07/14/10 (2001)
Pre-bus-blog.

We went to a wedding this weekend. Or, more of a wedding reception, since it was the party part for people who would have otherwise dozed during the whole isles and sappy oaths and promises thing. It was in the form of a backcountry picknick.

In Vermont.

For those just tuning in (and I can understand why you might have tuned out...) the past week has seen temperatures in the 90's, and very high humidity. Being the brilliant bastard I am, I decided to recharge the air conditioner on the way to Vermont on Friday evening. This might seem random, but when it's apparent that you're going to spend 3 hours driving into the sun when the ambient air is already like a sauna, the ideas you have get much more interesting.

I keep the hose the connects a can of coolant to the A/C system in the tool bag in the back of the car. After a 15$ stop at a parts store, and some careful arrangement of stuff, it's possible to fill the A/C on the boat while in traffic. This is a trick I discovered while in Ohio under similar conditions. I list that among my better revelations.

(post-bus-blog)

On short order, this arrangement put the girly, the boat, and myself bouncing down the roads of suburban New Hampshire blissful chill. The sun glowed low in the sky, the car was filled with orange light. In a word: it was cool.

Then, the time came to test the can. I put my foot on the brake to slow the car to turn into a parking lot.

It was then that the noise started.

A dry, rumbling, metal-on-metal noise.

In the three years since the last time I cared about the A/C compressor, it's bearings have gone, and pressurizing the system caused them to ride differently. Wonderful.

The a/c kept cooling for another hour, then it stopped. The rumble came and went for the entire trip. I kept hoping that it wouldn't seize. The downside of serpentine belts is that there is no prayer of cutting the belt on a frozen alternator/power steering pump/air pump/compressor and nursing a few more miles out of the car. It just rumbled, thankfully.

Deeper probing, after the trip, revealed that the compressor actually smokes when the clutch is engage and the engine is running. The clutch no longer engages the compressor, either. The whole thing is very, very hot. I replaced the serpentine belt with one for the A/C free model of the car. Fortunately, the engine is designed so that the compressor is a bolt-on, and there is a safe belt path without it.

There is 1/4" play on the compressor shaft.

I always knew I would end up as a statistic.

If you care at all about education topics, I want you to read the sidebar of that article too. A lot of education research focuses on very vague methods and ideas for teaching methods. My thought has been that you really need 3 factors to come together:

  1. The students have to want to learn the material.
  2. The teacher has to be able to teach and communicate.
  3. The students and the teacher need to work together as much as possible.


Point 3 effectively means small class sizes. All the other little subtopics are important, but you really need a good foundation.


Quick thought:
"Arm your children with manners."

I have had some strange dreams as of late, that haunt me into daylight.

I dreamt that people would get trapped in places, and monsters would appear and eat them. Quite gruesomely. It would have been merely funny if it had not been so incredibly bloody.

Generally, as time went on, people got trapped in increasingly exotic places. Early on, they were in schools and offices and playgrounds and things. After a while, they were on space ships. Sometimes, the monster would come out of a wall and take someone. Other times, one of the people would simply turn into a monster. No one knew who or what to trust. I began to wonder if maybe there was a virus going around. It got quite ridiculous at times. When people were trapped in space ships, inevitably, the group would be reduced to one person. The one person was very afraid, awaiting their certain doom. Then, a FedEx guy would show up with a package. Even the person on the space ship was confused. The packages were gift wrapped. The person would then open the package and a monster would pop out and dismember them.

I would then find myself watching a different group of people being consumed by a mysterious creature that seemed to have an insatiable appetite.

Some people got smarter over time, and learned not to open the packages. The packages would get bored and come after them. I remember a small yellow box with a red bow, about the size of a shoebox, deciding it was hungry and leaving the table it was sitting on to find lunch.

