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| Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 | | 8:30 pm |
walkin with my feet ten feet off beale
long weekend. Andy and I had been planning a trip with James to Arkansas to climb at horse shoe canyon. James decided a long weekend trip was too much, so when he backed out Andy and I started talking about heading to the Red River Gorge in Kentucky with the group from the climbing club. The thing with the red is that the free camping along the river is riddled with crime. tents and other camping gear, along with climbing gear is regularly stolen while people are climbing in the gorge. The safe place to camp is a little pizza joint called Miguelles. The scene at Miguelles is cool, but we just weren't in the mood for it. Andy sent me a text message thursday morning saying, "Lets go to Memphis". I picked up a kid from the club, now living near me, on Friday morning and drove to champaign. loaded up Andy's car and headed to the land of the delta blues. Memphis has it's own style of BBQ so the first thing we did was stop at Interstate BBQ for dinner(thus ending my pseudo vegetarian diet). Saw it on the foodnetwork a few times so it seemed to be the place to go. we stayed at the downtown marriot so we could walk to beale street to hang out. beale was the home of bb king, muddy waters and the rest of the delta blues. unfortunately now it's more of a party place. i was dreaming of walking down the street hearing all manor of good music. Unfortunately it was mostly unimpressive bars and clubs. we wandered by a filthy little place and andy heard exactly what we were looking for. he grabbed me and pulled me in. the band was pretty good. great guitar and the most curious bass player you would ever see on beale st. she was a young woman from osaka japan. looked either completely lost or completely bored. after the band finished we headed further up beale and ended up shooting pool for a bit then another dive bar that was probably not worth stopping in. stumbled back to the hotel and passed out. saturday we lounged around most of the day. walked to a coffee shop and had lunch and checked emails. stopped at a street festival and listened to a really good blues guitarist. went back to hotel for naps and pool and shower. that night we went straight to a bar we had seen on our way back the night before. The whole wall behind the bar was covered with working beer taps. the best part was the staff. about 15 absolutely amazing women, all wearing tight shirts with phrases like "beer goddess" and all seemingly very knowledgeable about beer. after a few or more there we decided to check out BB Kings. Unfortunately the music there wasn't really what we were looking for and the place was over priced. we had some snacks and a few whiskeys then Andy decided it was time for bed. I stayed on beale st and just sat around watching people and talking with the guy sitting next to me. On sunday we checked out of the hotel and started heading north. went to jackson falls in SoIll to climb on monday. we got there in the evening and found some UofI people that were just getting ready to head back but waiting for others to show up to pick up some of the club gear. we offered to hold it for them and ended up down in the canyon touching some boulder problems. well, andy at least. we then headed back up to camp and fire cooked the brats and were just laying on the crash pad thinking about going to sleep when the second UofI crew showed up. One of them was Ben, he's married with children so doesn't get outside much, but he's a very good climber. the others were people i don't really know. Ben had his mind made up that he was taking everyone midnight bouldering. that usually includes beer and headlamps down in the canyon on the same set of problems. andy and i grabbed our bourbon and down we headed. about 1:30 we got tired and went back to camp. the rest of the crew didn't get back until much later. climbing on monday was pretty rough. andy and i were basically hung over from three straight nights of drinking. i bailed on a 5.8 that andy had to finish. he and ben put up a bunch of routes and it was fun to watch the new kids working on them. ben was funny in describing them. he didn't know them but the guy had never been camping and he didn't think the girl had ever been outside, literally. they both turned out to be very nice and I think they had a good time. we got back to champaign about 9:30pm and I tracked down the guy I had taken down on friday. we were back in naperville by 12:30. i felt hung over all day today as well. the heat and exertion of yesterday combined with the lack of sleep all weekend has taken it's toll. all in all it was a really nice weekend. back to work. pounded on a paper for a few hours and thought about a few other things. gotta get a lot done this shutdown. Current Mood:  sore | | Tuesday, August 28th, 2007 | | 9:48 pm |
