Fun

University Kayak Club

My first summer in Seattle, I joined the kayak club and learned a fun skill that takes me outside with a great bunch of people. I am the Sea Kayak Tzar for 2012-13.

Water

I spent 4 years as a lifeguard and 10 on swim teams (and some other years swimming regularly for fun). I really like the water, and even have a minor obsession with islands (e.g., swimming to them, paddling around them, being on them, island culture and literature). Recently, I have taken to swimming in Lake Washington.

Traveling

I enjoy traveling for science and for pleasure. I spent the summer of 2006 drifting around Europe. I had a year of summer in 2009-2010 by traveling on both ends of an oceanography cruise, starting in French Polynesia and ending in South America.

Languages I've been known to use

c         FORTRAN 77
! FORTRAN 90
%%% Matlab %%%
Moderate conversational French
### Unix-like shell scripting (e.g., csh, bash) ###
### Python ###
*** GrADS scripting ***
<!-- HTML (e.g., this page) -->
### S-Plus ###
/* Java (formal instruction only) */
Italian, Spanish, Mandarin (sometimes better than charades)

Miscellaneous offerings to the internet

There are a few things I couldn't come up with a better place to post than on my website. So, here you are in case you are interested.

Lake Temperatures
King County maintains a buoy in Lake Washington that takes profiles regularly just north of Mercer Island. I have a script set up to retreive the temperature at 1 m from them every 4 hours and plot the last month of measurements (using the Google Charts API).

P6 Clouds
In 2010 I went on the CLIVAR P6 oceanographic research cruise (see fieldwork). I was at sea for 38 days along 32.5 S, and I tried to take pictures of the clouds roughly every day. It was great fun, and some pretty pictures resulted.

Dual boot
Over the years I have become attached to Linux and I've become able to manage my own Ubuntu (personal) computers. Every time I go to set one up I feel like I'm reinventing the wheel, and I spend hours scouring the internet for the same things I looked for last time. I mostly end up following the logs of other people setting up their own computers. Now I want to give back (and remember what I did the next time I need to set up a computer), so I put my log online.