Back Home from the Synchrotron

I'm lucky to be back home now. There was a blizzard warning yesterday. There was heavy snowfall when I went to the Saskatoon airport and the temperature was -20 degrees Fahrenheit (-40 with wind chill)! But I guess it cleared up enough in the afternoon to take off. I'm taking the day off today to try and catch up on sleep and food. Working long night shifts really takes it's toll after a while.

Saskatoon, Here I Come!

So I'm here in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and it's really cold. Not as cold as Regina, but still really freakin' cold. After finishing safety training and getting badged at the Canadian Light Source, it was only 3pm, so I decided to walk into downtown and get some late lunch/early dinner with Dominic (he flew up with me to help me share the beamtime). We found a nice Japanese restaurant, but even though they had their lunch specials out, lunch was over so we had to order a full dinner. The miso was so-so, but my katsu don was pretty good. Then Dominic headed to his hotel and I headed back across the river to the seminary dorm where I'm staying. Since I had to walk through the University of Saskatchewan campus to get there, I decided to explore a bit. I found the student union by accident and walked around inside, and discovered that there are secret tunnels and bridges everywhere on campus. Students can go from their dorms to the student union, to the dining halls, to the library, and to class without even going outside in the cold! Then I went to the geology department and walked around looking at their mineral displays. They had some pretty outstanding fluorite and calcite. They also had giant replica dinosaur skeletons in the foyer, too. By then it was getting late, so I came back here to the seminary. I'm going to go peruse the student paper and then go to sleep.

Three Days of Bitter Cold

I hope everybody had a nice three-day weekend. For us it was too cold to do anything. Kelly and I mostly just stayed inside and watched TV. We did have grand plans to go see There Will Be Blood and the Hopper exhibit at the National Gallery, but like I said, it was way to cold for us. However, we did finish the third season of Deadwood. It really sucks that HBO canceled the series after the third season because they were in the middle of a story arc, so there are a lot of unanswered questions now. I hear there are talks of making two 90 minute episodes to finish the storyline, but who knows if that will ever really happen.

In other news, I did manage to brave the cold for a quick eye exam. As I expected, I do need glasses, and I have to special order them because the perscription is too strong for LensCrafters to make them in house. We'll see how they work out in a couple weeks.

The Amazon.com mp3 music store just got more awesomer. Warner agreed to allow them to sell their music DRM-free, so now old Led Zeppelin, Smashing Pumpkins, and Radiohead albums (among others) are available for purchase as high quality mp3s with no restrictions. The last of the four big music conglomerates, Sony, is also considering selling DRM-free tracks through Amazon.com. Take that, iTunes!

LPSC abstract

I've been stressing out the past few work days collecting last minute data and writing my abstract for LPSC. Unlike most conference abstracts, this one is two pages of 10pt font with data and figures, so you can't really bullshit it. But I finshed a draft yesterday evening and now I'm waiting for edits from my co-authors.

I also wanted to mention that I had to replace the garbage disposal in my house this past weekend. It just sorta quit on us. But I bought a new one and installed it with few problems (except for the when I cut the dishwasher drain hose too short and had to buy another length of hose). It seems like something breaks for goes wrong every month in this house. It is pretty old, though; built in the '50s.

Best of 2007 - Prologue

Now that it's January and 2007 is over, it's time to start compiling my Best of 2007 music CD. Unfortunately, this year will probably only fill a single CD because there weren't very many good releases. There are some gems, which will make it onto the CD, but there were also too many disappointments. Just look at any music critics Best of list for 2007, and you'll most likely find Rilo Kiley's Under the Blacklight. This is NOT a good CD, and has disappointed a large portion of Rilo Kiley's fanbase (including me). But it's better than most music dreck, and because there wasn't a whole lot better, it has made many best of 2007 lists.

Anyway, my real point here is to make a few honorable mentions that won't be on my Best of CD for various reasons. The National came out with a great album last year, but none of the songs really got to me. So although it won't be on my tracklist, it's worth checking out. Also, The Smashing Pumpkins got the band back together and released a CD. I didn't really like any of the songs I heard on the radio, so I didn't buy it, but that doesn't mean there aren't some good songs hidden on the CD. I just haven't had a chance to hear them yet. They're a talented band, so I can't just dismiss them without giving the CD a listen.

Back to Work

The new year has begun, so it's time to get back to work. I know I have a ton of stuff to get done. I hope everybody's holiday celebrations went well. Kelly and I just had a nice, relaxing, low key Christmas and New Years. We watched a bunch of Deadwood and Sopranos episodes. Like Beth said, I think the first season of Deadwood is great, but season two is not as good (so far).

back home

We're back from Virginia Beach now. It was a pretty good week. Very relaxing. Now we both have a couple days at home before we have to go back to work. Yesterday I cleaned out the gutters on the house. It was the first time I've ever done that, and I had to buy a ladder from Home Depot just to get up there. It was gross, but not as bad as everybody makes it out to be.

