Tim's Blog

July 11 – Fly to Venice, Italy
July 13-20 – Greek Isles Cruise
July 21 – Fly to Budapest, Hungary
August 7 – Fly home

Going with my Hungarian grandparents and cousin. I can’t wait. It’s going to be awesome.

I bought myself a new desktop for Christmas and I just finished installing Gentoo Linux. From now on, I won’t have any computers running Microsoft Windows, I have completely converted to Linux. The girls are going to be all over me now, nothing drives them crazier than a dual-monitor Linux desktop… right?

Winter break is approaching the bitter end. I just got back from a couple of back-to-back vacations. First I went with my family to Santa Barbara directly after Christmas to see the sun and go to the beach. Then after a one day rest at home, I flew to Boston to see my friend Allie. While I was there I was lucky enough to see my Aunt Ruth and her partner Pat. I hadn’t seen her in a long time and it was good to catch up. Apparently things on the East coast are relatively close together, so I went to Maine to visit Wade, a friend who recently transfered out of Montana State. Boston is an awesome city, it is really big (compared to Bozeman) and has a nice atmosphere. I spent most of the time hanging out with Allie in the dorms at MIT and sightseeing in Boston. One thing that I learned about MIT is that everyone there is a complete nerd. Tomorrow I fly back to Montana, classes start next Thursday.

I bought a domain name today: TimMontague.com. Eventually I will get my own webserver running and I will switch my website over. Currently that domain points to vanerp.org/tim.

I am back home in Bellevue (finally) after being a refugee from the power outage. I arrived at Sea-Tac on Friday afternoon and went directly to a hotel in downtown Seattle. My dad, mom, sisters and I stayed there for 2 nights until we had our fill of the city. On Sunday night my dad stayed at home to keep an eye out for burglars and the rest of my family stayed with my uncle Mike, aunt Jo, Tyler and Devin. I spent most of Sunday and Monday building blocks with Tyler so that Devin could knock them down. Finally on Monday our power came back, our server came back online and we went home.

Immediately after Christmas, my mom, dad, sisters and I are going to Santa Barbara so that we can get our seasonally dosage of warm weather, sunshine and beach. After we come back home and I am heading off to Boston to visit my friend Allie. Shortly after that I am going back to Bozeman to get a couple of days of snowboarding in before classes start on the 18th of January.

This summer my hungarian grandparents Nagymama and Nagypapa are going to take me and my cousin on a trip to Europe. We are going on a cruise in the Mediterranean Sea and we will see all of our relatives in Hungary. It will be a lot of fun to go to Hungary with 3 people fluent in Hungarian. I am really looking forward to this trip. That will last the second half of the summer, and I am looking for a job for the first half. I am planning on calling my boss from last summer, NASA Mike and asking if he is looking for interns. We’ll see.

I got tired of work, so I quit today. Bioinformatics isn’t what I want to do when I grow up. Even though I was learning a lot, I didn’t particularly enjoy it. Now I can have more time to study and do fun stuff outside.

School is starting to make me bored. I am getting tired of doing the same routine every day. I wake up, walk to class, alternate between class and work, walk home, figure out what to eat, procrastinate, do homework, sleep and repeat. Every day is pretty much the same.

Last week was the first snow of the year. It snowed a couple of inches in town and a couple of feet in the mountains. It started snowing on Monday afternoon and by the evening I was getting restless. I decided to remedy the situation by going on a hike. I got on my hiking boots and warm clothes then drove to the Albertsons to buy batteries for my headlamp (by this point it was pitch black and snowing hard.) I drove a little ways out of town to hike up Scypes (sp?) canyon. I made it about a mile before the snow got deeper than my boots, and rather then get wet feet, I turned around. That’s the most exciting thing that happened recently.

Of course I do have some things to look forward to. This Friday I am flying to LA for the weekend. Woo Hoo! I am meeting Allie there and we are going to go to a big Halloween party called Monster Massive and we are going to have fun!

The end of my summer was very busy, I went to New York for a night, Ocean City for 3 days, Key West for 5 days, went home to Bellevue, spent a week in California visiting family, spent a week at home and now I am back at school in Bozeman. Working at NASA was a lot of fun, my boss offered me a job working for him next summer but I need to decide if NASA is the place for me.

Classes started on Monday and so far they seem like they will be interesting. I am taking CS425 Computer Graphics, EE371 Microcontrollers, MATH225 Differential Equations and ENGL123 Intro to Literature. None of my teachers wasted any time in giving out homework so I have been busy. In addition, I started work at a bioinformatics lab on campus. Currently I am doing Linux system administration for them, setting up servers and making sure everything is working properly. Eventually after I learn a little bit more biology, I will be working on the code for the lab. The code searches for and records genetic retroid agents in the human genome as well as other genomes. It is pretty interesting stuff, although most of it is above my head. They want me to work 20 hours a week. Between classes, homework, cooking my own food and work I will have very little spare time.

The summer has been a blast. I am having lots of fun hanging out in the DC area and I still manage to get some work done. In 2 weeks I am going on a “business” trip to Florida with my mentor and 2 of the other interns that I work with. We will take a tour of Kennedy and then drive down to Key West for a couple of days. On the 12th of August I am flying home for a couple of hours, then it is off to California to visit family. Then the summer is over and school starts again. Summer goes by way too quickly…

Possibly the coolest thing ever. Just type “telnet diego.ascii-wm.net 2006″ (or if using linux “nc diego.ascii-wm.net 2006″) into a terminal and enjoy a live ascii broadcast of the World Cup over telnet.