| east and west |
[29 Jul 2009|11:30am] |
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mood |
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 melancholy |
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music |
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hummmmmmmmmmm |
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I really hope my advisor pulls the stick out of her ass once my DQEs and her tenure decisions are over. I haven't been to Chicago since the 10 days last christmas and my advisor gets all fucking catty when I think about taking off weekends, so any type of week-long trip is out of the question for a while. I'm assuming once the huge burden of tenure is lifted she will start to mellow out, but it's not certain since she is chinese and inherently work-focused. This summer I've taken off like three days she knows about, and she was hesitant to let me take off that third day this past monday.
I saw my brother during spring break, but I spent that week working days then not sleeping at nights to hang out with him. Kelly is heading out here in October for a weekend but besides that I will basically have a year between visiting the majority of people that matter to me.
I cannot wait for the time where I have a job that pays more than table scraps and requires me to do work while at the workplace and not all day every day. Three years, maybe? To me a job is a way to provide for doing things you want to do, I feel sorry for the people who make work their entire life. I spent the weekend out in Newbury, MA and basically swam at the beach and ate candy the entire time. Now if only every weekend was like that.
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| 26 and 2 |
[23 Jul 2009|12:39am] |
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mood |
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 tired |
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music |
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Daïtro - Se Noyer, S'oublier, Regarder Partir |
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Kelly is heading out here in october for the albany marathon. She was joking at first about having us race for the title of best child in the family, since i smoked her at the turkey trot 5k and won it, but after a bit of thinking i decided to train for the marathon. The only reason i had against it at first was because of a ton of work i need to do for my DQE in september. The amount of time spent a week training though is so little, and i already was getting back into running anyways, so i figured why not?
The boston marathon requires a qualifying time from other major marathons in order to participate. For the age group of 18-34 or something, males need to beat 3hours 10minutes time. Thats about 7:15 pace for a mile, over the course of 26.2 miles. Luckily, the Albany marathon is one of the fastest marathons due to having a net elevation drop of 370 ft, and only two real climbs with a majority of it a slow decline. I really think this is achievable, for a few reasons.
First off, there is a great training calculator for marathons at the runnersworld.com site. Kelly used this for her training since other methods lead her to minor injuries, and everyone rants about the calculator giving an accurate estimate to their racing time and being great for preparation. After inputing a 20minute 5k time for a recent run(i ran a 20:20 in the freezing cold for thanksgiving last year) and a marathon 12 weeks away, it gave me an estimate of 7:29 pace and an according training plan. Kelly said that it's always better to train for lower than your goal pace, since it lessens the chance of injury and also makes you a bit more energetic come race day. This combined with the quick course should be a great environment for qualifying under 3hours 10minutes.
Second, Kelly will be running with me. She is planning to run in 3hours 5minutes to 3hours 10minutes pace, so keeping with her will help pace myself much better and also keep me motivated. When we run together for long distances it never feels like were actually exercising, it helps keep my mind off the running itself. I have a feeling she will pull away towards the end or I will lag a bit behind, but overall it should help a ton.
Overall, doing this is certainly going to go a long way towards keeping me in shape, but another benefit is the diet control. I need to eat a lot more of certain things if I'm going to be constantly running long distances, so this makes me far more aware of what I'm eating/drinking and how it affects me.
I like it.
______________________
In other non-running related news:
I have gotten a lot better at the math and physics required for my DQEs. I still have a lot of work to do in areas but I feel 10 times more confident and able. I really hate work sometimes, but who doesnt? I think I'll end up passing the DQE with the correct amount of effort, so that's a morale booster at the moment.
I've been seeing a girl for the past 2 months or so, she is best friends with one of my good friends from undergrad. Unfortunately, she lives north of boston, so it's a weekend thing at the moment. Fortunately, all is going well and she hasn't found a way to utterly disappoint me like the majority of women I've met recently. She lives on an island, which is pretty awesome because visiting her there means beach time all the time and barely any mosquitos while you're at it. We will see how things go, heading out there this friday for about 4 days.
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[30 Jun 2009|10:51am] |
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its a horrible feeling when you come to the realization that you know nothing. what a complete waste of 5 years.
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| chance and tides |
[09 Jun 2009|10:27am] |
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mood |
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sleepy |
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music |
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i would set myself on fire for you - so this is our home |
] |
will i ever make up my mind? probably not.
current course: phd in about 3 years. after that we'll see how it goes.
in february I seperated my shoulder and continued playing the rest of a hockey game short shifted to 5 defenseman, so that was screwed up for a while but it got back to normal as far as i can tell. only took about 3 and a half months... and now my foot is fucked up from soccer, somethings wrong with probably the tendon along the bottom near the footpad of my middle toe. however, i will continue playing sports anyways since i'm an idiot.
i'm not sure if i'm going to play hockey for the club team this upcoming semester. i would love to, but the time commitment is going to be even greater than last year. i might see about being an assistant coach or something along those lines, if i play on the team I pretty much lock down my weekends and weeknights. that normally isn't a problem for a college student but beingin grad school complicates things. once again, though, we'll see how it goes. tryouts arent until after my DQE's so that should make the time less hectic during my decision making process.
summer research is boring, i want to go back to the beach and play with dogs.
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| if i remember |
[01 Aug 2008|01:28pm] |
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mood |
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 awake |
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music |
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circa survive - meet me in montauk |
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my sister kelly is coming here august 13th, for some trivia, killer bird viewing, and then a trip to nyc. lots of museums and places to see, and were getting tattoos done by the guy in nyc who taught her good friend mario desa how to tattoo when he was just starting out. im pretty set now on what im going to get, some configuration of the constellation orion on the inside of my upper right arm. not sure about specific details but i'm working on them right now.
work work work
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| hurf |
[23 Jul 2008|09:32am] |
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picked up an xbox 360 with ffxi and bioshock. not going to spend all my free time playing but it's nice to have something to do rather than work all of the time or go out partying with people. i love my friends but sometimes you just need to kick back and relax with a healthy dose of x-ray radiation from a crappy tv.
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| livejournal is for venting |
[26 Jun 2008|03:53am] |
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mood |
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 dead |
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music |
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brand new - millstone |
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just spend 2 hours and 45 minutes in the clean room starting at 1 am for only 3 times that my recipe worked, and only one of them actually came out looking uniform throughout the wafer. i want to slam my head in a car door. the machines are always reserved way in advance during the week so it's hard to schedule anything during working hours of 10am-5pm. the clean room was empty tonight but what good that did me. also i cant fit any of my samples into the convection oven to hard bake the photoresist since they are an abnormal shape, kiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiill me. i would have really gone insane if i didnt bring my mp3 player with. good ol' death from above 1979.
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| uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh |
[25 Jun 2008|12:06pm] |
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mood |
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 optimistic |
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music |
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I Would Set Myself On Fire For You - Six |
] |
Been doing two people's worth of work on this project, it's not impossible but it's just a giant pain in the ass knowing that I should have significantly less things to do this summer than I actually do. Progress is going well, using the scanning electron microscope is fun as hell.
I'm taking an independent study course this summer concerning waveguide operation. I've done some of this stuff before but it's a more comprehensive course comparatively, involving just my advisor and another student that is in his 3rd year. I feel kind of stupid sometimes because of little mistakes that should be obvious, but it's nice realizing that the other person ended up making the same mistake that I did before figuring out that it was wrong, so at least I'm on the right track. Yesterday I had to show my in-depth derivation of fresnel equations using the extremely tedious boundary equations as a basis, which ended up taking over 40 minutes to fully write out on the chalkboard and that was using a few assumptions that I luckily didn't have to go into detail on. I ended up getting cramps in both of my hands from it, since I had to hold up a notebook with one hand and chalk with the other.
It's very early to come to conclusions, but I have a feeling I will end up working in the industry rather than in academia. I like all the aspects involved with working through the company on my biosensor project, even when it comes to making kick ass presentations about the progress and whatnot. The thought of having to go through hours of derivations to teach students isn't anywhere near as interesting to me at the moment, so we'll see in time.
This week is dragging on so slowly, the good part of the middle of the weeks out here is the Wednesday trivia, which is only a few hours long but oodles of fun. It makes the week a bit more than a 5 day wait until Friday, which helps me retain some sanity.
