Thursday, October 22, 2009

Nebraska Engineering Alum Magazine

This came out over a month ago and I'm finally getting around to putting it up. I made it my alumni magazine from Nebraska, not once with my Fulbright story but twice with the Sand in the City coverage!

FULL ONLINE VERSION FOUND HERE









Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Volcano Trekking in East Java Indonesia

This weekend I put down the EnergyPlus manual and flew off to Indonesia with a group of the Chinese graduate students from my program. We flew into Surabaya, East Java and spent three days in a hot van on extremely "Indonesian" roads (you'd have to be there to understand) to go to the two Volcano groups of Mt Bromo and Ijen Crater.


View East Java Volcano Trekking Trip in a larger map


Mt Bromo and surrounding volcanoes at sunrise (Yoyo's Pic)



At the edge of Mt Bromo

There were two new life experiences rolled into one for this trip. First, my senses were exposed to some of the most unique and epic views of the volcanoes. We were taken up to the summit of a nearby ridge to see Mt. Bromo at 4:30AM sunrise and climbed to the top of Ijen Crater to see the milky blue water of the sulfuric lake within the crater. The pictures that were taken can never do the view justice.

The second experience was to hang out and get to know the fellow Chinese students from my program. It was very interesting to get to know their culture and individual personalities.



The whole crew



Ijen Crater

Below I've posted some of the videos that I took on this trip - kind of my first psuedo video blog attempt.









Sunday, October 4, 2009

Formula One Race

Despite my American ignorance about the rest of the world's sports obsessions, soon after arriving in Singapore in July I realized that the Formula One Race that was held here last weekend was a big deal! F1 is the world's most popular racing event - it's kind of like the rich man's Nascar. My Swiss friend Jerone scored a few tickets and had one  "walk around" ticket that he was able to sell me. The race was ridiculous! You can see the pictures here


Also here's a little video - it's hard to describe the noise and the excitement that you get when those cars fly by. Soo much power.





The next week or two I will be spending night and day on my project outline. I hope to make the time to have a good post regarding the SCTF system and the specifics about my project when that is completed. And after all the hard work is complete, I'm heading to Java for a trip to Mr Bromo at the end of October.... pretty excited about that.