Posted by barb on Sep 4, 2004 in
Biking,
Books,
Pictures We biked up to Hole in the Wall Books again today. We didn’t have very much time last Thursday, since we needed to get back to the car before it got too dark, so we decided to head out again today and take our time at the bookstore.
The ride feels shorter and shorter each time that we do it. Today, like Thursday, I actually made it up the big hill going east just after the Beltway. But today, unlike Thursday, I also made it up that same hill going the other way. Whoo Hoo!
Our destination:
After we got back, Groom Bear, in the back seat of the car, felt the need to be protected from my driving:
Posted by barb on Sep 3, 2004 in
Movies 3/5 stars
This is just not my kind of movie. I can see why Aniston would choose it as a break from her typical comedy role — her character is a “ordinary” woman stuck in a marriage she’s not happy with and working a dead-end job. She finds an easy diversion with a new, young employee. But in the end, this is just a depressing movie about ordinary people where not much happens along the way.
Posted by barb on Sep 3, 2004 in
Thesis/Grad Life I had a great meeing with Kim and Chris today about my thesis. First, I convinced them that the oddness that we’d been seeing in MCG -6-30-15 is, in fact, instrumental. And, this convinces us further of the importance of using spectral analysis, especially for long-term studies of XTE sources.
Then I showed them my results from flux-selected fits of the MCG -6-30-15 data from the same data set as a published set. My results did not exactly match theirs, but Chris argued that he had never thought that theirs made a lot of sense, from a physical standpoint. The reasons my results are better stem from the improvements of the background and response modeling that the XTE team has done in the intervening years. I can have more data points than they did, but still retain similar error bars. In addition, I can use a bit more of the band-pass than they used, which helps pin down some of the model parameters.
Finally, I showed them the results of time-selected spectra from MCG -6-30-15 and NGC 5548 from my current pipeline. I had fixed a couple major problems in the pipeline, so these results look much, much better. In fact, they look good enough that Chris suggested that I just start plowing through the mountains of data that I have now. Yikes! This is what I’ve been working toward for the last year, so it’s quite exciting…
While the data is running, I need to start thinking about an outline for my thesis, as I see it now. I also need to start reasearching the sources I’m analyzing, and I still need to do a few things to help understand that oddness in MCG -6-30-15 that we’d seen so that I can write it up for a chapter in my thesis.
Posted by barb on Sep 3, 2004 in
Memes, Etc. The most exciting phrase to hear in science is not “Eureka,” but “That’s funny.”
— Isaac Asimov
Posted by barb on Sep 3, 2004 in Uncategorized
At 4:44 AM this morning, while I was deeply involved in a dream, our smoke detector beeped five times. Needless to say, I was out of bed in a heartbeat, ready to find the smoke source or evacuate the house as appropriate.
But it stopped beeping after five beeps.
That’s it.
Nothing else.
We searched around, sniffing, to make sure there wasn’t any smoke in the house. Andrew took the battery out to see if it still had charge (it did). We wondered if it could have been the CO detector responding to a power-glitch, but then I remembered that it just chirps once when that happens. Andrew popped open the attic, just to be sure. But then there was nothing else to do but lay back down for 45 minutes until the alarm went off. Of course neither of us actually slept….
Oh, and I wrenched my neck in the whole ordeal. It’s been bothering me all morning now.
Still…better than a swift kick to the head.
Posted by barb on Sep 2, 2004 in
Biking,
Pictures We’ve had little opportunity to bike on the weekends, with the panda-hunting trips and wedding errands, so we went out after work tonight. Sadly, it will soon get too dark too early to ride after work.
Tonight we took the W&OD trail from Vienna towards Falls Church. We made a little side trip to Hole in the Wall Books on Broad Street (aka Route 7). It’s just a block or so off of the W&OD trail, and the road has sidewalks, so it’s an easy ride. There I picked up a few books on the 100 Most Challenged Books of 1990-2000 list. Banned Books Week is Sept 24 – Oct 1 this year, and I want to release books like I did last year.
On our way back, I took a couple pictures:
The road behind
and the road ahead:
Total miles: 10.4
Posted by barb on Sep 1, 2004 in
Wedding A few more wedding notes:
- We had our second, and last, meeting with the minister last Thursday. We went over the ceremony that Andrew and I had put together — most of it is from the materials that he’d given us, with only the readings and benediction from other resources.
- We’ve made our entree and appetizer selections, so everything on the restaurant side is pretty much decided, since we went over the restaurant lay-out last week with the manager.
- I continue to knock some of the minor, but nagging, little things off my to-do list: made my garter, decorated my shoes, bought program paper, finished the frames for pictures of our parents’ and granparents’ weddings, and on and on and on.
I’m really hoping that we can have a wedding-free day or two this weekend….
Posted by barb on Aug 30, 2004 in
Movies 3/5 stars
Except for the annoying cinematography, I quite liked this movie. I think that even someone who hasn’t seen the first one could get what’s going on fairly quickly, though some of the specifics of the “Treadstone” project would remain murky.
Sadly, the cinematography nearly ruined the movie. Much of it is filmed in a jumpy, hand-held style…picture Blair Witch but without the cameraperson as part of the cast. This style worked well for the fight scenes. And, in fact, it probably would have worked well in some of the what-the-hell-is-he-doing-now CIA office scenes. But the use of it became gratuituous, and it felt as if about half of the film, or more, was done in this style. Both Andrew and I felt barfy on the way out.
Posted by barb on Aug 30, 2004 in
Wedding As the wedding day looms closer, I’ve noticed that there is less and less content on my blog. In fact, there seems to be less and less content in my brain. I came up with the following to illustrate the phenomenon:
Posted by barb on Aug 29, 2004 in
Around DC,
Pictures Today’s panda-hunting trip did not find Andrew nor me at our best. This trip was meant to catch the pandas that aren’t easily accessible by Metro, and I had carefully plotted out driving directions to several of the pandas. As usual when using driving directions to navigate DC, we found the directions lacking, and had to scramble to figure out an alternate route. Andrew did a great job navigating, and did get us to 7 of the pandas. Sadly, we ended up missing 5 of them due to…um…road weirdness beyond our control.
As usual, I have pictures posted on Flickr.
Here’s my favorite from today’s trip:
