Orals today. I finished the talks and answered all their questions, and now I'm waiting for their decision.

Here's a good quote from the Onion in their review of Anything Else.

"Who would have thought that starring in a Woody Allen movie would prove an artistic demotion from pastry-fucking in a teen-sex comedy? Yet [Jason] Biggs' anxious, flop-sweat-drenched performance as a divorced 21-year-old comedy writer makes his performance in the American Pie movies look sublime and restrained by comparison."

I had mocks today. Tough but informative. I also got an email from Tom about another EELS guy at ASU who got a hold of my proposal and is making comments about it to my committee members. Not good comments either. I don't know if I need to talk to this guy or not. I'm tired and stressed. Leave me alone.

Session 2 pics are online! I tried to experiment with long exposures, so a lot of pictures came out fuzzy. I also screwed up the distance setting a few times as well. Oh, and the developer screwed up some pictures as well, giving them a red tint. Oh well. Live and learn. Your assignment is to find Beth. Check out the two-headed dog! And the creepy Ring-esqe pictures.

Even Italians love anime!

I just turned in my two proposals for orals...and may God have mercy on my soul.

Strange things are afoot on the 6th floor. Today I discovered a mysterious token in my mailbox. Whover could have done such a thing? The game is afoot!

My brain is mush. I left my copy card at Noble library twice today!

They're having an 80% off sale at the cell phone shop! I got my $30 car charger for $6!

In other news, sorry for not blogging much, or reading other people's blogs, but I'm swamped with proposals for my oral exam. Both proposals are due monday, and I haven't even started writing my second one (I spent the past two days reading papers). Fortunately, I finished my revised draft of my first proposal, so that one is basically done.

So I'm back from the synchrotron. I was working from 8AM till after midnight, nonstop. It's one of those things where you have to keep working as long as the microscope is working, becuase you never know when things will fuck up. It was also mind-numbingly boring. It was basically click and wait the whole time. Each image takes a few minutes to record, so it takes forever to set up things the way you want them to look. Then you set up a "stack" which is a series of images at different energies (about 200 images) and let that run for 6 - 10 hours (depending on how you set things up). That's the time you get to sleep. Of course, if you run a stack during the day, you have to sit and talk with the guy working with you for that whole time, just waiting for something to go wrong.

The ironic thing is, for all that time I spent, I don't have any data! I didn't realize that there is extra data processing to be done. So the technician for the microscope is supposed to analyze my data and send it to me in a week or two. But I don't have time to worry about that...I have proposals to write for my Ph.D. exam!