Pug’s Place

August wanes and as is traditional I’ve started the fall semester of classes here at UF. Katie has departed and now I’m ruminating over what has happened this summer.

I started the ’summer’ off by immediately driving up to Greenville to spend ~two weeks as I previously posted. Upon my return I swung into classes: Programming Language Principles and non-thesis ‘research’ work making a PLIB-ODE integration library and its accompanying documentation. Additionally I began working for UF’s Bureau of Economic and Business Research initially on a project to convert its research call center to Voice-over-IP (and Asterisk, an open-source PBX). I spent my off-time in May plotting things to do for the rest of the summer and watching things like American Dad. I also vainly tried to make OGRE and Newton or ODE play nicely together, but that’s another post… Finally, I spent the last Saturday in May at the Florida Folk (Music) Festival listening to everything from banjo jams to bluegrass to Kingston Trio-wannabees.
June was a bit more busy. I started to feel some stress about not having created any real products yet in my physics-3D integration effort, additionally I engaged in other time sinks such as playing an Ewok Jedi Guardian in a Star Wars role-playing game for half of the month (his name was Gwidug) (yes, I’m serious, an Ewok Jedi. Yes, it was funny). Some of Theresa’s D&D friends put this together and I was able to weasel my way into a character slot. It was … a different experience. I’m somewhat ambivalent about playing RPGs with non-CSC members… still, I mostly had fun, despite being the ‘outsider.’ E. and I started watching a lot of movies since I renewed my Blockbuster Online account, additionally I re-watched most of the extended editions of The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers on a weekend whim.

I spent most of June at work prototyping SIP-protocol software telephones. E.g., writing things like Skype, but with specific features for our call center’s employees. This was interrupted in the last week of the month with a different project: learn Java 2 Enterprise Edition and fix a major crash issue with a piece of production software whose chief maintainer was about to leave the country for a month. I quickly found that JavaBeans are annoying… Also in the latter part of June Theresa, E. and I saw Stomp! at the Phillips Center. As one could guess, noise was created and the audience was enthusiastic. People clapped hands, clapped the floor and probably clapped each other. It was just that kind of show. The audience in the balcony surged upward in their seats when one of the cast clomped out on stage wearing the oil barrels on his feet; the audience-surge was alarming, luckily the engineers who designed the balcony accounted for occasional audience craziness and we didn’t all plunge into the Orchestra Center seating.

July began with a couple of important events: Katie arrived, Independence day happened and the newly reformed Trio went to Farm To Family, an area bluegrass get-together. The first was an event of great joy for me. The middle was of moderate joy: Katie and I went to Micanopy for their fireworks show. Like any good Americans we celebrated the Independence of our country by blowing up a part of it… like any good mosquitoes, they celebrated by feasting on everyone present. I had enough bites on my legs that E. thought I had either fallen off of my bike or had gotten some other sort of rash. Finally, the trip to Farm To Family was quite entertaining. It started out slow, got bad and then got quite good. The first act was alright, the second act was rather bad. We couldn’t help but chuckle quietly at those performers, especially when one of their songs had the chorus, “I’m sooooo… out of tune…. with you!!” Too bad I wasn’t the only thing he was out of tune with… The last act we stayed for made it all worthwhile. Not only were they quite talented, they also sang some rather hilarious songs. Possibly the most ludicrous thing they did was play Young M.C.’s “Bust A Move”. With Bluegrass instruments. That song gets *so* much better with a fiddle, a banjo and the Bassist singing the background vocals in a falsetto.

