This summer was always going to be busy. Between executing my normal post-doctoral responsibilities, starting the ramp up on the ATLAS experiment, and getting ready to move to Dallas, I wasn’t expecting a whole lot of down time. This only reminds me that I should have taken a vacation when […]
Life
490 posts
This summer is going to be another one of those insane summers. Next week I’ll be at CERN for the ATLAS Physics Week. This will be my first (of many) trips to CERN in quite some time, and I am excited to see how the place has changed now that […]
Everybody needs a day that’s just about them. Birthdays don’t count – people see that coming. You need one of those great, unexpected my days, one that is delicious because you spring it on people. OK, mine wasn’t all that spontaneous. I spent my Sunday afternoon two Sundays ago, and […]
Jodi runs a Stanford post-doc book club, and a few months ago the club’s book was “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan. That book catapaulted Pollan into the public eye, making him a spokesperson for the food movement in this country. It’s not a wheatgrass and hemp-humping diatribe. It’s an […]
As I announced in my professional blog the other day [1], Jodi and I will be joining the faculty at Southern Methodist University [2] in August. We are VERY excited about this – the move to Dallas, teaching, mentoring students, hiring post-docs, establishing our future research careers. We rarely have […]
Last Thursday, I effectively went into a communication blackout owing to the visit of many family members. Jodi’s mom and dad, her sister, and her sister’s twin sons, all visited us for four days. We rented a minivan so that we could get around, stocked up on food for the […]
Tonight on NPR was a timely story about why we can’t get the internet on our TV [1]. Most of the blame gets put on Cable companies and content producers in Hollywood (and other places). For me, the bottom line is: I DO have the internet on my TV – […]
A few weeks ago, we received notice that Comcast would be transitioning channels above 30 to digital, away from analog. This transition is to happen on April 15. We were told we could get either a converter and a set-top box, or a pair of converters. Jodi and I opted […]
Back in the beginning of 2006, I constructed my own Mythtv-based digital personal video recorder, or PVR, which Jodi nicknamed “sTeVo”. Many people found this amusing, and some people found it down right cool. Everybody asked me the same question: how much did it cost? It was a $500 up-front […]
The NY Times reported that the results of an extensive study comparing diets found that it was calorie reduction, independent of the means by which calories were reduced, that caused weight loss [1]. Surprise, surprise. As cranky Maryland physicist Bob Park has put it many times before [2], Eighty-five percent […]
I love that you can watch the show “Big Bang Theory” on United flights. There is something deeply satisfying to a particle physicist about a whole plane full of people exposed to a situation comedy about young researchers at the frontiers of their respective fields.
Oh, sweet three-day weekend. After the last few weeks, having a couple of days to sleep in sounds like heaven. I started off on the right foot last night by doing a little drum practice on my electric kit (my sweet Christmas present from my family). Ah, rest. What’s amazing […]