AK Trip Itinerary

here's our preliminary trip itinerary. we'll certainly deviate, but it is a starting point.

Bagging It

so keith has been working on baggage for his motorcycle. on sunday we went on a marathon shopping trip to get some bags to go on the rack that he has built. one of the things we found was saddle bags at the army surplus store. keith didn't want them vibrant army green.

so we got some dye from wal-mart and plunked the bags in the dye in a bucket in the backyard. we used a handle from a plunger to poke the bag and keep it aggitated in the dye bath for 30 min. and turned the bag around in the bath using our hands with some nitrile gloves on. we were hoping for a charcoal gray. it came out darker.... still definately green, but darker, muted. so that came out alright.
UPDATE:
here's some pictures of bag modifications. for additional support we added some straps that go from the back of the bag, around the bottom and then will hook into the existing D-rings. also added was a microsuede backing to the bag which covers the straps on the back side of the bag so things don't rub as much on the seat of the bike.

Done .... (almost)

so my defense went well... exceptionally short. 1 hr including their deliberation time of a couple minutes and signing my papers. so now i just have to do my corrections and then turn in my crapola of papers. should be all done by friday.

yay!

Pray and Cross your Fingers

from a comment prompt....
my defense of my ph.d. is this tuesday 25 july at 9 am. so hopefully i'll pass and everyone will sign my papers and i'll be done (except for the grammar edits which are sure to be turned in by the committee).
so hopefully by the end of july i'll have all my paperwork turned in and i'll officially be graduated in august.

Quote

from a simpsons we watched last night:
Bart Simpson: Hey look at me! I'm a grad student. I'm 30 and I made $600 last year.
Marge Simpson: Bart! Don't make fun of grad students - they just made a terrible life choice.


classic!

A Glass of Iced Tea

yesterday i made some iced tea from celestial seasonings bengal spice tea (adding some sugar while brewing the hot tea). the curious thing is that i drink it from a glass glass. i prefer to drink most of the time at home from a plastic cup. water, pop, juice. but iced tea i have some great need to drink from a glass made from glass.

Excel as a Scientific Calculator

there are many things excel can do and it does a pretty good job at even though it is designed around being a financial piece of software. for instance it has some decent column picking capabilities and does regression (can even get it to spit out some sheet calculations on many types of functions by modifing the x column(s) you choose for it). so people use it for scientific data analysis. myself included.

but it has some definate shortfalls that a good piece of scientific software would fix. for instance the ability to pick peaks out of a spectrum would be nice. also nice would be if you could enter data in min.sec and have it convert to seconds for analysis purposes. you can get excel to do these things but it takes some fanangling.

there is probably a better program out there to do scientific analysis but tradition, familiarity, and the fact that many people already have excel because they buy ms office means that excel will probably stay in the scientific toolbox for a long time to come.