Actually, Farm to Family isn’t the only thing that happened on that weekend - earlier that day Katie and I went to the Florida Natural History Museum. Impressions: it’s a lot bigger than I expected! It’s worth wandering through if you’re in Gainesville. It also has a quite cool “Butterfly Rainforest” exhibit which Katie and I had to go visit. Inside that “Rainforest” room are enough butterflies that they’re effectively everywhere, always fluttering by you. Amusingly, one of the Monarchs decided that Katie was sweet. First, one landed on her shirt and decided to take up residence for about 5 minutes. Shortly after that one departed, a Blue Morpho landed on Katie’s cheek… and took up residence for what must have seemed like an absurd amount of time to Katie. Despite our attempts to gently dislodge it from right underneath her glasses it persisted in perching there, deliberately tasting Katie over and over again with its proboscis. Obviously, butterflies prove what I already knew: Katie’s sweet. Oh, and kids and adults under the age of 80 around Katie during this time found her predicament both very humorous and cute. I don’t know what Katie felt about that, but perhaps she’ll comment below.
Katie started her summer internship at the University Press of Florida that week and we began a routine of having lunch together in the middle of the Warrington College of Business every day we were both working. She only had two weeks in Gainesville before the largest of my summer plottings occurred: Katie and I spent a 4 day weekend in Savannah, GA.

Among the various things we did in Savannah was take silly pictures of each other. Oh, and I learned that I should Avoid Pi! I’m not taking heed of this advice.

The next weekend, in the tradition of keeping busy, the Gainesville Crewe made a trip I’ve been intending to make for quite some years: Theresa, Katie, E. and I went to Silver Springs. Oh yes, I never did make a writeup about Silver Springs… Well, first, I have a photoset on Flickr titled very appropriately, Theresa Pets Everything (our Silver Springs Adventure). Silver Springs is a nature theme park whose primary attraction is one of the largest artesian spring formations in the world, producing nearly 550 million gallons of clear, clean water daily. It’s also the head of the Silver River, upon which the park’s glass-bottomed boats drive tourists around.

Anyway, Silver Springs was a load of fun. It wasn’t overly expensive and it was perfectly sized: we arrived when they opened and finished seeing everything right before they closed. It had lots of animals for Theresa to pet, lots of reptiles for us to stare at (and be stared at by) and a surprising number of little “rides,” like a Jeep-trailer through some random forest, several glass-bottomed boats on both historical and pretty parts of the Silver River and a “lighthouse” spinny-go-up-in-the-air-in-cupolas ride… Hrm, this description is appearing to become rather forced, so I’d best wrap it up: Theresa became every mean bird’s best friend. Additionally, she helped a “small human” get a souvenir stamped penny and she petted a “corn dog plant”. Like I said, “Theresa Pets Everything”. A random point of trivia: Silver Springs is now owned by the same company which now owns Big Kahuna’s in Destin.

It was very useful to me to be doing fun activities like this because at this time at work I was busily frustrating myself trying to track down problems relating to JBoss, Enterprise Java Beans, inordinate amounts of memory consumption and thread leaks. If that sounds obtuse and annoying, you’re half right: it was also disheartening because I wasn’t, at that time, solving any problems.

After Silver Springs we had another important occasion to mark: Katie’s birthday (photos here!) We had the gang over for made-from-scratch pizza (and I roasted the red pepper!) and Quick After-Battle Triple Chocolate Cake (like what we did last summer. Hey, it was good!). Of course we had an appropriate number of candles and sang for Katie. We also had some extra fun immediately after all the candles were lit: as I was instructing Katie to “make a wish,” one of the candles became too tired to continue with the whole rigmarole and decided to lay down on the cake. E., for her part, reacted instinctively to preserve the sweet, sweet cake: she blew out all the candles!

E. claims she didn’t make a wish so it didn’t count. Anyway, we re-lit them all and the true birthday girl had the joy of making fire go ‘poof!’ Additionally, as pictured on the right, Katie had a brief fling with Theresa (her words, not mine!).

The next weekend Katie and I went home so that I could meet my niece and nephew and she could celebrate birthdays with her family. On our way back to Gainesville we stopped in Marianna to see the Florida Caverns park there. It’s a fun distraction for a couple hours - delving underground and seeing nifty rock formations and the like. I had never been into a cave before, let alone one with stalactites and their varied friends. I took some pictures there but none turned out very well - most look very flat when in fact nothing down there was flat, leastwise the walls!