One FedEx guy had the task of delivering a refrigerator sized box to a spaceship orbiting Jupiter. The last remaining crew member had the presence of mind to ask how the FedEx guy had survived. The FedEx guy replied that he made sure to leave before anyone started opening presents. The guy pulled the paper off the box right there, to reveal a large white object that opened in to to show lots of blinking lights and buttons. There was small square panel in the middle. FedEx guy was unworried. He explained that the monster would come out in a long time when the guy (presumably now stuck in Jupiter's orbit) wasn't expecting it. The FedEx guy then left somehow, and the monster grabbed the guy with a tentacle when he was trying to enjoy his ice cream.

I then had the pleasure of watching the demise of a group of people on a ship in deep space.


06/27/10 (0936)
Ducks:





Slime:





After the rain:





During the rain:





Bug bite:





Flowers:













Green:









Northern California in January, 2008.






06/25/10 (0645)
My brother asked why parts are becoming rare for my 1990 vintage car. I basically surmised that most cars had driven over 200,000 miles, and/or sustained breakdowns that far exceeded market value of a replacement vehicle.

Using some EIA statistics from a 1995 report, if figured out how the average american car accumulates miles, and compared that to the ChevOldsmoBuiac. If anything, the average car drives less miles than I would guess, but i have spent most of my life hanging round the most mobile segments of society (23-29 year olds), 4 person households, ect. It will be 16 years until the boat makes it over 200,000 miles. I estimate it will rust to bits before then.





06/10/10 (0935)
The girly points out that I have not written much. That is not completely true. I have. Just.... not... here.... There is something like 160-170 pages of thecal matter floating about my hard drives.

I was actually intending to write a blog for my brother. Ghost blogging. I want a latin word for it: you'll get it when I do it. I want to call it exegetical blogging or something more erudite than the quotidian ghost variant. Writing a blog entry for someone else that plainly recognizes that it is not written by the person that clearly wrote it has got to have a special phrase. The plural you might just call it psychotic. I somehow forgot the password to his blog, and I left the secret tome of useless information in an undisclosed location, so Alex will not be blogging until I figure that out.

This is a topic close to home. I tend to have a relatively permissive view of taxpayer funded research: if it's not directly related to national security (e.g. it didn"t happen in a national lab or for weapons development activities), the information derived from research belongs to the public. I also think that the software tools should also be available, even if it"s just by request.

Unfortunately, this is not the current situation. The main channel of dissemination is through for-profit, peer review journal articles. You"ve heard of some of these journals, I"m sure. They have names like Nature,Science, and The New England Journal of Medicine.

For profit journals require investigator to pay to submit articles for review and publication. These are invariably taxpayer dollars. Journal access is usually by subscription or per-article. University and public libraries pay subscription fees to access the whole journal (or suite of journals). These subscriptions can be quite expensive (I've heard thousands of dollars...). These prices are generally out of reach of the general public and researchers at poorly funded institutions. Thus, they science the public paid for is out of reach to them.


Apparently it's becoming out of reach of the institutions now. California is having trouble affording a big name: U. of California Tries Just Saying No to Rising Journal Costs.

A solution to the issue is online-based, open access journals. Having journal articles freely accessible, online, in a paper-free format has all the advantages of the internet. To fund these journals, they still collect submission fees from authors. This funds the editors and the server prices for keeping the journal spinning. Anyone with an web connection can read the articles, submit reviews, and generally learn stuff.

My favorite open access journal is: Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

Share what you know, kids.

Early Summer River:













Toys:





Dog:





Eloped and boogers:





I found the bike had a flat tire when I tried to ride to work yesterday. I was first surprised by how long the nail in the tire was, then more surprised that it had gone into the tire head-first. Wild. My patch kit has turned to concrete over the years. I have had zero flats since I came to new hampshire. In Socorro, it was a weekly event. I used tube shields, thorn proof tubes, and slime. Even then, I think I went through 3 sets of tubes in two years.

