Posted by barb on Apr 3, 2004 in
Random Thoughts The girls came up this weekend so we could shop for bridesmaid dresses. Check out the dresses in my wedding blog — they were bought in record time, so we had time in the afternoon to play a bit in Alexandria.
After we picked up the dresses, I drove us down to Alexandria to check out the bridal shoes store there. We parked by the Torpedo Factory — a building full of art studios and galleries — which Andrew and I had never managed to get to while open. It was open, and we were at the main entrance (which Andrew and I hadn’t found before), so we decided to go in.
We saw Marcia Jestaedt’s studio. Andrew and I had seen one of her works at the Alexandria symphony last fall, where she had done a ceramic kimono called Birds in Space.
We also stopped in Matthew Harwood’s studio . He was trained as an architect, and uses that training in his work. He makes paneled watercolors which display the depth of his subject. The one he was working on when we stopped in was a perspective of New York from the Brooklyn Bridge. I stopped in because a Greek collonade with a star-streaked background caught my eye. If I was in any position to buy original art, I would have snatched it up.
Sweetie found something at Alicia Roman’s studio that she loved — a magnetic pendant that said “hurrah” in the middle and had magnetic beads that rolled around the inside.
After the Torpedo Factory, we walked down to the bridal shoe store, The Glass Slipper. Sigh. I just don’t like bridal shoes. They’re all so…so…so cheesy. My current plan is to get some cheap, white Keds and decorate them like I did my Teva’s for Mushi’s wedding. (Sadly I don’t have a picture of them, cuz they were way cool.)
By this time, we were just about ready for dinner, so we headed up to the Stardust Restaurant (that’s where the reception is going to be). We were fairly early (5:30-ish), so were the first in the restaurant (though there were a couple people at the bar already). We were seated next to the back fireplace, which was running, so felt quite cozy.
Our conversation ran from the weird to the bizarre to the embarrassing. And our waiter had impeccable timing — he always showed up just as we were saying something stupid. “No more Twinkies for me” (as he’s setting down the pesto with portabella mushroom and mozzarella). “Butt Man and his sidekick, the Boy Plunger.” “That’s when I started throwing up.”
The food was great, dessert even better, and the company divine.
We got home fairly early, watched Wonderfalls, and talked until 1 AM (someone forgot to remind us that we would lose an hour!).
Posted by barb on Apr 2, 2004 in
Random Thoughts Sweetie was flying into National Airport near the heart of DC, so I decided to Metro in to pick her up. I could have driven, but every time I try to get home from National, I end up driving around the monuments, so I decided to forgo the extra excitement.
This was my first Metro ride by myself since I got my iPod a few weeks ago, so I decided to bring it with me. Frankly I was a bit nervous carrying my $350 iPod on the Metro at night…maybe I’m just a big baby. It was nice not to listen to the general noise of the train, though. Plus, I love to play aladdin casino game at www.EasyMobileCasino.com so I played it
the whole time, which made the ride go a bit faster.
When I reached the airport, I decided to leave the music running. Sweetie was coming in on Northwest, which meant I had to walk to the little, tiny terminal that used to be the entire airport (9 gates). To get there, I walked down a deserted tunnel between the spiffy new terminal and the old one. Duran Duran’s “Wild Boys” came on just as I started down the tunnel. I’d never realized, but it is the perfect walking song. With one step for each beat, I was motoring down the tunnel in record time. I had to keep from singing out loud.
For a brief moment, I pretended that I was in an alien space port, but then wondered if “Wild Boys” would really be the theme song for a space port — maybe only in an 80s movie.
I realized that I liked having a soundtrack, though. It might just make some of the boring moments of life more interesting, and perhaps, could soothe those stressful times. I could imagine Devo’s “Working in a Coal Mine” coming on as I drive to work every morning, and one of the themes from The Lord of the Rings soundtrack when I’m tackling a difficult problem at work. Right now, I’m hearing Barenaked Ladies’ “Another Postcard” just for silliness.
Posted by barb on Mar 19, 2004 in
Thesis/Grad Life I shared results from my fits to spectra for MCG-6-30-15, IC4329A, and PG0052+251. But more exciting than that is a re-presentation of some data I shared at our last meeting. I shouldn’t really say much other than that we think we’re seeing behavior that no one has seen before in AGN. I’ve got a list of things to do, and then we’re going to submit those results as a letter to ApJ.
Yay!
Posted by barb on Mar 16, 2004 in
Random Thoughts I have a web page dedicated to my nephew who died of SIDS in 1996 when he was just 4 months and 21 days old. Because of this page, I have received several e-mails telling me about an effort to make a SIDS stamp, which would be similar to the breast cancer stamp. It would cost a few cents more than the regular first class stamp rate, and those extra cents would go directly to SIDS research.
They are asking that you do not send letters directly to the post office, because once an investigation into a stamp request is rejected, there is a one year period where the stamp will not be considered again. Instead, they would like to collect letters, and send them all together to show how much support there is for such a stamp. Check out the above link to see how to address a letter and where to send it.
Read on to see a draft of the letter I’ll be sending.
Read more…
Posted by barb on Mar 12, 2004 in
Pictures,
Random Thoughts I remembered to bring my camera today, so I dragged JD over to Building 7 to look at the new Swift display that I put together. It’s supposed to be a light box display, but I hadn’t been able to figure out how to turn the lights on.