food for food
Been eatin mostly vegetarian for the last few weeks. Well, fish and eggs and cheese, but no red meat or chicken. Actually bought free range eggs as well. It's inspired by a bit of social conscience and a lot by just feeling fat and unhealthy lately. It helps that i bought a basil plant. she's cool. snacks that grow back! Subscribed to Napster a couple of months ago. It's $10/month for unlimited listening and downloading. To keep the songs permanently they are $.99 each but i haven't felt the need. It's really nice to just have a random song pop into your head and be able to go listen to it. It's also cool to follow the recommendations from one band/artist to the next. Current Mood:  refreshedCurrent Music: F1 in Turkey | | Friday, July 27th, 2007 | | 8:46 am |
growin up
Well, got a job offer from Argonne! About a %50 increase in salary. My boss seems to understand that. Now we just have to work out the details of the transition. From a work point of view nothing is going to change for a while. But He's got a grant and seems to think it will be bad to have a vacant postdoc position on the project. We'll see, I need to talk to Argonne management a bit. I'm a bit worried about having real management in my life. Let's face it, postdoc life is pretty nice. With no hassle I can take off for a three or four day weekend. Formally at Argonne I'd have to apply for vacation days and wait for approval, etc... That would put an end to the random phone call from Andy on a thursday night telling me to come down for bourbon and SoIll climbing. But yea, the whole money thing.... I have to believe it will be better. Could always quit the job and become a carpenter in a couple of years. Current Mood: excited | | Sunday, June 24th, 2007 | | 8:54 pm |
entertainment
I received this email today from the Enthought Tool Suite mailing list. Envisage is python based development environment for scientific applications. It's not ready for prime time, but the movement is strong. Subject: [Enthought-dev] EZVisage: The barbarians are raiding the village Opening scene: all is bliss and happiness in Envisage village, with beautifully manicured abstractions, elegant connections between them and large, elegant towers built out of them. Its citizens are sophisticated and protect how their elegant town allows them to do things that others can't really do with lesser resources. Cue music, pan camera over the horizon: a horde of barbarians is seen approaching. This tribe, known as "The Scientists" is made up of famously primitive members, single-minded thugs whose only purpose in life is to "publish papers" and are willing to commit unspeakable atrocities of software engineering to achieve their goal. They care not one whit about the beauty of the abstractions they trample on, have no patience for understanding the underlying principles of the tools they use, and typically force their enslaved populations (known as "graduate students") to actually raid and pillage in search of the elusive paper. A bloody battle of two days ensues, where the barbarians sleep little in order to pillage as much as they can before the citizens of Envisage can summon reinforcements. After the smoke clears the next evening, this is all that is left: http://amath.colorado.edu/faculty/fperez/tmp/ezvisage.tgz | | Sunday, June 3rd, 2007 | | 3:06 pm |
interview
I had a job interview on Friday. Argonne is hiring a bunch of people into what are called 705 positions. The title is something like "assitant physicist". They are really beamline scientists. It's essentially the job I have been doing here on a voluntary basis for the last year and a half. I figured if I was doing the job I might as well make more money, so I applied. Well, we'll see what happens. In some ways I really want the job, in other ways I don't. Postdocing is second only to being a grad student for lifestyle as far as I can tell. Taking a position at the lab would be something of a change for me. I'd have to keep regular hours and then some. It would also mean not taking off for random three and four day weekend climbing trips. | | Thursday, May 10th, 2007 | | 9:15 pm |
Randomness
