breathing water

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:52:58 GMT

its a horrible feeling when you come to the realization that you know nothing. what a complete waste of 5 years.

chance and tides

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 14:42:32 GMT

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.

Excerpt from the list of things to do before I die.

Tue, 05 May 2009 15:21:18 GMT

~~Visit Barringer Crater in Arizona~~

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 05:39:18 GMT

24 years ago this day...

a panicking woman went to the hospital wondering what the fuck was going on, considering her baby wasn't due till november. thankfully, technology worked out and this annoying, fussy baby held on and kept going.

now, as i spend the wee hours of the morning nursing a strange and presumable lymph node flare up from a spider bite and procrastinate on doing work, i take a moment to reflect on everything.

one year ago, i took a moment to look at my life and how it changed over the past year. i was in the middle of a fucked up situation and really didn't know how proceed. taking steps was called for, no matter if i was making mistakes or doing the right things, to try and set things on track. if i asked myself where i thought i would be a year from then, i wouldn't have said anything remotely close to this. it's not a good thing or a bad thing necessarily, as i am content with the way things have been carried out, and regardless of the path taken i will always endure.

to me, the most important thing is happiness. not the type you think of such as winning the lottery, or having anything you can imagine. the type i'm thinking of is the type where you can sit back for a moment and be content with what you're doing, and where you are heading. one might think that what you have done should figure into that also but, to be blunt, you are wrong. barring magical time machines, you can't change the past and although you can learn from it to affect the present and future, it shouldn't have a bearing on how happy you are.

one of the factors in my own happiness is using what i've learned to have a positive effect on others. it gives a form of validation to the experiences i have that go beyond simply benefiting myself in future situations. in that scope, i have something i want to share with you, whoever the reader may be, because if even one person takes something out of this it will have been worth it.

what i want say to you is this:

even though we cut our lives into sections, one year here, ten years there, never forget to take a look at today. are you happy? are you doing what you want to do? there are limitations to everything, but your first and foremost duty is to yourself. if you want to go out and climb a mountain, swim across the english channel, visit the eiffel tower, pick up a guitar and make a band, whatever you can think of to truly make you happy, do it! far too often we enforce these constraints on ourselves as to what we can or can't do. if you look too much in the past, you end up wasting what little and extremely valuable time you have in the present.

this isn't a call to unrestrained hedonism, since i assume some general level of common sense to anyone who reads this, and this isn't a war against retrospection either. this is simply a heads-up, a refresher, since i fully am aware how little things that seem obvious can be forgotten at times. take a look at your life every so often, even if you just start annually, and try not to get caught standing still. you'll be better off for it.

with that said, make your own meaning to this inherently meaningless process of existence. the biggest hurdle is yourself, and the quicker you can stop letting your own inhibitions defeat you before even setting out, the better. this as much aimed at others as it is at myself. there are always ways to grow as a person, no matter how far along you are. so step outside, do something you've never done before, and enjoy yourself.

thank you

if i remember

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 17:30:25 GMT

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

hurf

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:36:27 GMT

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.

growing pains

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 05:27:12 GMT

slowly but surely i am growing up...

part 1: i should soon have my first credit card that is not only in my name but also solely my account. im not worrying about going into some big credit snafu over it, since i already take super anal financial records with my excel spreadsheet thing i put together. the card is through my bank of the past 5 years, and is pretty damn nice too. i've already been paying my own rent and everything else for the past 7 months, and haven't needed any help from my parents even though i thought i was going to in may but everything turned out fine.

part 2: went through another monthly meeting on friday with the company that is overseeing my research project. i spent the last week and a half working my ass off to get some good results for this meeting, since there was a lot of problems that popped up lately. for the most part i had some good things to present, although I wish my pictures looked a bit better. the SEM is a pain in the ass to use though. the biggest difference between this meeting and all the other ones is that i was the lead, and ive basically been in control of the entire project for the past month. when chris(the liason from the company) asks a question, i was the one that knew the answers and only once or twice did my advisor or the other grad student have anything really to add. both him and my advisor were very pleased with the level of work i've put in this project so far, and i'm pretty happy. of course i'd much rather have a nice paying job right now and pay for my moms trip to norway this august as a giant thank you, but that will have to wait. its kind of funny how people end up talking about what theyre going to spend their money on when they graduate like a car or their student loans or a house, but id rather give my parents a giant vacation because they've really put so much into our family and don't have much to show for it outside of giving their kids as much of an opportunity as they can.

part 3: women are frustrating as hell but i try to not let it bother me that much. it's really gay when some girl neglects to tell you she is seeing some dude and flirts with you all the time, then acts like everything is peachy when you find out from someone else about everything. i think it was fucking with me the most during the past 2 weeks since i was barely getting sleep and had so much work to do, but after friday i really haven't worried about it. i have plenty of things to occupy my time with.
_______________________

sleep time

ah, weird

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 05:19:05 GMT

n/t

livejournal is for venting

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 07:57:16 GMT

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.

uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 16:28:42 GMT

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!"

