Bored, bored, bored. There ain't much to do here, so I'm starting to play pool at the local bar. I'm getting good at backgammon too.

I've realized that the best way for people to learn something is to have them experience it. For example, my roommates. The moroccan is pretty damn annoying, so I've just responded in kind by being equally annoying and harassing. It's starting to work; poke me in the back randomly, I'll punch you in the stomach. Wake me up by calling out my name repeatedly from the kitchen for no reason, I'll harass you when you fall asleep on the couch. Similarly for the mexican, we're always waiting around for him. So today I said he could find a ride home (since class ended early so we could do presentation work) and nobody else wanted to leave right away. Waiting around for people sure sucks, doesn't it? We can't discount the importance of experience, as lecture and discussion rarely have a visceral memory attached to them.

I was reading an interesting article online that stated that Mars has gone through a global warming of 0.5 C over the past 50 years (or 100, doesn't really matter). Almost identical to what Earth has gone through...

Also another interesting article: Click!
Gotta leave it to the Germans for the ice cold logic of why you can't have your cake and eat it too. It is a pretty good point though, either your for women's rights or you're for multiculturalism; you can't have both. I personally don't believe in culture, or tolerance of culture; people have basic rights. You are your own person dammit, and should be accountable for your own actions. Yeah, I went there Ian.

Check out the floating bed, I want one! Click

Party...PARTY

I was talking with the Europeans and it's rather funny to see the symmetry between Nutella and peanut butter with North America and Europe. As you well know, peanut butter is quite popular in North America here, and we have many choices. And in the far off corner of the shelf is the Nutella (the chocolate hazelnut spread). Apparently it's pretty much the opposite in Europe, all the different kinds of Nutella, with a single jar of peanut butter in the corner. I dunno how I'm gonna make it over there, without my peanut butter and banana sandwiches, how long can a man last? And how the hell can you justify a chocolate spread? Jesus, I just think of spreading a pot belly on bread.

All day I sit in class next to a sarcastic Frenchman, we have great times. And now I've got the Gmail chat going with everyone all day...oh man, it's fun sending data over a vast network spanning thousands of computers to tell the guy next to you that he's a jerk.

Got to see the computer room at work today. Wow, a computer geek's (like myself) wet dream. Thousands of computers, petabytes of storage (google that fools!), and air conditioning out the wazoo. It was quite interesting to see how they manage problems of topology of the network and how this is evolving over time. Without breaking any contracts here, it is comparable to how music was being traded over the internet. From a hub based system like Napster which everyone connected to and it dealt with individual connections, to the distributed Torrent based system is a comparable evolution. Small, self contained nodes are much more resilient than a big lumbering architechture. If one node fails, no big deal, but if one part of a large architechure does, you're screwed.

I hate to be one criticizing the US gov't (since everyone else does), but CLICK!

Looking at it, and actually being in Houston here, I believe it. America is slowly becoming a fascist state, there is propaganda everywhere, the looming threat of police, rights slowly being taken away. It is all being perpetuated by this relatively new belief of Americans that they think they need to protect everyone, including people in their own country from themselves. Benjamin Franklin put it best, "Those who are willing to sacrifice freedom for security deserve neither"

We are all giving each other nicknames in the office, so far: I'm Frostback, Aaron is Vanilla Face, Yann is Hpot (he's a French Harry Potter), and Tommy is Eggroll/the Asian Invasion. Still a few to figure out hehehe.

Allright, so I pulled my lower back last night, resulting in me being layed up all day. So, what did I do? Read great literature? Work on my presentation? Hell no, I surfed the internet!

And here are some of the most interesting links I found:

A festival winning short

A rediculously cool physics toy

A summary of Christianity

A really cool picture of space

Beautiful waterfalls in Croatia

And possibly the saddest, sickest news story I have ever read

So, those of you at work, new time wasters!

EDIT: An even cooler physics toy!

Wow!

Allright, allright, I'll stop hoping for a comment and continue.

I said screw it, and got a membership to the gym and big bottle of creatine monohydrate. I'm gonna hit 190 one way or another. I'll be bloated with water, barely any abs, and the scale will teeter at 190, but I'll be there.

We are getting some interesting lectures from head managers from all aspects of the CGGVeritas business. We do a lot of stuff, even though it may all seem the same. Most of it has to do with the Gulf of Mexico and the challenges it presents. There are these giant pockets of salt everywhere, and it makes everyones job more difficult. One of the really interesting things they are doing now is adding Wide Azimuth Marine Surveys to the repetoire. To understand this, you have to understand how a traditional marine survey is shot. Basically a ship towing a bunch of streamers about 10k long with sensors all along. Right behind the ship is an array of pressurized air sources, that make big bubbles which make our seismic data. What wide azimuth does is add 2 more ships with these pressurized air sources on either side of the main ship with streamers, thus adding more angles of attack so to speak for the seismic sound waves. It costs many times more, there ends up being so much data we don't even know if we can process it, and it'll take about 3-4 times as long to do. But big oil cries for big money, and we all know, if you throw enough money at a problem, it'll go away.

