Well, that time has come again. Merry Christmas everybody!

Kelly and I are preparing to head off to London this afternoon. I'm pretty psyched about it all.

Yesterday I finished a web-friendly PDF of my dissertation, but it's 18 MB, so I have to figure out how I'm going to put it online. ASU only lets me have 10 MB, and I've already used most of that up. That's also not a very friendly size for email either. Hmmm.

Since I'm working on getting a good job/postdoc, I figure my crappy homepage should be updated to look a bit more professional. I liked how my blog turned out, so I copied that style, and I think the results look pretty good.

I think I've got the blog looking the way I want it to. I need to futz around with the sidebar elements somewhat. But unfortunately, it doesn't look right in Internet Explorer. I don't know what the problem is yet.

EDIT: Fixed it! I had to add an extra float property. For some reason IE7 assigned a float:right to the main content, so it moved when the window was resized. Now it doesn't because I added a float:left, so everything sticks to the left side of the window.

Pardon my dust but the new Blogger setup disagrees quite strongly with my very old layout. It will take me a little while to recreate it with all the new web doodads.

AGU was good. My talk was poorly attended since it was in the "mixed-bag" session, but I did get a few questions from informed parties. The talk before mine was about Permian polar forests, and the one after was about Humpback whales. But the main purpose of the meeting was to talk to certain individuals and make contacts for my future postdocs. That went well. Now I'm back working frantically to make sure my proposal is complete this week. I'm also working on finalizing my adjunct teaching position at Chandler-Gilbert Community College for the spring.

My friend Lisa gave me a copy of Guitar Hero II for Christmas. It is frickin' awesome! There's some really good songs on there. Kelly and I are still working through it. Thanks Lisa!

Kelly and I watched the hackiest movie ever: Moving Violations. This 1985 gem stars not Bill Murray but his brother John Murray. And not Stacey Keach but his son James Keach. And Marty McFly's whiny sister. And the "where's the beef?" lady. And Jennifer Tilly playing what appears to be a mentally retarded NASA scientist. Oh, and if you look closely, you can spot Don Cheadle in a brief scene as a drive-thru employee. Did I mention the movie is about traffic school?

I turned in my manuscript to the bookstore for binding. And extra copies to my dad for binding. See, my dad knows the guy who does thesis binding for ASU, so I can get a discount on extra copies by going directly through him, bypassing the ASU bookstore. I also paid the extra fee for copyright, so I can publish my own copies later if I see fit. So I think that's it. I'm done.

I gotta get my AGU talk finished, though.

I've had this song stuck in my head ever since I heard it--"Parentheses" by The Blow. It's not the usual kind of song that I like, but I think the lyrics are sweet. My favorite lines:

If something in the deli aisle
Makes you cry
Of course I'll put my arms around you and walk you outside
Through the sliding doors
Why would I mind?

Things have been busy again, with finishing dissertation revisions and preparing my talk for AGU. Tom wanted all of us to give practice talks today, so I threw together a presentation this morning. It helps that I just gave a major presentation on this stuff not too long ago (my defense), but I had to condense a 40 min talk into 10 min. Actually it wasn't so bad because I posed the question in a new light. Tom and everybody seemed to like it though. Usually I have to reorganize everything, but this time I only have to add a couple slides.

In other news, Tom gave the OK on my revisions yesterday. I hope to get the Graduate Dean's signature on my dissertation tomorrow, so I can start printing out copies for binding!

I never thought I would have to say this, but a bird shit on my laptop...while it was in my house!

My laptop and all my dissertation-related stuff was on the kitchen table, and I guess Jace left the back screen door and Ed's doggy door wide open when he left. So in the few hours while nobody was home a bird must have flown in and out. There was also shit on the sink, the refrigerator, the clean dishes in the drying rack, and one of the kitchen chairs.

I finished A Million Little Pieces last week, but I've been so busy working on revisions that I haven't blogged about it. It's a pretty good story, and I think it's important for this day and age, because the main character pretty much takes responsibility for his addictions. It is his choice to use drugs or alcohol or whatever, instead of a disease or uncontrollable urge. He chooses not to continue in his addictions instead of relying on what he sees as other harmless addictions like food or religion or AA. I think that's a great message.

My only beef with the book, and Kelly and I argue about this, is the writing style. It is pretty simplistic and repetitive, kind of like Hemingway. I hate that style, but I have to admit that it fits the content of the book really well. So I see it as a necessary evil.

Anyway, I would recommend the book to others. To bad it has that Oprah stigma around it now.

Now I re-reading an old book from my youth. It's sort of a retelling of part of the Arthurian legend that I remember liking. Now I'm not so sure. Actually, I'm just tired of seeing it on my shelf, so I'm reading it one last time before I sell it. It should be a pretty quick read.

I sort of dropped off the face of the earth this week. After coming back from Seattle, I didn't feel like doing anything, so I didn't. Plus I came down with a cold. But I'm starting to feel better today. I've got lots to take care of now. First and foremost are dissertation revisions. I need to complete those and get all the required signatures by the end of the month.

Here's a tank full of rockfish, I think. 

We went to the Seattle Aquarium. The otters there were really cool (as usual). They had both river otters and sea otters, like this one. After the aquarium, we walked around Pike's Market, which is one of my favorite places in Seattle. There's just so much good food there, even though it's sorta touristy. 

A nice mossy tree in Discovery Park. 

The day after my defense (I passed!) Kelly and I took off for Seattle to visit Beth and just relax for a weekend. It was rainy and cold, but not too bad. 

Less than an hour till my defense. I'm nervous as hell, but I think I'm ready.

I gave a second practice talk yesterday. It went much better, and even with some stammering it was only 42 minutes. So all I have to do it practice and get it down.

By the way, if anyone is interested in getting TiVo, you can get an older model for free with the purchase of a service plan directly from the manufacturer. This is how I got my free TiVo, but I was able to get the lifetime plan, which they don't offer anymore because TiVo lost so much money on those plans. The only problem with the older model is that it needs a USB adapter to connect to a home network, and it requires a phone line for initial setup. But after that all communications can be made over the internet.

I just gave a practice defense talk. I basically blew it. I didn't even get past the first slide before my mind went blank. I guess it doesn't help that I finished the talk last night at 11:30 and I only went through it once this morning. But, since I sucked so hard, Tom and everybody helped out alot with organization and comments, so it should be alot better by Thursday (so soon!). I have a plan now, and I've identified alot of extra information to cut out. But tonight I'm just going to feel sorry for myself because I did such a shitty job today.

Kelly and I didn't dress up for Halloween this year, but we did dress up the dog! He hates it so much! We were going for Abe Lincoln, but it turned out more Amish.

My format review came back yesterday. That was pretty fast! Luckily, there aren't to many format changes. Mainly some of my header styles need to be changed. I'm working on that right now. I also found something they missed. Page numbers are supposed to be at the top right corner of the page, with a double space between the number and the main text. But beginning with chapter 3, it was only single spaced. So I'm changing that as well. I want to get all these format issues out of the way before I have to make content changes after the defense.

I turned in my dissertation for formatting on Thursday last week. I was pretty frantic until then, working until 7PM every night to get everything done. Friday I was busy as well, making copies for all my committee members. But this weekend was very calm and stress-free. Kelly and I relaxed and played around for most of it. We made dinner for Kelly's family on Saturday and it turned out great. Kelly made an awesome soup, and I made some big pumpkin muffins. As a side dish, I went out and picked up this super spicy kung pao cabbage from our local chinese restaurant (which we love because the food is great and it's usually empty).

