As I entered the ballroom, I caught my coworkers debating over making last minute changes to a poster that hadn’t been printed out right. As active as they always are, their improvising instincts kicked in and made the best use out of the available resources and we all jumped in and geared up for our presentations after the keynote speech. A few minutes later, Tony Hartshorn shows up with all his exciting equipment. He claimed his booth and began unravelling all the wires before he took the equipment out and set them up on the table. Andreas, with a smile on his face whispered, I wonder how many times a month Tony gets arrested for his equipment. The joke instantly registered in my brain and we both cracked up, reminding me once again why it’s so nice to work with geniuses who has good sense of humor – they do a great job in both entertaining and enlightening me. Once set up, Tony now with a smile on his face, said to me, “Sufi, I know you’re interested to blow into it, but let’s also see who else I can get to blow into it”.

Tony Hartshorn is an Environmental Science professor here at James Madison University. For the last few months, CIT had been working with him to display live-tracking of CO₂ readings to demonstrate Harrisonburg “Keeling curve”. We are to display and archive hourly the carbon dioxide concentrations outside Memorial Hall. Andreas wrote a nifty python script to generate the data and store them on a JSON file, while I wrote a script in PHP to display the data through an interactive and intuitive graph using Google flot.

The equipment he brought to the conference was a device to measure the CO₂ concentration in the room, and to show readings when people blew hot air into the sensors that fed data into a device connected to a computer to generate live graphs. Mine was about 10,000 PPM. “Wow Sufi, you’re just full of hot air”, uttered the enthusiastic professor. While I certainly felt terrible contributing that much of Carbon Dioxide into the air, Tony was quick to fill us all in about how we can help the environment by being mindful about our activities and the environment instead of stop breathing to help the environment. And while Tony was explaining all these nifty details, I just couldn’t stop paying a lot of attention to the way he was enthusiastic about his work. I have always admired people who are passionate about their work, and I must say, he just goes beyond admirable to respectful for me.

I didn’t get to stick around till the end of the conference to see who won the IPad that was being given away. But the presentation went successfully, despite the initial glitches. It was a good learning day for me as it was a day of making successful impromptu presentations!

To contrast with how much CO₂ concentration I had in my breathe, here is the current CO₂ concentration near Memorial Hall, Harrisonburg, VA.

And here is this week’s (October 3-7) graph:

Keeling Curve October 03 - 07

A professor, some of my classmates and I were enjoying the graceful smell and taste of tea today at a local tea place when one of our friends informed us of the death of Steve Jobs. Everyone, almost instinctively, brought out their cell phones to visibility and started Googling right away. While we all were hoping it to be one of those nasty internet hoaxes, the news was confirmed to be true and inevitably there was a pause in our conversation. Twitter, wikipedia and google showed feeds almost as if it had happened way before it had actually happened.

I’ve always been a Microsoft person, but needless to say, Steve Jobs has been one of the most aspiring figures of my time in the industry. He was a visionary, and with his death, he’ll remain immortal in the hearts of many. May Steve Jobs rest in peace.

Apple's Homepage after the death of Steve Jobs (October 05, 2011)

DTV transition took place earlier in the mid of this year after a gruesome fight for change of deadlines. Being in the test team and thus, down at the SDLC chain, the change of deadlines had a significant impact on our work load. Nonetheless, both the web team who were responsible for designing and developing the site and the test team did a great job on the successful relaunch of DTV 2.0 and keeping up to its hype even till after the transition, which finally and gracefully* took place on June 12th of this year. Fortunately or unfortunately, I had joined the team at a time of heavy DTV workload nearing the crunch time.
I took the liberty to walk down to the DTV Command Center inside the FCC building and took these pictures there during the time of transition.

* No animals were killed in the process of this transition. The term excludes all server failures.

ne of the perks of working where I work is the free tickets I get to special events at the Verizon Center here in the nation’s capital. The band whose songs were played in many memorable events in my life, now performed before me live. And the best part of it all is that it was as inexpensive to view as it would’ve been if I were to watch them on YouTube. Free concerts always sound good. Greenday made it sound even better. They started out with songs from their new album, 21st Century, and later moved on to songs I personally am more familiar with including Boulevard of Broken Dreams and Time of Your Life.

Verizon Center, for some unearthly, stupid and downright ridiculous reason, does not allow anyone to bring cameras to the venue. That’s a setback I will never forgive this venue for for the rest of my life. I had to torture myself by realizing I had to depend on my memory to capture these moments instead of the much more dependable CF cards of my camera. Nonetheless, I was able to (or so I think anyway) capture some pics of the place through my cell, ending up pushing it to its limit seemingly effortlessly. So here they are and I hope you guys can make some sense out of these pictures.