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I get to go to france
I'm going to a conference in Besacon, France, leaving on Friday, and taking a week off to hang out in Paris after the conference. I think this will be a nice break for me, considering my recent near nervous breakdown type of feelings. Wooo hooo for science travel, for sending me there and paying for my conference and hotel during the conference ( Read more... ) -
PMS sucks.
Thurs and Friday I didn't get anything done at all and I felt totally unmotivated, hating all the work I had to do, wanting to leave grad school right now rather than deal with it, frustrated with myself because I bumped something and now I need to realign my nonlinear fiber and two interferometers so I won't have the data I wanted to get for my ( Read more... ) -
philosophy of ethics and professors
So, back when I was a senior in high school I took an ethics course from the philosophy department at UCSC with my friend Elizabeth. It was a really interesting class and I'm glad I took it. You look at different ways of forming ethical systems and various arguments for and against those. For example, in cultural relativism, whatever is morally ( Read more... ) -
there and back again.
Feb was black history month, which for NIST, involved having a table full of books, movies and cd's somehow related. I borrowed a book on Martin Luther King Jr., with some of his speeches. It's amazing to think of what he did for this country. The nonviolent resistance to segregation was amazing. I was starting to feel all this good feeling and ( Read more... ) -
stolen bike
I went to ride my bike to work this morning and it was missing. It's my own fault, since I've stopped locking it when it's in front of our apartment. We live in family housing on campus, my bike is a piece of shit, covered in stickers and probably as old as I am. I just got lazy, especially in the winter when I'm fumbling to get all the clothing ( Read more... ) -
conversation for dummies (or really smarties at only one thing)
I just got this email:
Join Debra Fine, former engineer, now nationally recognized speaker and author for her fast paced, informative and entertaining presentation The Fine Art of Small Talk. Together we'll laugh, learn and leave with insightful and informative conversation skills and networking techniques on how to strike up conversations and keep ( Read more... ) -
dilema
So, as some of you may or may not know, I used to work for a terrible/evil/mean/awful adviser. He makes all of his students and postdocs pretty miserable. I mean, sure, some of them deal with it better than others, but they are all unhappy with him in general. I know some other advisers who some of their students and post-docs love and some hate ( Read more... ) -
pigs not wars
So, on NPR they were saying that, yesterday, when Obama came to Denver to sign the stimulus package at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science (yay, he's already showing us how much he loves science), a bunch of republicans were protesting at the state capitol. They had pigs and were complaining that the stimulus is all pork or whatever. Hmm, ok ( Read more... ) -
taxes done!
Yay! And I got a small (<$10) refund from my Colorado state taxes. I owed Uncle Sam <$100, so it's a good year. Well, I don't owe a lot, which is good, but I didn't make much $, which sucks. I just don't know why they can't just take the right amount out in the first place so we don't have all this drama every year ( Read more... ) -
so not fair!
Adam was going to sleep and I was sitting in bed chatting with him for a little bit before he goes to sleep. I got up to take a piss, came back like 1.5 minutes later, and he was already asleep! How is that even possible? That is so not fair.