Thursday, December 04, 2008

Coming Soon...

Sorry about the lack of posts everyone. I have two planned but I need to find a moment to get them going.

Stay tuned.

Monday, November 24, 2008

The Food Chain.



This is a shirt from Threadless.com. Feel free to send it to me (size large). :-)

Wednesday, November 05, 2008

Tuesday, November 04, 2008

Happy Voting!

Get out there!

Monday, November 03, 2008

Busy.



This was taken from today's Garfield Minus Garfield. Those of you unfamiliar with this great comic strip, here's the official description:
Garfield Minus Garfield is a site dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. It is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb.

Friday, October 31, 2008

It's Snowing!

It's the first snow of winter in Oulu!

The Pics Are Over There.

Becky posted some pictures of our trip to Turku last weekend. Click here to be automagically transported to her blog.

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Daylight Update.

The sun rose today at 8:01a and set at 4:02p for a total of 8h 1m of daylight and falling.

We set the clocks back an hour over the weekend. The days right before then were a little weird. I would wake up at 7a or 7:30a and think it was the middle of the night. I woke up one morning and struggled to see the time on our analog clock, only to have the morning alarm go off as soon as I picked it up.

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Picture Overload!

(Click the pics for bigness)

August 29:
This is a solid spherical stone in the city center. It is supported by a jet of water from underneath. The water pressure is strong enough to slightly lift the stone from it's base so you can rotate it. The way you can tell that it is solid stone is by the incredible amount of effort needed to get it to spin. Once it's spinning, it's really hard to change its direction or stop it.



That is not a reflection in the center of the sphere, that's a dry spot. You are looking down the axis of rotation.


September 6:
Here are some berries on a huge bush in the park downtown.


These are pictures from the rose garden in the park downtown. It was even more beautiful earlier in the year.












This is near the rose garden, in the same park downtown. It's in a little area with benches where you can just sit and enjoy the day while looking a pretty flowers.


A bee working hard on the last few warm days.


Same flowers, sans the bee.



Becky waiting patiently while I take a million pictures.




This guy can't get enough.



"Hey round-boy! Give a skinny guy a chance!"




Everyone wants a piece of the action.



I like the bright red berries in the tree.


That's the coffee shop in the park.






I'm not entirely sure why this couple is dancing in the median, but behind them is a performing arts theater.



September 8:
As we were leaving work, we noticed this. I think this was in preparation for a faculty/new student party that night.


September 9:
This is a lake very near our apartment called Kuivasjärvi.



These are pictures taken along the path around the lake.




September 23:
The morning walk to work.


Saturday, October 18, 2008

Friday, October 17, 2008

...except G.I. Joe actually was awesome.

song chart memes

Nope, my calendar reads 2008.

Here's a video of some Ohio voters discussing why they won't be voting for Obama. They make some intelligent and well-reasoned arguments.




Did I just bum a ride from a guy in a DeLorean and end up in the 1950's?

Thursday, October 16, 2008

The Post Onslaught.

I feel like I haven't posted anything in a long time. I have really great fall pictures on my camera I want to post, but that will have to be later. The sad thing is that fall here is pretty much over now. The deciduous trees are nearly bare, the weather is getting colder, and the days are now 9 hours 36 minutes long. There still hasn't been any snow yet though.

Last Friday or Saturday night, Becky and I saw the aurora for the first time. It wasn't as impressive as pictures make it out to be. It basically looks like a swiftly changing cloud lit up by a full moon. It looked quite pale and didn't have the vibrant green colors you see in pictures like this:


The camera I have won't let me set the exposure time longer than 2 seconds, so I have essentially no chance of photographing the northern lights.

On Sunday night, I went to 45 Special (my favorite bar in Oulu) and saw a popular Finnish band called Viikate. I also saw them the last time I was in Oulu. They are pretty talented.

Lately, I've been kept pretty busy with writing an application for telescope time and a proposal for a Fellowship that sounds really good. I also had to read through the proofs of the last paper of my dissertation, which should be published soon. That can actually be a lot harder than it seems, depending on how good your proofreader is. Unfortunately, the proofreader I had on this last paper wasn't as good as on my previous papers.

Today was the first day in a while where I felt like I could take a breather, so I decided to let my computer do some work for me while I played around with the format of my blog. As you may or may not have noticed, you can now Digg individual posts on my blog if you want. I've also signed up for Twitter and placed a feed in the right column so you can feel like "big brother" and track my every move. I've also started to really use Google Reader and I love it. The cool thing about it is that you can "share" any of the posts you read, so I've also set up a feed that lists some of my most recent shared posts.

Stay tuned for pictures!