Now for the next two weeks my priority is to create my defense talk and practice!

I just finished chapter 7! But there's no time to celebrate. The format review deadline is next Thursday, so I still have to format chapters 3-7 and create all the pre-text material (like tables of content and stuff).

I'm almost finished with my final chapter, but with all the exposition, I thought it needed a few descriptive figures. Here's one I decided to draw quickly today. I'm not really all that happy with it because my drawing skills in Illustrator suck, but I think the figure is adequate for my dissertation. Any comments?

I don't really like My Morning Jacket all that much ("Wordless Chorus" makes me want to put a power drill to my head!), but I'm really starting to dig their new live album, Okonokos. The sound quality of the recording is amazing, and much better than their studio recordings IMHO. I've also been listening to a similar new band called Catfish Haven, not to be confused with Catfish Hunter. Sometimes I can't tell the two bands apart.

This guy must have known I was taking a picture because he opened his mouth as he swam past. 

These are some deadly frogs, but they look plastic to me! 

The Aquarium of the Pacific is in downtown Long Beach, right next to the ocean. It is one of the nicest I've ever been to. Here's a funny looking sea turtle.

Kelly and I spent the weekend in Long Beach, CA. She was running the half marathon there, and she was really impressive. Long Beach is a pretty nice town. There was barely anyone on the beach. 

Well, they found my reciept and I was able to apply for graduation today. That's a big load off my back. In other news, I've been writing well on this final chapter. I probably only have 3-4 pages single-spaced pages left. I'm right on schedule to finish all the writing by Oct. 20, leaving me plenty of time for revisions and formatting before the official university Format Review deadline.

Applying for graduation at ASU is a major pain in my ass. I tried to apply in mid-September. I paid my graduation fee and went to the registrar, but they had no record of my comp exam. It turns out the geology department doesn't finish the paperwork, and never tells the student this. So then I waste a bunch of time getting signatures, and turning the form into the grad college. It takes a week or two to process, so I'm trying to apply for graduation again. But in the meantime I've misplaced my paperwork. I can always fill out the forms again, but I'm missing the reciept for my graduation fee. So I go back to cashiering services today, hoping they can print out another reciept for me, but of course that's not how they do it. I have to fill out another form, and they have to look for their physical copy. I don't remember the exact day I paid either, so apparently they have to look through the reciepts for the entire month of September! Why can't they just look up my account in the computer? I don't know, but that will take another couple of days for them to find it. Meanwhile, the deadling for applying for graduation is next Monday, and this whole process is really starting to piss me off. I have more important things to worry about.

I've set a date for my defense. November 9th.

I couldn't sleep last night, so I got up and finished reading the last 50 or so pages of The Winter of Our Discontent. It's a wierd book and very different from the other Steinbeck I've read. It's set in 1960 instead of the '30s or '40s, so it has a more modern point of view. Most of the book is dialogue, using lots of slang and probably jingles and slogans too. And it doesn't help that the main character, Ethan Hawley, is something of a joker. What's tricky about the book is that what's going on in the dialoge is not what's really going on, so there were several parts where I was confused about the plot.

Let me explain. The main theme of the book is how business is at odds with human nature. To be successful in business, one needs to be calculating, efficient, and only think about the bottom line, but to be a successful human being, one needs to be caring, empathetic, and understanding. Hawley begins the book as a grocery clerk, and basically makes the choice to be a businessman rather than a human, and to do this he ends up fucking over some people that he really cares about. But he has to do whatever he can to win back the family fortune, right? So in much of the dialogue he is lying, playing dumb, or has an ulterior motive. He struggles with the guilt of his decisions, but also realizes that humans are both cruel and kind, depending on the situation.

The other main theme is that capitalism is going to destroy American "values", represented by Ethan's two kids. True business acumen breeds two types of people: cheats and snitches. This is more of an interpretation on my part, but it seems more and more obvious near the end of the book, and it's hard not to be disgusted with the kids once everything plays out. But morally, Hawley can't punish them because he's done both!

Unfortunately, I can't really recommend this book to anyone. I think it's an interesting picture of post-WWII America, but it's not really applicable today. The implicit racism and sexism in the novel don't exist in the same way nowadays. Also, the importance of family lineage and heritage that drives most of what Hawley is trying to accomplish doesn't apply today. And the "insights" into capitalism, like how a criminal with wealth is just called a capitalist, are common knowledge today. We know that God does not balance everything out in the end like Adam Smith said. A lot of people don't even believe in God now. There are just so many important political and social events that happened after the book was written.

I will say there was one part in the middle were Hawley was going to do something really bad, and had planned it for several chapters, and right when he was about to go through with it circumstances made him abort the plan. That part was pretty exciting.

I'm pretty much done with chapter 6 of my dissertation. I haven't had a lot of time to think about my SIMS data (collected last month) like the rest of my data, so I'm not that satisfied with my discussion section, but I'll get a chance to present some of this new data in a few weeks at our next research group meeting and get some feedback. As for the chapter, I'll sleep on it tonight and then tomorrow fix up anything I want to change, and then send it off to Tom to review. I should also send a copy to Rick, who runs the SIMS instrument. He seemed pretty interested in my experiment.

Next up will be to revise chapter 1, the background chapter, which Tom got back to me a few weeks ago. Then I need to start scheduling the actual defense. Looking at the deadlines and wait times (the dissertation has to be turned into format review 10 working days before the defense), I will most likely defend the first week of November. Two weeks for writing the final chapter (mostly arm waving), and two weeks for format review. I better get cracking!

Kelly and I went to Flagstaff yesterday to have dinner with Beth and her parents and a few extra people. It was a long way to drive for dinner, but we had a good time visiting and catching up. Plus we finally got to meet Nic!

Imagine the earth being sucked into a man-made black hole! There's a small chance it might happen when the new Large Hadron Collider goes operational next year.

I decided to drastically alter the figure from last week. Having a separate figure for each sample wasn't working well for easily comparing the data, so I decided to combine the three figures. I think this makes it much easier to see similarities and differences between samples.

I fulfilled my civic duty today and voted. I usually don't care about primaries, but this one was important for Scottsdale citizens because of the so-called "Strip Club Ban". Basically, the city council rewrote the sexually-oriented businesses rules so that no girls can be nude and no girls can be within four feet of a patron. This means that dancers have to wear underwear and lap dances are banned. These new rules will effectively put Scottsdale strip clubs out of business, which is exactly what the city council wants. They can't ban strip clubs outright because that would be illegal, so they've attempted to cripple them. It's no coincidence that ASU is building a new high-tech research park within a mile from both strip clubs. No council member will admit that this is the motivation for the new rules, but most people supporting it have recognized its predicted results.