Saving money is a pain in the ass, I need to buy new goalie leg pads eventually because my brother's old gear is usable, but the mechanics of goaltending in ice hockey have really shifted in the last 10 years. Most goalies rely on taller pads with a slightly different form to the outside that allows them to play a very different style. New pads will run me about 300 dollars at the least, for decent ones, unless I can find some used which would be amazing. I need to buy new skates also, for playing out of the net. Those will run me 300+ new, depending on what the new Bauers are like. I used to have Bauer Supreme 5000's but they no longer make those, so I have to figure out what the equivalent is since those skates were amazing. So, right there is a potential cost of anywhere from 300 to 600 dollars depending on if I can find some good deals on used gear that isn't horrible. Ideally I'd want to get the skates brand new since they form fit to your feet, so buying them used will cause a lot of problems blistering for quite some time.
I played ice hockey goalie Monday for the first time in about 17 years. I've played roller hockey goalie a lot lately, but the mechanics are drastically different from outdoor roller hockey. It took a bit to get used to the feel of the skates, since goalie skates have very small edges which allow you to slide sideways across the crease. I made some ridiculously good saves despite it being my first time on the ice, but then I let in some really shitty goals through the five-hole since I couldn't block that right without taller legpads. Overall I had a wonderful time playing for about 2 and a half hours, which really showed how much conditioning goes into goaltending since I was exhausted by the end of it to the point where I still had time available to stay out on the ice but I could barely get up after making some saves.
I think if people from my old team heard I was playing goalie nowadays they would most likely laugh. Probably Jason the most, although having so much fun with breakaway or shoot-out type 1 on 1's with him really helped a lot with playing goalie for those situations. Only made a few stupid moves last week during breakaways, but they were counterbalanced by the one unbelievable stretch I made. "DIRTY!"
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| watch when you fucking drive |
[12 Jun 2008|09:10am] |
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one of my friends from high school was killed while biking home from work monday night. someone opened their car door without looking, clipped him off his bike into traffic, and the rest is history. take a god damn second to look when you're in a car, it's not that fucking difficult nor time consuming.
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| chi caaaaah go |
[24 May 2008|07:48am] |
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mood |
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 bouncy |
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music |
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suis la lune - fingers. voice. heart. shake. shake. shake. |
] |
in the windy city for a bit, before heading out tomorrow to cedar point with all the nigs. we got 11 people going this year, including da byron jones so it should be a fucking riot.
going out to breakfast with my brother and sister in a bit, then hanging out at the tattoo shop for a while today while i have matt most likely work with me to figure out some specifics with my tattoo. kinda strange that matt knew who i was before i even met him, since he played baseball with my older brother way back in the day.
i need to check out a few bookstores around belmont and clark, and also get a postcard mailed out. trying to describe my life in 23 words is something you would think would be very easy, but it's proving to be otherwise so far.
i should be taking a bunch of pictures today and a zillion during cedar point, which is nice because i always end up taking pictures of things and never getting any of myself but there will be multiple cameras with on the trip.
can't wait, which describes so many things right now. no matter how aggravating things have gotten with work or the stupid shit they pulled with my checks, it feels great to just be anxious for so many things coming up and there isn't an end to it in sight.
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| t-minus 24 hours |
[20 May 2008|04:13pm] |
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mood |
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 frustrated |
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music |
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funeral diner - this truly is god's country |
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throughout the spring semester i spoke to my advisor and a few other people in the department about the whole summer research position dealie. everyone told me "so and so will take care of things, don't worry." lo and behold, no one did shit until i annoyed people by calling and emailing the people involved. i ended up having to fill out some forms today, which is also the deadline for payment by june 6th. meaning, no one decided to inform me i wasn't getting paid yet, and won't be paid friday despite doing a ton of work the past few weeks. great!
now i get to go home friday, have a ton of things already planned that cost plenty of money, and then come back to having to pay my rent. wait whats that, you would think they would send my first missed payment on the next scheduled payment period? logic has no home here, naive student. instead of that, i will be getting paid more per check over the course of the summer. realistically, that ends up cutting me out of 700 dollars before my rent is due, which either means i live like a fucking eastern european immigrant for the next month or i end up borrowing money from my parents for a week. i hate the thought of borrowing money now that i've pretty much been set out on my own. however, i don't feel like having other people's bullshit mistakes ruining the next 4 weeks when they should be the best thing to happen to me in a long time.
hopefully my tattoo ends up costing me nothing except the money for tipping the artist, like when i got my lip pierced. that would be great and is a possibility, but who knows. one more day full of work and i'll be done for the most part this week.
