Big money, yes whammies.

Good news: I was awarded a travel grant for the trip to AGU. This benefits the school more than it benefits me, since it means that they can keep some of the money I have/plan to spend on a hotel, car and more but it does look good for my reputation as a bread winner. Science like those people.

Bad news: I had another Thermo test calamity. I felt great about my answers but since I did a few switcho-changeo tricks on a variable here and an exponent there, I lost a bunch of points. I didn't fail but I couldn't have gotten much more than a C. As I have said before, though, I recognize more and more with each exam that there is a difference between getting points on an exam and getting the correct answer to the same problem outside of the exam period. I know for certain that if I had written what I wrote, went to lunch and thought about something completely unrelated, then returned to the problems, I would have immediately seen the errors and fixed them. It's as though I just need to reset my brain for a short interval. The point is that I know the material and that is all I really care about.

I guess that's all the musing for now. Just like last semester, Drs. Pohl and Portnoy have piled on the homework at the end of the semester so I have a lot of stuff to do in the next two-and-a-half weeks. At least I can feel even more justified for leaving Friday's!

Easy like Sunday Morning

I came to the lab a few hours ago, thinking that the space would be air conditioned and that I would be less distracted here. The latter seems to be correct but I was mistaken to presume the former and am now paying for the sin of assumption. I, as I'm sure most people do, think of the two best aspects of spring/summer: the warmer weather and longer days. What I often forget, though, is how oppressive the humidity can be for someone who reacts to it the way I do. I hate it. Here is what I'm talking about: I slept until 10:30 today and though I know that I was tired from a long day yesterday, I blame some of my sluggishness on the sticky warmth. Now, sitting in the lab, I can't shake the feeling of having just woken up, even though it is 3pm; that, too, is at least due in part to the heat. So what I need to do is move my computer outside...Hmm. Maybe I'll just go to lunch soon and take my time traveling to and from.

Good news last: I had my last shift at Friday's until June last night. It feels really nice to know that I can devote my full attention to school work and projects and that I don't have to spend that extra brain juice each week deciding how I am going to structure my school time to fit around Friday's time. Of course I caved in and promised that I would show my face once or twice in the coming month but I guess I never said anything about not going there at all to see those of my coworkers who I count as friends (though I do have to treat it like any other money-sucking bar and avoid it except for rare occasions).

Hope fully

The big news of late is that my proposal for a summer research fellowship was met with open arms (wallets) by whomever is important enough to decide which students get the awards and which don't. That means that I can work at the lab full-time this summer without costing Marc a dime, that I will have this to put on my resume and that closure has finally been brought to that two-week-long near-heart-attack that I experienced from the end of February into the wee days of March. The work will be similar to what I'm doing now but I will be able to dig more deeply into it since I will have my full attention to devote. I will likely work a bit at Friday's but the details haven't been ironed out. I have taken a leave of absence, effective after next weekend, to last until the beginning of June. By that time, tests and projects will be handed in and I will have returned from my wild road trip to AGU in Toronto. Do you know what else I will do this summer? I will play some music, damn it (excuse me). I will actually spend time writing songs and playing music with other people. Won't that be lovely?

Just right

That title means nothing with regard to this post. The "Title" field auto-fills old post titles when I enter a letter (like lots of online forms do when you start to enter your name or address) so I decided to start from the beginning of the alphabet and keep trying letters until I got to the first one that didn't bring up any old titles. That means that you are reading the first ever An Expensive Habit post whose title begins with 'J'.

Hurray!!! Balloons!!! Champagne!!!

I don't have to work until Saturday night and boy does that feel great. (Disclaimer: I understand that it will hurt me financially). I felt so clear-headed today; I spent extra time learning material that will be next year's extension to what we learned in calc today and I think I may have even been more productive with my time. I like to know that I can dig more deeply than the minimum necessary to get an assignment done.

So I started to post the following to facebook as part of my impromptu sociolinguistic rant and, though I still may do so, I thought it only fair that I post first to this blog.

I had a brief exchange with a class member today in which I said "ambiguous" a few times when describing something related to the lesson. Specifically, I told him that the request to find a certain point in polar coordinates seemed ambiguous because there are two angles that have the same cosine (and two that have the same sine, of course). I must have had to say it a few times because he suggested that we use a different word: he wanted to say "inconsistent." The problem, I told him, is that there is no inconsistency. The mix-up that I called "ambiguous" happens every time for the same reason. That is not inconsistent. The point is that words have meanings.

In my next installment, I remind someone, casually and without malice, that punctuation also has meaning. Then I quickly add that I am no punctuating pro myself.

Does anyone want to start a campaign to reinstate the adverb? Maybe I should start with a facebook group.

I just wrote a facebook note about making small talk and I tried to paste it here but Blogger didn't like that. I think it's another anit-mac attack. Booo. The gist was that I saw this comic  and realized that I often consider how best to approach this situation. I have to walk a fine line between speaking the social language and refusing to engage in meaningless conversation. Maybe this gets me in trouble when I don't realize it... 

We had a (planned) fire at (Jim/Anna/Kristie/Matt)'s last night; I smell happily of wood smoke. I have been working all day on math homework and I have to go to Friday's soon. It's a drab day, which makes going there a little easier. 

Now I am going to play the guitar, which I haven't done in a while. Check out the permanent link to xkcd if you like. It's geek humor though, so you don't have to get it if you don't want to.

Back together

Every couple fights or has arguments or gets mutually annoyed but it seems to me that the test of love is the ability to get through all that and come back together. We are no different; after some bitter disagreement and the feeling that nothing was going to work out right, physics and I have overcome our differences and are more in love than ever. True, those tests last week didn't go well but I have learned to better interpret what physics means when it tells me that I'm wrong. It is only being honest out of a caring spirit. It only wants to see me succeed. I didn't have to work at Friday's today so I spent all day doing homework that is due tomorrow and it's a good thing that I did because it allowed me to spend some welcome time wrapping my brain around what is happening in my classes. I also went to the lab and spent some time fixing up files for the ducting study. It turns out that I needn't have done that because the other Matt was able to use the old data files but that's okay. It was nice to do some programming again after a month of tediously running the main program over and over and over and over and...

...over and over and over and...

I just chalk those hours up to becoming more familiar with the programming software. 

I got new glasses on Friday. The frames are a fairly standard width but the lenses are larger so that I am not so aware of them. I used to get headaches because the other frames would slip down on my nose and I would end up looking over the tops as though they were some ad hoc bifocals. No more! These ones are big and dorky and great.

That's all. I have been glad to have a few conversations with Dad and to hear that he is at least doing well in spirit, if a bit bored. Maybe I'll bring him a laptop and he can waste a few hours running through spectrogram plots.

...over and over and over...