I came to New Hampshire, swapped parts around with a bike I acquired from Packrat, and have ridden on those tubes and tires for 4 years. I vaguely remember that I didn't do the normal tire-hardening procedure when I put the bike together during the swap. I was surprised to find no slime in the tire at all. There"s a big bottle on the shelf, which I know dates from when I was in New Mexico. I must have been lazy in 2006. Instead of patching, I just put a big dollop of slime in and pumped up the tire. There was a brief spray of Vulcan blood when I spun the tire, then the hissing stopped.















05/28/10 (2057)
This was left to be posted, from nearly a month ago.

I realize now that asking the mac to resize a pile of photos while it's encoding video will likely take a while, so it may not be realistic to expect a post with photos right away.

I seem to remember writing about this before. I sometimes find myself having moments that remind me of how my mother of father would handle something. Yesterday had a definite dad-moment.

The girly was hanging clothes to dry. She was wearing her pretty tear drop shaped earings that look like hooks that droop into big fat drops of silver. When she reached over her head to hang things, her shoulders pushed the earings out of her ears and into the grass. She came in when she couldn't find them. She was beginning to think they were lost for good.

I get this funny feeling in the back of my head when Dad suggests I do something that is obviously monotonous, seems pointless and impossible, and will take forever, possibly with no redeeming value.

Shovelling snow, for instance.

I got that funny feeling, and offered to go look in the grass for the earings.

Quick math check: Earings: 3cm long, 1cm wide (0.00032m). Yard: 63,5002m.

Amazingly, after carefully walking back and forth under the clothes line for a while, I caught a glint in the sun, and found one. Shortly after, we found the other.

Dad moment.


Young Dogs at the Sheep and Wool Festival:






















































05/07/10 (0942)
There is a sign in the gantry between a couple of the buildings.

It's a poster, a banner really (it's huge).

It has pictures of boots and compasses and a backdrop of a yellow legal pad with triangulations on it.

It's text trumpets all the adventure scientists have.

I'm tempted to buy a fat sharpie and write "If scientists get adventure how come they're all so pale and fat?"



This time last May, it was raining. It didn't really stop until July.

We stepped out the door this morning to find it hot, muggy, and raining.

It must be summer.



The heat is making it hard to function. If it will stay for a few days, i'll get used to it. At least, that's what I tell myself. If I jumped off the bridge, I would know damn well that it was April just a few days ago.



My brother migrated his blog to his wiki. Actually, considering he left all his old entries behind and starting posting in his wiki, I suppose it's more of an exodus than a migration.

In an age contracting internet, where people are hiding stuff from each other, this move is a bit in the opposite direction. Instead of bitching about bad spelling, grammar, or whatever, those who have permission can just edit the entry.

The possibilities are intriguing.

I could write blog entries for him.

Based on who I recommend he friend on Facebook, I am guessing this is probably a bad idea.


RIP Apple Pro Mouse Optical.

It was 8 years old. I had to glue the glider back onto the bottom in January. It's click was always a bit sticky after that. Oops. When I got it, optical mice were new and snazzy, and everyone hated cleaning the rollers on their mouse tracking balls. To see how much better optical was, I decided to see how long it could go without cleaning the sensor.

The answer: 8 years.

A few weeks ago, the mouse started freezing. Wiggling the cord made the LED flicker, signifying a broken wire. I discovered that if I coiled the mouse cable just so, it worked very well. (Who hasn't done that trick anymore?) Then, for my birthday, a cordless Logitech V220 showed up. Two buttons, scroll wheel, high resolution, and fast tracking update speed. Did I mention it's bright orange?

The only thing I miss is that I really really really like mice with bright LEDs on the bottom.



04/19/10 (0645)
Recession Notes

I've noticed a few changes around town over the past few years.


I applied for more jobs, even though I said I was going to focus on writing my thesis for a while.

Motorpickle





















Signs of Spring





























Subject A?





Dog.










04/13/10 (1101)
"The longer you are in grad school, the longer it takes."
-Me

Stuff just comes out of my mouth.


04/01/10 (1443)
It finally stopped raining.