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| fucking exhausted |
[19 May 2008|12:35am] |
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mood |
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aggravated |
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music |
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ctts - eleven owls have eyes |
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i desperately need friday. well, and wednesday and thursday. but i definitely need to have a vacation. tried to balance a bunch of work my advisor wanted me to have done for tuesday, and hanging out with friends who just graduated. wont see most of these people more than once or twice for the next lots of years, so it was kind of important. glad i ended up spending some time with all of them, but i'm totally beat right now, and i can't even go to sleep yet. still have to write up a progress report and then wake up early as hell to get some more work done. ugh.
it would be nice if i ended up getting both my stipend as well as the stipend for the douchebag that left my lab group, since i'm now doing both of our work on this sensor project. the clean room is down this week since there is no hot water in the CII, so i can't do anything there before i leave.
i hope my stipend shit is all taken care of so i actually get paid. this week is the transition from TA stipend to summer research stipend, and if this shit fucks up when im supposed to be going home and getting a tattoo and going to cedar point im going to be pissed off.
the only thing keeping me from passing out or punching something is thinking of making and eating a delicious strawberry strawberry cake on wednesday. bleh
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| aahhhhhhhhh |
[07 May 2008|01:26am] |
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mood |
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tired |
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music |
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... who calls so loud - 4.4.4.4. |
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haven't written up details about my nyc trip, but i wanted to put this link up.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=hard-drive-recovered-from-columbia&sc=rss
this is an article about how one of the hard drives on the shuttle columbia survived the breakup and crash, with 99% of the data being recovered. i dont know about anyone else, but it kind of blows my mind. orbital velocity of a shuttle is something like 20km per hour, and this shit hit the ground hard.
edit: read that the orbital velocity of the soyuz capsule in the russian space program was around 8km/s, and the nasa shuttled are around 8.2km/s which is considerably faster than what i thought before.
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| so fucking psyched |
[02 May 2008|10:48am] |
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mood |
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totally awesome |
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music |
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... who calls so loud - coming together over a black sun |
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bringing a camera with me on my trip to nyc, finally get to do something instead of finishing up the semester by not sleeping at all. gone till sunday night.
au revoir
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| my greatest fear is wasting everything i've ever learned |
[30 Apr 2008|10:32am] |
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mood |
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 busy |
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music |
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piano sonata no. 2 third movement |
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almost done with this semester, thank fucking god. i have to finish up some long ass paper for my fabrication class and i have a quiz/hw/final combo that i need to turn in online within the next 4-5 days.
in about 3 weeks or so the majority of campus will be gone. that leaves me with no classes left so extra time to do things but also with about 4 people that will be around still to do things with. a few people will go to open ice at the knickerbocker often, which will allow me to get back into playing goalie for ice hockey. jeff was talking about how they have no goalie for the A league team, i was planning on playing defense for them but if they need a goalie that is much harder to come by. either way it will work out, who knows. in addition to rat hockey, theres still the browns trivia every wednesday, i think, which jeff, rob and kerry will go to. kind of surprising how 3 people i've ended up hanging out with quite a bit and that will still be around for the summer come from our floor hockey nemesis and a total stranger. life works in mysterious ways, when it works.
the streetlight manifesto show is tonight, going to head there after roller hockey and then swing over to browns after the show to compete for a round or two and say hi to people when im grossly drenched in sweat. this show is the start of 4 in less than 2 weeks, although the tulip festival doesn't really count as a show as much as a "eat food, listen to music, drink and converse" get-together. either way it should be fun. this weekend i end up taking the train down to nyc to walk around absorbing the magnificent city, mail postcards to awesome people because i'm a dork, watch a show at abc no rio, and hang out with my friend nuber who lives right over the border to new jersey. may 12th is a circa survive concert, and i liked the changes made to northern lights so that should be a damn good show.
23 more days until i fly back to chicago, get a tattoo(possibly two), and head out to cedar point. i cannot wait to eat some deep dish pizza. mmmmmm, tempted to bring one back in a cooler to share with the natives.
someone told me au revoir the other day...oh dear...
