To recap the previous week: I worked, worked some more, and worked again. We're down to the last two productive weeks (since the last week we're here is filled with presentations/presentation practice), so I have a lot of work to do to finish my project. But we have results! And they're good!
Part of the reason for working so much last week was the fact that we had a mandatory all-day trip to Corning (the town) on Friday. We toured a little bit of Corning's (the company) R&D facilities, then went to see the Corning Glass Museum (CMOG). The tour wasn't that exciting, largely, I suspect, because they couldn't show us much due to safety and/or privacy concerns. CMOG was really cool, though. It's a museum devoted entirely to glass, with both artistic and scientific exhibits. They just happened to have three exhibitions of Czech glass while we were there (contemporary sculpture, Communist-era design, and 19th and early 20th century design) that were all really interesting. I'm a sucker for pretty glass, so this was me in hog heaven. Especially amusing to me is that some of the pieces on display from the early part of the 20th century are things that my grandparents own. We only had two hours in the museum, so I didn't really see much else (I almost entirely missed out on the science exhibits). I'd really like to go back, but w/o a car this is problematic.
On Saturday I (finally) went to see Taughannock Falls - they're some 40 feet taller than Niagara, and the gorge around them is quite beautiful, but owing to the fact that it's high summer and it hasn't rained in a while, the waterfall was a shadow of its former self. Still, it was nice to see it and hike around a little bit.
\begin{ShamelessPropaganda}
I've finally started proofreading e-texts for Project Gutenberg again, which is why I haven't gotten lots of sleep the past couple nights. Try it - Distributed Proofreaders is a great way to help out. They have books in English and a little bit of others; if your taste runs to more exotic languages, say Spanish, Czech, or German, try Distributed Proofreaders Europe. It's a great way to read some interesting forgotten literature, as well as getting the warm fuzzies from helping to save a piece of history.
\end{ShamelessPropaganda}
Cheers!
Archive for July, 2005
Ithaca is even more gorgeous
Tuesday, July 26th, 2005Niagara Falls, etc.
Monday, July 18th, 2005
First off, I love Wikipedia, and the kind person(s) who posted the plot summary of the sixth HP book, so I don't have to read it. Yay! (I liked the first three, the fourth was okay, but I can't stand books about teenagers being angst-ridden teenagers. So I stick to my Wiki-notes.) I wonder how many kids have learned to read through HP? I also wonder how many trees went into the millions of books sold, and where they'll end up once the mania is over.
Saturday we took a day trip to Niagara Falls, and it was absolutely awesome, in the original sense of the word. I got soaked twice, once by the waterfall, second time by the rain, but it was well worth it. It's hard to describe the falls and convey the sense of awe that they inspire - the sheer volume of water that flows over them is staggering. The color of the water is unusual too - not the traditional swamp green/brown, but an almost sea-green turquoise. I took some 160 pictures, which is all that my camera could take, but they don't really do the falls justice.
I started off on the American side of the river, doing the Cave of the Winds tour. It's a tour along the base of the Bridle Falls, and the wooden bridges go right up to the waterfall itself. It's very much like a shower, which is why everyone who goes gets a cute little yellow plastic poncho and sandals to help reduce the drenching factor at least somewhat. Me being me, I got drenched anyways. Only afterward did I realize that things don't dry very quickly when it's 95% humidity out. After walking around the bank some more, I went on the Maid of the Mist ride - it's the one where a boat takes you right to the base of the Horseshoe Falls. This time we got cute little blue plastic ponchos.
Unlike the US side of the falls, which was made into a state park, the Canadian side is part of the city, replete with ice cream vendors, souvenir huts, etc. The view of the Horseshoe falls is definitely better from Canada, owing to the fact that the sidewalk extends right up to the edge of the gorge. It's enough to give a person vertigo, watching all that water fall. Unfortunately, while in Canada, I got caught by a flash thunderstorm - it was the first time I'd actually seen lightning streak down and hit something. I was also very glad to not have worn white - the whole world instantly turned into a wet T-shirt contest full of unprepared tourists running for cover. I had to hoof it back to the US to make the bus back to Ithaca, so I trotted through the rain. If the weather at Niagara was anything like Ithaca, that storm was a good 10 days in the making, and certainly felt that way.
