Part 11: My mom told me not to talk to strangers

Thursday June 14th, 2007.

That’s the last time I talk to a stranger on the bus. This tall, black guy with almost no teeth started the conversation: “Are you Mexicans?” After that he wouldn’t shut the hell up! To be honest, I think I understood a tenth of what he was saying. He started talking about race and heritage. “I’m also South American, we could be family” he said, to which I responded: “We all descend from Adam and Eve” doing my best not to correct him by telling him how mad it makes me when someone in the States calls us Mexicans “South Americans”. He went on and on about races, languages and nations, to change the conversation to religion. He said he was a Jehovah’s Witness and that the final battle was about to begin… THAT type of conversation. I was tempted to stop the bus and wait for the next one, but I didn’t want to be late for work. Finally we reached the transit center and I ran for it.

Dr. Jose Florez is a programming virtuoso that helped me on compiling the code. Actually I didn’t even compile it, but he helped me on making the computer TRY to compile. So now I have an actual response from the program.

At 11:00 Ananth and I had a video conference meeting with Dennis and Eric, both in Iowa and working on the same project. I think I got served. Eric had already compiled the code and run the simulation. At the end I guess it wasn’t all that bad, now I have a lead on how to do the next step.

Eureka! After lunch I finally was able to run the simulation. It’s a good day. I can’t help thinking on how clumsy Archimedes must have been. I mean, not dumb at all, but seriously, I would feel a little awkward running around naked every time something awesome happened.

In the afternoon, Ananth told me that he was impressed that I had “made this much progress in such a short time”. I beg to differ, but who cares, my boss just told me he likes what I doing.

On my way out I had a quick meeting with Stefan Birmanns to discuss the different software packages that I could use to implement the 3D environment of the simulation. After that I was already late to meet everyone at the museum of Natural Arts. It was really cool.