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Summer 2009 Kiran and I walked for graduation in May. This is a sample picture: 
+ some of the other pictures we took.
I drove the first 2,000 miles alone this month (I have ~ 30,000 miles total, but I have not driven for so long in consecutive days until now) with Potato (the dog). I went to St. Louis to work with Jaya on the luke-warm dark matter paper. I hope we will finish it this summer. Magdi (the car) did well and I got back safely. We have a draft of the paper. There are some things we don't understand when the dark matter particle is in an eigen state with a wavelength larger than the horizon, but we'll figure them out eventually. Potato vomited on the way back. I gave him too much chicken because it was cooked and I did not want to carry it. He vomited it all on the back seat. I wiped the vomit off at Jeni's place and my car still smells a little like chicken-vomit. Jeni (my best friend from high school) passed her qualifiers and is writing two papers in genomics/bio-informatics. I am proud of her. I think she will graduate and do well. She'll be the first person I've advised to finish graduate school. And ... On the 21st of June, 2009 I should have been in NYC at midnight with Ravi. I was supposed to be going to the Amaldi conference with Ravi, but he got the flu. So, I ended up going alone. I gave Ravi's talk on building a color-magnitude diagram for white dwarf and neutron star - white dwarf binaries for LISA and Meagan's talk on "MaxEnt: Detecting things that go bump in the night" and I had two posters at opposite ends of the room. I am not sure I got any better at giving talks, but at least I am practising. The conference was fun. Szabi and Zsuzsa were great organizers. Janna Levin (prof at Columbia and best selling author) gave an amazing talk on sounds from space and we saw a movie about the launching of the Blast telescope in Alaska. On the way back I sat next to a gentleman who was interested in science and asked me if Mercury's orbit is closer to the sun than it was in the past and if pulses from pulsars change due to relativistic effects. I thought it was pretty awsome that someone with no science education would ask such questions. He was a butcher. The train was full. I was positively impressed by that and by the fact that there are plugs in trains. There were also two people who told me that they got drunk in NYC and were lost from their group (tourists) and needed to go to Mexic. A train called "the Pennsylvanian" was probably not the right way. They said they had no working credit cards and only cash. I thought of taking them home and helping them buy a plane ticket, but since I live alone I gave up on the idea. They got down in Philadelphia in search for a travel agency. Since it was the nearest big city, I thought it would be a good idea. They also wanted a swine flu vaccine, but I could not help with that since no tested vaccine exists yet. I went to the PennState astrofest a week ago. I thought it went really well. The main resources were people - enthusiastic students - both undergrads and graduate students who wanted to teach physics to interested kids and were very excited about it. Ravi and Hannah wrote a talk on gravitational waves and black holes and had the Black hole hunting game. Two volunteers from the astronomy department presented the slides and it was well attended - over 100 kids in some of the sessions. I did three random activities: spectroscopy (looking at light through a diffraction grating and distinguishing various elements from the periodic table based on their color spectrum), the tour guide of the universe spread over five floors (interesting and came with good physical exercise) and make your own comet. I think it's great that universities do this kind of outreach. A few days ago I fell with the dog while running. As usual I fell and he kept running and dragged me through some gravel. I did not suffer major damage. I lost some skin on my right hand, elbows, and knees. After two days it healed a little and I drove up to Cornell to see Sabrina deffend and to spend some time with Andy and Dave. I met with Ira after the deffense. We talked about work and maybe writing a Nature paper, which would make me very happy IF we can do it. He looked at my injuries and did a Mihai-like estimate: two hands, roughly equal, right hand a little bigger since I am right handed, not swollen and therefore I will heal without problems. My mom said that hands are well vascularized and should heal fast. She was right as usual. One week later I have an almost-fully-functional hand. The rest was mainly scratches and almost went away. I updated the front page a little and changed the picture. Writing on my website is always a good way to procrastinate. The previous picture was taken when I was 15. It was when I first designed the website and so it meant something to me. Now I am 26 (I'll be 26 until September) and I guess I do look a little different...besides, I got tired of hearing Andy (or Dave) making fun of the picture/me. And today Mihai told me that there is something called "the National interest waiver" that I could use to apply for a green card. I need to read up on it. If it's true maybe I will not be obliged to apply for a new H1 visa every year and finally be able to own a PA drivers license without marrying a PA truck driver. Last but not least...Jaya has an idea for writing a book on urban ecology - physics, energy, and the environment. I hope we (Mihai, Andy and I) can help her and make it fun and easy to read so that it will have some impact. She thinks we can write one chapter every month and finish it in an year. She has to teach a course on this topic the following year. It will be good if Jaya can go on sabatical at Mississippi. Mihai will be able to help her with the book better than any of us. On another thread, and perhaps the most important one, I have not finished the papers with Ravi and Sam, which should take priority over everything else. I should be able to just write them and also finish the pulsar timing simulations before Ravi and Sam get back. |
