I stood in the back row of the textbook floor in the Yale Co-op. My summer job as a janitor had given me about $2000 to spend for the two semesters, including book expenses. I had all my class books, but that didn’t matter. The dark beauty standing in front […]
Life
485 posts
Tonight is very likely my last shift on the BaBar experiment. I just got the baton from the penultimate liaison shifter, my colleague Jose, and here I sit. The usual Liaison console has been commandeered by the staff of the PEP operations crew. There’s a buzz in the room. The […]
This weekend marks the final shifts of the BaBar experiment and the final operations of the PEP-II collider. The last few months have been among the most personally exciting time of my life, a time in collider physics that I had been led to believe was long dead. Of course, […]
After a week of traveling and reading and generally reminding myself of the joy of the world outside of SLAC, it’s time to return to my research. I set guidelines for this past week. No work-related e-mail. This was helped along by the fact that the place to which I […]
I just got my new U.S. passport today, after only sending the paperwork in about 1.5 weeks ago. Crazy. A little brochure came with the passport, its cover reading “With Your U.S. Passport, the World is Yours!” I’m writing an open letter to the U.S. State Department in response to […]
The press of the past few weeks has now officially caught up to me. While I am very much looking forward to returning to my research, I am also mentally and emotionally burned out. The last meeting of the trip was on Friday, late afternoon, at the Department of Energy […]
I’m trying not to be paranoid, but I think the universe is trying to tell me something. It started over a year ago, when I had my last real vacation. It was Christmas break, and Jodi and I did our usual family-to-family cross-continental hop. That’s tiring, with driving and flying, […]
Well, we went from the summer of nuts, to the winter of insane, to the fast-paced late-winter of WTF. I’ve been cutting non-essential things out of my life as a result, including this blog. Oh well – last to the table, first out the door. Today, however, I’ve been forcing […]
Today, as I was thinking more about my undergraduate experience in physics, I recalled that I had a photo of my advisor, Michael, floating around on my home computer. What made me think of it was the laugh I had when I first found the picture. In one of my […]
Today, some very painful news reached me. My father informed me of the death of my undergraduate mentor in physics, Dr. Michael Schmidt. After a long battle with cancer, he passed on November 18. Michael was one of the reasons I survived my time as an undergrad at Yale. Without […]
The last few weeks have been quite something. If I’ve been brief – administrative, even – it’s only because I’ve been caught up with home life, work life, and linux life. I ran my first road race a couple of weeks ago, the SLAC annual run/walk. It’s a four mile […]
As part of the changing of our lives, Jodi and I have come to realize that the demands of our work and the demands of our home are becoming incompatible. We simply cannot keep a clean home and get our work done; doing both leads to no leisure time, which […]