of or relating to fear

i have to take the GRE in about four weeks. well, to be honest, i haven't signed up for it yet, but my goal is to take it in four weeks, before school starts again for the fall. can't say as i'm looking forward to it though, but i can't really pinpoint why. i am very excited about graduate school, moving to a new city (poop to grand rapids for not having a Ph.d program in chemistry), and immersing myself in research for five or six years (hopefully five). the problem is, i'm really scared about it too. there is so much riding on two tests, both before you apply, and after you get there. that's a lot of pressure. i'm sure i'll do fine, my grades thus far indicate that i do know my chemistry, and i've got something like 400 hours of research to my name (pretty decent for an undergrad not yet to his senior year).

i guess i'm just cringing at having to study for a test so far in advance. why in the world the test makers think that knowing "defenestration" [the act of throwing someone or something out a window] is a word that graduating seniors should be tested on is beyond me. fortunately, the math is pretty easy, but after differential equations, algebra 1 better be!

i suppose my fear of the unknown isn't healthy. but at the same time, knowing ahead of time that what you're about to do is no picnic, and working really, really hard is the only way to make it through can be a good thing.

gross negligence

back from minnesota. the conference was great. i learned a ton about molecular dynamics and solvent boxes with periodic boundaries. i also had a nice talk with one of their computational chemists (don truhlar) about some of his current photodissociation work.

came back to a week off of experimental work though, and that means the chance to wrestle with a misbehaving diode laser... today we painstakingly charted wavenumber v. applied voltage over a range just large enough to tell us our laser "mode hops", or occassionally - but not always mind you - decides to output a different wavelength of light than we expect. we're likely going to have to hotwire in some other equipment that will give us wavelength readings at all times during normal work, a pain, but not impossible. this way, we can monitor the laser and plan for some way to compensate. the joys of measuring isotope ratios in carbon dioxide.

finally started reading the harry potter series. i never realized how engrossing those stories are. i was impressed, and couldn't put the book down. but i couldn't get my hands on book number two, so i'm currently reading harlan ellison's troublemakers, and about to start (because i'll finish the other one tonight) stephen king's the gunslinger. yay for books

i wish i was a cat

they get to sleep like 19 hours a day, and all that is expected of them is to not hack up a hairball on anything expensive. and here i sit, staring at a series of hamilton's equations of motion trying to muster up the energy to type them in to that most horrible of programs, microsoft word equation editor. once all six are in, i can finally move on to writing the speaking notes for the last five slides of my presentation and get some sleep.

i still really need to find a good definition for the "r sub e" variable that appears in the morse potentials i used. my spectroscopy book uses it, even puts it on a potential well, but doesn't tell you exactly what it is. i think it's the bond distance at the minimum potential, but i'm not entirely sure.

i figured out today that the programming i was doing for the gauss-chebyshev quadrature is going to be a bit easier than i thought. i was having trouble with the subroutine calling, and the computational chemist at my school gave me some great tips on how to make the code run smoothly. i can't wait to have no other projects on the horizon [and i really should be studying for the GRE, which i intend to take in august], so that i can work on the program some more.

it's a lot... like life, and that's what's appealing

just got a facinating book entitled "photodissociation dynamics". it apparently is a must read for those in the field, and claims to be accessible to advanced undergraduates as well as first year grad students. i have found it to be not out of my reach thus far (though chapter 2 is pretty tough), even though i haven't yet had a p-chem class.

a lament... i once was very involved in a local 'magic the gathering' card community, but alas i have not been able to afford cards since WoTC raised their prices. it was a hobby that i dearly love(d), and wish i had some time to pursue it still. maybe next year, but it's so hard to keep up with. some of my best memories from high school involved sitting in smoke-filled rooms listening to offspring and playing game after game with my worn out red/blue counter & creature deck (yay for the time when shivan dragons were good creatures to play) against power 9 decks and enjoy every minute of it.

back in my day...

maybe i'm getting older (though this can't possibly be the case as i am still years away from 30), but the people who live above us, the ones who in a drunken stupor ran their heads through part of our bedroom wall (it borders the stairwell), and who let water leak through our ceiling from their toilet are downright annoying. they don't seem to work, or go to school, and are completely nocturnal, with all the trappings of a real world house (complete with people yelling at their significant others at three in the morning on the front lawn)... oh well, one more year and we can move.

pretty excited for the long weekend. i was asked an interesting question today. when did the war end that was precipitated by the signing of the declaration of independence? i have no idea. my high school history teacher couldn't find his shirt most days. i did have a wonderful class on the korean war in college, but that doesn't help here.

good day all around though. went to pizza hut, or should i say "declining service" hut for dinner. the pizza is always incredible, but it's become a place to eat that only families with very young, and completely feral children attend. that episode of simpsons where they try to ban children sounds pretty good to me right now.

so many lines of code to check

i have a talk coming up entitled "classical trajectory modeling of the photodissociation of the linear argon-iodine complex" based on research i did last semester, and i dusted off the program to work on the talk, but it's outputting really messed up data, and i can't figure out why. part of the problem is that there are like 2000 lines of fortran to sift through, though thankfully i have the problem nailed down to a very small section. this involves the always exciting writing of many 'write(*,*)'made it this far' statements looking for the one that doesn't print.

i'm also writing code to do a gauss-chebyshev numerical integration for my summer research. this also has a problem i can't seem to fix, but in this case it's due to my own ignorance in fortran programming. i seem to be calling my subroutine with the wrong variables....

so, after wading through all that stuff about computational chemistry, here's the 'non-nerdy' stuff. had a wonderful dinner tonight with some friends, talking about our small group and how to make it more accessible, and at the same time foster close relationships.

my stupid fantasy baseball team has decided not to hit any more. i have five 10+ game winners for starting pitchers, but my batters are in a slump, all of them... except for andruw jones.

strange behavior

just a bunch of interesting "goings-ons" i experienced today.

today during research, we noticed that our laser was being really picky (more than usual...) about its temperature.

i got a couple more nice comments about my talk on tuesday. how "using a diode laser to study the 13C/12C ratio in CO2" turned out to be such an interesting topic to a bunch of non-physical chemists i have no idea, but it was nice to hear that people understood what i talked about, because i really tried to make it accessible.

got a call from the DNC (democratic national committee), wanting to hit me up for money. i told them the honest-to-goodness truth that my wife and i support different political parties, and rather than give money to both and grumble about having our hard earned dollars go to "the other side" we decided not to give money to either, unless its random personal cash on hand. the guy on the line was amazed and started laughing. little did he realize, i was telling the truth!