Sinking Under a Mid-Term

Sorry for the dearth of posts lately. I have been out of town (about which I plan to post), and this is the end of my mid-term crunch, and I have a Monday 8:00AM exam.
Molecular Gas Dynamics!!!! Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner...

I give you Light and Shadows...

If you haven't done so already, visit my wife's blog today. Her latest post is high literature.

MS 150

The MS-150 fund-raising bike ride from Austin to Houston is in progress at present. The MS-150 is a bike tour that raises some millions of dollars annually for research into treatment and cures for multiple sclerosis. I have participated in a similar fund raiser (the Pan-Mass Challenge, for the Jimmy Fund), and am somewhat familiar with this kind of thing.

I wanted to hilight a neat thing going on this year. My friend Steve works at National Instruments, and he told me about the team they are fielding this year, which, appropriately enough, features fully instrumented riders, whose vital signs and position data is updated live to the web. Check it out here. Very cool.

Micro-Retraction

OK, I have a little, minor, micro-retraction to make regarding my previous bash of the latest version of Microsoft Office. My previous post is all true, and I stand by everything I said there, but there is actually a little bit of redemption for Microsoft.

First, here's the back-story: I'm leaving Monday to go to the 2008 SAE World Congress in Detroit, where I will be presenting my first publication! In preparation for going, I have been making sure that I have all the appropriate cables, software, etc. for delivering my presentation. After a failed attempt to get a mini-DVI to VGA adapter on eBay (they sent a similar-looking but incompatible adapter, the mini-VGA to VGA) , I hoofed it over to the campus computer store to get the right thing. While I was there, I saw a Mac up and running a demo of the new Office 2008 for Mac. I thought, why don't I see whether the badness was perpetuated in the Mac version... Imagine my surprise to find all of the best features were preserved, and they actually managed to make it better: customizable toolbars, actually helpful help, etc. One big improvement was that it now correctly reads figures from Windows machines where it used to improperly rotate the text in figure axes; this was a point of constant consternation for me when I had to transfer files back and forth with my adviser. That was enough to convince me to buy it (at the academic price of $29, how could I go wrong?).

So I still have a gripe, which is not really relevant anymore, but could have an implication for my friend Sam, who is on the Mac-Windows fence: How could MS manage to get it so wrong for its Windows products and right for its Mac products? And also, what's up with the 350MB of updates I have to install?! They only published the software in February. That's a lot of things to fix already in April, IMHO.

(You may legitimately accuse me of making a mountain from a mole-hill, but it's the little things that matter sometimes. I realize I've staked my entire opinion of MS Office on the ability to customize the toolbars. That's just who I am... ;-)  )

A Life Goal I'd Like to Share

I'm sitting here in my engines lab (one of my last efforts to be graded), with head pounding from carbon monoxide, high CO2, and various hydrocarbons. I've been fixing the emissions measurement bench in a for-show-only attempt to make this lab work. As soon as we get one instrument fixed, another fails. There is no budget for this lab, and there is not one single person who takes care of it, so it ends up getting hodge-podge maintenance from those of us who are not scared to lift maintenance hatches. I'm taking a break while someone else attempts to fix some software that, thankfully, I know nothing about.
It's 5:18. The lab started at 2:00. It's supposed to end at 6:00. We have no data yet. Same thing happened in the last session.
My thoughts wander. Here, is what I'd rather be doing.


A life goal of mine is to get certified to fly sailplanes. One day, when there's time and a few extra dollars, I'll indulge maybe. Enjoy the 4-minute preview.

Milestone Passed

Wow I'm on a blogging kick! I'll keep this one short.
Yesterday I managed to line up the last of my dissertation thesis committee members, and now I'm scheduling the first meeting to defend my research proposal. Once I'm through this they'll wave their hands, and I change from Ph.D. student to doctoral candidate. That means I'll have attained to ABD status (All But Dissertation, a chronic condition for some).
It also means that I'm spending a lot of time now getting my dissertation research proposal ready. Woohoo! Lots of quality time with the computer.

Folder Size for Windows XP

Rather than just complain about how Windows XP does not calculate folder sizes like Mac OS X does, I decided that someone, somewhere must have done something about this already. It turns out they did. Click here for a nifty little tool to show folder sizes along with file sizes in details view.
In case you're wondering (as I'm sure my DW will) why I would even bother with this, it helps to know how big folders are when I'm cleaning out the hard drive, looking for junk to throw away to make more space. This is an issue because I run XP on a 10GB partition of my MacBook and Windows is such a bloated disk hog. Oops. I was going to try to not bash Microsoft, but I guess I just couldn't make it...