flight is canceled tomorrow, but that is a real gamble. Last time I took the train (the only time really, so this is not exactly a statistically significant sample) it departed Denver seven hours late.

I do hope to go home tomorrow. When things go wrong, however, I am surprisingly calm and patient in the face of massive disruptions to my plans. After all, what can I really do about it?

Happy holidays (and safe and effective travels) everyone.

This is a follow-up to my earlier post “The Austin Bat Bridge“.

This post is mostly about bats. First, however, is a couple turtles I observed while on the Ann W. Richards Congress Avenue Bridge (i.e., the bat bridge).

Now to the main event: the bat report. In my earlier post, I expressed disappointment that the bats would not be around while I planned to be in Austin. The good news is that some stragglers were still living there.

On my first day in Austin, I walked across, around, and under both ends of the bridge and could hear a lot of squeaking noises coming from under the bridge. It must be much louder during the summer.

I went out again to observe the bridge as the sun was setting, hoping to see something. I was not the only one, though, as twenty, or so, people had the same idea at the north end of the bridge. As the light was fading, the bats came out, although I did not see a large, dark swarm. Instead, I saw a few bats flying around above me.

I took some pictures, but they waited until it was pretty dark to come out, so here’s the situation: I had to crank the ISO of my camera up to 1600. Translation: the sensor becomes more light sensitive, but it also increases the noise (graininess) in the image. In spite of the increased sensitivity, I was still having to use exposure times between 1/80 and 1/40 of a second at full aperture (the depth of field — the range of distances at which objects appear to be in focus — is very shallow at wide apertures). That shutter speed is pretty slow for a bat picture. You should take the above discussion as a warning that you are going to see out-of-focus bat blurs, rather than bats.

A closer look at the previous bat blur:

One more blur pair:

I just happened to run across a group of bighorn sheep when I was up in the foothills conducting some business. They were actually standing on the opposite side of the highway from the destination in my mission.

The ram on the left has an identification tag on his neck.

Here is a closer look.

Well, the past few weeks have been filled with a variety of activities. First, I was gone to a conference in Austin, as discussed in earlier posts. Then I came back to Colorado for half a week before traveling to Seattle for a few days over Thanksgiving weekend. After returning, my brother came to visit for five days and we spent a couple of those days skiing.

I expect to be in Colorado until Christmas, although it is possible that will change on short notice. You can look forward to a future post containing photos of bighorn sheep that I saw while on a mission in the foothills. Additionally, I am planning a follow-up post on the bats in Austin. Some bats were still living under the bridge, and I managed to capture a few photos. It was pretty dark, however, necessitating a long exposure. You will see what I mean later.