The display is on a walkway around a high bay area, on the second floor. We followed the wires from the display down the wall under the walkway. To figure out where it went from there, we went downstairs, and followed them straight into a wall. Oops. JD counted the steps to the door so that we could try to figure out which room the cords went into from the hallway outside of the high bay. Unfortunately, they went into a closed room, since this wasn’t our building, we didn’t feel like we could just walk in.
Someone in the hall suggested that we talk to the facilities manager in the building. Well, that would be too easy, plus we didn’t know his name. Fortunately this random person did know his name, and we went to hunt John down. (Actually, his office was right across from the room where the wires disappears…convenient.)
Sadly, John didn’t know how to turn the light boxes on, either. He led us into the room where the cords disappeared, and at the other end of the cords, we found a plethora of circuit breakers. Of course, none of them were labeled.
John did claim to know someone who would know how to turn on the boxes, but was unable to find him. I took a few pictures of the display, anyhow, since the display is bright enough to see without the lights on (unlike the Cobe display that preceeded it).
John called me later in the afternoon to tell me that he’d found out how to turn them on. Sixteen new light bulbs ought to do it. Apparently, they are always on.
Here’s the whole display:
Panels #1 and 2
Panels #3 and 4
Panels #5 and 6
Panels #7 and 8
Posted by barb on Feb 23, 2004 in
Random Thoughts There was an interesting article on Salon today about tech support, or lack thereof: We Don’t Support That.
Our two-week “intensive training” course was helmed by a 19-year-old named Chad. Chad had great difficulty making it to class within three hours of the stated meeting time. As for how to actually troubleshoot and fix computers, we were largely on our own. Beyond a cursory overview of the computers we were in charge of healing, the closest thing to a troubleshooting tool we were taught was The Mantra. . When class ended, which varied wildly depending on Chad’s interest and mental status, we were all encouraged to say The Mantra out loud. The Mantra is simply, “We don’t support that.”
The article is written by a guy who used to work in the tech support office of one of the three major computer sellers in the US. The tech support people are actually outsourced, and earn money for each call completed, whether or not the customer was actually helped. Needless to say, the outsourcing company wanted the tech support phone calls to be kept to a minimum — 12 minutes was the goal, with shorter being better. This produced one of four types of employees: the punter who basically tells the customer that they’ll have to call someone else (such as the software company, phone company, etc.), the giver who sends hardware to callers just to get them to shut-up, the helper who actually helps people though this person usually gets talked to by management because their calls are invariably more than 12 minutes, and the quitters (the majority).
This article makes me very happy that I’ve never had to call tech support. This is for one of two reasons:
1) I’m generally very stubborn and will either poke around the computer enough to figure out the problem or poke around the internet until I find someone else who has saved the same problem, or 2) I get so frustrated that I sick Andrew on the problem.
To those of you without an Andrew, I wish good luck.
Posted by barb on Feb 6, 2004 in
Thesis/Grad Life I met with Kim and Chris today, finally. Unfortunately MCG -6-30-15 was not quite done (273 out of 290 spectra were fit), but I could still show them the majority of my results. MCG -6 continues to be an enigma, though that’s nothing new. It’s been well studied over the years, and it has been shown to display unusual behavior.
The good news is that we are starting to be confident in the results from my pipeline, so I am going to go ahead and fit more sources over the next month. I’m also continuing a bit more with MCG -6, including doing some hardness ratios and color-color plots. I also need to write scripts to do flux-resolved spectra to compare our results from time-resolved spectra. We suspect that the results will be different, since flux-resolved spectra may smear out any short time scale changes (i.e. changes on the order of a day to a week).
Posted by barb on Feb 3, 2004 in
Thesis/Grad Life Check out the Table of Contents for the February 1, 2004 issue of ApJ!
If you scroll down to the article on page 771, you’ll see why I’m so excited.
Posted by barb on Jan 26, 2004 in
Random Thoughts I didn’t realize that adults got just as excited about snow days as the kids do. Today’s reprieve felt as good as a snow day on a day when I hadn’t done my homework, even though there wasn’t anything pressing due at work today!
Andrew and I started the day by watching The Guru, then I wrote for several hours (it feels so good to write creatively again!), and I made soaps in the evening. Translation: I didn’t do much of anything today. And that’s the way a snow day should be!
Posted by barb on Jan 9, 2004 in
Random Thoughts Ask me how good my steamy, hot, long shower was this morning after not getting one yesterday. I dare you. Ask me.
Oh. Wait. I didn’t have hot water again this morning. I was fooled into thinking that I did have hot water — enough so that I hopped in and shampooed up my hair. But then things started getting cooler and cooler. Turning the water all the way up did not help. So here I am, two days without a real shower.
Yeah. That feels good. Thanks Hilton.
My flight home was delayed, but not by too much, and my luggage made it with me. Any flight where my luggage makes it with me is a good flight.
When I walked into the house, there was a beautiful bouquet of red tulips on the table to greet me. It was from Andrew, Duncan, Ares, and Artemis, though I suspect that Andrew had a big hand in it 🙂 What a sweetie! Of course, I was so tired and worn down, they made me cry, but it was good, happy-to-be-home tears.