The new year has brought a new spate of travel for Jodi and me. Jodi’s up first – she departed Friday night for Calcutta, India, for the Weak Interactions and Neutrinos (WIN) conference. This conference moves from location to location, and this year physicists from all over the world are converging on Calcutta. I’m hoping Jodi can guest blog after her trip with some tales, but sufficed to say she noticed the difference between America and India the moment she stepped off the plane.
Unlike American or European cities, she said, the slum-like housing stretches forever in the city. Hotels, like the one some of the conference attendees are staying at, are embedded in the midst of these crowded areas. Driving is insane (I’ve downgraded my experiences in Moscow to “nuts” after hearing about Calcutta), and lacking basic safety equipment like seatbelts. Thankfully, the conference organizers have provided transportation to and from the conference. The hotel prepares meals for guests, which is good because water sanitation is *notoriously* bad in India (as in China, and even a bit in Russia). No fresh fruit or vegetables, no brushing teeth with tapwater. We stocked her up with two two-liter bottles of water before she left, as well as toilet paper. I had always been told to be prepared for India. We didn’t do everything that you’re supposed to do when going to India, but Jodi was 90% prepared for this departure from modern sanitation.
Jodi’s absence always makes me pass the time with projects. The biggest this weekend was to record drum parts for some musical projects led by my friend Eric. I setup my drumkit in the spare room (lots of carpeting and a nice bug futon for sound absorption), along with a Shure SM57 microphone hooked into an M-audio fast track USB box. Ubuntu and Fedora recognize the box, no problemo, so I was easily able to record a track alongside Eric’s playing and singing. In fact, I wove together some retakes of my drumming for limited parts of the song where I just lost it during the recording. I’m a bit rusty, but considering my long departure from serious drumming it went pretty well.
My other projects wer varied. I cleaned the house, which isn’t remarkable except that I always find furniture to reorganize or storage space we’re not using well. My big project on the tech side was to replace our TV with my old 19-inch ViewSonic monitor. This is possible because our living room is powered by MythTv. It takes in cable and outputs VGA, which looks great on the monitor (much better than a crappy NTSC analog TV). I changed the webbrowser in MythTV for Firefox 2.0, and I can stream my favorite programs (video, like “dl.tv”:http://dl.tv, and podcasts, like “TWIT”:http://twit.tv) right to the screen. I moved the VCR and DVD player into the spare room, along with the old 21-inch TV.
I also spent some time shepherding an upgrade of Jodi’s desktop from Fedora Core 5 to Fedora Core 6. Whew.
After all is said and done, I am eager to get back to physics tomorrow!