Overall, an awesome day. One interesting thing I noticed - there was an overwhelming number of Indian/Middle Eastern and Russian tourists (Indians/Arabs made up something like 50-60% of everyone there). I wonder if that was an anomaly, or the standard state of things.
Saturday we took a day trip to Niagara Falls, and it was absolutely awesome, in the original sense of the word. I got soaked twice, once by the waterfall, second time by the rain, but it was well worth it. It's hard to describe the falls and convey the sense of awe that they inspire - the sheer volume of water that flows over them is staggering. The color of the water is unusual too - not the traditional swamp green/brown, but an almost sea-green turquoise. I took some 160 pictures, which is all that my camera could take, but they don't really do the falls justice.
I started off on the American side of the river, doing the Cave of the Winds tour. It's a tour along the base of the Bridle Falls, and the wooden bridges go right up to the waterfall itself. It's very much like a shower, which is why everyone who goes gets a cute little yellow plastic poncho and sandals to help reduce the drenching factor at least somewhat. Me being me, I got drenched anyways. Only afterward did I realize that things don't dry very quickly when it's 95% humidity out. After walking around the bank some more, I went on the Maid of the Mist ride - it's the one where a boat takes you right to the base of the Horseshoe Falls. This time we got cute little blue plastic ponchos.
Unlike the US side of the falls, which was made into a state park, the Canadian side is part of the city, replete with ice cream vendors, souvenir huts, etc. The view of the Horseshoe falls is definitely better from Canada, owing to the fact that the sidewalk extends right up to the edge of the gorge. It's enough to give a person vertigo, watching all that water fall. Unfortunately, while in Canada, I got caught by a flash thunderstorm - it was the first time I'd actually seen lightning streak down and hit something. I was also very glad to not have worn white - the whole world instantly turned into a wet T-shirt contest full of unprepared tourists running for cover. I had to hoof it back to the US to make the bus back to Ithaca, so I trotted through the rain. If the weather at Niagara was anything like Ithaca, that storm was a good 10 days in the making, and certainly felt that way.
Overall, an awesome day. One interesting thing I noticed - there was an overwhelming number of Indian/Middle Eastern and Russian tourists (Indians/Arabs made up something like 50-60% of everyone there). I wonder if that was an anomaly, or the standard state of things.
It’s a bird! It’s a plane!
Thursday, July 14th, 2005
It's an update!
Yeah, my sense of humor is (somewhat) lacking, but hey, at least I'm updating! ;)
The talk by Paul Fierlinger was reasonably interesting, although not as good as I had hoped. The movies they showed were quite good, though. The Sea Inside is well-deserving of its Oscar - such a gorgeous movie, although bring a box of Kleenex along. Inside Deep Throat, in my opinion, shamelessly made money off titillating movie goers with 70's porn, but it was an interesting documentary nonetheless. Masculin Feminin is one of a legion of art movies I will never quite understand/appreciate. 'Nuff said.
Aside from movies, I (finally) made it to New York this weekend, or, more precisely, the make-up trip one Saturday was highly successful. (The first time around, the bus broke down on the way to NYC, we hung out at a rest stop for some five hours, then came back top Ithaca.) The weather was great, so I was actually able to walk about the city a little bit. But, being the boring me that I am, I pretty much headed straight for the Met (I did get to see downtown Manhattan, I promise.) The museum is huge, and a living testament to the adage that one man's trash is another man's treasure - it has everything from fabulous Impressionist paintings to ancient Indian statues to random, commonplace items picked up in gothic European buildings. It also confirms my belief that oftentimes, the collection of art of a museum's native country is the most boring collection, because the museum feels compelled to show every single painting produced, regardless of its quality. That was certainly true of the American collection - there were some great works, to be sure, but a lot of the art was (in my opinion) wall-filler. Still, I only got to see about half of everything I wanted to see - and I was there for six hours. Next time...
Other events of note recently: We got a tour of Novalis (formerly Alcan), the largest recycler of aluminum cans in North America - they cast aluminum ingots of various alloys, roll them out into long rolls, then sell them off to stamping and pressing companies. Thye tour was pretty good - we got to see the whole process, although not as up close as I would have liked. I was pretty impressed by both the physical cleanliness and layout of the place, as well as their efforts to clean up the manufacturing process itself amnd use less energy. One piece of trivia: when they melt aluminum cans, they actually use the lacquer/paint coating on the outside as fuel to help melt the aluminum. Pretty spiffy.