The strip clubs are fighting back and got a resolution on the ballot: Prop. 401. I voted to keep the rules the way they were before the city council got involved. Why, you wonder? Aren't strip clubs degrading to women and associated with criminal activity? Yes, that's true to some extent, but that's not the issue here. Strip clubs are perfectly legal, but what the city council is trying to do is not. The new rules are an attempt to legally accomplish what the council cannot do outright. The new rules take away the freedom of a business to fully operate. The new rules are unfair to patrons of Scottsdale clubs because they remove the primary reasons for going to strip clubs. Even if you are morally opposed to strip clubs, you can see how this is an unfair situation and should be struck down. There is a big difference between saying "I believe strip clubs are bad and I would never go to one" and "I believe strip clubs are bad and I don't want anybody to be able to go to one". This is just another example of politicians pushing their moral agenda into people's private lives.

Yesterday Kelly and I went with Kelly's parents to the new P.F. Changs by Scottsdale Fashion Square. On our way out we walked right past Jeffrey Ross! He was in town this weekend at the Tempe Improv, but Kelly and I knew him from the William Shatner celebrity roast. We didn't stop him or say anything because at the time, we couldn't even remember his name!

I wanted to post this figure because it took me a while to figure out how to present the data. It shows the average, standard deviation, and max/min values of four atomic ratios in my sample. IDL is a bit limited for error plots like this, but I managed to figure it out. The vertical sides of the boxes were actually added in Illustrator. As for the data, I had to convert everything to log scale to calculate the means and standard deviations, but I needed to convert back to linear scale to plot the data (even though the final plot is still in log scale). There is a keyword flag for making the box labels at the bottom of the plot, but I had to center the labels in Illustrator. I think the figure really shows the relationship between the ratios like I wanted to show them.

Do a Google Video search for "look around you". You will not be disappointed. Here's one to get you started:

Calcium

There are also videos for Sulfur and Iron to find. I especially like the one's on Germs and Music.

I didn't do much this holiday weekend. Kelly had to work, so I spent most of my time finishing setting up my new laptop and then reinstalling Windows XP on my old laptop for Kelly. It makes me feel good that I can do something like that for her. They only have two field laptops at her job, so now she has one all to herself.

In other news, after over a year, I finally finished Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. Three books with at least 800 pages each, set in 1700s Europe. Now it's not like I was reading every night. It was mainly during plane trips or babysitting the synchrotron. I really liked those books, but I wouldn't recommend them to anyone since they have a unique style unlike traditional historical fiction. Instead, I would first recommend Cryptonomicon, and if that is bearable, then move on to the Baroque Cycle.

Now I'm moving on to something a bit more mellow.

This is some SIMS data for one of my cherts. You can think of SIMS as counting individual atoms, so it's good for stable isotopes or simple elemental ratios, as seen here. From the plot, silicon has a constant concentration independent of carbon concentration, but nitrogen is dependent on carbon concentration. I had to create three custom symbols in IDL to make this plot (guess which one is the built-in symbol!). I also had to specifically add the extra tick labels on the top and right sides. The dashed line and annotations were added in Illustrator. The main point of this figure is that nitrogen is associated with carbonaceous material within the chert.

I finally received my new laptop today. It was sort of a surprise, since the Dell website indicated that it hadn't even shipped yet. Of course the first thing to do was uninstall all the extra crap. Dell really does put a lot of shit on their computers. Real Player...maybe when it becomes relevant again. Wild Tangent...delete that spyware shit before it even gets started. Corel Photo Album...if I need a photo organizer I'll use Google's Picasa, which is free. Google Desktop...I like software that doesn't take over my CPU and send out all my personal information. And get rid of all those dial-up installers. Then it's time for updates. Then I can start downloading some software, starting with Firefox and Thunderbird.

This is the first time I've "migrated" to a new computer, so I tried out the Windows File and Settings Transfer Wizard. It works fine, but it's also an easy way to fuck up your new computer just like the old one. I basically removed everything it wanted to transfer by default and instead selected the few folders I really needed and my old Thunderbird address book and settings. Anything else I can easily redo myself.

So I gotta say the new laptop is pretty sweet. It's actually bigger than my old one. The screen is the same height as my old one, but since it is widescreen, it's almost an inch wider. Plus it has that coating that makes the LCD all shiny for playing DVDs. I think it has a setting for booting up directly into a media player for watching DVDs without having to boot fully into Windows, but I haven't tested that out yet.

Oh, and I got some work done today as well. I've been working on some intricate plots this week, so I'll try to post them tomorrow to show off. I'll probably be the only one impressed.

I found out today that using Google video code someone can easily post mp3s on their website. I was thinking about adding some music to the sidebar of my blog, but halway through coding it I realized that there are probably some serious copyright issues with that. So I unhappily scrapped the idea. Oh well.

There's this weird thing going on at ASU parking and transit services. You know the phrase "can't get arrested in this town"? Well I can't get a parking ticket in this town. I've gotten three tickets since I've been at ASU, and EACH ONE has been mysteriously paid for without my knowledge. I got the third one at the beginning of August, and I recently checked the website to check out the fee, and next to the ticket is $0.00! It was a $30 ticket! Nobody else I've talked to has ever had that happen to them. Maybe this will work out in my favor since I didn't buy a parking pass for this upcoming school year. I'm parking on the street right now.

In other news, I bought a laptop this morning from Dell. I've been checking the refurbished listings, and today was the right configuration for the right price. A decent Pentium Duo CPU, 80GB hard drive, 1GB RAM, 15" widescreen, Windows XP Pro, for $720. My laptop now has been giving me grief for so long, especially now that I'm using Word, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Media Player simultaneously most of the time. When I bought that laptop, I was only thinking of the present, and I'm feeling the burn now after four years. So I'm getting more than I need in this new laptop so that I can get more out of it in the future.

This is a large aperture, long exposure, non-flash photo of the campfire. I think every photography hobbyist has taken a picture like this. I played around with the ISO settings on my digital camera, and it seems the lower the better. It seems sorta silly to me, because ISO is an attribute of filmstock and has no direct meaning for digital camera CCDs. 

Ed playing in the muddy pool before realizing there were tons of bugs skimming the surface around him. 

Rain over Four Peaks across Roosevelt Lake from where we were camping. 

Kelly and I got back from camping today. We left Monday, the day after I got back from the wedding. We took Ed with us and it was a blast. First we went back to the Sierra Anchas and camped by the Jug. That kinda sucked because it kept raining, but there was barely any water in the Jug! So we got out of there the next day and camped over by Wet Beaver Creek. We found a spot by a creek just off the forest road (see pic). Wet Beaver Creek has one of the ultimate swimming holes, but you have to hike in three miles to get to it. Unfortunately, my Tevas fell apart at the jug, so I was wearing $10 Walmart velcro walking shoes with no socks. My ankles are still cussing me out for that. But the swimming hole was great, with nice rock ledges for cliff jumping. On the way out we saw a huge rattlesnake right where we had laid out our clothes just a half hour before. Not surprisingly, Kelly freaked.

We spent Thursday in Payson and stayed at the Best Western there. That particular hotel has certain unmentionable romantic affiliations for us. Plus they allow dogs. Then we headed up to the Rim above Pine/Strawberry to find a camping spot for us and Kelly's family. They showed up Friday afternoon. The plan on Saturday was for them to hike from the Rim to Pine, while Kelly and I hike the opposite way, swapping keys when we meet. But Ed was very sore and tired from earlier adventures, and my ankles hurt, that Kelly, Ed, and I only went up the trail partway. But it was still a good time. We found a spring and Ed got to chase water skeeters on the muddy water. 