I had the most random of evenings. The Argonne users meeting has been going on this week. I gave a talk on Tuesday in a workshop, for some reason it's attracted a lot of attention. But anyway... I decided to sleep in today and got up and had coffee and dressed really bummy because it's a really nice day. Wandered off to the lab and went to a talk and went to lunch in the meeting tent. Went to a few more talks and finally made it to my office. I was sitting here and a group of people walked by my window, one of which was a very attractive russian girl, another was someone that I know so I decided to see where they were all going. Ended up in the Center for Nano Materials tour. The director of the x-ray optics group was taking the tour and he was excited to talk to me about a bunch of new ideas he got from my talk. So I guess that was a good thing. He's really energetic and easy to hang out with. We wandered off from the tour and went to the poster session where we started talking to a few people. One was a staff scientist from the material science department here at Argonne. He had a very nice asian girl with him, a post doc. So I ended up browsing around the poster session with her and we found one of her group members who was presenting a poster. A guy I've never met from the European Synchrotron source (ESRF) wandered over near the poster, because he knew the scientist from the material department. Turns out all of them know my boss well, so we all got to joking around and chatting about random things. Eventually the ESRF guy was ready to head to the banquet so the post-doc girl and I started walking with him and chatting some more. She finally got to her car and left us but I kept walking with him and ended up at the front door just kinda hanging out with another of the beamline guys that I know. A whole bunch of the Xradia guys turned up at the front door hoping to get into the banquet but it was sold out. They are here doing a multimillion dollar installation for the nanocenter. The one of them that did have a ticket to the banquette gave me his and they all left for the pub. So I ended up sitting with Martin, the beamline guy, at the nano center banquette dressed like I was ready to go rock climbing in a t-shirt with holes and a ratty pair of shorts. Sometimes randomness leads to interesting times. | | Tuesday, May 1st, 2007 | | 12:01 am |
Ouch
following Jocelyn's recent enthusiasm for exercise i decided to dust off my bike this weekend and go for a ride. It's was a really nice day and I just kinda wondered my way from home to the lab, about 16 miles. Took it easy on the way there, stopped in the park, stopped for lunch, poked around an outdoor shopping mall that I didn't know existed. By the time I got to the lab I noticed it was getting hard to peddle and the head wind wasn't helping much. Spent a couple of hours in the office, talked to Duncan on the phone and did a little work. Nobody I knew showed up to work on a nice Sunday afternoon so I resigned myself to the ride home. Luckily it started to cloud up so my already sunburned arms got some relief. The wind had shifted from southerly to northwesterly. In other words, another head wind all the way home. About two miles from home my knees were screaming in pain and my right foot was going numb, and it was raining on me. Today I could barely stand up from a chair. All in all it was a great afternoon. New sights, new roads traveled, new horses whinnied at. But I feel old. thirty two miles kicked my ass when I used to wonder for sixty or seventy in an afternoon in San Diego. Current Mood:  sleepy | | Tuesday, February 27th, 2007 | | 4:11 am |
Silent Treatment - Revisited
So creepy dude from November 19th is back at our sector. This time he's got the high pressure people to provide an interesting sample and has been less annoying. I've come to think he's one of these people that is a sink of energy. He just sucks it out of me and doesn't give anything back. Actually it might be something of a language barrier. He's fairly good at speaking but I've started to get the impression he doesn't understand what I am saying and just doesn't let me know. So of course I assume he's either a retard or an ass, or both. Well, his measurement has been a challenge for me. It's by far the hardest thing we have ever attempted at the beamline. I've learned a lot and am actually having some fun when I don't have to deal with creepy dude. Current Mood: exhaustedCurrent Music: the beat of my own drummer | | Tuesday, February 13th, 2007 | | 11:12 pm |
nostalgia