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Posting again: one year later. January 2009. New developments (not in the order of importance): 1. Received a Ph.D in August 2008. Now I am a postdoc at Penn State. More degrees, older (I am 26 now), but not necessarily smarter ... 2. Bought a house for 25 k in Bellefonte, PA (~ 10 miles from Penn State). Short drive. I love it. I have a river in my back yard and a park at the end of the street. 3. Adopted a dog from a Centre County shelter. His name is Potae, which means an all kinds, street smart dog or at least that's the meaning that Mihai and I have been giving to this word for many years. I think a dictionary would say "potae = a dog that is not of pure breed". On the shelter documents it says he is half pitbull, half labrador retriever. However, I am starting to doubt his street smartness because last week he got hit by a car (Dave calls him Potato; the alternative name may be a good idea). He is OK. Driking lots of water, staying still. He'll be better in a few weeks. I just hope this will not happen again. 4. Daniel was born on August 10, 2008. He is Mihai's second son. See pics below. He has green eyes (so far; they were blue initially) and looks a lot like my mom did in her baby pictures. 5. other things: attempted to save two birds while I was at Cornell. One is a starling. I found it in the middle of the road. She could not fly because of an enlarged chest (this what the wild life center said). Saving it was a group effort. Dave B. called to find the location of the wild life center, Sharvari held the bird while I drove, and Andy provided moral support and googled for directions. The second one was a sea gull that got caught in an airvent at the Rochester Home Depot (Home Depot is the store I buy materials such as paint from; why Rochester? well...because Mihai owns a house in downtown Rochester, which was bought as an experiment and to prove that the housing maket was going down to a company he worked for. The house was bought more than 3 years ago when people still needed proof. I was trying to help fixing it up since Ithaca is close to Rochester.) The bird had a very badly broken and turned backwards wing and did not make it. 6. Submitted 3 abstracts for APS (I am only first author on one). All with a very visionary approach, i.e., research not done yet. I hope we'll get to do it by then. I will make more progress if I stop watching youtube and reading the news so much. This should be my new year's resolution. In the end it turned out well. Mihai gave a really good talk on the dark matter project and the poster and my talk went OK as well. 7. My Dad broke his humerus bone before Xmas (complete fracture). He survived and is doing well now. David has been helping mama treat him. He was very serious and enthusiastic about his job. 8. Mihai received his PhD from Caltech in May 2007. This year he is a visiting professor at the University of Mississippi. He is not sure what he will do next ... at least not yet, but, so far, I am very proud of him and of his beautiful children and wife. 9. Andy is postdoc at Syracuse (graduated in August like me) and Dave graduated in January of 2009 and has just received a prize postdoc offer from Caltech. I am proud of all my friends. Jeni (my best fried from high school) came to visit. She is a graduate student at the university of Notre Dame, taking her quals and studying mosquitoes that give malaria. She also helped me paint and I promissed I'll help her some day when she gets a house. Pictures below (first time I used the Mac iWeb; for some reason it replaces ' with some strange characters, but other than that it's nice): August/October/December 2008 Lisa's camera August/October 2008 my camera I need to go now. I made an offer of the other half of my house (it's a duplex) and I have to meet my realtor agent today. I also need to finish answering my referee report (I received it in October). Since I don't like paperwork or answering referee reports this post is not very optimistic. It's more like a facts + to do list... next time I will try to be more fun. Oh..and I need to not forget to change the address (I moved in October) on my 10+ credit cards. I won't see if my APRs go up this way and Dave is probably tired of receiving my mail. I also received a new driver's license from the NY state that is valid 8 years, but has a big date in red that says: beware temporary visitor until August 2009, which is my graduation date (I graduated a year early - August 08, but nobody checks these things apparently; however, they want to appear that they do and so they put dates in red). I wonder which date matters more. I cannot receive a Pennsylvania driver's license until I have the right to work for more than a year, which may never happen ... even my H1 visa will be for a year. Doing visa paperwork once a year is better than doing it every day. Alright ... postive thinking! Tomorrow is monday and I have a new exciting week ahead full of code debugging and hopefully planning some papers and submitting the referee report and more skype meetings. Featured pics: 
 Daniel Thoughtful. Should I cry to get someone to pick me up or should I wait 5 more minutes? Dec 2008. 5 month old (left). David (1 year and 10 month old) and Daniel. 31st of Dec 2008. (right)  Mama and David. October 2008. 