I had a great time at the wedding last weekend. Ann Arbor is a nice college town, and it was good to see some old friends. Of course I had my eyes closed during the group photo. Even though there was an orange alert, I didn't have any problems at the airport, but my bags took forever, so I was late to the rehearsal. No problem, though, because all I needed to do was read a Bible verse. But the rehearsal dinner was insane! Mike is Chinese, so we had a traditional chinese wedding feast, with eleven courses, I think. I had to stop after the seventh, which was leeks and mushrooms. The next day, the wedding was at 3 in the afternoon, so I had some time to kill. I met up with the groom and groomsmen for lunch downtown, and saw my first hippie drum circle on the Michigan campus. What a bunch of freaks!

The wedding was great, and I think I did pretty well with my reading, but all in all that wasn't important at all. I though I was nervous, but try being the bride or groom at one of those things! There was lemonade and cookies afterwards, and I got to chat a bit with Eric and Caleb and Jerrywill (just Will now). Then off to the reception! It was good, with toasts and dancing and whatnot. I was at the Northwestern table, and we all had a good time catching up. The DJ was seated at our table, and told us he was hip to cool music, but crumbled into silence once the indie talk began (the extended conversation about the Economist couldn't have helped either). Now I like alot of indie artists, but it's weird how the artists I like are so different from everyone else's. I don't think it's a matter of obscurity or musical genre either. I just can't get into Guster or Death Cab for Cutie; I prefer Built to Spill or the Long Winters. But it was a good ole' time.

The next day I met up with Jaime and Matt for lunch, then went home for a week of camping with Kelly. 

Kelly and I are leaving for my a wedding for my old college chums this weekend. Early Friday morning, in fact. So I'm thinking of working from home tomorrow in case I need some time to run some last minute errands.

SIMS is over with. I messed around with the data a bit and it all looks good. So I'm very relieved, and all that time I spent redoing analyses was worth it.

I've been on the SIMS instrument all day since yesterday. It's pretty monotonous, but not as bad as babysitting the STXM at the synchrotron. I've been analyzing for silicon, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorus. In a chert, Si and O should be constant, but C, N, S, and P should fluctuate together depending on how much carbonaceous goo is around. However, I've been getting constant, large N signals, which was weird. So this afternoon I put in a sample I had previously analyzed two years ago in the old SIMS. I went to the same spots as two years ago, and N was still too large. Then I noticed that the signal coming off the sample for N was diffuse instead of a tiny beam, like all the other elements. So I tried putting in a tiny aperture around the beam to cut off any stray electrons other than the central ones, and suddenly the numbers began to match up. Almost exactly like before. So I have to put the other samples back in the SIMS tomorrow to see if an aperture affects the N signal from those samples as well. I may have to redo all the previous analyses (or most of them at least).

I've written about all I can of chapter 6 as possible without getting the last bit of data that I need. Hopefully, I can get on the SIMS on Monday or Tuesday next week. So tomorrow I'll finish up my sample prep, which involves polishing a piece of chert until it is super shiny. Better bring my mp3 player!

I've been addicted to Guitar Hero lately. It's so much fun to rock out to songs, and the difficulty ramps up so gently that it keeps you playing. I'm trying to beat the game on the "Hard" difficulty setting, which uses all five fret keys. At first this was hard to get used to because you can only use four fingers, which means that you have to shift your hand to play the songs. The easier songs only required one or two shifts, but on later songs my hand is all over the place! It took be seven or eight tries, but yesterday I finally beat Crossroads, which contains what some consider to be the greatest guitar solo performance ever, making Eric Clapton an official guitar god. There are actually two solos in that song, and both are f-ing hard. So now I have the final five songs to beat, which are probably going to kick my ass for a while. Pantera's Cowboys from Hell and Ozzy's Bark at the Moon were hard enough on "Medium"!

I finished chapter 5 of my dissertation today! That one went pretty quickly (only two weeks, I think). Now I'm in sort of a predicament, because I don't have all the data for chapter 6 yet. I have to get some on the SIMS. I might just write the beginning of the chapter and then move on to chapter 7 until I get the last of my data. But it feels so good to be getting all this over with.

By the way, A People's History of the United States as a really good book. To sum up so far:

1. European explorers were assholes
2. Slave owners were assholes
3. Land-owning colonists were assholes

For a history book, it's a pretty entertaining read.

For a month or two I've been reading this book about the history of the early Christian church whenever I have a few minutes of downtime here and there (like waiting for my laptop to boot up or when I'm running backups). I've always wondered how Christianity became this whopping religion that had such clout in the medieval world. Obviously, this was helped when the Roman emporer Constantine made Christianity the official religion of Rome. But I could never figure out what happened before that. I mean, I was tought in school and Sunday school that early Christians were severely persecuted and fed to lions, so how can such a religion ever prosper to the point that a friggin' emporer could convert? Well, the book helped out a bit. It turns out that official persecution was intermittent until 313 when Constantine proclaimed Christianity was OK. I think it was only about 20 years total for that first 300 years. And it was mostly directed at Church leaders who were supposed to give up their sacred documents. Everybody else was required to just make a public sacrifice to the Roman gods, and if you didn't go, then nobody really came looking for you. For the common person, they were only persecuted if they did something obvious to bring it on themselves. I'm not saying it wasn't horrible for early Christians, I'm just saying the picture they paint in church is far from accurate.

Anyway, the main reason persecution was intermittent was because Christianity was so popular, which meant there are Christians merchants and civil servants. When persecution occurred, then the Roman economy suffered, and the emporer couldn't raise sufficient armies to fight the Turks or barbarians. So when external threats arose, persecution ended.

The Christians basically had about 40 years after the death of Jesus to grow before Nero burned Rome and blamed it on the Jews, which in turn blamed it on the Christians (which was considered just a radical Jewish sect in those days). That was the first time people were fed to the lions. Jews were pissed off because the Christians were growing so rapidly, mostly because they were inclusive, appealed to Platonic philosophy, and didn't require circumcision. The Greek-speaking world saw it as a rational alternative to the official Roman paganism.

But how did Christians ever come up with the idea of a pope? As rediculous as it sounds, the pope only became a worldwide leader until the mid 400s with Leo I. Before that, Roman bishops tried to enforce a church heirarchy based on foundation by Peter or Paul. But the problem with this is that once the Roman capitol was moved to Constantinople, the church there was automatically an authority even though neither Peter nor Paul had anything to do with it. The first hint of Roman authority was in a letter by Clement in 96. He was trying to say that churches should follow the example of the Roman church, but a mistranslation caused later people to think that he was saying other churches should obey Rome. Later bishops attempted to enforce this primacy, and Rome did have some authority, especially in the West, but really nobody cared. Then Leo I at the council of Chalcedon in 451 really hit it home that everyone should obey Rome, and since such things were written down in the canon of the council, it was basically Christian law from then on.

I could go on and on, because it was a pretty interesting book. It was not a good read, though. The book assumes you know a lot already about the history of the Roman Empire, which I do not. Anyway, now I'm moving on to this book of revisionist history. I've only read two pages, but I already think Columbus was an asshole!