NHPR, the only traditional media I have easy access to, suggests that this month set a record for rainfall in New Hampshire, 11 inches and change. March has been a re-run of last summer.

The Lamprey River has gone over flood stage every year since 2006. I don't think this was a normal thing when they put in the roads, because the roads regularly flood, cutting Newmarket, the town south of the University, off from northern locales.


My brother has started a wiki. I might have pushed him into the idea... I tried it on my userspace at NMT, but I'm having trouble with my account permissions letting php scripts execute non-php commands (like calling sqlite).

I think I like wikis. The community editing component is neat, but the whole editable-cross-referenceable notebook idea is where the real psychosematic action is at. I am really good at making notes, but horrible at finding them in the ocean of notebooks I have, and even worse at reading my own neocaligraphic scrawls.

The editing sentax is a little steep, but no worse than Latex. I should start editing the pages in wikipedia I know all about.

The dog photos on Sunday were a blast to photograph. I have been mostly busy writing, and so haven't been shooting as much as i would like. I have been wanting to experiment a bit more with stopping down a bit. Most small aperture lenses (like superzooms and cheap teles) work in the range of f/3.5 to f/6.3. These pretty much demand to be shot open under a lot of conditions, and i don't think average users really think about what happens beyond f/8, unless their camera demands it. Faster lenses tend to make you ask if you want more in focus... leaving things at f/2.8 or f/1.8 (or bigger) can make noses sharp and eyes blurry if you're not careful.

Since sunday was sunny and bright, I tried stopping the 70-300 down to f/8-12. I think this helped keep otherwise wiggly dogs in focus, as the AF system wasn't the only thing working to keep the dogs in focus. To be honest, I have no great conclusion from this experiment. I think i got a better hit rate.



Today's lesson is about installing Windows.

It takes a really long time to install Windows. I don't have a stop watch handy, but i think this process of putting a clean windows XP install on a somewhat recent machine has taken upwards of 6 hours. 6 hours!

The mac, which really can't be considered recent at all, it being 8 years old, took perhaps 2 hours.

As long as you don't have to reformat a drive, ubuntu can be done in less than an hour.

By 'done', I mean, finished dittling around with the computer and being back to work.

What are they thinking?


03/28/10 (2221)
A day exploring the coast:













I still hate gulls:













Dogs!
(Mine is a dirty bastard)










































03/21/10 (2026)
Todays exercise in surrealism comes from the ISA bus.

We have a moderately ancient and excessively expensive bit of hardware that originated in the mid 90's. It relies on a cutsie and archaic proprietary communication bus to talk to controlling computers and other bits of equipment. The interface cards we have are ISA. As a result, we have been nursing various machines (generally, older than PIII) along to use the card and software. It's a loosing battle.

Our first casualty has been a Cyrix 5x86 box. A lovely little beasty with an RF leak so bad it warbles the last CRT we have in the lab. It blew it's ATA controller.

A few years back, old machines with a spare ISA slot or two were commonly available. That supply seems to have dried up. We can't afford to purchase a new PCI(e) or USB based interface (only several thousand dollars!).

We found a company that makes an ISA to USB bridge. An amazing and somewhat convoluted device. To really work well, it needs an external power supply, and then it requires an ENTIRE USB2 controller all to itself. It doesn't use the standard windows driver interface, but a custom software 'enumerator'. It's amazingly convoluted.

So it's been no surprise that getting an amazingly convoluted interface card and the amazingly convoluted USB to ISA bridge to work together has been an exercise in error messages and downgrade to windows 2000 futility.

It's a bit weird to be setting hardware interrupts with jumpers on the old card and wondering just what is going on in software that is supposed to make the whole mess stick together.


Edit: We gave up. After some fiddling, we (I) figured out that the real issue appears to be how the orignal, 2001 vintage insturment control software accesses the ISA board, which is not through a driver, but through a library. The library refuses to load on a PIV vintage machine. Amazing.

Fortunately, I happen to own a computer that has an ISA slot, so the boss man and I have agreed to trade for a like computer that has no ISA slot, as I have no use for one.

