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 […]
Life
490 posts
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 […]
This blog has gone dead in the past month. This was for a variety of reasons. I made a great number of changes in my life this past month, in an attempt to prepare for the great number of changes likely to come in the next few years. I had […]
As adults, we have the pleasure of a high vantage point from which to look back on our misspent youth. The locker betrayals, the backstabbing clique politics, the Hamlet soliloquies of the heart writ in the boiling ink of our hormones. In the last couple of months, I had the […]
I have never hinted at the meaning of this blog’s title – “The Adventures of My Pet Hamster”. Well, I have a treat for you regular readers. Recently, while going through a bookshelf with old lab notebooks, I finally found the original adventures of my pet hamster. These will give […]
For the last seven years, and certainly in many decades prior, we have faced issues regarding convenience and privacy. A specific subset of that pair is security vs. privacy, popular instances of which have arisen in airport screening and warrantless wiretapping. However, these particular examples can seem ethereal and distant, […]
It’s been a while since I jotted some thoughts here in the old blog. It’s been a rather on/off series of weeks. I went on a four-day vacation while my sister was here, then returned for a full week of research. Labor Day weekend was spent in Connecticut with my […]
This has been a really refreshing week, quite a turn of events from the constant obsession with fundamental particles. My sister arrived on Tuesday, and after finally clearing my plate of all my last minute research items I was ready to put aside physics. We hiked, we biked, we watched […]
Two years ago, we in the United States were treated to the destruction of an entire city, the failure of local, state, and national government institutions, and an ongoing saga regarding the New Orleans’ levee system. Last year, predictions were for an equally destructive season, something that was averted thanks […]