I was at Fry's Electronics this weekend picking up a cheap USB drive so that Kelly's parents can backup their computer (even though it turns out that their backup software won't recognize a USB drive under 8GB! Stupid OneCare!), when I noticed a demo for a Playstation 2 game called Guitar Hero. It's a typical timing game, where you have to press a combination of buttons when they appear on the screen, but I've heard alot about it recently (like "Best game of the year" kind of talk). Oh, and did I mention you use a plastic guitar as the controller! So I tried out the demo for like a minute and it made me giddy. For a game that looks so stupid and sounds rediculous on paper, it is unbelievably fun to play.

Well, Kelly and I were trying to figure out what to do on the fourth of July because she had the day off. So I went and bought the game. Then Tracy and James were in town, so they came over and helped us rock out. It was so much fun! I like playing Iron Man by Black Sabbath, but Kelly's favorite is More than a Feeling by Boston. We beat all the songs on easy mode pretty quickly, but started to get stuck on some of them on medium difficulty. I guess we need to practice more!

Kelly had Friday off, so I also took the day off. We had a great day making food and watching the British stage production of Oklahoma! Consequently, today Kelly is working, and so am I. I think of it as merely switching Friday and Saturday, which seems fair to me because I can avoid rush hour traffic and crowds on both days. Anyways, today I finished Chapter 4 of my dissertation. It turned out to be a 41 page, 35 MB monster, which explains why my laptop has been running so slow lately. Onwards to Chapter 5 (Gunflint and Strelley Pool Chert) and postdoc proposals next week!

Is there a scientific term that encompasses the concept of "comparing apples and oranges?" Someone told me to use "this is akin to the similarities between Malus domestica and Citrus sinensis", but that strikes me as insufficient and way to punny for my tastes.

Hard at work on my dissertation, I just reached the 50 Figure mark today. That's a lot of fucking figures! I'm at 84 pages right now, but that will grow when I apply double spacing at the end. I should finish chapter 4 tomorrow, or friday at the latest. There's just one last section to write, but it's sort of a complicated one. I need to finish up this chapter quickly because I have to start on a NASA postdoc proposal due August 1.

This week has been full of highs and lows, and it's only Tuesday! For example, on Sunday Kelly, the dog, and I went to play in Tonto Creek by Gisela. There were some huge deep pools and plenty of places for cliff jumping. We totally wore out Ed, and he didn't want to move for the rest of the day and most of Monday as well. On the downside, I had brought my phone along in a plastic bag, and a little bit of water got in. Not much because the money in my wallet wasn't wet at all. I guess ziploc bags aren't 100% watertight. Don't ask me why I needed my phone with me, 'cause I don't have a good answer. Anyways, after that my phone was frozen on this blue emergency screen, so I had to buy a new one. And damn those things are expensive when you aren't getting any discounts! Bare-bones phones that are advertised in the Verizon store for $80 are $200 retail. Luckily they had a refurbished phone for $90. But still, that's more than I thought I would pay.

On Monday I got a lot done on chapter 4, and passed through some writers block that was plagueing me last week. But today I spent most of my day doing menial tasks. The big thing was I found out I had to register for one research credit for 1st summer session. I though I only needed one credit for the whole summer, like last year, so I only registered for 2nd summer session. But I got an email saying I needed both. Of course normal registration is closed, and I needed to fill out paperwork and get some signatures for late registration. Luckily I found out about it today, because the head of the department is gone until next week, and the only person who can sign for him is leaving for vacation tomorrow.

I just got off the phone with George Cody at the Carnegie Institute. I'd never talked to him before, but he's got a sweet lab set up there, and there's a nice postdoc program there too! I was a little nervous cold calling him like that, because I really didn't know how interested he was in my research. But it turns out he's really interested. He told me about some possible projects that are right up my alley. Whew, what a relief. There's a NASA postdoc fellowship deadline August 1 that I'll apply for. The stipend is 50k with an 8k travel allowance plus moving expenses, which is pretty fucking sweet.

A while ago I mentioned that I was going through my mp3 collection and purging the crappy stuff. Four gigs later, I finished this weekend. Now I'm working on ripping my CD collection so I can get rid of some CDs. I mentioned to Kelly that I'm in the market now for a new mp3 player since the free one I've been using sucks balls and goes through AAA batteries like nobody's business. I decided on this one, and Kelly offered to buy it for me as an early graduation gift! Thanks so much sweetie!

For a while I've been thinking about online music stores. I like Yahoo alot, but there's two others that have captured my attention lately. First off, eMusic has been around for a while, but I haven't paid much attention to them because they're mostly independent labels. However, they've been getting alot of press lately because they don't use any kind of protected file format, just plain old mp3. Nobody has to worry about the songs not playing on Macs or PCs, having special mp3 players, or having to have required software. That's something I strongly support now that DRM schemes are so common. eMusic has some artists I like, especially some of their older albums, but there are many of my favorite artists that aren't on the site. So I could never use eMusic exclusively, but I wonder if the concept is worth supporting so that one day, larger labels will allow their songs to be available through eMusic.

The second service is MTV's Urge, automatically available as part of Windows Media Player 11. It's a pretty typical service to Napster, except it has several key things going for it. For one, it is completely integrated into WMP, so you never have to have two separate programs open just to download and listen to music (I like using a single media player for all my music/video needs). Plus, it's really easy to go back and forth between URGE and my music library. I like the ease and simplicity alot. It also has plugin support for other music stores like WMP10 has, but you still need separate programs for those to work. Secondly, URGE allows you to watch music videos for free (if they exist). I like being able to see a music without the complicated browser navigation on MTVs website. Thirdly, URGE allows you to restore your downloads. This may not sound like much, but it makes things so much easier for me. Typically, when you purchase a song for 99 cents, the license only allows playback on that computer. But I have two computers that I use for music: my laptop at ASU and my computer at home. With Yahoo, for example, I would have to buy a song on one computer, burn it to a CD, then rip the CD on the other computer, with a loss in quality. With URGE, all I have to do is go to my account and click on "Restore Downloads". I even tested this with one song and it works great. I think other music stores do this as well, but my current favorite, Yahoo, does not. To my knowledge, URGE and Yahoo have the same offerings, even though MTV proclaims it has about 500,000 more songs.

If URGE is so great, then why isn't it my new favorite? Because of price. It's $10/month and Yahoo is only $7/month. That's a big difference per year, and to me that's worth a little inconvenience. Meanwhile, I'll still use Ruckus because it's free, even though it's a big pile of shit.

I hope everybody had a nice, relaxing, long weekend. I know Kelly and I did.

On friday I finally finished chapter 3 of my dissertation. It took longer than I would have liked, but at least it's done. The next couple of chapters shouldn't take as long because my data is already in easily-accessible formats. Unfortunately, my laptop flipped out on me when trying to make a PDF of chapter 3. I guess it's all those high quality figures. The Word file is 19 MB, so I needed something I could email to Tom to review. I tried three different computers in the lab before I could successfully generate a PDF version. But that turned out to be 5 MB itself, so I basically wasted a whole hour on it. But I need to just forget about the whole thing and move on to chapter 4!

On saturday, we went to pick peaches at Schnepf Farms. It was pretty fun, and we walked away with 16 pounds of peaches! I made a couple peach-raspberry pies, and Kelly made peach crisp, peach-banana smoothies, and peach margaritas. We have about 6 peaches left, and they are perfect for juicy snacking!

