An Ode (ish) to Adobe

I suppose it's time again for a blog post. And, once again, I'm going into finals, which means my life is pretty far from exciting.

The big news is that Ev's residence permit was approved!

Finally!

Which is kind of awesome, especially since it means he now has no excuse to leave me. Mwahahaha!
Anyway, he did his biometrics (photo and fingerprints) and is now waiting for the physical residence card to show up. Good times.

Now that Ev gets to stay, I need to get us plane tickets to Grenoble, France for spring break (first week of February) to go skiing. My friend Eric (remember Eric from a few posts back?) lives there and we're going to crash at his place and be ski bums for a week. It's going to be magical.


We're also starting to plan out our summer travels. After our amazing experience in Mallorca, we're going to go to Kalymnos, Greece for a couple weeks after my classes finish to do a bunch of climbing and hiking. Naturally, the climbing in Kalymnos has a lot of overhangs, caves, and some slabs. In short, I should probably improve my upper body strength to the point I can do a pull-up. Heh. So we have started "training" for our summer climbing adventures, with way more bouldering than I would like (but then again, I am not a fan of bouldering... because I have crappy upper body strength).

It's nice to have things to look forward to.


The "what will our travel schedule be like when we go back to the States this summer" planning has also started. Kinda. Things are pretty uncertain right now, but we'll firm them up and start getting tickets here soon. Ish.



For my Behavior of Soils and Rocks class, we're using a geotechnical modeling program called Plaxis for the final assignment. It's a really nifty program and pretty much all the processes are coupled, which means you can build the models and use multiple variables rather than having to plug in variables separately and do multiple simulation runs. The graphs generated can be customized and plotted to, well, whatever.

I am a fan.

A large part of the assignment is annotating the graphs to show how different parameters are derived and basically prove that you understand how to interpret them. I plot everything to a pdf and annotate it directly in Adobe, since it can look pretty and is really easy to change. Last night (yes, I was doing schoolwork on a Friday night. Surprise surprise) I showed a bunch of my classmates how to annotate in Adobe. Because it's waaaaaaay faster than drawing in the lines in Excel. Seriously. Screw Excel.

Did I mention it comes out pretty?


I felt kind of smart. Ish.

Or at least like I got to apply some of the magical skills I acquired working. I love Adobe.


On that note, my laptop is at 9% battery life and I'm running a Plaxis simulation remotely through a VPN (modern technology is the best). Which means everything is probably going to die soon.


So that's it for this week. Thrilling, I know. Such is the life of a grad student.