Hello, World!

Hi!  Yes, I do have a blog, even though I don't seem to have enough time these days to write anything on it.  Sorry about that.  Things have been extra crazy here lately -- supervising three students is a lot of work.  It could be a full-time job unto itself if you let it.

In addition, I've suddenly been given another big task (supervising the hiring, care, and feeding of ten postdocs, most of whom have already been hired).  It's an interesting task, and allows me to learn a lot of new things about hiring and supervising people, so in that way it is a really good thing.  But, it is pretty time-consuming as well.  I have inherited this task from someone who didn't quite have enough time for it, and I'm planning to take it and run with it further than was expected.

The postdocs are computational scientists in different application domains, and I don't directly supervise them (but technically, they report to me).  They have mentors in their science domain who have provided them with projects and supervise their daily work.  But I plan to help connect them with different resources on the computational math and computer science side, to round out their computational science skills.  The whole rationale behind hiring ten postdocs in science domains was to train them to become great computational scientists.  So, I plan to help them develop their high-performance computing skills.  In some cases, this requires a lot more work than in others.  One of them never even said the word "computer" when giving the interview talk.  So that will be quite a challenge!

In other news, today is my sister Rachel's birthday.  Happy birthday, big sis, pioneering the way through the ages!  (In other words, I think you're old!  Hopefully this ruins your life once and for all.)