No Surprises

It was windy and rainy on Wednesday. We could even feel the beach house shaking! We decided to check out the Virginia Beach Aquarium. There were some cool exhibits, including an awesome shark tank, but it was ultimately disappointing because nearly half of the place was under construction until sometime next year.

Dolphins

Kelly and I took Gunner for a long walk down the beach this morning while the sun was rising. There was nobody around except for a few surfers. We also saw a pod of dolphins just past the wave break. Most of them were just surfacing to breathe, but a couple actually jumped a bit out of the ocean. It was pretty cool.

Vampire Weekend

I hate that I like the new Vampire Weekend song. What the hell is a mansard roof anyway?

Virginia Beach

Kelly and I rented a beach house in Virginia Beach for the week. We took Gunner on the beach at 6pm (when dogs are allowed) and he went nuts in the surf! He kept trying to go after the sea foam. But he kept running really far out in the surf, so we called him back and went back to the beach house. Maybe in the morning we'll try it again when we can see better. Kelly and I are gonna try and get up for the sunrise tomorrow.

If you're wondering how I'm blogging this, let me just say that there are a lot of people around here who don't know about wireless security.

What do we know about Renazzo matrix?

It's been several weeks, but I finally finished a powerpoint summary of all the publishable data I've collected on my Renazzo meteorite sample. You see, it broke off not too long ago, and we need to figure out if we have to ask for more sample from the American Museum. So Rhonda asked me to put together a powerpoint showing all the data I have to see if we can get a paper out of it, or if we really do need more sample. It's kinda like how a dissertation is a summary of all your knowledge from 4+ years of grad school; this was more like 5 months of various TEM and STXM observations, including images, electron diffraction, x-ray emission, x-ray absorption (but no electron absorption, unfortunately). Needless to say, it's a lot of material.

There's actually a lot of interesting stuff in my Renazzo section. Interesting carbonates, sheet silicates, organic matter, and even (possibly) a mineral that has yet to be found in a meteorite (It's only been discovered on Earth so far). It does really suck that we lost the sample.

cold and windy

It is so cold and windy right now. Last night the wind was so strong it blew open our back door twice! It must have really sucked to have been a colonist on the east coast during the winter months.

Snow!

I walked into my cube today, ready to finish up my AbSciCon abstract, when I saw that I had no computer to work on. I had forgotten it at home! So I drove back through traffic, grabbed my laptop, and came back to work. That was a 90 minute mistake!

Happy Thanksgiving

Kelly's parents came to town for Thanksgiving this year. They really had a lot of fun with Gunner. Kelly made Tofurky with all the trimmings, and awesome vegan meatloaf, some vegetables from the local farmer's market, and vegan blueberry cobbler. It all tasted so good it makes you wonder about all those people who complain about how you're missing out if you don't eat meat.

On Friday we all went to the zoo. The sloth bear was out pacing around

On Saturday we met up with some of Kelly's family that lives in southern Virginia. There is a huge natural bridge near the halfway point, so we met there. It really is pretty big.

Meanwhile

This is a really clever Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-style comic book by Jason Shiga. It's full of math and science too!

Kindle

Even though it's kind of ugly and has a silly name, the new Amazon Kindle is pretty cool. I seem to be reading quite a few thicker books lately, and it's a bit of a pain packing them for travel or handling heavy books at night when I'm getting sleepy. I like the addition of the keyboard for making notes or searching for text, and the EVDO cellphone wifi is interesting (including the wikipedia support), but I don't know how ultimately useful wifi would be. I think the e-paper technology is the way to go, though, for these types of devices. They look more like real ink-on-paper, cause less eye strain (due to the absence of a backlight), and use much less energy than traditional LCD readers. Unfortunately, the Kindle is way out of my price range.

On a side note, since Amazon opened the Kindle store for ebook downloads, I now have the option of uploading ebooks for sale in the store. Since I own the copyright on my dissertation, maybe I'll put that up for sale. But I think the figures and tables might be a problem. Amazon says that HTML uploads will work the best in their conversion software, so I would have quite a bit of work to do to get my dissertation to look good in that format. I wonder if anybody would want to pay something like $10 for a copy of my dissertation on their Kindle (I would get ~35% of the sale price). Probably not.

Netflix

While Beth was in town, the topic of Netflix came up. A number of friends have been using Netflix for a while, including my brother, who watches TV shows on DVD exlusively rather than paying for cable. And everybody seems to like the service. Even with TiVo, Kelly and I have been renting at least two movies a week, either from the local independent video store or from Pay-Per-View, so Netflix is much more cost effective. So we signed up for a 2 DVD-at-a-time Netflix account this weekend to try it out.