However you want to putit, Dad's leaving has left me no choice but to go back to old colthes and porridge, put the nose tot he grindstone, knuckle down and get back to the real world. I have managed to stretch Christmas intot he January holiday and that into Dad's visit and now after almost two months of minimal effort I have nowhere to turn but the work at hand.
I am writing what will be the last of the module papers and then will put together my thesis proposal, both to be finished by June and then when I return from the summer, part of which will be spent in dear old exciting Leicester I will have to actually start in on the thesis, (that's what them limeys call a dissertation) thye do everything backwards. Nice to know I have the next 20 months planned out!!
I just sent in an article to the International Jouranl of Educational Administration and am about to send one to the Learning Organization Journal. The first one has made it past the first post and been sent to three referees in different countries. The second one could have more problems- I just noticed that theri last issue was devoted entirely to what I am writing about so they may have had enough of that for a while. We'll see. Keep your fingers crossed, I'll know and about six-eight weeks if things have been accepted for publication. These things apparently take time.
Dad's visit was fun, we hung out here quite a bit and went around town doing various things. Poker in Al Ain was great - but Dad's right. Ralph very quietly sat and played his beginner game and walked away with a fair whack of the bank. Ahhhhh. I beleive him when he says he never played but he still knew exactly what he was doing.
So now it's work, walking while the weather is good and YOGA!! the new power - soon I will twist into any shape desired and roll effortlessly down the street like a wheel of fire. I am learning to levitate and slow my heartrate so I can see the people in the near dimensions. It's good. At the moment I am trying to learn Ashtanga and get the breathign right and then maybe move on to some new stuff. We'll see how it all goes.
I love you all and now that I have skype will try to use it talk to you. It already worked with Mom and Andrew, we'll see what we can do.
Bye
Saturday, February 24, 2007
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Far From the Madding Crowds
greetings all. having been back in Kabul for a few days I am greeted by a gathering of 15,000 former mujahadin downtown demonstrating in favor of amnesty for their sins -- now why does that not surprise me! -- so I am locked inside my little house. Thought I'd used some of the enforced leisure to say howdy. And to remind everyone to send the Matriarch best wishes for her benefit performance this week! break a leg.
The photos above indicate how I spent much of last week. Lounging around Abu Dhabi and hanging out at Vasco's with Kate and Chris. Lovely time, except for a part of it I could enjoy the yummies due to dental tortures. On the other hand, I now have an excuse to get back soon for a long weekend and have some more drilling, prying, yanking, and hammering done. Chris has been good enough to promise to lay in some soup and yoghurt.
I did manage to get out to Al Ain for a poker game with the remnants of my old crowd, and had a great time. Ralph came and played, proving to be one of those "is it good when they're all the same color and in sequence" players! Watch it, Andrew. Stopped by the house and was disappointed to see that my very large Neem tree is gone, but not the bougainvilla -- exactly the effect that i was going for (although I would trim them a bit). Sunlight filtering into the living room through the red petals. Very nice indeed. Went to the Starbuck's and a couple of other places as well, where of course I was met by a chorus of "where's Ms Gail?" from all and sundry. Katie says they're down to asking once a week or so at the one in Abu Dhabi mall!
back in harness and will write all of you later. Meanwhile, everyone write Andrew and remind him to WEAR HIS SAFETY MASK!
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
SPECTROSCOPISTAS!!!!!!
Data! Data! I've got DATA!
If you wander around the parts of this ( the chemistry ) building that are devoted to organic chemistry you get to see some strange and wonderful things. Every room is packed with gleaming walls covered in labyrinths of round-bottomed glass flasks and tubing. At first you think "Oh how pretty. How cool! How SCIENTIFIC." Then you see the disheveled and slightly demented graduate students spend 4 years putting in 25 brightly colored ingredients and pulling out (with huge grins stapled to their pale, awful skulls) a white powder. I swear to god, that's all those wierdos make: white powder. I don't understand it, I walk by rooms with round-bottomed flasks the size of beach balls full of spinning purple liquids and all they ever get is white powder. Whatever. The point here actually concerns the aforementioned purple beachball.
That stuff is deadly. That stuff is explosive. That stuff is flammable. That stuff is tended by sleep-deprived social retards. After realizing all that, you look around and think to yourself "Oh... how...oh... my god." And then you start to understand why all those firemen break into a sweat and move down the bar away from you when they hear you're a chemist. Pansies.
At any rate, we don't have any of that crap here in the Hamers group. We DO have a few million dollars of topflight surface analytical equipment that look like props for Brazil. Some of which are homebuilt! Which basically means that a Hamers group member is far more likely to be able to fix your VCR than one of the organic chemists. However, VCR repair skills don't really get you any props in this hood so we're sort of mocked as chemical dilletantes. " You guys look at chemicals, you don't use them" that kind of
thing. (I, by the way, am exempt from this the second they look into my terrifying, stained, inorganic synthesis hood...the stains glow under a black light...it's freakin' awesome...and they're poisonous) So we here in the Hamers group try to look for opportunities to show the danger in our lives wherever we can. One fine example is shown above.