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| that was unexpected |
[28 Apr 2008|04:24pm] |
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mood |
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tired |
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glassjaw - trailer park jesus |
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i had my weekly meeting today with my advisor. it started out different from normal, with her asking me about the other person in our lab group named george. he seemed like, if i may lightly stereotype for a moment, the standard egyptian student here. works hard, but would rather work out stuff himself than trust someone's already published paper. that in itself isn't too bad, since you get a lot of experience working through things instead of taking the quicker route although you end up taking much longer to get things done. also, whenever he is confronted with a conflicting opinion or viewpoint he becomes very defensive. granted, he may be right most of the time, but he takes it very personally.
throughout this semester george expressed a bit of disappointment with his classes here, compared to back in egypt where he received his masters degree. he had some valid points, optoelectronics was rather tame if you came from an optics field. also the courses available to optics-oriented students is rather limited compared to computer systems or circuits students. apparently, today he spoke to my advisor expressing his final and abrupt decision to leave after this semester ends this week. no one heard a thing about this until today, and he said he is not changing his mind.
i can understand if you are not comfortable with the situation you are in and he has all the right to leave. the thing i don't understand is that he just passed his DQE's and has promising research into an area that is far from competitive. optics is not like circuits where you have 40-50 groups throughout the world competing for a single design optimization contest. the design we are using has been around for, at least the mach-zehnder interferometer, since the 60s or so. of course fabrication and technological advances make the capabilities vastly different, but the design is something that isn't excessively innovative yet even though no one at all is working towards an MZI biosensor besides us. seems like walking away from a really nice situation since once we get a device working we can truly make innovative changes to it for heavily increasing the sensitivity, and thats a big plus. if you're just concerned about the lack of difficulty in classwork then i dont see that as much of a reason to give this up. classes are the least of your concerns in grad school and for the most part they are inconsequential compared to your research.
he signed papers as to the confidentiality of the project, even though i doubt he would do anything with the information he has about the sensor. theres problems of a corporate sponsor, a clean room, and existing masks/fabrication items that are just non-existent for the most part in egypt.
as far as how this affects me, i am now essentially taking over the entire project. my advisor assured me that it shouldn't be a problem and i shouldn't worry about being completely swamped with two people's amount of work. she continually says i'm doing a great job with what i present, research and achieve, and her having advised 3 students through graduation in the past 4 years should mean something. i do think i've done a good job, i just need to get used to the fact that you cannot do everything and there are some things that just will fail. i dont like having her approve my plan for the next week, and then i end up not saying i did every single thing i set out to do.
i'm not quite sure what year the other two members of my lab are in, jun i think took the DQE test last fall so this would be the end of his either 2nd or 3rd year. shengling i am fairly certain is ending his third year. i am the only student in the lab group that is currently on a TA(teaching assistant) stipend. if george is gone, i think after next fall i can rely on having an RA(research assistant) stipend which will give my the same money and tuition payment for my normal research work. that relieves quite a bit of unnecessary stress.
i'm going to have a lot of work to do the next handful of years, but i think once we get a device going we will have a lot of things to get decent papers written for. for optics, that's what matters too, so we'll see. my 1st semester thoughts: things have gone incredibly well and i enjoy this more than i even thought i could. even though i didnt sleep last night, i'm happy, and things are increasingly on the up and up.
infinite words
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| when will people learn... |
[27 Apr 2008|02:47pm] |
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mood |
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busy |
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music |
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funeral diner - it is good that we never met |
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that neglecting to say something is just as bad as lying. Hiding something in two different ways is still hiding something, there is no justification.
Tell the truth, because if someone means enough to be hurt by what will be said then they sure as hell deserve to hear it.
Although for the most part I try to give credit and assume that mistakes are learned from, I guess some people never change.
--------------------
Friday night I hosted a party at my place for a few friends that are graduating. The theme of the party was a beach theme, but not everyone abided by that. Some of us had swimwear on, I bought a bunch of squirt guns(horrible/awesome idea), kerry brought some of those hawaiian necklace things, and someone brought a palm tree blowup thing that resembled an odd wang. Without fail, tristan simulated that the palm tree was in fact a green and brown colored dong.
A fun time was had by all, there was around 40 or so people at a time here, with 50-60 throughout the night. Of course, no party is complete without tristan, bannon, and I breaking something. 2 windows, and 3 walls later, the party came to an end. Got a chance to talk to a lot of people that I've known but never spoken to in any real depth. The end of the night is really hazy, with my ass going through a window and also dancing around in the remains of the front door's window. Magically, I was unharmed throughout the ordeal. Apparently I disappeared for what people describe as anywhere from a half hour to an hour or more, but no one really has any information on that. I made it back to my bed though, which is always a plus. Somehow I woke up without my lip ring in, and wearing boxers instead of my swim trunks.
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jigsawpattern's journal
anxious