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.