I mean, there was even a "Well, damn!" moment when I discovered that it -had- an EISA slot, cleverly hiding behind my RAID controller.


I also discovered that the PIV will never, ever, see all 4 gigs of ram, because it's 925x chipset doesn't support PAE, even thought the processor does. Go figure.

It's raining again

Someone egged the car again.




Something bolted down.




Something in the yard.




The tubs are back!




Flooded out of work.




My friend used to tell me about how the feminists would sit around and call all objects that were longer than wide phallic. Bananas. Cucumber . Zucchini. Rifles. Flag Poles. Telephone Poles. Toilet Plungers. Pipes. Drills. Ramrods. Trees...




Flowers!




But not leaves...




Cat Inventory:
Subject A is slightly less afraid of dogs:





















I thought Subject B -was- Subject A. Cursory analysis proves otherwise.
Subject B





Subject C follows Subject B under the steps.





Bug.





Something looks like I used to.




The building is growing back.






03/20/10 (0710)
We never feed The Dog monkey food.

Except for the rare exception of carrots and apples.

He loves apples.

Sometimes it really pays off.

I have a pan full of bacon on the stove.

The dog is snoozing in the sunny spot in the other room.

He has no clue what he's missing.


03/14/10 (1329)
Official π day post.


03/14/10 (1323)
I'm sort of intrigued at how writing curves back and influences how I go about doing it. It's really a dynamic process. I was writing a cut-and-dry experimental section. Voltages, pressures, and mass channels. Background subtraction and cal curves. Standard stuff. I added just one sentence, talking about other techniques. I realized, by looking at my notes, that I had compiled a nifty review of everything that has been done. Those begat a pretty nice paragraph. Thus, I realized, that when i'm taking notes, there's some critical data I should be writing down to make the process easier next time.

~oh~ I like it when I know those things.

Tell me more.


I have an entire discussion about the joys of the EISA bus just waiting for you.

I put the remnants of my halloween costume, 7 pairs of large white fruit of the loom underware, into a large ziplock baggie, scrawled a promise that it was essentially clean and unused, and dropped it off at goodwill.

The job search continues to depress me. I applied to a position that I had sort of taken as a promised plan Z. (Plans A-Y having gone to the nutters) (Not completely true... but i'm suspicious.) I have also mostly cleared my dockette of known positions.

We have gone back and forth about trying to work seasonally as a tech in remote field sites. I'd feel bad leaving the girl and the dog alone for so long. The issue isn't pressing now, but in a year, it might be. It's intrigueing to think about how much dog food we can afford.

The dog gets his 1 year checkup tomorrow. He's really more like 18 months old, but we got him from the shelter, so the clock starts from then.

It's raining so hard there's puddles forming in the house. That's not including the one under the big wet dog that just came in.

He's moping. He wants a walk. It's raining so hard that it leaks through my zippers. He's learned not to beg for a walk when it's raining. He's welcome to go out on his own, however.

The power hasn't gone out. I think that living beside a retirement community must give us a special blessing.



03/04/10 (2245)
Writing a thesis is one of the least exciting ways I could imagine spending my time.

There's a pipe under the road downtown. I finally got the right light for it. I fear it will soon be scrawled over by the hoodlums that write me love letters on the covered bridge and the tower.






I'm shooting yet another friends wedding this weekend, and so am trying to flair my creative bits so I can deliver the goods. The formals are going to be challenging because they are indoors. Checking my portfolio, I have not done many indoor formals. The ones I have do not make me hover in my chair.

So I've been thinking about how to best apply artificial light to the situation.

A few good strobes can be made to go quiet a long way. I was amazed what I was able to do with a single gelled flash, even in direct july sun.

The big question is how I will -gently- illuminate a bridal party for altar photos. I tested bouncing light off the (quadrillion foot tall!) ceiling of the church, so I have a clue what my limits are (read: don't trust the flash... it barely works).