 My house (the one with the dumpster in front), my car and Potae (my dog). November 2008 when Mihai came to visit. |
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Now I have a new camera and I am finally posting some pictures. This is another way to avoid work and applications.
some pics from GR18 First time in Australia! First time at a GRxx conference. It was fun. Beautiful country, busy schedule, many talks, I've met a number of interesting people. California: before and after GR18 + a brief weekend trip in May to see David (my brother's son) for the first time. That's right: I am an aunt! Paul's birthday: At the Taste of Thai again with my officemates and other grads from the office next door. Xmas07: I spent Christmas with the Jacangelo family (the neighbors of Andy's parents). They are really nice. John (their son) said he is intrested in nanotech and physics and that he may come to visit us at Cornell this spring. He is a sophomore in highschool and gets really good grades. We spent the rest of the holidays (Dec 24th to Jan 1st) with Andy and his parents, sister, cousins, friends, several cats (Lucy, Mouse, Bella, Homer, Smoochie, kitten), dog (Blue), etc. Other Random Pics Featured Pics:   This is David. Isn't he perfect? and of course sweet and adorable. The pic on the left is his passport photo (6 month) and the one on the right is at 9 month: Mihai (my brother) and David (my nephew) in the plane on the way to Italy. |
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I am finally posting the pictures I took this summer.
August 2006 Pics Featured pic:  Me and my cousin, Sasha. He is 5 years and 3 month old. He was born the year I left home...It's hard to believe I've been away for so long.  Oh...and this is Kiki, my latest dog. A car hit him and broke his hip bone, and, of course, I took him home. He was homeless and I didn't think he would have survived otherwise on the streets with a broken leg. Anyway, it healed extremley fast - in about ten days because he is very little and the fracture was not severe (there was no displacement; fractura in lemn verde as my mom calls it). And then, of course, I left. So, now my parents have another dog. Two dogs were not enough and Kiki is *very* cute. |
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| April 2006 Pics: a few pics from the walk around the Commons and various waterfalls with two prospective students and some pics from the grad ball. | |
| Random pics . These are pics with me, Mihai, Lauren and Jeni from the summer, fall and winter of 2005. | |
I was told that this picture looks crazy. So, I decided to post it.
It's a pic with me in California a couple of winters ago (correction by Mihai :). I initially wrote summers. It was in December a couple of days before Xmas.) with a car that
looks normal, i.e., it is rented. 
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Winter Vacation: December-January 2004 This winter break I went home for the first time in the last two years. It was nice to be back. I gave a talk at the West University of Timisoara. Afterwards I had to go to Bucharest to change my visa. There was an endless line even though we were supposed to have appointments. Anyway, my mom came with me and she got a visa for 10 years! Now she can visit my brother and me anytime. We also went to see my cousin Andreea in Iasi and my grandmother. Andreea si 7 years old and she is very bright and sweet. Last time I went to visit her she told me she loves me. So, I had to go again. Below you can see a picture with us. 
I spent the holidays with my parents and Jenica, my best friend from highschool.
After the holidays I spent the rest of the time with my parents and my pets.
My dog, Blacky, is very bright (she was homeless before and we took her in when
I was 10). She can climb fences and do a lot of cool stuff. Now she adopted kittens! If you don't believe me you can look at the
picture!
Here is a pic with me and my best friends from highschool (except for Alina
who did not come home this winter). From left to right: Vero, me, Jeni and Adi.
We have met several time. We played: cards (uno), mime, and laughed a lot.
It was great to be home again! Unfortunately, today I had to come back to
Ithaca :). Here it is ofcourse snowing...but I'll survive.
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2 Octiober, 2004
Today a Blue Jay got into my kitchen. It flys a little, but something seems to be wrong with it. I bought some food for it and I'll keep it for a couple of days to see if it gets healthier. It's a really pretty bird and it sings. Of course, the first thing I did after I found it was to call my brother up. Mihai and I named it "cioara" (it means crow in romanian, which is not so far off. I've read this species of birds comes from the same family as the crows). Here are some more pictures with it. 
