Leaving USA

Today I was going to leave USA. I changed the flight from Albuquerque to Los Angles to 4:00pm yesterday because I wanna to buy an Angel Food Pan for Anna. I saw this on WalMart at Santa Fe last Sunday, so I thought I should get it at Albuquerque. Unfortunately, there was no that pan at WalMart at Albuquerque. Then I drove around the Albuquerque to search this pan. The city of Albuquerque is bigger than Santa Fe, but I didn’t know why I could not find that pan I saw at Santa Fe.  Finally I didn’t buy it and was going to return the car to Budgets. The total cost of rental car was 2/3 of the cost of hotel. Lucky, I can claim all the expense back. After I returned the car, I had a lunch at airport.

It was about 5:00pm when I arrived at Los Angles. After I checked in, I started to search some food for dinner. Finally, I decided to have dinner at Japanese restaurant and ordered an expensive food. The food was not good. I should not be greedy to take an expensive food.

It was not directly flight from Los Angles to Melbourne. I needed to transit at Auckland and waited for two hours. This was my first time to be New Zealand. If I did not arrive at here at night, I could take some photos.

Last day at Los Alamos

Last day at Lanl, I believe it should be the last day for me to work at Lanl. Greg has left and Craig is leaving soon, so my contract with Lanl should not re-continue for next year. Today I was a quite busy, because I needed to finish my tasks before I went. Finally, I had finished the testing and wrote down the profile how to set up and run testing on parallel machine for Craig. He could follow my instruction to keep doing testing on Coyote later on.

My last dinner at Los Alamos was at McDonalds. I has a burger meal and salad.

During the Los Alamos, I drank a lot of water. You could see many empty water bottles.

Crazy dryer machine

I spent much time on configuring how to run my work on Coyote today. At the afternoon, Craig, Chris, Dan and I went to had Mexican food. Dan is from Livermore National laboratory. The food was very hot; I could not imagine how hot it is. After lunch, I still focused on my work. Craig didn’t help me. He was always talking at next room, but I could talk to Greg on ichat fortunately. Finally, I solved the problem and it was 6:00pm already. Normally I could not work after 5:00pm. It is a rule in Lanl for visitor. Anyway, I needed to complete my task before I go.

I went to laundry tonight. After I put all my dirt clothes to washing machine, I had dinner at Quiznos sub where located at opposite of the laundry.

Then I put all the cloth to dryer machine and I only inserted $0.25 into it. Normally, $0.25 is for 15mins drying, but my machine was running over 25mins. Amazing! A guy next to me already inserted a second coin, but my machine did not stop. Finally, I opened the machine door to stop it because my clothes already dried.

Login at Coyote account successful

Today I could access to Coyote finally, but I needed to configure out how to install and run my work. It was quite complicated because Coyote is a big machine and has a lot of security issue. Nothing special happened today. I had dinner at hotel. I had the food which I bought last week. I needed to clean them all because I will leave on this Friday.

Books arrived

Work again. My office is in this building.

Today I was trying to set up my work on Coyote which is a cluster machine and contains over 256 nodes. Unfortunately, I could not access into it, so I needed to wait again. The books were arrived after I was back to hotel. These books I ordered online from Borders and Amazon website. Lucky, all books were arrived at the same day because some books were shipped from different date.

Then I went to Greek restaurant for dinner again. This time I ordered the most expensive dish. It costed about $19. I had daily per-diem reimburse later, so I didn’t mind how expensive it is. Daily was $49 (breakfast $9, lunch $15 and dinner $25).

Shopping at Santa Fe

Sunday, I planned shopping today. I drove to Santa Fe on the morning. First I needed to find a book for Anna. Then I went to borders for searching the book. I found another store had this book in store, where the store was closer to some big supermarkets and not too far away.

After I bought the book at another store, I was going to look for an Angel Food Cake Tan. I found this at WalMart and Target, but there were no size I wanted. I marked down the price only and needed to discuss with Anna later. I spent about two hours on shopping.

I went to downtown for lunch. There was a Sunday market at the middle of downtown and I walked around.

Finally I decided to have lunch at Subway. This was my first time to have Subway on this trip.

After lunch, I drove back to Los Alamos because I still needed to do something on my work. This time I had dinner again at China Moon.

Bandelier National Mountain

This morning, I got up so early about 6:30am because I planned to go to Bandelier National Mountain. One of the reasons to get up early because I did not need to pay the entry fee. Nobody would check me at the entrance in morning; otherwise I needed to pay $12.

I drove about 30mins from hotel to the Bandelier at about 60-70 mph speed. During driving, I mostly hit a deer. It stopped on my lane and I was driving at high speed. Lucky, I cut to opposite lane to pass it.

I had been this mountain before, so I stayed a while and then went back. I drove to another direction to up the mountain. It was great. Also it was very cold about 20 Fahrenheit degree (-5 Celsius degree). There were many snows and I parked the car and captured some photos.

When I tried to walk on the snow, I dropped down nearly. The snow was so deeply about 5 inch deep.

I planned to work at hotel from afternoon. I had lunch again at McDonald’s. This time I ordered double Filet-O-Fish meal.

I worked until 8:00pm and then I bought a dinner at a Greek restaurant. I ordered “Roast leg of lamb” and it costs $15.1, but I didn’t bring enough money only $14. Then I told the waiter to change my order, but he said it was okay for $14. The food is very good and I had a lunch there last week, so I came again this time.

Moving office

Today I needed to move from Greg’s office to Craig’s office because Greg left and someone will move into his office.  I captured some photos of Greg’s office and Craig’s office.

 

This is a great monitor and I want to have one.  You can see how big it is by comparing to my laptop.

Today was Craig’s day off.  I heard from Chris who is one of our team that each employee have holiday on Friday once a fortnight.  It is much better than in
Australia.  Chris will be day off next Friday, so I had lunch with him today.  Someone added another supercomputer account to me.  It calls Coyote which is more powerful (more nodes) than Bladerunner. I can use it on next Monday, but I needed to fix some problems before using it.  Then I brought some works to hotel and planned to work on weekendL.  Tonight I tried pizza, but the taste was worse than in
Melbourne.

 

Access to Bladerunner

Same as previous days, I drove my car to office before 9:00am and asked the office to open the Greg’s office for me.  It is because I need to close and lock the door everyday when I was leaving.  If Craig was here, then I shall ask him to open for me.  Greg came back today and we discussed something on our work.  Then he would not come here again.  I felt a bit depressed.  We started the project together, but I seemed to stay at the same place and he jumped to another level.  I need to build up myself.

 I used this card to generate password to entering Lanl’s system.

I am so stupid.  I forgot to ask the receipt on lunch.  I need to remember it next time.  After lunch, my supercomputer’s account got approved.  I could access it and started to do my scaleable testing on parallel machine.

I had dinner at McDonalds tonight because I felt upset and didn’t want to thing too much on food (lazy).

Got Lanl email account

I got a Crypco card for generating password and applied Lanl email address kchu@lanl.gov. Each time I logged into lanl system, I need to use this card for entering password. Something like online bank system. We had lunch at lab food court and I had chicken salad.

After work, I went to supermarket and bought a lot of things. I planned to have dinner at hotel because I just got a microwave. I requested this when I just arrived, but I just got it yesterday. Anyway, I had an instant cup noodle, roast turkey microwave food and corn dog.