I suppose in an ideal situation, potential gift givers would spend all year studying my personality, habits, needs, and desires in order to deduce the perfect gift that even I didn’t realize I couldn’t live without. This is hampered somewhat by most of my potential gift givers living at least a few hundred miles away. That and having lives that don’t revolve around me. So for the convenience of busy Christmas shoppers this season I have actually managed to work up a short list of things that I feel I might like to have. This is, of course, not an exhaustive list of things I might like, but it’s a place to start (or end, if you shop anything like me).

I think the Barbarians at my virtual gates wont be put off of their destructive rampage until I make some mention of the fact that for one of the weeks I was away on vacation I was at Burning Man. For those of you who don’t know much about it; it’s in Nevada not SoCal, and it is not a hippy music festival (I still get people asking me, “oh, you went to Burning Man? Who was playing?”). What it is, is epic. It is too big and too complex to be described in one sitting or by one person. You can get an idea of what it’s like by listening to stories of what we did or what we saw, but to really know you have to be there and feel it. I think all I will say here for the moment is that this year was a scouting mission. Next year we go for real.

Some of you may already know this (word travels fast sometimes) but I recently bought a new bike. I feel I’ve been getting impulsive of late, though it came about after having ridden a friends road bike and being surprised at finding we’d gone almost twenty miles on a casual evening ride, and then spending several days researching and discussing what type of bike would be good. After a bit of looking, I decided on this bike:

It is very shiny. In the Firefly sense, it’s actually a mat black Felt F1X and not literally shiney. If you are curious, its not a rode bike or a mountain bike, but a hybrid type known as Cyclocross. Both in my opinion and in those of many of my friends here in Santa Cruz, this type of bike is well suited for this area, with the slightly more upright frame geometry and wider tires for mild off road along with stiff frame construction and racing handlebars for speed and handling. It also has that wonderful sports car-esq property of wanting to go fast anytime it gets the chance : )

It’s also motivated and enabled me to stick with my summer goal to ride my bike up to campus for every day I have lab. Those of you out there who I’ve managed to trick into coming to visit know that the ride to my office from my house is… nontrivial. The reduced weight and rolling friction has made it significantly easier and faster (from 30-35 mins to 20-25 mins kind of significant), which also contributes to an improved mentality for riding. So far its been four days a week for four weeks and I’m still managing to drag my sleepy self up there. Actually, I’ve had a deal more energy now than before and I’ve been eating more, which is good I guess. Just hope my upper body strength doesn’t go to hell.

It still needs a name though, and possibly a gender…

The trouble now is the next two days are booked pretty solid. I suppose I could go tomorrow after lab, but I’m usually pretty tired/hungry/crazy at that point so it doesn’t seem to likely. I suppose if I eat a late lunch and have a snack I could have enough blood sugar left for a run…

Anyway, enough stalling. Time to get back to grading labs.

Those of you who have been here will know that biking from my house to my office counts as cardio, and I even brought some work with me so that I might be productive there(ha!). Perhaps if anyone else had been on campus working I would have gotten some of it done. I instead went to the gym and proceeded to tire myself out even further. I was a little worried my arms would give out if I hit any big bumps on the ride home. Altogether a fairly successful trip out.

Of course now tomorrow me is worried that he’s going to have trouble convincing later-this-week me to do it all again, or that we’ll all be “too busy”. Well that’s for later; right now I’m going  to get some food and relax for a bit. I lurves me some endorphins.

See, it wouldn’t normally be a problem except that they feel the need to cram four of us in here with some creative office logistics. My desk faces directly into the back of a set of shelves, which effectively hide me from view of the doorway. They also effectively hide about half of the room from the light switch. So every twenty minutes or so the lights go out and and I obediently shuffle over and wave my arms around. Do you know what that means? Thats right…

It’s on.

I think this was all a side effect of the fact that I’m taking some more serious courses this quarter and I’m back to TAing a lower div lab. This leads to a much more busy donut than previously appearing in this blog. I’d blame the lack of posting on it, but that would be nothing but lies; I’m just lazy.

Also, I think doing five months worth of posting makes me the Ultimate Champion of  PEDotW.

I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised, what with the getting cold and dark. Also the end of the quarter is coming up rapidly, and I’ve been scrambling to get all the stuff I’d been putting off done somewhat close to on time. It actually feels good to be getting some of that work done and its reminding me that I can do this stuff.

You know, most times I like to try to write a good solid cohesive rant with some sort of goal. Today I think I’m going to go for the rambling approach. I do have one goal for this rant, and I think I’ll blow all the suspense I could have leveraged by simply saying that I have a very meager wish list up on the site navigation to the right there. Go ahead and check it out, not much there as usual, but I might add stuff at random intervals when an idea hits me. Due to the extreme shortness of this list, its probably a good idea to check with each other as to who is getting stuff off of it, as there’s not enough list items to go around.

Now to figure out when/where I’m going for the break this year…

Seems a large number of you are unsatisfied with the speed at which I deliver certain news items via this site. Some have even gone as far as to disseminate the knowledge themselves (thanks! by the way) and post comments telling me I should post this information myself. So I thought I would take the time to explain the basic thinking behind the update schedule for my little blog here.

While it is true that my posts almost invariably contain information about the current happenings in my life, one should not expect the inverse to be true. To put in less confusing terms, all posts have news items but not all news items have posts. Now how do I decide what news gets posted? It’s very simple really; it’s whatever news is on my mind when I feel like writing a blog post. Its rather backwards I suppose, but I write posts when I feel like writing, not when I have news to share.

And I’ll be honest, as far as my schedule goes, blogging is pretty low on the totem pole when it comes to free time activities. One can see from my previous posts that I often post when I’m bored out of my mind and sleep deprived. This leads to the interesting trend that when I have a lot of interesting things going on in my life, I don’t post about them because I’m too busy doing all that interesting stuff. Things have, and will continue to be, left out.

I was seriously tempted to write this whole post and intentionally leave out the news item that sparked this rant, but I decided that the angry mob outside my gate already had that “who brought the pitchforks and torches?” look, so I’d better not temp it.

It is official, I passed all of my quals (bold for your reading convenience) . While this is a great thing and one more step towards a degree, its not exactly unexpected nor does it really have any effect on anybody until next summer. Not having to study for and then take quals really opens up my options for summer plans considerably. I’ve even started to explore some of those options already : )

Ah, and in case you hadn’t heard and were thoroughly confused by some of that last paragraph, I am currently in a hidden government laboratory under a cornfield somewhere in the Midwest. Thats right its beamtime again, but you all know what that’s about now so I wont go into details. It is interesting being out here surrounded by farms instead of the Bay city. In fact I’m told the guest house I’m staying in used to be a farmhouse before the owner donated it to the lab, complete with mice. Little tiny buggers, had one run around my room a few times before it realized that I was horribly uninteresting. They managed to scare off my adviser though, he moved to a hotel a little ways down the road.

Its funny, I always thought of myself as a city kid growing up but I hadn’t realized how close to rural life I was. Little things, like the weather and the mouse, keep popping up on this trip that made me think about it. The locals will occasionally say things like, “How do you like being out in the middle of nowhere?” when they find out I’m from the Bay Area, and my response is usually, “It reminds me of where I grew up, actually”. Different kinds of trees a bit more humidity and a decided lack of mountains, but it still feels home-ish. I feel much more out of place in a big city.

I kinda wish I’d brought my camera (weight was tight as I had to carry all my stuff and some of the lab equipment here) as this is the first time I’ve been told explicitly that I could take pictures of the synchrotron, and it’s and older model so you can actually see the beam pipe and magnets and such.