I also went kayaking on Tuesday - not the cheap play-around-in-the-water kind of kayaking, these people were serious. I can almost do an eskimo roll now (the maneuver where if you roll over in a kayak, you can right yourself back up), in addition to having lots of bug bites and sore arms. During the course of said kayaking session I further learned the perils of going swimming in jeans (and I did plenty of swimming back to shore...) - it's not that they're uncomfortable, but cotton tends to stretch out when wet, so dry jeans that fit have a tendency to float several feet behind you once they get wet. That make swimming just a wee bit tricky. But that's why we have PFD's a.k.a. personal flotation devices a.k.a. lifejackets.
Also on Tuesday, we got a seminar over lunch about how to give scientific presentations (since we have to give a 10-minute presentation to our fellow students, mentors, and grad students at the conclusion of the program). The most notable thing about said seminar was that it was given using a PowerPoint presentation that violated almost all of the rules of good presentations.
Aside from play, work is going pretty well - I'm up to my eyeballs in resin samples, but that means I'm busy and the work is progressing (or at least gives that illusion...)
Yeah, my sense of humor is (somewhat) lacking, but hey, at least I'm updating! ;)
The talk by Paul Fierlinger was reasonably interesting, although not as good as I had hoped. The movies they showed were quite good, though. The Sea Inside is well-deserving of its Oscar - such a gorgeous movie, although bring a box of Kleenex along. Inside Deep Throat, in my opinion, shamelessly made money off titillating movie goers with 70's porn, but it was an interesting documentary nonetheless. Masculin Feminin is one of a legion of art movies I will never quite understand/appreciate. 'Nuff said.
Aside from movies, I (finally) made it to New York this weekend, or, more precisely, the make-up trip one Saturday was highly successful. (The first time around, the bus broke down on the way to NYC, we hung out at a rest stop for some five hours, then came back top Ithaca.) The weather was great, so I was actually able to walk about the city a little bit. But, being the boring me that I am, I pretty much headed straight for the Met (I did get to see downtown Manhattan, I promise.) The museum is huge, and a living testament to the adage that one man's trash is another man's treasure - it has everything from fabulous Impressionist paintings to ancient Indian statues to random, commonplace items picked up in gothic European buildings. It also confirms my belief that oftentimes, the collection of art of a museum's native country is the most boring collection, because the museum feels compelled to show every single painting produced, regardless of its quality. That was certainly true of the American collection - there were some great works, to be sure, but a lot of the art was (in my opinion) wall-filler. Still, I only got to see about half of everything I wanted to see - and I was there for six hours. Next time...
Other events of note recently: We got a tour of Novalis (formerly Alcan), the largest recycler of aluminum cans in North America - they cast aluminum ingots of various alloys, roll them out into long rolls, then sell them off to stamping and pressing companies. Thye tour was pretty good - we got to see the whole process, although not as up close as I would have liked. I was pretty impressed by both the physical cleanliness and layout of the place, as well as their efforts to clean up the manufacturing process itself amnd use less energy. One piece of trivia: when they melt aluminum cans, they actually use the lacquer/paint coating on the outside as fuel to help melt the aluminum. Pretty spiffy.
I also went kayaking on Tuesday - not the cheap play-around-in-the-water kind of kayaking, these people were serious. I can almost do an eskimo roll now (the maneuver where if you roll over in a kayak, you can right yourself back up), in addition to having lots of bug bites and sore arms. During the course of said kayaking session I further learned the perils of going swimming in jeans (and I did plenty of swimming back to shore...) - it's not that they're uncomfortable, but cotton tends to stretch out when wet, so dry jeans that fit have a tendency to float several feet behind you once they get wet. That make swimming just a wee bit tricky. But that's why we have PFD's a.k.a. personal flotation devices a.k.a. lifejackets.
Also on Tuesday, we got a seminar over lunch about how to give scientific presentations (since we have to give a 10-minute presentation to our fellow students, mentors, and grad students at the conclusion of the program). The most notable thing about said seminar was that it was given using a PowerPoint presentation that violated almost all of the rules of good presentations.