On sunday, we went to Bookmans to sell some old books we don't really want to take with us if we move next year. They took about 2/3 of them, mostly hardcovers. They were going to offer me $150 in store credit. Unfortunately, that's only good for books and magazines, and only equal to $75 in credit good for anything in the store. Of course, I'm not going to even use $75 in store credit, so I split it into $20 A-trade credit and $40 cash. I found an old Steinbeck book I've always wanted to read, and Kelly found a book and a knobby milk-glass vase she really liked, so that's why I got some store credit.

Otherwise, we just did some cooking, cleaning, laundry, and sat around watching movies all weekend. It was nice.

Yesterday I got an 8 page letter from the Nouveau Tech Society wanting to send me "free secrets" because the have discovered "special qualities" in me. This is not only a scam to sell me business and gambling literature, but it's also a cult! Here's a summary of the founder and their business practices, including testimonials. By the way, there is a hidden link at the bottom of the Neo-Tech webpage to get into the real website and read some of their bullshit articles.

The new issue of American Mineralogist is out with my first paper. The abstract is available to everyone, and I'll probably put a copy of the entire paper on my website sometime this week.

On Sunday Kelly and I went to see a matinee of Les Miserables at Gammage. It was pretty fun, and since it was a matinee, it wasn't a clusterfuck. We really need to do this kind of thing periodically. Next we want to see an opera. The Marriage of Figaro is playing in November.

I'm moving offices today. Boy, I sure have a lot of junk. Mostly papers and books.

To give you some idea of what I'm doing, here's a figure I made today for my dissertation (Chapter 3). First I had to match up the EELS data with the correct image, then pick the best image to use (there were three different ones). I saved the data from my big Excel workbook to a single CSV file, which I could read with IDL. I like to plot with IDL because I have more control over plotting. But in IDL the output is a postscript file, so then I open it up in Illustrator. To add the image, I have to extract the JPEG from Digital Micrograph (TEM software) and then import into Illustrator. In Illustrator I can now combine the spectrum with the corresponding image, and add labels, scale bar, arrows, and circle to represent the beam spot, making sure that everything will fit on a printed page. But I'm not done yet. For printing, line drawings don't look good unless they're printed at greater than 600 dpi. However, Microsoft Word only opens postscript files at 72 dpi. So I save the figure as an encapsulated postscript (which allows you to manually set the resolution) and open it up in Photoshop. I ran some tests and 720 dpi work well for me, so I set the resolution to 720 dpi and save the final draft as a grayscale PNG file. A reduced version of the final figure is what you see here. If I know exactly what I want to do, this process takes me about an hour, which may be overkill for one figure, but I end up with a nice journal quality high resolution figure plus an original that I can easily change and alter for the future.

It's been a little while since my last, depressing post. Everything's fine now. Since it's the end of the semester, there aren't as many people around, so I was able to just jump on the nice TEM for a few hours yesterday afternoon. I had found a nice carbon coater in the geology department, so I used that to coat my samples, and it works the way it's supposed to! So I got the data I need with minimal hassle.

I also got a haircut yesterday. But I have to remind myself to go to the barbershop next time instead of the salon.

On the downside, it appears Tom made a deal with the devil for more lab space, but I lose my office. If you didn't already know, they are getting rid of all the grad student offices on the second floor (the "zoo") to give the new SESE director lab space. I'll probably have to move into the computer lab, but I don't think it will be that bad. I have to keep running over there anyway to get printouts and look at my old data.

With all the great things happening lately, I knew I was due for a shitty day.

This day is one of the shittiest. Of course it's a day when I have TEM. I stayed late at ASU yesterday to carbon coat my samples for today. Chert and the SiO substrate don't conduct electrons very well, so I get charging effects (very bad!) in the TEM if I don't have a carbon coat. The carbon coater seemed to work strangely yesterday, but I didn't think anything of it. But this morning I noticed some bad charging right away, so I took my sample out and quickly ran over to the sample prep lab to coat it again. I did it twice and didn't notice any difference in the sample. Usually, I run the evaporation at a medium level for one or two seconds, and that gives a light coating on my samples, just enough to get rid of charging but not affect any spectroscopy. This time I ran the evaporation on high for five seconds, twice. And I couldn't see any darkening of the glass slide, meaning my samples weren't coated. By now I'm getting pissed off because I'm wasting the TEM time that I've already paid for ($25/hour) and I can't get this goddamn carbon coater to work!

Then the shit hits the fan. I open everything up to set up for another evaporation (third time's a charm, right?) and I drop the bell jar. This is a heavy piece of glass, about 18" high with a 12" diameter, and it shatters. At that moment, the rest of my TEM session is wasted, I can't do any TEM for several weeks, and nobody else who has an insulating sample can do TEM for several weeks. Now everybody will be pissed at me and know me as the "doofus who broke the carbon coater". I'm fucking pissed at the carbon coater for not working like it should, and pissed at myself for doing such a dumb thing. The lab manager who helped me clean up the mess said he broke the bell jar 2 years ago by opening high vacuum valves in the wrong order, but I still wish it didn't happen to me.

The Sierra Anchas are made up of the Precambrian sequence we saw previously at Kearny in our spring Field Geology class. The Jug and Salome Creek expose basal granite, diabase, and cliffs of Pioneer Shale. Above that are cliffs of Dripping Springs Quartzite. The entire sequence is exposed in the actual Sierra Ancha mountains, including Mescal Limestone and Troy Quartzite. Apparently, there are outctrops of Cambrian Tapeats Sandstone (or equivalent) at the tops of some of the peaks in the range.

Kelly and I went camping in the Sierra Anchas this weekend. On saturday we went to "The Jug", which is a totally awesome creek hike. There are some pretty deep pools, and we had a lot of fun swimming around and exploring. We almost got stuck down in the canyon! 

Had a bit of a scare today. When I turned my laptop on this morning, it wouldn't start up all the way. It just sat there with a blank screen and the hard drive light was lit up, like it was just spinning the drive but not doing anything. After a while I remembered that yesterday I told my computer to run disk check next time it starts up. But it's still scary to look at a blank laptop like that. I find that as I'm writing my dissertation, I'm becoming more paranoid about the little fits and spurts that my laptop throws. It already takes about 5-10 minutes every day before the backlight turns on and illuminates the LCD screen. I just don't have another $1000 to throw at new laptop, as nice as that may be.

I finished chapter 2 now. It's the methods chapter, so it will change alot while I'm writing the rest of the dissertation as I remember additional things. But at least it's down and I can move on to chapter 3, which is basically my American Mineralogist paper.

I watched Crash tonight. Kelly could only stand about 40 minutes of it. It was all about how shitty life is with prejudice, so it was depressing and boring. I say boring because it was the same old stuff I heard in my freshman diversity seminar in college. But I did learn some things...

Top 5 lessons I learned from Crash:

1. Never pick up hitchhikers
2. Don't be an asshole if you're asking someone for a favor.
3. If your lock is broken, fix the damn thing yourself.
4. Never, ever live in L.A.
5. If I wanted to see a bunch of famous actors playing people with fucked up lives connecting through a series of coincidences, I'll watch Magnolia, thank you very much.

Then Ed sunned himself on the rocks to warm up. 

Ed had a blast swimming around. 

Kelly and I went to West Pinto Creek today with the dog. 

Working on chapter 2 now, which is the methods chapter. I'm also doing my last bit of sample prep this week, which helps refresh my memory for writing.