I think the ticket out will be to gel the flash heads to match the church light, and use an umbrella (or two!) to push the background down a few stops. It looks great in my mind, but I'm worried they shadows will be too dark in reality. The second strobe might go to backlight a bit.

To test my lights ability to get a large group, I set it in the driveway and did some full dump shots to see how much light was usable.

These are shot at about 50mm f/2.8 @ISO 400. (1/250s, but this was taken very late at night).

Small silver umbrella:




Big White umbrella:





These tests always seem to violate some law off physics that I thought I had mastered. I took many shots with different zoom settings on the flash. They had little affect on the spred of light. Inspecting the silver umbrella, there's some conical light leak going up the side of the house. I'm not sure where that light is coming from. (The flash, obviously). The flash optics must not be too tight.

Also, It seems like the translucent umbrella, even leaking light through the top, spreads more light on the ground. It's larger size (um. 42" vs 36"?) must help. Or the silver must have a lower albedo than one would expect.

Surprisingly big.

The Dog modeled for me:
























02/15/10 (2020)
RIP Canon.

I'm agitated that it died. I miss using it. The Olympus Tough gets points for being tough, but looses points for focusing on the wrong thing and being slow. It gets in the way. Which sucks. It's a nice tight little camera. I want to love it. The LED illuminator right by the lens is a brilliant idea. The small size, and hard metal casing is great. *sigh*

I am using the D200 more as a result. Although, not very much compared to what I did before I found out my grad school career was being short circuited.

The chive flowered. It only took like two years.





The next wedding is here:













Flag:





Friendly 'mallow:





Spring is coming:





The dog and I went for a walk at the farm. The snow is gone again.









I changed the hoses in the boat (more on that later).
The dog spent the entire two hours sleeping in the back seat of the car.





The Girl brought her work home with her in a bag:

























When she does things like this I can feel myself slipping more into love with her.


02/10/10 (2011)
For the record, it's Bayram. Not Bayrum. Not Bi-ram. Nor Biron, for that matter.

Bayram

That's Turkmen for "celebration".

I won't even try to show you how to spell it.

Bayram is synonymous with:

  1. Snot-cannon: (when you roll him over on his back so his sinuses drain into his nostrils while you pet him)
  2. Mr. Fidgets: Because when he gets all steamed up, that's what he does.
  3. The Muppet: His fur sticks out every which way. His head is big. He looks funny and his paws are huge, stubby, and awkward.
  4. Cousin It: Long hair
  5. Old man dog: He's got a beard. And he's not even two. That is, when we haven't had to cut pieces of it off due to the stuff that gets hopelessly stuck in it.
  6. Mr. Peebody: The source of the mysterious puddles and wet paw prints from time to time.
  7. Chicken: He sometimes confuses the name of his toy for his name.
  8. The Dog: That's what he is.


The Canon died. That's the second A570 IS that i've killed in about 3 years. I doubt that there will be a third.

I'm debating about replacements. Mal-Wart claims to have excess old cameras behind the counter on clearance, I may inspect them. If I was rich, I'd snag a Canon S90. In the short term we have little spare money. Most of it goes to keep the basics of our little life machine going. I've been fiddling with The Girly's Stylus Tough. It's fun, but the exposure compensation is hobbled by trying to show 4 different exposure values at once. That's very frustrating for me because that's one extremely important feature for me.

All those worries are for later, really.

At the moment, the big push is to complete my thesis and to find work by May.

At the same time.

Both goals seem a little psychotic and impossible.

Completing my thesis seems hard because it's like trying to grab the dog when he's trying to eat something nasty. It just jumps back about when you reach for it. Getting closure on some things seems impossible because every eccentricity leads to a giant black hole that usually ends in either an area that has not been directly addressed by the scientific literature or gets so deep into theory that it would take me a month to deeply under stand what I'm reading. It's hard to know when to explore something more deeply, and when to make a best-guess approximation and move on.

I'm also questioning my choice of degree in several dimensions.

