Update on the big move to MA

In just over 9 days, I will be departing for the big move to Massachusetts with nothing more than 16 boxes holding 30 cubic feet (about 224 US gallons) of my belongings. I will be traveling with my dad and cousin Abel and leaving behind 23 years of memories physically in the good old Houston of Texas.

The trip will involve a little-engine-that-could Ford station wagon and a Nighthawk 750 motorcycle with the three of us alternating riders for all of the comfort and enjoyment that the 1800 miles will bring upon us. The trip will look something like this:

I was fortunate after looking at 2200+ postings on craigslist to find a place to live for a good price (good by New England’s standards) which has all bills included AND is fully furnished! All I have to go on is a few pictures from the landlord and a few external supporting pictures thanks to modern technology (Thanks Google and Microsoft!):

I’ve tried to make it a focal point just to be a listener for my last days in Houston. My story is already known; I just want to slowly and patiently take information in as the final days leak through the drain.

Tianguis Cultural del Chopo

Last night, I met someone who was embarking on an adventure at the same time as I, except in a much different direction. She lives in Austin and will be taking THE bus down to Monterrey, Mexico then flying into Cuba for a few days. Just to explore the world and take in more experiences, couchsurfing style. What a great idea.

While I was looking around and making a customized Google map to share with her some cool spots that lay back in my memory, I was trying hard by visual cues and street names and picture order to find a punk/hippie/skater flea market that I ran across in Monterrey. I believe that it was fashioned after this concept in Mexico City:

The Tianguis Cultural del Chopo is a Saturday flea market near Mexico City downtown, known locally as El Chopo. [...]

Originally, the Tianguis was a place for hippies to trade sixties memorabilia including not only records but also clothing, magazines, books and other collectibles. Eventually, the Tianguis has also given place to more recent musical styles like metal, goth, punk, grunge and ska, among others. Almost always, some local and touring bands play live gigs at the back of the market, where you can also find the casual traders standing and looking up for that rare and collectable record or CDs.

On the northern end of the market at Aldama and Camelia is an area called Espacio Anarcho-punk. Vendors in this part of El Chopo sell mostly books, movies, and other materials that have an anarchist or radical perspective. Many of the Espacio Anarcho-Punk vendors contribute to a weekly zine of the same title addressing local social issues and radical politics.

(from Wikipedia)

Lots of cool stuff to be seen in the world.

Information R/evoultion

An excellent video about how information access, sharing, collaboration, and all of my other favorite things going on in the world is here:

Working as a fire alarm technician with a company that does an amazing 100-mile radius for service calls leads to my eyes being exposed to a ton of sights and adventures - both lovingly good and giant-naked-lady bad. I have tons of stories and supporting pictures to share with over 6 years of working in the good and the bad.

This week’s journey leads me to a Thursday night (day 2 of 3) in Caldwell, TX. I am doing fire alarm inspections for four local schools that are pretty huge and thusly I am hanging out at the Sunset Inn for 3 days. This means that I get paid to torture the summer cheerleading camps and office ladies with blaring fire alarm sirens all day long.

And just so you know, in the picture on the front page of my hotel’s (Sunset Inn’s) website, there is a huge Walmart sign right there looming in the background for your nightly dose of subliminal Caldwell advertising - it’s like a bad smell that you can’t help but keep smelling.

Caldwell TX is about 25 miles south of College Station. So everywhere I turn, I see AGGIE COUNTRY signs and all sorts of aggie references. Nothing new here, just overloaded with it. THIS IS AGGIE LAND!!!

Last night, Katie and I were hanging low with the locals at the Texan Lounge about 0.8 miles away from my hotel room. Everything was typical Texas - maybe so insanely Texan that it was just… normal. A sign on the wall said - IF YOU AIN’T OILFIELD, THEN YOU AIN’T SHIT. And I didn’t even want to ask the bartender and get shmacked in the head nor do I even want to Google it. Just let it coexist within my mind, alone and peaceful.

Now to the media: Yesterday, when inspecting the local high school’s fire alarm and deafening the occupants to their demise (and my pleasure), I came across this room (it was actually in the faculty “work room”). Hmm, my school didn’t have one of these:

Smoking bans in Houston bars, smoking rooms in high school faculty lounges, I see the real truth now.

Next up, in the bathroom reserved for only the staff and faculty to do their dirty handywork, located smack in the center of the building amongst the hallways, where surely a middle school student could take wafts of their biology teacher’s deuce:

Thanks Caldwell schools for keeping my teachers clean and freaked out by psychadelic super graphics from space!

