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).