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I bought some Europants today, or should I say Euroknickers. We are in Galway now, having spent a couple of nights in an amazing cottage in the Middle of Nowhere, County Kerry. I had to fend off sheep to capture a midnight photo of the house, and Angela awoke to cows mooing one morning. In keeping with the traditional Irish theme, we made multiple peat fires. And despite the ubiquitous Irish rain, the experience was, as they say, brilliant.

There is Guinness to be had and photos to be made now. More details on Monday.

Through extreme turbulence and canceled flights and crowds of chain-smoking Europeans, I prevailed. Here I am in Dublin, barely awake enough to produce this update. But update I will. Our British Midland A330-200 won my approval despite its being manufactured by Airbus, due largely to its nose and belly-mounted cameras. I was so excited about watching the landing from the pilot’s perspective that I forgot to snap a picture; I’ll try to remember on the way back. In the meantime, here is a less-exciting photo of the moving map display from somewhere over the north Atlantic. Upon landing in Manchester, I managed to spend $10 on a breakfast consisting of yogurt, fruit and water, and I can’t even blame it on my poor French. As it turns out, the dollar is weak and flabby in these parts. Finally, I would like to point out that people continue to drive on the wrong side of the road here, and I’ll be joining them again tomorrow. We’ll be purchasing full insurance on the rental car.

Naptime. If I can update from Kerry and/or Galway, I will, but I won’t count on it.

Have you ever had a telemarketer CALL BACK immediately after hanging up on them? I always assumed the slimiest of slimy telemarketers couldn’t be that obnoxious until it happened to us today. A woman called up this morning selling AT&T Wireless service (with a free Nokia phone!), and Rachel promptly hung up after explaining that we already have cellphones. Ten seconds later, the phone rang again: “This is Alicia again…” Unbelievable. Telemarketing is a notoriously crappy job, so I’m never rude to them; I blame the company, not the individual. But in this case, Alicia is lucky that Rachel, not I, answered the phone when she crossed the line and called back.

In a related story: I recently discovered that posting your email address on an Internet message board is an excellent way to increase your daily spam intake by about 500%. How fortunate I am to have discovered so many new ways to “Stimulate [My] Love Life”! Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go “Claim [My] $500″ from 123OnlineCash!

If you have a lot of digital photos to organize, Adobe Photoshop Album ($50) is the greatest program, ever. You’ll never again have to worry about filenames or hard drive organization, and it even lets you offload your hi-res TIFFs or JPEGs onto CD-ROMs while storing smaller, screen-size versions on your hard drive. Tres useful.

Take-home exam is done, finally. Now I just need to do laundry and prepare for Monday’s trip!

Well, I accepted the job offer today and sealed my fate for the next few years. All things considered, I’m looking forward to it. My start date is June 10th with no vacation during the summer, but I do get to come home for the wedding and take a week off for the honeymoon (lucky me!) The work is exactly what I want to do: flight simulation, with a little bit of aerodynamics and a little bit of coding.

The company builds flight simulators. Pictured below is a highly-modified Model 142 from the Beckman building here on campus, which we will be using in an upcoming NASA-produced film of our icing research. Rob and I put together a demonstration using this sim today, and I used my new digital camera and Windows Movie Maker to produce a short video clip (highly recommended!) Note the cheesy transitions and titling; obviously, I was a film producer in a former life. Let me know if you cannot play the clip (it’s a WMV, whatever that is). I can convert it to MPEG if need be.