Spent the snow day in Illinois hanging out in my apartment. It's nice, basically two rooms and a bathroom and kitchen. I've had this vhs tape of a trip I took to Europe with my dad shortly before he died. It was my graduation gift, a bit early because I was about nine months from actually graduating at the time we went. The tape's been sitting on the shelf just begging to be watched, and archived onto my computer. Well, today i caved. Dug the vcr out of the box it was in when i bought it second hand. hooked it up to my computer and sorted out the video capture software. Spent the following four hours laughing and crying. I can't believe how much I still miss my dad. It was almost a strange coincidence, but I also got an email from my uncle today. He's been handleing my dad's estate. A job I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy, but given who that is, It's probably a good thing they don't have it. He's just about ready to close out everything with the estate, something like six years after his death. The end of the vhs tape was about an hour of my dad and Lynda making a trip to Colorado to hang on the land an check up on the house construction. That was wonderful to watch and painful. Of all my siblings only two of us to have gotten it with respect to that place. the rest of the assholes made us sell it. i just don't get it. In happier news. Demian's in town! Here from India for a month or so. He's going to live in the Milwaukee area and hang out at uwm. I finally got a phone call this evening. Tentative plans to go gym climbing this weekend. I havn't climbed since Batu caves in Malaysia. Even then it was only two easy routes. Current Mood:  nostalgic | | Wednesday, January 10th, 2007 | | 3:38 am |
traveling
hanging in hong kong waiting for a flight to singapore. what am i doing in asia again? oh yea, visiting Wendy. gonna hang out in singapore and kl for a few weeks. Current Mood: tired | | Monday, January 8th, 2007 | | 12:47 am |
Kelley Clan
Spent the night in Milwaukee last night because the Kelley family, my mom's side, was having a get together. Almost everyone was there, I think only one of my first cousins once removed was MIA. Anyway, got to talking with my aunt's significant other about London. He's spent some time there and seemed anxious to talk. It wasn't until he mentioned sleeping in the subways because the V1 rockets were raining down did I realize he was there during WW2. God bless the greatest generation. Current Mood: contemplative | | Thursday, December 28th, 2006 | | 4:12 am |
culture clash
I'm kinda drunk. drove back to illiois tonight and made chili, following my moms recipe. turned out pretty good. got bored went to bar and started drinkin jameson on the rocks. text messages with friends revieled goings on in town tonight. andy showed up at my door, after i had made it home and started learning about the apolcalypse on the history channel. ended up at kevin's parents shootin pool and drinking beers. was kinda nice, after a weekend of family and a day of tai chi friends, to hang out with the climbing crew. Current Mood: buzzedCurrent Music: slience | | Sunday, November 19th, 2006 | | 2:05 am |
Silent treatment
This guy is using the beamline tonight. He's a postdoc in the imaging group that wanted to learn how to do our technique. Somehow he fanagled some time on the schedule and also managed to talk my boss into giving him our samples! That's the bit that bothers me. He's not brought anything to this "collaboration". He's not interested in using my programs, meaning he's not going to contribute to their development. He's not brought any interesting ideas. He's just brought himself and kind of an attitude. Well, I guess he did manage to get a member of the high pressure group, whom I really like, to load our samples into a diamond anvil so we can crush them while measuring. From that point of view it's been a good thing, because the HP guy is interesting to have around. I've been getting the silent treatment from the guy for the last couple of hours. He's like me in that he doesn't like be shown to be wrong when he believed with all his heart that he was right. I got a little short with him because he just kept saying the same thing again and again and I finally told him to just stop talking. Now that he's been shown to be wrong he's not talking at all. Oh well. The HP guy is still interested. My impression of this cat from the imaging group is that he's always trying to jump on the hot bandwagon without bringing a bottle of booze to the crew that's already there. Current Mood: working | | Thursday, November 9th, 2006 | | 3:23 am |
freezer
It occured to me tonight that it's a good thing to have more than one martini glass in the freezer. It gives you the ability to rotate through them. It's great, you always have a cold glass for your next drink. This is from back before I realized this. freezer I fear i'm becoming something of a republican. the democrats just look like such idiots these days. what the hell is a phased withdrawal? Current Mood: entertained | | Monday, October 9th, 2006 | | 3:33 pm |
