The ALS Brain Drain

Another long night at the ALS. Right now the x-ray beam is off for some reason. It shut off unexpectedly at 11:30. I've been sitting here waiting for them to start it up again, but it looks like the control room is waiting until 1AM (the regular refill time). I am dead tired from these long nights, and I didn't get much sleep during the day. I think I'll go take a walk around the synchrotron ring and try to wake up a bit.

from the ALS

I'm here at the Advanced Light Source at Berkeley now. Yes, I'm at another synchrotron facility. I hope to complete my "tour" by visiting the Canadian Light Source in Saskatoon sometime after the New Year. It's just an opportunity to use each of these facilities and decide which one(s) is(are) most appropriate for my samples and the travel costs of visiting them 3-4 times a year. Unfortunately, I'm running the night shift...8pm-8am, which in DC time is 11pm-11am. I just started and hour and a half scan of my sample, so I gotta go run and eat something. I hear there's a Thai restaurant that's open 'til 1:30am. Let's hope so.

The System Works!

So I've been wanting to read The Name of the Rose for a long time. I've heard it's a really good book, and I kinda want to ease into Umberto Eco's themes and style before I tackle Foucault's Pendulum. But I've never started the book because it's chock full of Latin, and I don't know a lick of it. I learned my lesson after reading Lolita that if you can't understand a large portion of the book, you're gonna miss out on some plot development. There's a book called the Key to the Name of the Rose which has a glossary and translations of all Latin phrases, but neither ASU nor various public libraries had it. Well it turns out the Fairfax County Library system has a copy, but it's in a branch far away (well, too far away to be worth the effort). Plus it was checked out. But, not only was I able to put a hold on the book online, but they shipped it to the library branch just down the street from me. So I think I'll start reading it tonight or tomorrow.

I'm back in DC now, and it feels good to be home again. Gunner seems a whole lot bigger than before. Kelly's been making this special food for him full of protein and vitamins. I'm taking the morning off to do some laundry, pay bills, and rest for a bit, especially since I didn't get a weekend.

I am so sick of this place, being here for five days now. So this morning, since my scan looked to be going well, I took off and went to the beach. It's only a few miles south of the lab. Anyway, I found a nice comfy spot near the dunes and took a little nap. I felt a lot better afterwards, but now that I'm back on the beamline, my headache has returned. I'm getting good data, at least.

A month or two ago, Kelly signed up on MySpace, and sort of convinced/forced me to sign up too. But to be honest, I despise MySpace. It looks horrible, and it's full of spammers. Plus I already have a Blogger blog (obviously), and I just figured out how to use Picasa to create online photo albums.

However, I do see the value in using a social networking website. So my question is this...of the big three social networking sites (MySpace, Facebook, and Orkut), which would you recommend? I remember Facebook starting up when I was at Northwestern, but I didn't care about it at the time. Facebook also seems to be gaining popularity, especially among college students and professionals. Orkut, on the other hand, is run by Google, so there will most likely be future integration with Blogger and Picasa.

Anyways, any suggestions? I guess my decision is a balance between which website offers the features that I want most and which website the majority of my friends and colleagues use.

 

Another long day of collecting data at the NSLS. I was on my way back to the dorm around 10PM when I saw a herd of about seven deer along the side of the road. I decided to take advantage of the situation and got out and sat really still in the field with my camera. One deer came within 15 feet of me!

I probably say this everytime I'm at the synchrotron, but there's something in the water here that gives me a sore throat. Maybe it's in the air. I don't know. There was a blown fuse somewhere here today, and it smelled like smoke for about an hour. We're still waiting for the x-ray beam to come back online.

Today's the beginning of a five day stint at the synchrotron. I'll be here at the NSLS until October 1. I've done three days before, but never five. Luckily, I've got a colleague, Tom, here to help me out the first few days. But I miss home already, and Kelly and Gunner.

Right now I'm waiting for the x-ray beam to come back online. It's been down since 6AM this morning.

This weekend Kelly and I got fed up with the half-finished floor in our sunroom and did some remodeling. When we first moved in, the room was mostly carpeted, but a part of it was covered with some cracked and broken linoleum. The carpet was disgusting, so the home-owner agreed to rip it up, and agreed to just paint the concrete underneath. But the handyman didn't touch the linoleum because it wasn't in their agreement. Over the past few months, I've been trying to get the linoleum removed too, but the home-owner wanted to get some quotes, and the property manager was just sitting on his ass about it. So yesterday I went to Home Depot and bought a pry bar and rubber mallet, and Kelly and I went to town on that linoleum. We had about 1/3 bucket of paint left, and that was just barely enough to paint the rest of the concrete, but floor looks great now.

I subscribed to Napster after Kelly and I moved out to DC, and I've been pretty happy with it. Anyway, I thought I'd post a few new bands I've discovered that I really like.

Barcelona
Sarah Blasko

They're both kinda mellow, just to warn ya.