So I wanted to test all this mp3 store shit, and I bought a song off the Yahoo music store. If you must know, the song is "The Commander Thinks Aloud" by the Long Winters, which is a totally awesome song. Of course it is a protected WMA file, but that should play on even my crappy mp3 player. Unfortunately it doesn't. So I bought a song and all I can do with it is play it on my laptop or burn it to a CD. It's not even transferrable to another one of my computers, even though I have the Yahoo software there too. What a gyp! But there is a silver lining. I can burn it to a CD, and then rip it from the CD to make an unprotected MP3. But that reduces the sound quality. I'm gonna play with that a little more to see if I can increase the quality a bit, but it's pretty ridiculous to jump through all these hoops just to listen to a song that I own on my mp3 player.

Edit: ripping the CD to a WMA file works much better, because the file was originally a WMA.

I finished chapter 1, finally. I was working until 6:30 on Friday, but I was starting to zone out by then. This morning I just had to add a short summary paragraph to close the chapter, and then I was done. Then I sent it off to my committee for them to shred apart.

This weekend was pretty relaxing for me. Kelly and I exchanged anniversary gifts yesterday. I gave her a blue apatite ring and she gave me the new Godfather PS2 game (which is awesome!).

I forgot to mention yesterday why encoding an mp3 at 192kbs is important. At 128kbs, most songs sound ok, but every now and then, especially when they're burned to a CD, you can hear hissing or chirping or other audio artifacts. Only the most anal audiophiles can catch artifacts at 192kbs. The only problem is that the file size is slightly larger, but with the huge hard drives nowadays, that's not much of an issue.

Yay! I hunkered down and finished the next section in my dissertation. Now onto section 1.5 Fischer-Tropsch-type synthesis.

I've been using Ruckus for a while now because it's free to ASU students, but I've got to say that it is an absolutely horrid music download service. The software has almost no options, and it can't even play the music I already have on my laptop from ripped CDs! So of course I use it only for downloading and not for playing, but then it fucks up whenever you rename or move a song or edit the media information. Of course, as soon as Ruckus can't find the file, sooner or later the license will expire, and you have to renew it through Ruckus. Right now I'm redownloading a number of songs that had this happen. I'm also keeping the files where Ruckus puts them, even though the organizational scheme bugs the hell out of me. You see, the Ruckus database is primarily organized by Album Name rather than Artist Name, and I've already downloaded a number of songs that don't have an Artist Name in the database. I know, it's super retarded.

I've been messing around with the Yahoo music service for a little bit, and I like what I see. Like Ruckus, it's has unlimited downloads but no CD burning or mp3 player support. However, it's super cheap ($5/month instead of the standard $10/month) and it doesn't punish subscribers who want to purchase songs outright ($.79 per song for subscribers; $.99 per song normally). I've already noticed that Yahoo has a lot more of the indie songs I like than Ruckus, although I still can't find the new Mogwai album. Another good thing is all the Yahoo songs are encoded at 192kbs rather than the standard 128kbs that the other big subscription service, Napster, uses. Ruckus songs are sometimes at 192kbs, and sometimes not. So I'll continue to use Ruckus because it's free, but once I graduate, I'll probably switch to Yahoo.

Besides, I love their widget software!

I started writing my dissertation again. It's been a few weeks because of going to New York and LPSC. It actually feels good to write again. I'm on section 1.4 - Kerogen.

In case you're interested, I've put a mini-version of my LPSC poster online.

I'm back from LPSC now. It was a good week, but very exhausting. The thing about LPSC is the parties every night of the week, hosted by major universities. So I think I'm going to be dry for a week or two.

Anyway, my poster went well Thursday night. Too well, I might say. There was a constant stream of people who wished to talk to me, which is a good thing when I'm trying to get my name out there fishing for possible postdocs. On the other hand, there were a number of posters that I wanted to see that night, and I didn't really get a chance to see them. But after the poster session, my week was pretty much done. Time to cut loose! That night the big party was at a local bar, hosted by the University of Arizona. I met some very cool people there and had a lot of fun. I hope my horrible dancing didn't scare off too many people, though.

By the way, I think I had one of the best ideas of my life this week. A large portion of the oysters in the US come from the gulf coast of Texas, so I always make it a priority to have oysters at least once a week. And to tell the truth, I do get a craving for them every now and then, but I know they'll never be as good as the one's in Houston. But what if you're vegan? My solution is SOYSTERS! You can start with some silken tofu in a plastic shell on ice. Since the best oysters don't have much of a taste (except that they taste "fresh"), I don't think flavor would be much of a problem. The big obstacles are texture (probably not much of a problem) and appearance. Real oysters are gray and have a black rim, which might be hard to replicate. But I think soysters would be a great appetizer for more hip vegan restaurants like Green (formerly Veggie Fun) and Mandala Tearoom. And you'd never have to worry about having rotten raw shellfish! I'm welcoming comments on this idea, especially if it is actually a horrible idea and I'm just fooling myself!

I finished my LPSC poster today. I've been working on it nonstop since Monday. I think it turned out really well, and the woman in charge of printing out posters thought that it should be on glossy paper instead of matte paper. I'll put it online when I get back from the conference next week.

Sirius headquarters. Howard Stern must be around here somewhere.

Rockefeller Center. It reminds me of the last episode of SNL every year.

You're fired!

Many generation of Apple products at the Museum of Modern Art

Vespa at the Museum of Modern Art

On site a Brookhaven National Labs. One of the dorms is on the right.

I've been quite busy today. Not only am I collecting data at the synchrotron, but I took a participated in a national survey on the suicidal tendencies of graduate students (I'm not, by the way), and I wrote a review of an NSF proposal that was sent to me (that was a lot of work, actually). I gave the guy a good review, with a few noted exceptions, but I thought the proposal was very important and definitely something that should be funded. I know the guy who wrote the proposal (everybody knows everybody else in this "business") and he would do a good job of it. Anyways, I think I'm gonna take it easier for the rest of the day.

The x-ray beam is going to be shut down for an hour or so at 7, so it'll probably be a long night tonight.

I'm at the synchrotron again, but an exciting thing happened to me today.

I went into the city (New York City, that is) because I had a free day. I walked around 5th avenue in midtown, past some fancy stores, past the Sirius studios, past Trump Tower, past NBC studios, and past Rockefeller Center. Then I headed over to the Museum of Modern Art, which was fucking amazing! I definitely recommend it, especially if you like Picasso (I don't), because they have shitloads of it. There's some pretty weird stuff there too.

After MoMA, I started walking south again back towards Penn Station, but west of 5th Avenue so see something new. I passed on intersection with a bunch of italian restaurants, and then a few minutes later you will never guess who I ran into...

Michael Imperioli.

That's right, Christopher from the Sopranos. He was with a few other people, probably family members, and probably heading out to eat, so that's one reason I didn't say anything. The second was I couldn't recall the guy's name! There's also that split second reaction of "Oh shit, don't piss off the mafia guy!" So, even though I had my camera with me, I didn't get any proof that it was really him, but it so was.

I need to start thinking about my music listening habits again. You see, I've been stuck on this idea that the only music worth some monetary value is that recorded onto CDs (from a record company), and in a sense, that's sort of true. But a person can't listen to CDs everywhere. I'm basically limited to listening to them in my car, but I want to listen to music when I'm on the computer, when I'm in the lab doing sample prep, or when I'm on the TEM. (Recently, I was given a free promotional mp3 player, and I've found that the latter two activities are made tremendously more bearable when I can listen to music.) Plus, I now have a shitload of CDs that I don't really listen to, but I do when I'm in the mood for a particular CD.