I get to explain linear prediction in frequency-phase shift space as a means of anti-aliasing of seismic data in regards to spatial interpolation . What does this mean? Lots of Fourier, lots of matrices, and lots of complex analysis. Yeah...YEAH!!! No. Basically making fake traces (what a seismic sensor recieves from a shot) and predicting what wave it would recieve based on what the data around it looks like so that we can get rid of a nasty property of turning analogue waves into digital ones.

So I dunno what else right now. I had the terrible idea that perhaps my lower back was hurting because it was weak, so I should work it directly. I've been a useless bum who can't bend over all day. My moroccan roomate is driving me nuts, and everyone else for that matter. I realize, it don't matter how smart you are, it don't mean shit if no one wants to/can work with you. A bunch of pretty smart guys will always do better than one really smart guy.

Oh yeah, I saw the Nexen Long Lake project for you Nexicans. Wow, that looks like a big giant pain in the ass to do, even the seismic is a bitch to shoot. Depth analysis at 350ms with hard rock right underneath? Yeah, that's like shooting blindfolded.

They see me rollin, they hatin, patrollin and tryin to catch me ridin durty.

Went out to a club last night, pretty entertaining. Of course I got slammered, what can you expect out of me? Man, I now believe that Houston is America's fattest city. Seeing giant fat people of every race, jiggling to the latest club tracks....grinding each other *shudder*. Seriously, I thought the bar was all the hot people came out to strut their stuff. Even the beer tub girl, who in Calgary is the absolute hottest girl, untouchable, carved out of stone; in Houston, she had a pretty big ponch, and was in a bikini.

Check out this article from Esquire: Clicky!

I've recently tried the whole maintaining eye contact until the other breaks contact with you, and it does give you power. All of a sudden I've got people smiling to me, coming up to talk at the bar, willing to the "extra mile" at restaurants, and weird enough a lot of people grabbing my ass at the bar. Maybe that isn't due to eye contact though.

I had an absolutely wonderful Saturday, my parents would be proud; somewhat anyways. Chilled out with Yann (one of the Frenchmen), had brunch, and promptly drank coffee whilst playing backgammon. Theeen, we got a bunch of beer and played poker. I like playing for no money, because then I don't lose any hahahaha.

Man, Murphy's Law holds true exactly when you don't want it to. A meta-Murphy's law if you will. The one time we needed to find a restaurant relatively quickly (because everyone was dragging their asses to get ready for the bar), there was none in sight. What the hell this is Houston!?!?! I should be able to find a restaurant anywhere!

I also had this crazy drunken dream last night. Atheists created a place to...not believe I guess, but a minister of types got ahold of it and turned it into a religion of sorts. Preaching to the choir and whatnot. I thought it was pretty entertaining. Also earlier in the dream I was going to people who annoyed me in the bar and punching them in the face. hahahaha.


EDIT: Here's a very, very interesting blog post I found: Click me!

I finally found a comic that perfectly suits me:
http://xkcd.com/

A couple of my favourites:

Playing Devil's Advocate for the win

Yeah, I know this is a cop-out of a blog, but this is what I filled my day with. Our trainer has the habit of going into in depth explanations of the concepts I completely grasp (oh no, reverse polish notation deserves a half hour explanation? Internet time...) and not enough explanation of concepts I don't get (which results in me writing equations frantically at lunch hour).

But man, 8 hours of geophysics a day is...a bit much. I'm starting to realize all that pretty pure math I learned just got ruined by the applied mathematicians (or reality if you want to get picky). Things that are really easy in theory, turn out to be a big bitch when they actually try to apply them. Similarly the big "interesting" (to me) problems, are just either glossed over or assumed to be one way or another.

It's funny, I'm so used to starting with something uber abstract, and then just going from there. But here, we start with a very concrete concept, a sound wave going through different layers of earth, and by the end of the presentation, it's all just abstraction. "That isn't even real! How the hell did we end up here?"

Math math math, seismic, geophysics, oil, Fourier.

Finally saw Borat last night. I laughed, but to say I was impressed is a blatent lie. Wow, people give strange reactions when you introduce them to a vastly different culture, k...

Speaking of culture, a few ideas I'm going to try in Houston: going to a firing range and shoot assault rifles, going to Sunday mass at a Fundamentalist Church, maybe a waterpark...with big fat Americans everywhere hahahaha.

I dunno what else, oh yeah: Click!