Last night Kelly and I watched two new TV shows, Kid Nation and FOX's bastardization of Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares. Both were a bit disappointing. The original BBC version of Kitchen Nightmares was a really compelling show, and taught me things to watch out for when eating out. But FOX took the idea and produced it just like another Survivor-type reality show with quick cuts, moronic narration, and unnecessary captions. The sad part is that the content of FOX's premier was really interesting. It was the production that ruined it. Part of the heart of the show is Ramsay sitting down with the owner or head chef and explaining what exactly is wrong with their restaurant. But with all the quick cuts, we get the feeling that we are just watching sound bytes rather than a real conversation. There was no real feeling of progress while watching the show. Instead, we saw problems, conflict, and then success. In the BBC version, we get to see the restaurant getting better and working through their problems. I mean, look at that Italian meathead in the first episode...there is no way that vain bastard changed overnight to take the restaurant seriously, but that is exactly what the show presented. Bullshit!

And don't get me started on Kid Nation. I think they designed the show all wrong. Instead of testing the idea that kids could come up with a functioning society, they turned it into another Survivor clone, except instead of voting somebody off each week, somebody gets a $20K check each week.

On Sunday Kelly convinced me to run a 5K race for the Falls Church Education Foundation. I don't really enjoy running like Kelly does, but I thought it was something we could enjoy doing together. I even bought new shoes, since I didn't have real running shoes. It was pretty cold during the race, but Kelly and I did well. They put this killer hill in the middle of the race, but I was able to recover going down it. I surprised myself by finishing in 27:44, although timing was done by hand, not by computer chip timers. Kelly finished right behind me. I admit I had a good time while running, even though I sorta felt crappy soon after.

I'm a big fan of open source software, so I always try to use Firefox and Thunderbird whenever possible. However, when I got my new work laptop, I decided to try using Microsoft solutions (Internet Explorer 7 and Outlook 2007) instead, because they are supposed to be much improved by competition with Firefox and Thunderbird. But after about a month of struggling with Outlook to get it to do what I want it to do, and IE7's ugly and non-intuitive interface, I've decided to switch back. And I'm glad I did. Now I can edit my Google calendar from within my email program, and I got rid of the annoying security pop up every time I access my NRL email. Outlook has this fancy-ass contacts system, and I could never access or organize it very easily. Thunderbird has a much simpler contacts system. And my biggest Outlook complaint of all...I couldn't even search my email! I think Outlook was trying to index all the email on the NRL mail servers! The only bad thing about Thunderbird is that it doesn't read all my RSS feeds properly, but at least I can organize them the way I want, unlike Outlook. As for Firefox, it has such a simpler user interface than IE7, and looks better too. I don't know why everybody just doesn't switch.

My car just passed 100,000 miles, so I took it into the Nissan dealership yesterday for a tune-up. It cost me $600, but they did do alot of stuff. It's all things that I could do myself, but I just don't have the time to take care of it all. It took them three hours, but it would have taken me at least one whole day to do it all. Anyway, they also gave me a list of things that should be fixed, which is good to have. And they gave me a free Nissan Versa to drive for the day.

I hope everybody had a great Labor Day weekend. Kelly and I rented a cabin from the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club in southern Pennsylvania. It seemed so far away, but it was only like a two hour drive. Gunner had a blast running around the forest. I would post pictures, but Gunner chewed up the power cord for my wireless router on Thursday. Luckily I had a backup router, so at least we can connect Kelly's PC online.

Another week, another weekend. Time seems to be just flying by. Days pass way to quickly at work. And Gunner is as feisty as ever. We took him to the Vienna dog park and he had a blast chasing and being chased by other dogs. Kelly and I try to spend a lot of time with him during the weekends to make up for working so much during the week. When we walk him, we try to go by a playground (there are a lot of them out here) so he can run around. He even goes down the slides on his own! We could never get Ed to do that.

Kelly and I saw Superbad today. It was really funny, in a dry, subtle sort of way. The way the characters interact with each other and the things they say are pretty hilarious. We saw it in this really old multiplex theater that's close to our house. I doesn't have stadium seating, or even cupholders in the seats. And the seats are partially leather, so they squeak every now and then. But the awesome thing is that nobody goes there, so it's less stressful for us, which is important to us nowadays.

There are too many bugs here!

Windows Vista still sucks, but my data turns out to be fine. I have to just remember to turn off the thumbnail view before I open my data directory. Vista Explorer still crashes when I try to drag and drop files, though.

Let me just state or the record that Windows Vista sucks, Sucks, SUCKS! It is slowly corruping my TEM data every time it tries to "index" my files. Afterwards, I can't open or delete them!

It's been a hectic few days, so I'm very glad the weekend is here. In grad school I only had to worry about one research project. At NRL I'm working on three different projects! Then on Thursday the tread came off my front passenger tire while I was driving on the beltway. Both my front tires were almost bald, and the DC freeway system is not in the best of conditions. The tire still holds air; it's just missing the tread. But when the tread came off it ripped everything out of my wheel well, including the wires to one of my side blinkers and the valve to my windshield wiper fluid tank. You can imagine my initial panic when I pull over and see a whole bunch of liquid pouring out of my car. I stopped by a tire place in Alexandria yesterday and got a pair of new tires, but that set me back almost $300.

Today Kelly and I went and saw the Simpson's Movie. It was actually funny. It wasn't as good as one of the classic Simpson episodes, but it was much better than recent Simpson episodes.