And finally, the local schools are plastered with reminders and motivational messages from Aristotle, Einstein, and other great thinkers. But this one particularly caught my eye; they sure do want to remind us of something here.. what is it? Oh yeah!:

I can’t make this stuff up folks. I love it. This job gives me random input from all angles that I never see coming. Good pay, good travel, good summer work. And great timing! - I am definitely getting my Texas fix in before I leave this great state in 20 days.

After working until 8:30 pm tonight, I only had the energy to visit the Brookshire Brothers about 400 feet from my hotel and gather some resources for my last night here: cold beers, a TV dinner, a banana, and a bear claw for breakfast in the morn. During my checkout process, the grocery sacker told me about six and a half times how cool it would be if “you could buy beer when you were 15 years old.” He was about 2.5 times larger than me. Noted.

Thanks Caldwell. Seriously, I love your offerings, no jokes. And here’s to tomorrow. I <3 you Texas.

P.S. Thanks to Sunset Inn for making this blog post all possible with a $35 dollar room with free Wifi! Ahh America!

Wordle.net says that if you took my public brain so far and blended it into oblivion, it would look something like this. Looks about right to me!

WPI

Welp, I’ve been accepted to start my M.S. and eventually start my Ph.D. at Worcester Polytechnic Institute this fall! I will be studying fire protection engineering, a continuation of my bachelor’s degree. The school is populated with just under 4,000 students and it is a private engineering school. Not only does this school house one of the top fire protection engineering programs in the US, but the faculty and their work align closely with my values and passions in life.

The big move will look something like this in 8 weeks:

Some cool info about the school includes the fact that Robert Goddard went there and graduated in 1908 - he was the gradnfather of modern rocketry with the first liquid fueled rocket. Also, the fire protection engineering department has about 150 masters of science students and 4 (!) doctoral students. This is quite the opportunity I smell.

What I did during the summer of 2008

So far this summer I’m being funded by UHD as a last request to make a catalog of fire models for various textbooks. The work is very refreshing and I love to work when I learn much more than I expected. Another cool side effect of this work is that I can include the FDS models and example writeups on my website, free for anyone else in the world to see and learn from. The technical writeup is located here and it gets updated automatically anytime I change a single word in there. Eventually it will have links to FDS files for FDS users and students around the world to download and use on their own - I love technology.

FDS MESH Size Calculator tool

Finally, to finish off a nice post about fire protection engineering and FDS: I updated my FDS Mesh Size calculator on my other website to include some awesome and never-before-done functionality! It now takes in x, y, and z dimensions and an expected heat release rate and gives the user three MESH lines (coarse, moderate, and fine) to guide them on making an FDS file that has an adequately resolved MESH.

The tool can be found here on my FDS/sciency website and the nice folks at NIST gave me a link on their third-party tools page of the FDS website: http://fire.nist.gov/fds/thirdparty.html

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I know I post out-there stuff like this on my blog here sometimes, but this is what is on my mind and taking up my mental cycles and daily days. Jump in and read the linked pages or play with the tools of my creation!

Some of my friends and colleagues may have heard me go on a rant or two about net neutrality or equal information access. Hopefully this post will describe my stance a bit better. Those who know me know that I stand strong for open knowledge and easily accessible information for all of us in the world. This includes upholding open document standards and the opposition of tiered-internet infrastructures. But most people that use computers these days, I am afraid, don’t think or feel that these ideals will affect their day-to-day computer usage that they partake in.

Well, I happen to think that it not only affects your daily pursuit of knowledge and you work in whatever field you are in, but it also greatly affects the way we work together as a society, create and bring new ideas into fruition, and nurture successful generations to follow.

Last Thursday, the FCC held a public hearing on net neutrality. 5 commissioners from the FCC joined and heard from leading public scientists, network operators, and entrepreneurs. 2 commissioners were in support of network neutrality, 2 against, and one neutral (pun intended). Also, Comcast and many other carriers were invited to the hearing; however, they declined.

Here is the video from the hearing as well as other snippets on the topic:

Jason Devitt, CEO of Skydeck, testifies at the FCC Hearing

Law Professor Lawrence Lessig on Net Neutrality and the Rise of Google

From Barack Obama’s address at Google

You’ll notice I stuck a button on the right of my site in support of net neutrality. I’ll be calling my senator and representatives on Monday morning to let them know of my support of net neutrality and a new Act working its way through the House of Representatives. I urge you to do the same. It is critical to recognize that issues such as Verizon winning the FCC spectrum auction to Microsoft’s OOXML as a international standard to Comcast breaking fundamental ethical and technical ways of the internet are of utmost importance to our current age, culture, and political era.

In the end, regardless of the specific topic at hand, be cognizant of those trying to disrupt and block the progressive movement that is before us. Especially when it involves profit rather than progress. Especially when that blocking impedes our societal learning, sharing, innovation, creativity, and global and equal access to information for all.