Years ago, numerous parties told me that computer science was a waste of time because anyone can code, however, the zeitgeist has moved to the point where only CS people (and some engineers) code, unless you're a scientist who is a modeler. You have to be extremely persuasive to prove otherwise. I think abandoning doing something that I enjoyed doing and was marginally good at was a mistake.

The lack of funding for environmental measurements is nothing new, unfortunately. In 2001 the Bush administration went after climate and environmental science and measurements are the most politically charged and (conveniently) most expensive aspect of the field, so the Ax fell there. At the time, the thought was as soon as administrations changed, the wind would blow the other way. 2004 and 2008 came and went, and things have not improved. After 10 years I do not think it is reasonable to expect a career in fundamental environmental research to be viable option. Meaning that unless you are lucky, you should expect not to make it and have Plan B ready. Things have moved beyond publish or die to publish and hope not to die. You research has to not only be first rate, relevant, and fruitful but also politically tenable both at a public level and the level of your peers; particularly those in funding agencies. Lastly, the price tag has to be something palatable. If you know the right people and can do what they love to see, the rails are still greased for you.

My field, trace gasses, seems to have taken the back burner to aerosol science and mesoscale and global modeling. I'm now trying to paddle in that direction, but I've got to compete with a large hoard of other people doing the same thing. In that regard, I'm just another drop in the flood.

Another aspect I am facing is that my personal research has always been a little tangential to the direction my group and adviser was taking. If I had any specific goal in coming to grad school, it was to develop skills in instrument design and writing code, particularly for data processing and automation. The vast amount of my time has been spent in technical pursuits, particularly with respect to mass spectrometry and pulse signal processing. However, without serious resources, classes, expert mentorship in these areas, I'm unsure where I am as a researcher and designer. I am a little eager for my papers (particularly the first one... the one that is taking forever to complete) to be submitted to journals because they so different.

Summarily, I will soon have a degree that says physical chemistry with a focus on atmospheric chemistry on it. However, i will have spent most of my time focused on research that is much closer to examination of ion processes... without the benefit ( or curse ) of a community and adviser with a similar focus.

The path forward is rather uncertain.

I am a bit frustrated that these ideas have only crystallized with the aid of time... I would not have had the breadth and foresight to get what was going on even a few years ago. Then I was just hating grad school because UNH keeps students from doing serious research until their third year.

While I still have some hope of landing a position on my home turf, atmospheric chemistry, I have been thinking of ways to get involved with biotech and nanotech. I think those areas have the most potential for growth and application in the coming years. It seems prudent to try to get in on the beginning of something and be part of what makes it roll.


01/26/10 (2026)
All these crazy rumors about this new apple pad thing remind me of something.

You know what? This happened before. I remember it like it was 8 years ago...

Go hammer in "Apple iWalk" into your favorite search engine and relive it.

Just because I am feeling extremely angry and cynical right now: I hope tomorrows apple event is another run-of-the-mill pedestrian upgrade of cpu specs and a new version of iLife.

Just because you people need to unplug and get some sun and learn how to hold a conversation.


01/23/10 (1817)
My experience in graduate school has done a wonderful job of revealing my strengths and weaknesses. I'd put my ability to find creative solutions, my mechanical and electronic technical skills, and (sadly) my ability to multitask myself into oblivion as strengths.

Writing is definitely a member of the list of weaknesses. The dry style that you are (by now) so familiar with is much closer to reality than eloquent invention made by an overly intelligent mind to cast a weaker version of itself. That's right! Spelling errors are real spelling errors.

I am by fits and starts trying to improve this quality. Certainly I have already ascended to altitudes far above the poor/newly-outsourced janitors who's resumes were amazing demonstrations showing that through application of Zapf Dingbats, one can give an otherwise bland piece of paper deep and verdant meaning. That said, there are parts of my soul that believes this is a lost cause. Where one can easily sit an hammer out reams in the lowly common vernacular, creating a document in correct scientific style requires a level of detail, discipline, and understanding, that quite frankly, hurts my brain.

