After 18 graduate hours down, another semester, two conferences, my first conference paper, Katie joining me up in Mass., and tons of other milestones for my life, it’s nice to sit back and just relax, reflecting on all that has happened.

On the last weekend in April, the weather went from 30 degrees to 85 degrees for a magical couple of days. Me and Katie capitalized on this and ran a 2 day random trip to the east coast of Massachusetts, to check out all of the hype around Cape Cod. The map below shows our roundabout route from Worcester to Plymouth, Sandwich, Provincetown, South Yarborough, New Bedford, Newport, Jamestown, Wickford, and back home.

To sum it up, it was amazing! Some pictures from the trip show the highlights! To view the full album, click here.

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From Cape Cod Weekend Escapade

From Cape Cod Weekend Escapade

From Cape Cod Weekend Escapade

From Cape Cod Weekend Escapade

From Cape Cod Weekend Escapade

Some pictures from a cool experience in January when stumbling through Round Top, TX at a place called Festival Hill:

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From Round Top Church

From Round Top Church

From Round Top Church

From Round Top Church

Link to entire album

It’s good to be back home in Texas. Mexican food, country music, great restaurants, Shiner Bock, good friends and family! Oh, and the 70 degree weather is a nice bonus as well. Katie switched climates and is now in Oregon for Christmas, skiing and with the family. I’m here for the holiday taking care of the kitties and soon to be in good ol’ San Antonio to take in the new year.

As my pop said this morning as we ate some great breakfast plates at a taqueria this morning for $3.95, life in Maine in the summer and Mexico in the winter would be a great thing.

It’s also good to just… relax. After a long and great semester of good work. It’s good to see everyone again, as if I never left 5 months ago… even Saxophone bum dressed as Santa! God bless Texas!

Here comes this weather that is very foreign to me!

A good day was had talking with the president of a big conglomerate corporation and tons of cheese. Tim Ferriss totally has it down with talking to big CEOs, they are like the hot chicks of the business and job world – i.e. everyone is afraid to talk to them straight and never does, therefore they love to have some informal talk with you and wil remember you always. Also, free beer on campus is cool (hooray private schools without state school regulations)!

Which reminds me, I used to have this statement written in a marker right above my bed when I would wake up in the morning: “Your intention creates your reality.” And I have it on my fridge now. Same idea. It’s true, eh.

Two years ago I quit my job to follow my dream, and each day it gets better and better. It’s amazing what the human mind can do with the help of God. This is exactly what I wanted and there is so much more good to come.

An excellent time was had here as well with my mom visiting Worcester for a week:

And Katie came to visit for a different week as well. We all had a blast here with deliciously cheap happy-hour seafood, bone-chilling temperatures, bland Dominican food in Massachusetts, nuns racing through the park, endless drives along the cliffy coast, and just plain being together. It had been a few months since I saw Katie, and it made it that much better. Many good times were had and many more million to come.

15 days ’til I return to the big Texas. I really miss the people, but not so much the place.

I guess Texas is the home of my heart and Massachusetts is the home of my brain. The two can coexist in harmony you know:

I haven’t updated the blog in a bit since I didn’t have actual internet for a while there, but all is exceptional here in Worcester, MA.

I’m outside in the setting sun in my makeshift office in the 60 degree weather in mid-August. And as Eetion would say about my temperature preference, I’m right at home. As Brenda would say about my mind and soul, welcome home. As Marcos would say about my outdoor adventures and motorcycling, I’m in a great place. And as Katie would say about my craziness and passion, I’m in my element. And as my mother would say, I’m too far away.

Everyone has had a huge impact on my transition, from my sick grandmother’s prayers from a very long way away to some new found friends at WPI to the greatly helpful faculty at school.

Hopefully friends and family can come and join me soon while I follow the trails of my passion in this weird and pleasurable experience and location.

You can see the entire photo albums here: the 4-day trip up here and the first day in Massachusetts doing high-pointing in New England.

Thank you to everyone and I will see you soon. Look for some exciting updates to come with my new found Internet connection.

And as always: peace, love, and happiness to all.

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!

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!

The group (me, Marcos, Rick, and Kim) made it home alive and well last Wednesday from the Houston-Canada-Houston motorcycle trip. It was a lovely, yet determined motorcycle trip that included my Honda Nighthawk 750, Marcos’ Triumph Bonneville, and the two ST’s (1100 and 1300) from Kim and Rick.

The route of the trip looked (very roughly) something like this:

Too many stories happened to put into one blog post, but here are some points for added excitement to the pictures!:

• Even a dead bike on the side of the interstate didn’t stop Kim and the crew. She dumped the bike in Rockford, Illinois and bought a new one on the way home to finish the trip!
• There is some amazing food in this country in shacks in the middle of nowhere. Country Girl’s Kitchen will get you the biggest whitefish fillet that I have ever seen in my life plus what seemed like 8 other courses for $7.99. And how can I forget the huge and tasty chicken jerk wrap made from scratch by a South American living in Canada for the last 28 years. I need to fast for a few days in memory of these meals.
• Highest price of gas paid for – $4.29 in Michigan.
• Two unexpected coolest towns on the trip: St. Louis, Missouri and Eureka Springs, Arkansas.
• The women in Canada are disproportionately beautiful and I must go back.
• We met a motorcyclist who was on day 28 of his trip from Cuernavaca, Mexico and had done over 8,000 miles with his buddies through Florida, DC, Maine, Canada, and was on his way home when he ran into us at the same hotel in St. Louis.
• No speeding tickets for us law abiding beatniks. Although I did get one on my way to San Antonio two days later. Ahem.
• Over 3,500 miles in 10 days!

On to the pictures! You can view the entire album here at Google Picasa Web Albums.

http://picasaweb.google.com/koverholt/CanadaMotorcycleTripLoneStarTrippers

View all photos in the album

I went camping this past weekend with the crew from the Montrose Motorcycle Riding Club, and the ride and cabin were awesome! Not to mention the lovely weather. I just wanted to share this video with everyone.