This machine on of our Infrared Spectrometers. The basic idea here is that you fire infrared light through a sample and the chemicals in that sample absorb the light at specific wavelengths. So if you scan over a large spectrum, you can measure the amount of light that gets absorbed at various wavelengths and get a chemical fingerprint. It's fast. It's useful. It's sensitive. But there's a problem. Since you're basically looking at how these things react with heat, you need to cool down the detector. In comes the liquid nitrogen. You have to pour, literally pour, liquid nitrogen into this machine from a big fancy thermos called a Dewar. This is fine really, but when the machine fills up, it unexpectedly fountains. This is what's happening here. That's not water. It's Nitrogen at -321 degrees fahrenheit. Which is really, really cold. If this stuff hits your skin it usually rolls off. If it hits your eye, say while it geysers out of the machine as you're leaning over to pour the stuff in from your thermos, then your eyeball freezes and you start steeling yourself for pirate jokes. Luckily, we have protective wear and the machine gives off a telltale noise before spewing liquid blindness everywhere. But still, it's pretty hardcore. Right? And we can fix your VCR.
Anyway, I love this machine. While jogging I had an epiphany moment that led me to a series of experiments based on using this machine. I was coming back from cooling down the machine when I spoke to you Dad and Chris. When I went back I did some badass experiments
and produced this graph. If you look in the handy yellow(?) rectangle, you see a series of peaks. The second from the top has a little peak next to the big one. The top graph is the same sample after some heating and the little peak has disappeared. This may not mean much but they're PEAKS. Chemists love Peaks like Satan loves Sinners. We see peaks and entire reams of meaning form in our heads. In this case, the peaks are telling me that I can't get my system to do what I want it to because the chemicals I have stuck to my nanocrystals are flying off when they're heating. WHICH EXPLAINS EVERYTHING!!!!!!! And leads me to some really groovy experiments to design a new ligand. One that I can't buy. One that I'll have to make. Let's hear those organic chemists laughing now.
Anyway, the boss is psyched and says this is the nucleus of a paper (music to my paper deprived ears) and that gives me hope that I may one day be an accredited scientist.
So that's my world. How are you guys doing?
If you wander around the parts of this ( the chemistry ) building that are devoted to organic chemistry you get to see some strange and wonderful things. Every room is packed with gleaming walls covered in labyrinths of round-bottomed glass flasks and tubing. At first you think "Oh how pretty. How cool! How SCIENTIFIC." Then you see the disheveled and slightly demented graduate students spend 4 years putting in 25 brightly colored ingredients and pulling out (with huge grins stapled to their pale, awful skulls) a white powder. I swear to god, that's all those wierdos make: white powder. I don't understand it, I walk by rooms with round-bottomed flasks the size of beach balls full of spinning purple liquids and all they ever get is white powder. Whatever. The point here actually concerns the aforementioned purple beachball.
That stuff is deadly. That stuff is explosive. That stuff is flammable. That stuff is tended by sleep-deprived social retards. After realizing all that, you look around and think to yourself "Oh... how...oh... my god." And then you start to understand why all those firemen break into a sweat and move down the bar away from you when they hear you're a chemist. Pansies.
At any rate, we don't have any of that crap here in the Hamers group. We DO have a few million dollars of topflight surface analytical equipment that look like props for Brazil. Some of which are homebuilt! Which basically means that a Hamers group member is far more likely to be able to fix your VCR than one of the organic chemists. However, VCR repair skills don't really get you any props in this hood so we're sort of mocked as chemical dilletantes. " You guys look at chemicals, you don't use them" that kind of
thing. (I, by the way, am exempt from this the second they look into my terrifying, stained, inorganic synthesis hood...the stains glow under a black light...it's freakin' awesome...and they're poisonous) So we here in the Hamers group try to look for opportunities to show the danger in our lives wherever we can. One fine example is shown above.This machine on of our Infrared Spectrometers. The basic idea here is that you fire infrared light through a sample and the chemicals in that sample absorb the light at specific wavelengths. So if you scan over a large spectrum, you can measure the amount of light that gets absorbed at various wavelengths and get a chemical fingerprint. It's fast. It's useful. It's sensitive. But there's a problem. Since you're basically looking at how these things react with heat, you need to cool down the detector. In comes the liquid nitrogen. You have to pour, literally pour, liquid nitrogen into this machine from a big fancy thermos called a Dewar. This is fine really, but when the machine fills up, it unexpectedly fountains. This is what's happening here. That's not water. It's Nitrogen at -321 degrees fahrenheit. Which is really, really cold. If this stuff hits your skin it usually rolls off. If it hits your eye, say while it geysers out of the machine as you're leaning over to pour the stuff in from your thermos, then your eyeball freezes and you start steeling yourself for pirate jokes. Luckily, we have protective wear and the machine gives off a telltale noise before spewing liquid blindness everywhere. But still, it's pretty hardcore. Right? And we can fix your VCR.
