Monday, July 23, 2012

DISC 20 Tulsa (9 July)

This was a stop that was not supposed to happen.  Even though Tulsa is the headquarters town of the SEG, I was not scheduled to give a DISC here.  This seemed a damn shame to me, especially since there are a lot of good geophysicists in Tulsa.  So I went to Denver last fall and had lunch with an old friend, Tom Jorden.  Back when I knew Tom at CSM he was just another graduate student, although a smart and really nice one.  Fast forward 30 years and we find Tom as CEO of Cimarex, a 4 billion dollar company.  Somehow, he found time to meet and talk about old times., and I pitched the idea of a DISC in Tulsa sponsored by Cimarex.  He liked the idea and worked to make it happen.

My host was Steve Roche also of Cimarex and another long-time friend from CSM.  Of course, I am very familiar with Tulsa since I was born there and worked 15 years at The University of Tulsa (also my MS alma mater).  One more point of contact is my new job at The University of Arkansas is only a couple of hours away, giving me the chance to work with some of the geophysicists attending the DISC.

As you can imagine, it was a joy to be back in Tulsa for the DISC.  With 17 attending, the worldwide DISC attendance now stands at 972.

The photo is a bit fuzzy, but what a wonderful Tulsa group. 

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Backup File Size

Update 12 July 2012

For quite a while now I have been keeping track of the growing size of my backup file.  I keep all my files and working data on a 250GB USB drive and back this up on my Mac system as a backup tar file.  Since tar is not a compressed format, the size of this file represents essentially how much digital information I am generating and accumulating.  The plot below shows how this has grown over time.


In the linear regression equation, y is backup file size in GB and x is time in years since 5/19/2008 (when I started keeping track).  The file size is doubling about every 2 years.  It won't be long before my 250GB drive will have to be retired.