| | Wednesday, October 4th, 2006 | | 11:00 pm |
bangers and mash
Spent a couple of weeks in London visiting the university that I now work for. It was an experience. Luckily I have a friend from the UofI climbing club that just took a job there this summer. We hung out a lot. Pictures . I've begun the quest. The quest for the perfect martini. Three revisions into it now and I think things are improving. Bombay gin, dry vermouth, and lots of cold. Cold is I think one of the most important ingredients. So far I've been maybe a bit obsessed about the cold. Almost to the point of hurting my fingers to mix the thing. Something that I've been struggleing with is the heat capacity of the martini glasses that I bought. They are leaded crystal from Reidel. Maybe I sould have gone with something a little heavier. Tonight's rendition involved.... gin in the freezer, vermouth in the fridge. Place steel drink shaker in freezer, with jigger. crush ice and fill glass with said crushed ice. breath on the outside of the glass to form condensation. dump ice and add olive. place fogged up olive loaded glass into the freezer to form a layer of frost on the outside. remove shaker from freezer and add a couple of handfuls of ice. pour about 1oz of vermouth over ice and shake. strain vermouth leaving vermouth coated ice in the shaker. add 2.5oz freezing cold gin and shake a bit. remove frosty glass from freezer and strain martini into glass. mmmmmmmmmmm Current Mood: cheerfulCurrent Music: sunny boy williams | | Tuesday, September 12th, 2006 | | 11:16 pm |
Colorado Memories
My dad told me this story. Shortly before my step mom Nelda died she awoke one day with a smile and said something like "He was laughing at us." My dad asked her who was and she said "RJ in Ice Lake." My dad immediately knew the reference, she must have been dreaming. About eighteen years ago we were on a backpacking trip to a beautiful piece of heaven on earth called Ice Lake Basin in Colorado, near Silverton. I managed to get fairly far ahead of them on the trail and it started to hail just as I topped out into the basin. There was a nice overhung boulder near the trail so I took shelter there and waited. It was entertaining for me to watch them round the corner being pelted in the face with hail so I was laughing. I wonder if it's a coincidence that it started to hail on me when I walked past that very same boulder last weekend. I really love that place. More pictures from my Colorado trip. Current Mood: refreshed | | Wednesday, August 30th, 2006 | | 5:33 pm |
vacation
I'm heading to Colorado on Friday. About two weeks of relaxation before I head to London to visit my boss for two weeks. I don't know what to expect there. Probably lots of work. I'm getting the impression that he is looking to get some computers set up. I am going to meet his new grad student. Probably hang out with Curtis for a bit. Curtis is a climber from the U of I that moved to London this summer. I've had a strong yearning to be in Colorado for a while now. I'm finally getting time to go. This whole living life by a beamtime schedule is kinda killing me. Missed several chances to go on climbing trips this summer. To top it off my thesis advisor emailed me and offered me a post-doc doing something interesting. Hmmmm... Current Mood: relaxed | | Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006 | | 12:03 am |
note to self
blended and strained cactus pears with shochu are worth revisiting. | | Monday, August 21st, 2006 | | 11:27 pm |
lucky
Got lucky. The user at our beamline seemed they were confident enough to let my take off. things aren't going well for them.. it's really a shame, because of the last few visitors we've had they are by far the most likely to have a good result. it's the fault of the other station. they have control of the source and it's in a state that is bad for us. got home and was thinking about taking a shower and heading to the bar when Mark called. i was just starting my dishes when he called so i couldn't keep working on them. somehow i got inspired to crack that bottle of shochu. started out straight and moved on to mixed with the end of a bottle of fresh pressed blueberry juice. i've had a couple of cactus pears laying around so i started doing something with them. Mark was at work late and modifying some code, 8pm his time, and so we just kinda kept each other company until his battery died. it was nice to just talk about random things for a while. that was sort of the status quo back in our office in milwaukee. of course a half/full bottle of shochu had me far more random. it was still nice. Current Mood:  drunk |
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