Anyway, I love this machine. While jogging I had an epiphany moment that led me to a series of experiments based on using this machine. I was coming back from cooling down the machine when I spoke to you Dad and Chris. When I went back I did some badass experiments
and produced this graph. If you look in the handy yellow(?) rectangle, you see a series of peaks. The second from the top has a little peak next to the big one. The top graph is the same sample after some heating and the little peak has disappeared. This may not mean much but they're PEAKS. Chemists love Peaks like Satan loves Sinners. We see peaks and entire reams of meaning form in our heads. In this case, the peaks are telling me that I can't get my system to do what I want it to because the chemicals I have stuck to my nanocrystals are flying off when they're heating. WHICH EXPLAINS EVERYTHING!!!!!!! And leads me to some really groovy experiments to design a new ligand. One that I can't buy. One that I'll have to make. Let's hear those organic chemists laughing now.Anyway, the boss is psyched and says this is the nucleus of a paper (music to my paper deprived ears) and that gives me hope that I may one day be an accredited scientist.
So that's my world. How are you guys doing?
Sunday, February 4, 2007
No Exploristas- o, tho I scoured
Hey everybody. Sorry I haven’t been online, we just lasy night got back from a week on Thailand. Gotta get that mid year break before the bleak slide into the hot long spring semester. Weather here and there is unbelievable. I guess global warming is going to give us some nice things before it kills us all. Right On!! Ok, that wasn’t quite as cheerful as I intended this email to be. I just spent a week on Koh Samui, one of the islands in the south. Never been south of Bangkok before and now I am kicking myself. Jungle Heaven if you get up away from the backpacking, full moon party thugs. Andrew at least is well aware of my feelings towards youth hostel rats, bless their cheesy little trust fund souls. Anyway, spent eight days at a retreat up the mountain in the jungle fasting, doing yoga, scrambling around the woods and taking some really foul tasting supplements. I feel amazing and maybe even have that clear eyed fanatical look one gets when all the toxins have been shifted.
We spent the last day and a half in Bangkok to get a giant city fix and then get home hours before I had to be back at work. Judging from the silliness of my first two hors here a work it was a VERY good idea to get away for a moment. I have discovered a real liking for Yoga. The woman who taught it at this retreat was very good and really got me excited about it, and surprise surprise- I’m pretty good at it. So far I have only done videos or books and a couple of isolated classes at the gym. But with a good teacher I learned more in a week than in the last year in total. Soon I will put my legs behind my head and float through the air, can’t wait. If I can sort out balance and strength issues now then when I fall at eighty five I will land catlike and spry instead of breaking my hips. Always thinkin’ ahead, that’s me.
Andrew, I scoured the Jungle for the Exploristas, but except for a couple of monkeys and clearing where junkies had hung out I found nothing. They are wily those Exploritas and hid themselves well. I even spent some time moving in the canopy saling from tree to tree on my extended wing flaps making chi chi noises so I would blend in but I never foind them. Perhaps Irian Jaya…..
Well folks, that’s it for now. Tucking back into work, edd work and looking forward to seeing Dad next week. I hope you are all well and I’ll post something more soon.
Chris
We spent the last day and a half in Bangkok to get a giant city fix and then get home hours before I had to be back at work. Judging from the silliness of my first two hors here a work it was a VERY good idea to get away for a moment. I have discovered a real liking for Yoga. The woman who taught it at this retreat was very good and really got me excited about it, and surprise surprise- I’m pretty good at it. So far I have only done videos or books and a couple of isolated classes at the gym. But with a good teacher I learned more in a week than in the last year in total. Soon I will put my legs behind my head and float through the air, can’t wait. If I can sort out balance and strength issues now then when I fall at eighty five I will land catlike and spry instead of breaking my hips. Always thinkin’ ahead, that’s me.
Andrew, I scoured the Jungle for the Exploristas, but except for a couple of monkeys and clearing where junkies had hung out I found nothing. They are wily those Exploritas and hid themselves well. I even spent some time moving in the canopy saling from tree to tree on my extended wing flaps making chi chi noises so I would blend in but I never foind them. Perhaps Irian Jaya…..
Well folks, that’s it for now. Tucking back into work, edd work and looking forward to seeing Dad next week. I hope you are all well and I’ll post something more soon.
Chris
Thursday, February 1, 2007
Photos! More Photos
You know one of the nice things about this blog (for which all high marks to Matt)? The pictures! There is, of course, no such thing as too many Ema photos, but all of them are welcome. One cannot, when languishing in the the hinterlands, have too many photos of one's family and these are mightily welcome. Now if Chris and kate would post a few. Chris at the stove merrily cooking yummy dinners, the two of you strolling along the corniche. whatever.
The facility to right-click, save picture as is a wonderful invention! Ema and her bowling prize has now joined my screen savers which cause people to gasp and mutter "ooooooh how cute!" even while I am preparing to chastise them for infringements of my admittedly arbitrary rules of behavior.
The facility to right-click, save picture as is a wonderful invention! Ema and her bowling prize has now joined my screen savers which cause people to gasp and mutter "ooooooh how cute!" even while I am preparing to chastise them for infringements of my admittedly arbitrary rules of behavior.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)