I'd rather be writing code or calculating something or building something. I am really good at that and it feels good to do. Sitting around for days/months/weeks at a time writing papers is incredibly dull.

I had hoped that any scientific career would involve a minimal of writing papers. Technical manuals I can handle. Simple reports and analysis, sure... I'd hope to keep the papers to something like one per year.

At least Jesus died to give us word processors and reference managers. I'd be useless and doomed without them. I was stupid and didn't pick up as much LaTeX as I should have. So now I'm stuck with the rather nasty combination of Microsoft Word and EndNote. As soon as I am done, I'm going to force myself to proficiency with LateX and BibTeX. That would give me a portable, free, powerful, and importantly, reliable solution.



I hope one of the interesting jobs I have applied for pans out. I was unsure about going to grad school, almost dropped out numerous times over the first 3 years, had fun for almost a year until it was revealed that the grant the funds me is running dry, and then nearly immediately turned miserable again and now I want to quit as much as ever, except for the small fact that I'm theoretically ABD.

A side effect of the economy and politics is that positions in my field are in short supply and highly contested. Fortunately, aside from wanting to avoid a tenure-track position, I had no specific career ideas in mind before grad school or now (which, in my view, means I shouldn't have gone). The Girly is un-employed, and we have no reason to be living as far as possible from our friends and families. So, I'm applying to an amazingly broad range of positions. I'm a little worried that, because I didn't pick up the skills I wanted, I'm now not a strong candidate for the positions I want.

Nothing would validate my feelings that this has all be an idealism driven chinese fire drill like being unemployable after umpteen years in the educational system.



I have mixed feelings about my Canon A570IS. I've actually had to replace it once, and it's flimsy-ness is a major short fall compared to my old Sony, which, while having a lower megapixel count, was also smaller, equally easy to use, and generally generated pictures that I thought were superior in quality.

I spend a lot of time thinking the A570 is a piece of junk. It turns on too easily and it's lens mechanism is fragile. As a result it's stripped gears in my pocket, so now it has trouble focusing, so the image quality is hit-or-miss. Also, when the lens is working right, it has trouble focusing... the sony never had that much trouble.

Sometimes, I'm genuinely surprised when i generate nice work with it.

Snow:














































I gave up on anyone responding to my request to have my workspace back. Between the constant inaction, apathy, and language barriers I might as well be complaining on my webpage. I decided I had to be proactive, especially since the equipment at the bottom of the pile is now non-functional and I need to get into it.

I asked my adivsor for a rack to put my hardware in. Several years ago I had floated an idea to rack all the equipment that was on desks and counters, freeing work space for actual work. This was sort of ho-humed, but no one really cared because there was lots of free benches, and finding racks was certainly going to be hard and expensive because no one had ever done it before. I let it slide. Since then I had noticed many racks that various IT/CS groups had abandoned laying around the building as they crawled their way to salvage or the dumpster. Asking around showed that those were actually overflow abandoned racks and that they were, in fact, quite common and being stored in all kinds of exciting places like labs, semi-trailers, elevator shafts, and (wouldn'tchaknowit?) in the closet at the field site.

I grabbed the closest one, scavanged the others for shelves, and then spent $15 at the hardware store for pinch nuts for the holes. I discovered that I could use my quick-grip bar clamps to hold parts at the perfect level while I screwed them in.

A major drawback is that some of the hardware doesn't fit in 19" wide spaces, so there are catalytic converters protruding at crouch level. Catalytic converters are wrapped in fiberglass cloth because they are 873K on the inside. I expect this will make working in the field more exciting.


Other things of note:
Dog:




I like blood and Moro oranges:




Broken glass duwar:




Boat in Snow:




Sunset:





Alex has posted one of the best photos of me I have seen yet:
Me at Thanksgiving.


01/18/10 (1252)
Death of a fire hose:








It made it 6 months. I should be happy.




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