So my value system used to be, only music on CDs, which have full recording fidelity, are worth anything, and any other form of music, like mp3s (which naturally have lost some of the true fidelity of the song, although you can barely tell) or burned CDs. Because of my CD glut at home, I've allowed myself to sell CDs that I no longer wish to listen to, but that has opened up a whole can of worms. Most of the CDs I've sold back are kitchy or impulse buys, which I probably wouldn't have purchased in the first place if I got to listen to them for a week. I've even sold back a couple CDs that are great, but have one or two completely unlistenable songs, so that it becomes an annoying hastle to listen to just the good ones. Imagine how much money a person could save by being able to preview an album for a week!

And like most people, I have a number of CDs that I absolutely love and listen to on a regular basis, and then a large number of CDs that I like and listen to occasionally. I'd rather not hold onto those CDs because they just take up space, but I do want to listen to them every now and then when I'm in the mood. And I paid good money for them, so why give them up?

I also have a number of mp3s that I've gathered over the years since I first found out about the mp3 format freshman year of college. It was the most awesome thing ever because the mp3 format encodes the music into a small file size, while the old wav format is uncompressed and makes a huge file. I used to listen to them all the time back in college, but now I do all my work on my laptop, and my PC just sits in the livingroom downloading BitTorrent files. I still download mp3s from time to time, but what good are they if I don't listen to them? They're worthless in my value system anyway, but I keep them around for convenience.

But now that I've gotten a "slap on the wrist" about downloading copyright content (I'm not going to talk about it here; ask me in person), downloading mp3s for free is not so convenient. Also, as I said before, having the ability to take mp3s with me on a portable mp3 player has made monotonous tasks much more bearable, so mp3s are beginning to have value for me. I also rely on mp3s alot for previewing albums or bands that I want to buy, to see if I like their music.

I've always hated the pay-per-song idea for mp3s (like iTunes). That's not that different from buying a CD in my eyes, because you can't preview the whole song, and if you end up not liking it afterwards, you can't sell it back. I would like the ability to download all the mp3s I want, whenever I want, and I'll promise that I'll delete them after a while. Because why would I keep mp3s around to fill up my hard drive if they are so convenient? And if I really like the music, I'll buy the CD anyway. These types of services are available (i.e. Napster, which used to be Roxio), but they cost a monthly subscription fee, and they each have their own limitations. Right now I'm using Ruckus, which is free to all ASU students, and I love the freedom to download a song or album whenever I want it or to preview it, but I can't burn songs to a CD or transfer them to my mp3 player. You have to pay to be able to do that, and I don't know if I'm willing to do that yet. But I've already discovered that some CDs I've been wanting to buy but haven't been sure about, I probably wouldn't listen to all that often, so now I won't buy them. I've also found another CD that I like alot and want to buy, so it works both ways.

So here's what I'm thinking so far:
(1) I want the ability to download unlimited mp3s and transfer to an mp3 player
(2) I want the ability to burn favorite mp3 songs to a CD (maybe willing to pay per song for this)
(3) If there is an album I listen to alot as mp3s, I will most likely also purchase the CD

Of course all this depends on my music listening habits, and my priorities may always change. I'm still working all this out in my head.

I haven't blogged in a while. Sorry. I've been focussing on many other things besides blogging right now. There's this little guy in the back of my head that keeps reminding me that graduation will sneak up before I know it. So I've either been very diligent with dissertation writing and research or completely procrastinating against it. Blogging doesn't really fit into either of those categories for me.

Although I've had a bit of experience with Unix and Linux in the past, and even installed Red Hat 9 on an old computer once, I'm pretty much a complete newbie when it comes to Linux. I just installed Ubuntu linux on my computer at home because it's the first distribution I've heard about that is "supposed" to be geared towards desktop computers (rather than servers). As a reference not only for me but for others as well, I thought I would begin a blog about it.

bradubuntu linux

Awesome News!

My paper has just been officially accepted to American Mineralogist! More details later once I get them.

GSRP Complete!

I finished and submitted my GSRP renewal proposal today. In plenty of time for the Feb 1 due date, too. I'm also excited because tomorrow I'll be heading to Tucson for the Gem and Mineral Show.

I've done three pages (out of five) of my GSRP renewal. It's 5:30 now, so it's time to cut out and go home. Hopefully tomorrow I can finish the rest, including two figures of spectra.

I met my goal for this week...finishing section 1.1 of my dissertation, entitled "Evidence for early life on Earth". It's just a brief summary of our current knowledge of microfossils, stromatolites, and biomarkers before I get into the nitty gritty of the rocks I'm studying (sections 1.2 and 1.3). This intro chapter is going to take me a little while because I am referencing about 10 papers per paragraph, most of which I'm reading or re-reading to make sure I get it right. Next week I have to cram and get my GSRP renewal proposal written. That shouldn't take too long, but it's one of those things that requires all sorts of people's signatures.

So I got a new haircut yesterday. I let Tennille do whatever she wants, and she was feeling "short" and "adventurous". So she gave me a military-type cut, that's sort of like a really mini-mohawk with a tail. Kelly thinks it's totally awesome, but Jace laughs every time he looks at me. I think Beth is more my friend now.

I had one of those big "Oh SHIT!" moments yesterday when I found out that the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference abstract was due today instead of next tuesday. I've been writing and making figures like crazy since then. I just submitted it, about 30 minutes before it was due. Whew!

I'll admit it. I've purchased ringtones and wallpapers for my phone, mainly because my newest cell phone had few good default choices. Yes they are a ripoff, but if you're into art (both modern and classic) two really good wallpaper services are START Mobile and Pixurez. The former has more good art (including kozyndan and Braveland Design!) than the latter, but Pixurez does have Junko Mizuno. I just wish START Mobile was available to Verizon Wireless customers like me, but I guess that keeps me from wasting my money on overpriced, low resolution images.

Most ringtone sites are pretty similar, but the polyphonic tones from YAMAHA seem to be of slightly higher quality than the rest. Unfortunately, they don't have Maps by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

Our sink backed up last night. I don't want to lay blame, but it might be related to the pile of carrot peels that Kelly shoved down the garbage disposal. Anyways, today I stayed home to fix it. It turned out to be pretty easy. All the pipes were plastic and they had screw-on connectors, so I could easily remove the section of pipe that was clogged. Now everything flows normally, but I still have to reseal the connection with the garbage disposal with plumber's putty.

Oh, I should mention that Kelly got me this totally awesome digital camera for Christmas. She really shouldn't have. She told me for weeks that she got me a drill, and I was completely fooled. When I was opening the present, I thought to myself, "Hey, Canon doesn't make drills?!?...Oh!" Thanks Kelly!

I'm back on the face of the Earth now. Kelly and I have been to Four Peaks for the past two weekends now. It's really awesome country there, and it's not too far away from home. Here's a picture of Ed in front of Brown's Peak from the first weekend. It was more of an exploratory hike, and it turned out both our guidebooks were wrong or misleading. This past weekend, Kelly, Ed, and I camped, and we hiked with Kelly's parents out to the amethyst mine.