I found out about this cool streaming radio service today. It's called Pandora and it's part of the Musical Genome Project to describe every song based on its structure and rythm (sp?), etc. Anyways, Pandora asks you for a favorite song or artist and makes a radio station out of it. It adds songs to your playlist based on musical criteria rather than purchasing statistics (like amazon.com or iTunes does), and it does a pretty good job of picking songs that sound similar. I don't think it's perfect (my Dresden Dolls playlist picked up a crappy Vanessa Carlton song), but it's a good start to what I'm looking for a song-recommendation service.

Kelly's off in Yuma right now and I miss her. It's actually quite boring when she's not around. She sounds like she's doing well in Yuma, and she'll probably be back in a couple days.

As for me, I finally got a wireless card for my laptop this weekend. I wanted one for my birthday, but Kelly didn't know which one to get, so you just gave me a gift certificate to Best Buy as a proxy. That was fine by me because I can guarantee I get exactly what I want. Plus, I got a chance to browse and pick out the Sirius satellite radio that Kelly should get and the digital camera that I eventually want to buy.

By the way, I'm only about 50 pages away from finishing The Confusion by Neal Stephenson.

I'm back from Salt Lake City and GSA. Yesterday I just vegged out (and did a little cleaning around the house). Thanks a bunch to everybody that wished me a happy birthday yesterday. Sorry if it seemed like I was ignoring anybody recently, but I've been so busy getting ready for GSA, and I've been out of town since saturday.

SLC is one of those places that would be nice to raise kids, but you never want to live there. It's clean and safe and well planned, but there's not much to do. Since it's mormonville, they don't allow bars. But that's stupid, of course. There are going to be bars, whatever the laws may be, so you just have to figure out the loopholes. There are two types of bars in SLC, "restaurants" and "private clubs". In a restaurant, you have to order any food item if you want more than two drinks, and you can only stay a certain amount of time in them. Private clubs, on the other hand, are members only, so they can do whatever they want, including serving alcohol all day. Anyone can become a member for a nominal fee, so it's like a bar with a one-time cover. Silly mormons.

But I'm glad I'm back. I gotta clean up and organize my office 'cause it's a mess right now.

So I had trouble on the TEM yesterday. Everything started out great. I got the microscope aligned quickly, and I found the area of interest on my sample relatively easily. Then I tried to get a background EELS spectrum. I record my EELS spectra at 0.05 eV resolution. To do that, I take a background spectrum at 1.0 eV, and then center the peak (from the electron beam) where I need it to be to get the higher resolution. It's kind of like when you center your thin section under low magnification in a light microscope, then change to high magnification. The spectrometer has 1024 channels (i.e. pixels), and I need to center the peak somewhere within the first 100 channels. For some reason, I couldn't do that. I could move the peak up to higher channels but not below about channel 150. That means I couldn't even take spectra at 0.3 eV resolution, let alone 0.05 eV. I think one of the apertures is misaligned, but I don't have access to adjust it. So my TEM session was bust. I just took a couple of pretty pictures and left. I have no idea when this problem will be fixed, but it is being worked on. There's one other TEM that I know how to operate, so I'll try that one next week.

This is an issue for me because I need to collect some EELS data before I leave for GSA on the 15th.