That brings us to August; as you see, my plottings made for a busy July! August wasn’t so busy. It began with James coming back into town on his way from Texas where he was working as a scout leader-type fellow. He dropped in Friday night and stayed for a few days. I didn’t spend a whole lot of time with him because Katie and I had, of course, plans laid out. Saturday morning she and I drove to Gainesville’s airport and (as previously posted) went flying with Barry, one of my coworkers. On our flight we did some sightseeing over both Silver Springs and Saint Augustine, forming a nice continuity bridge with our next out-of-town trip a week and a half later.

That night after returning to Gainesville Katie and I once again skipped out on James to have dinner with Jennifer, a friend of ours from IB. (Poor James, we just weren’t even home while he was visiting.) Katie and Jennifer did a lot of catching-up (as they hadn’t seen each other since our high school graduation) while I did a lot of looking pretty.

We did spend the next day, Sunday, around the apartment and thus around James. But Monday morning we forced him to leave early since Katie and I were driving down to spend an afternoon with my parents who were at the Governor’s Conference on Tourism in Orlando then. Katie and I had convinced my Mom, who was at the time thinking about buying a laptop for herself, to go to an Apple store in Orlando and try out one of the MacBooks before making her decision on a laptop. So, we got in my car and drove to one of Orlando’s giant malls, found the Apple store there and everything went to hell.

Rather than introducing my Mom to MacOS X, demonstrate that she could indeed use a Mac and that it did everything she could want, my Mom had decided to buy one for me. In my defense I did little but object to the idea, but at the end of the trip I was walking out with a black MacBook. We went back to the resort and the three of us went down to the various pools - Katie and I grabbed rafts in the Lazy River and went ’round and ’round through bubbly areas, waterfalls, sporadically-firing water cannons and the like while Mom read a book. After some Italian for dinner Katie and I returned to Gainesville.

That week was very busy for me; I had my final exam and both of my projects due. Neither of the projects was entirely done, so I had to scramble to finish the documentation for the ODE-PLIB integration stuff and to try and solve my remaining problems with the term project for Programming Language Principles. As it turns out, I never solved those problems. All the time I spent trying to solve them was time I didn’t spend studying for the final exam. In fact, I never studied for the final exam. Luckily, I got a perfect score on it anyway. Heh heh heh…

My stress level had been rather high that whole week so we didn’t do anything more special than go out to eat after summer classes ended. I de-stressed that weekend and then began Katie’s last week here.

Monday night we went to a birthday party for Linux hosted at Fiber Optics Plus, a local business. The local Linux Users Group decided that we needed to honor Linux turning 15 years old and so the Fiber Optics Plus people pulled out a grill, ordered a birthday cake (labeled “Happy Birthday Linux”, no less) and about 20 of us showed up to partake of the festivities.

As the picture on the right proves, Katie and E. both came with me to the party and they had fun with the Karaoke machine. Prior to Karaoke we socialized and played the ever-popular Werewolf. I should note that, as should be obvious when you bring girls to a party of mostly geeks, where ever the girls sit is where all of the guys congregate.

Wednesday of Katie’s last week we made a day trip out to the remaining check box on my plottings for our summer fun: Saint Augustine. This time from the ground, of course. The primary target of our trip was to see the Castillo de San Marcos, a fort I’ve considered Really Cool since my parents took me there 10 years ago or so. Katie also finds old forts to be of interest (like Fort Jackson), so we had a good time poking around all of the history there despite the oppressive heat. Following the Castillo we tromped into some of the revitalized downtown (which is mostly tourist shops, of course) to poke around and bask in air conditioning and cool drinks. Katie got complimented by a stranger and had an overly enthusiastic food vendor try to force samples of yogurt on her, but we managed to survive the shopping somehow and make our way to someplace slightly more reputable: Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museum.

If you’ve not been to one of these places, you should go at some time. It’s just a mansion full of crazy. It’s expensive, of course, but they have something for everyone… as long as you’re at least a bit messed up in the head.

The last night Katie was here we went and watched the ~100,000 bats by Lake Alice wake up and fly out for their night’s hunting.

It was a grand summer, from its start in Greenville until its symbolic conclusion watching the final bats take a turn around their roost before going hunting.

Now it’s the Fall with a new set of classes, a job search, a sub-leaser search, the Programming Team and one more graduation. More on all of this as time and inclination merge to bring it to you, dear readers.