Hopefully Friday will result in something other than the dreaded "ah, weird." but I have a good feeling about it. Only time will tell but the signs are there.

watch when you fucking drive

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 13:12:24 GMT

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.

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 07:08:18 GMT

chi caaaaah go

Sat, 24 May 2008 13:05:55 GMT

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.

ffffffffffff

Thu, 22 May 2008 04:06:07 GMT

god i am dumbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb

at least its been done, sort of

go with the flow

fuck the knicks, scoops

t-minus 24 hours

Tue, 20 May 2008 20:46:15 GMT

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.

fucking exhausted

Mon, 19 May 2008 04:43:42 GMT

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

Mon, 12 May 2008 15:12:37 GMT

that was a weird dream, and kind of disturbing. i wonder what brought that on. i know parts of it were due to the music playing at the time, but yeah. very strange

i suppose i will be slowly getting back to a normal person's sleep schedule, although i found myself getting only like 5 and some hours last night. i ate a bunch of food late at night and had the urge to work out a bit for the second time in the day to burn off all the energy. i ended up getting my gym routine started back up yesterday since i am nowhere near as busy anymore. my arms are pretty damn sore.

i need to be a bit more proactive. i think i have been, but not as much as i should be. then again, i think far too much. also, why does the us postal service suck so much ass? the world may never know. should probably listen to tristan more than i do(scary thought huh?) since he really has a point. just letting things run their course seems boring though, too much waiting.

waiting for an email from rgaa
waiting for info from purchasing dept
waiting for trivia wednesday
waiting for ice cream at friendly's
waiting for indiana jones movie
waiting for chicago trip events
waiting for my return here
waiting for that moment

just keep drinking water

Sat, 10 May 2008 15:52:00 GMT

brownies and ice cream, i think i should take that as a sign. a very delicious sign. why is this shit always so difficult? yesterday probably would have been easier but NOPE i have to make things as painstakingly hard as possible for myself.

in other news, i will be able to do the splits, at least most of the way, by the end of this summer. i cant wait until next fall, or even like, end of may and then june and then then then then.

aime la vérité, mais pardonne à l'erreur

aahhhhhhhhh

Wed, 07 May 2008 05:33:30 GMT

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.

so fucking psyched

Fri, 02 May 2008 14:51:24 GMT

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

my greatest fear is wasting everything i've ever learned

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 15:15:09 GMT

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...

that was unexpected

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:11:39 GMT

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

when will people learn...

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 19:11:55 GMT

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.

on a light-er(haha so punny) note...

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 15:43:20 GMT

in celebration of the 18th birthday of the hubble telescope's launch, there has been a compilation of the best pictures of colliding galaxies taken by hubble. some of these are simply amazing. it's almost mind-boggling trying to comprehend the scale of the interactions and, although galaxy collisions don't often result in stars colliding with each other due to the density of stars being quite small, two stars bigger than the sun slamming into each other is something i'd love to see. from very far away.

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2008/16/image/

there's a ton of cool information on that site, but the link i sent is just the 59 images released together today. poke around the site, you wont be disappointed.
---------------

after a painstaking 2 weeks of research culminating in two presentations today, my advisor asked me how i liked this first semester. i told her that, despite having times with work that almost feels overwhelming, i enjoy it a lot. she was very happy with what i did today and for this semester and said i've done better than she predicted.

______ - 4/22/08

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 05:07:17 GMT

12:17 to be precise

no shovel
the plot next to james tyler
without leaving soil freshly turned
no marker
absent of a reason
or excuse to ever revisit
no need
what lies buried is a spectre
the figment of singular imagination
no point
a plant watered by scraps and fragments
is in no condition to grow
----------

now turn to clay

----------

a two word manifesto

not anymore.