Aloha all

It was nice to see everyone this past weekend. Cowtown changes but it doesn't. I realize now though that I need to be gone for awhile though. I dunno if a year will be enough, it might have to be at least a couple.

Reddit.com is proving to be an excellent time waster while we are waiting for jobs to get processed at work. I read today that NASA may have inadvertantly nuked Jupiter when ending the Galileo probe mission of Europa (one of Jupiter's moons). Basically they didn't want to ditch the probe on Europa because it contains frozen oceans (thus potential life), so they ditched it on Jupiter...at 100,000mph. Guess what it was being powered by? Plutonium, lots of it. At that speed, and given the gravity on Jupiter, the probe reached a depth in the gaseous atmosphere at several thousand atomospheres (Earth is one atmosphere...duh) in mere seconds. If you don't know how a nuke works, it's basically imploding a fissionable material (plutonium, enriched uranium, etc..), usually via very carefully placed explosives around it. Pretty much the equivalent of the Jovian atmospheric depth the probe reached in terms of pressure. They noticed a black spot on Jupiter awhile back..hmmm...

This all being said nuclear energy is goood...probably better than oil in the long run. Clean, highly efficient and you can find ore with....seismic! Yeah...YEAH!

We're finally starting to learn how to actually process seismic data. It's actually pretty cool all the little problems that are inherent in the data, and how we go about solving them. Some of it is pretty ingenious, but I'm always asking about the little details. One thing I'm finding is that geophysics doesn't really care about uber accuracy, you'll hear "It's good enough" *quite* a bit. Despite it all being trigonometry, I haven't had to do any! What what!

Bah, the roommate situation is frustrating. The Mexican dude is getting better, slowly but surely. The Morroccan is getting worse. He now knows he annoys me and he keeps trying to provoke me. All day long he doesn't pay attention to what's going on, then turns and asks me what to do. Along with stupid comments about everything being "Bullshit", or "Oh yes!", I'm in a throttling mood. Thank god for the gym here.

So yeah, flight back sucked due to the huge Latino family aboard with about 20 kids who loved to run around the plane and what sounded like yelling in Spanish for 4 hours. But I'm here, drinkin a beer, cheers.

Breathe deeply Josh...breathe deeply.

Oh fuck, I knew, knew, knew this would happen. I was coming back from the field saying to myself, "I bet I'm gonna get stuck with the two guys who annoy me the most in my apartment." Guess what? I did.

They follow me around like lost dogs, I don't think either of them has done anything actually on their own before. Going to the grocery store took almost 2 hours, with me looking around for them for an hour of it. The creepy dude who I went on the field with just follows me around and stares at me. Fuck. Not to mention this same creepy dude cannot be on time for anything. Leave at 7:40? Hell no, he gets in the shower at 7:30. I might just give them the keys to the car and I'll find my own ride.

At least I have the master bedroom. P-I-M-P.

Oh and I absolutely rock at giving presentations. A smile, a deep voice and cracking jokes will help you go far in the corporate world methinks. Thank goodness for genetics, as I probably give presenations a lot like my dad.

Anywho, life is good otherwise. Houston weather is awesome, I love the heat.

Also drank some beer with other fellow classmates and found out that there are a lot of things that cross international boundries. Like drinking with your friends and listening to music. As well complaining about the state of women in the world.

Here I am, looking devishly handsome:

Back in Houston, thankfully.

The last few days in Oklahoma were not too bad. I was doing a lot of office work and finding out some actually relevant to what I'd be doing. So that's good at least.

After talking with some of the other trainees, I realize I got shafted. Everyone else did maybe a day of field work, and that's it. The rest of their time, the crew manager basically held their hand and gave them easy work. Not to mention, I was the only person who had to share a room for the entire field time. And still they bitch about it, hell one guy basically quit any kind of field work the very first day. Makes me feel good though I suppose, I can step up to the plate when everyone else pussies out.

We were all looking for something to do last night, so we ended up driving around town. We finally ended up at the bar we went to on the first bar night, and realized everyone there was about 20 years older than us. So, after that, we saw what looked to be a rather happening nightclub. We get in, and pumping rave music was abound. However, it was pretty much a mexican bar, latinos were absolutely everywhere. All the music was in spanish and had the usual spanish beats to it, ugh. One thing funny was that I was the tallest guy in the bar, it's fun looking over the entire crowd of people.

After working for 2 and a half weeks straight, it makes me truly appreciate a weekend now. Seriously, I'm loving today so hard. Sleeping for *gasp* 11 hours, and breakfast at the Waffle House, I feel like it's an utter luxury.

Apparently evaluations were being done on me while in the field. I'm quite curious as to who the hell was doing it, because everyone there didn't even know who the hell I was really. In fact on the last day I was accused of being a corporate spy.

Anywho, I should work out or do something active here as I'm starting to feel a thin layer of flab on my belly.