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Summer 04
This summer I went to Pasadena to see my brother for 10 days. We had a great time. Several exciting things happened. Our $400 car got BROKEN into (Mihai bought it with $400, but he had an accident in the meantime so now it's really not worth anything). We stopped in a parking lot next to a no trespassing sign and then followed a very steep route on foot to go down to a lake in the desert and at some point Mihai decided that we cannot advance any further (after he fell a couple of times and hurt his hand in some sort of cactus). I agreed to go back to the car only because I was suppose to be on a phone meeting with my undergraduate advisor about a paper we were submitting to Phys. Rev. D. This meeting was in about 40 minutes and we were still in the middle of the desert with the cell phones in the car (we left them in the car because there was no signal anyway). So, we went back to the road and got out right in the parking lot from behind a bush. As we approached the car full of dust and blood, we heard people talking about cell phones in spanish IN OUR CAR. They were 2 adults and 6 children and when they saw us they got into a subcompact car parked next to ours and ran away. They turned the lights on in our car and stole a pair of sun glasses and some pens (a total value of $4). When we came they were debating whether it's worth taking our cell phones or not. I am glad they decided not to because otherwise I would have missed my phone meeting. Of course, we had left the car open ... but still Mihai was very proud that someone thought his car worth breaking into. Afterwards we went to Kip's group meeting and heard from Sterl Phinney about building BBO for detecting the cosmic microwave background. This is going to be built after LISA. I didn't understant much from what he said, but I am glad I went. Mihai fell asleep at some point and he would wake up once in awhile and ask a random question based on the last sentence he heard. I was awake all the time, but I could not ask any questions. Besides this, we went to the beach almost every day, attempted to understand one of Hawking's talks about how information can escape from a black hole, ate icecream, found a very interesting plant in the ocean and put it the bathtub. Here are the pictures we took. These are really all my pictures from this summer (they are not very many and they are funny to look at, but the webpage might load slow). |
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Cornell - Spring 2004 -- more of Kip's lectures ... this time at Cornell -- Hiking in the wild New York ! (during Spring break) -- Second Hiking trip - during Easter - The trail was 8 miles and a half long! . -- Next hiking trip - April 17, 2004! The plan is to watch a gravitational waves lecture each week and go hiking every other week. --Mihai came to visit and gave an informal talk about his research with Kip. We had a great time: We went hiking and swimming twice, we almost got shot, we made a cake, Mihai fixed the window of my car with SuperGlue, we had a small party, we cleaned the floors in my apartment, etc. For more details see the pictures with Mihai, Tanja, Dave, Kelken, Andrew, Kiran and me. |
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December 2003 My brother and I organized a Gravitational Waves course based on Kip Thorne's ph 237 at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. As part of the informal course we also went swimming in the Louisiana swamps (Tickfaw national park) - with the alligators... 
See the course page and
Mihai's page for more crazy
pictures.
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August 2002
My second visit to Sunny California: My brother and I went to a few relativity talks and to two group meetings with Kip. Kip is working on a stationary solution for a binary black hole problem. He wants to put some radiation at the boundary that keeps the black holes for spiraling into each other to turn the black holes into white holes to keep the horizon from increasing. He hopes this will make the horizon disapear and will generate a stationary metric on the hole grid (the evolution will be completely periodic). This may make the horizon disappear to leave naked singularities behind and yet Kip believes that the real waves emitted by the holes can be constructed from a sequence of such stationary space-times.We have been to the beach almost every day and we made many pictures ... for more detailed information see mihai's page). |
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June 2002
Going home: |
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May 2002
I left Champaign for 3 days to visit Alina, my best friend from highschool. She is studing mathematics and computer science at Carleton collge and wants to pusue a Ph. D. in Mathematics. We cooked (my first and the last time for this year). If you don't believe me you can look at the pictures: me and the dwelled eggs. |
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December 2001
I went to see my brother in California. Unfortunately I stayed only three days and did not have the chance to meet very many people at Caltech. We drove on a highway for the first time (he got his American Driver's license in December). I saw the Pacific Ocean and we were together again like in the good old times. We swam all day, ate watermellon and talked about the future of the planet in the next 2000 years. This summer I am going to California again. This time I'll stay almost three weeks and we'll have fun! Calling home: 1 (the first thing I did when I got to California was to call mother :)).On the highway: 123 (Mihai driving on the highway for the first time) On the beach:123 (Swimming on Xmas day) My luggage |
