For my birthday, which was a national holiday (some jesus thing) F and I went to Keukenhof. It's about an hour by train and bus. This is the first touristic (apparently they felt a need to make tourist into an actual adjective here) thing I've done since I got here, and it was super fun. I plan to go every year, because the garden is amazing. Next year I'd love to rent a bike and cycle through the tulip fields, but it was much too cold this year.

From their website:
Facts and figures about the most beautiful spring garden in the world:
Has won prizes as Europe’s most valued attraction
It is one of the most popular attractions in the Netherlands and has clocked up more than 44 million visitors in the last 60 years
It is the largest bulb flower park in the world
It covers an area of 32 hectares 4.5 million tulips in 100 varieties
It is the most photographed place in the world
There are 15 kilometers of footpaths
It is the largest sculpture park in the Netherlands
7 million flower bulbs planted by hand
More than 2,500 trees in 87 varieties


It was stunning. We only walked through about a third of the garden, because it was getting cold out, and the sheer quantity of flowers was mind-boggling. And they redesign the flower beds every year (although I'm guessing the tulip historical garden stays pretty much the same) to keep people coming back. We were also there at the right time for the Lily exhibit inside a pavilion. I have never seen lilies like these. Some of the blooms were as large as a dessert plate! The scent inside was lovely, but incredibly overwhelming. Going out to the mildly scented cherry tree walk was quite a relief!


Keukenhof is logically located right in the middle of the major tulip fields, near the town of Lisse. This means you can see some of the tulip fields from the garden. Because the Netherlands is very very flat, you can see miles of tulips. It was a little late in the season, so a lot of them were dropping their petals already, but they were still gorgeous. As someone who grew up in the American midwest, entire fields devoted to attractive plants (corn is delicious, not pretty) are kind of alien.

I've added a link to the online photo album of pictures from Keukenhof in the sidebar. There are also some photos in the 365 album. I took the slideshow down because blogger and picasa weren't playing nicely together, and I'm tired of fixing it.

Code is also fun when it breaks

The downside to running code all day is that there's not much to do while it's running. Tomorrow I'm bringing a couple papers with me to read.

My job this week is to run the computer model, screw it up, and learn how to fix it. I'm pleased to announce that the screwing it up part has been a smashing success! Today I not only managed to make a bunch of small, easy to figure out mistakes, I also managed to break the code in two ways that have never been seen before. I discussed the problems with a few different people, and we still have no idea what I did wrong. The best error was when everything seemed to work, but there was no output in the output folders. Turns out you fix that by restarting the computer, and then restarting the experiment in a new directory. In the learning how to fix it category, I have learned how to find the files containing error reports, but that hasn't helped me much. I've figured out a couple small errors though, and managed to troubleshoot the whole afternoon by myself. My biggest issue has been a subroutine listed in an input file. If you forget to change the subroutine name to the new one, the program can't find it. Normally, this would be a pretty normal problem, but the code does something sneaky. It just keeps looking for the old subroutine forever, and doesn't tell you that anything's wrong! So everything looks fine, but it's not. I'm tempted to write CHANGE XX SUBROUTINE in giant letters on a sticky note and put it on my monitor. Only I don't have any sticky notes.

That problem is why I'm still here. I was planning to leave at 5, or whenever the code finished running. I restarted the code at 4:43, after noticing it had been working on the same thing for an awfully long time. It seems to be doing better now. I think.

My tentative week plan is totally cracking me up. I was planning to finish up about 8 test runs today and plot yesterday's data. I don't seem to have the data plotting software, so I'll be asking someone about that tomorrow. I have successfully completed 1 test run, and I'm waiting on a second.

...and I broke it again. Which means I can leave! Just as the rain is starting up.

There was totally a lady on the bus with bright yellow headphones. I was amused.

Code is awesome when it works

4:45 PM
I am running code. In fact, I'm waiting for it to finish. I'm also trying to figure out what time would be normal to leave, since I'm now at KNMI instead of on campus. Also, this code is hella sexy. Seriously, it's amazing. This is FORTRAN with a GUI, running on a ton of processors. Sometimes. I got an error today because the code (doing some sort of finite element analysis over a fair chunk of the coastline over a 6 hour period) was running on too many processors. I hadn't made the simulation complicated enough for it to use all the processing power available. Which means the code is efficient too. Awesome.

Anyway, I hope the Aeroboys read this, because no one else will relate to the geekiness in that first paragraph.

It's been an exciting day here in science research land! Having gotten used to the routine of going to campus every day, today I switched it up and took two trains to Utrecht. I usually like having routines, especially considering how crazy everything else is currently, so the morning was a little stressful. I made the train connection and got to Utrecht with plenty of time, and then I got help from CS finding bus tickets. I met an entirely new batch of people, even though I'm still working on names from my uni dept, and around 2pm I finally had a computer set up.

The downside of meeting new people today is that they're all significantly taller than me. Like, way way taller. Three of the people in this group have hit the 2m (that's about 6' 7") mark. It's ridiculous.

Getting on the train at all was pretty exciting, since it's nearly impossible to buy train tickets for the nearby station without a Dutch bank account. The smaller station only has machines, and they only take debit cards and coins. I certainly didn't have €21 in coins! My debit card doesn't work because US cards use a different format than EU ones. Most ATMs can handle both, but not a lot of other machines. I cannot wait to get a bank account! E bought the train tickets online for me, which was super nice of her.

I can knit about 2 inches of sock on the train ride from Rotterdam to Utrecht, so the new coffee break socks are growing pretty fast. I might need to rename them train socks, since I've been doing most of the knitting on the trains instead of during the coffee breaks.

The bus ticket thing is an elegant bit of technology, I think. I got a plastic card, and loaded it with a chosen amount of money, and then I just hold it up to a scanner (this takes like 2 seconds) when I get on the bus, hold it up again when I get off, and it deducts the fare for however far I went. You don't even have to slide the card, just hold it by the machine. It's quick and easy, both good when dealing with public transportation. I *think* I can put more money on it online, although I bet I need a bank account for that.

Code's still running. Yay for running code!

I've applied for a bank account at a local bank. It was pretty hard comparing banks online, because they don't have much in the way of English pages. They all seem pretty similar. I picked based on ease of understanding the Dutch, bank locations, and the fact that I could start the process online, which is helpful when banks aren't open on the weekends, when I could actually go to one. According to F, I picked the one most like a credit union, which I'm somewhat amused by.

I think the code finished! Why, in fact it did! And it worked! You wouldn't BELIEVE how much data this puts out. This is a huge improvement from last week. As it's now 6PM and I have an hour train ride to go, I think I shall be heading home.

Happy birthday to J!