Aside from play, work is going pretty well - I'm up to my eyeballs in resin samples, but that means I'm busy and the work is progressing (or at least gives that illusion...)
One (long overdue) update
Tuesday, July 5th, 2005
coming right up - fresh and piping hot!
To recap from my last entry (which everyone has read, of course (okay, so I get wrapped up in research just a little tiny bit too much when I start writing about IFSS in my blog...)), my last set of samples did cooperate with me, so the data looks as good as can be expected.
Last Friday, when my roommates were gallivanting off to NYC, our research group cleaned our lab - at some unspecified day in July, as the dep't. chair informed Anil, the safety inspector will pay us a visit, so everything better be shipshape. That means it's back to closed-toe shoes and long pants (as opposed to skirts and sandals). At least I don't have to wear safety glasses and a labcoat. Cleaning the lab was actually pretty fun - I got to employ my oft-unused skills at throwing out everything (hey, it's easier than putting it away ;)!) even remotely useless. Then I got to wash many sinks full of glassware we don't use anymore. Good thing, too, since I broke some four beakers/flasks. I mean, honestly, how does Pyrex expect round-bottom flasks to stay upright? After the cleaning extravaganza, Xiasong and I went to meet with Anil and talk about the results so far - Anil was happy, so I'm happy. Then, as reward, we went out for Cornell ice cream (not to be confused with ordinary, run-of-the-mill ice cream!) and talked about anything but work. In the evening, I went to go see fireworks over Ithaca College (no, I don't know why fireworks in Ithaca are on the 1st, and not the 4th.) They were small, but nice.
Saturday one of our RA's organized a strawberry picking outing, followed by strawberry shortcake extravaganza. The strawberries were pretty good, the shortcake very good, especially since I didn't have to bake it ;)! The rest of the day was spent bumming around the Commons and reading books in used book stores.
Sunday I wanted to go canoing in Cauyuga Lake, but forgot that this was the busiest day of the year and, therefore, no canoes were available anymore. So I took advantage of the beautiful day and went hiking at Buttermilk Falls instead. The falls were very nice, but even nicer was the walk itself - I inadvertently climbed up to above Ithaca College, which is on a hill opposite Cornell's hill, so I got great views of both Cayuga Lake and Cornell as I walked down to the Commons and back up the other side of the valley.
Monday I spent being an unabashed bum - I was definitely feeling the ten or so miles from Sunday, so I lazed about, watched DVD's, and did laundry. And I saw the DC, NYC, and Boston fireworks on TV. Boston was the best, followed by NYC and then DC - sorry Will, Sa'am, and co!
This week is my week of movies - today I went to see Paul Fierlinger's Drawn from Memory (he's an animator from Czechoslovakia, and he's coming to talk tomorrow (I'm there...)), Thursday is the Sea Inside, then Masculin Feminin and Inside Deep Throat - yipee!
To recap from my last entry (which everyone has read, of course (okay, so I get wrapped up in research just a little tiny bit too much when I start writing about IFSS in my blog...)), my last set of samples did cooperate with me, so the data looks as good as can be expected.
Last Friday, when my roommates were gallivanting off to NYC, our research group cleaned our lab - at some unspecified day in July, as the dep't. chair informed Anil, the safety inspector will pay us a visit, so everything better be shipshape. That means it's back to closed-toe shoes and long pants (as opposed to skirts and sandals). At least I don't have to wear safety glasses and a labcoat. Cleaning the lab was actually pretty fun - I got to employ my oft-unused skills at throwing out everything (hey, it's easier than putting it away ;)!) even remotely useless. Then I got to wash many sinks full of glassware we don't use anymore. Good thing, too, since I broke some four beakers/flasks. I mean, honestly, how does Pyrex expect round-bottom flasks to stay upright? After the cleaning extravaganza, Xiasong and I went to meet with Anil and talk about the results so far - Anil was happy, so I'm happy. Then, as reward, we went out for Cornell ice cream (not to be confused with ordinary, run-of-the-mill ice cream!) and talked about anything but work. In the evening, I went to go see fireworks over Ithaca College (no, I don't know why fireworks in Ithaca are on the 1st, and not the 4th.) They were small, but nice.
Saturday one of our RA's organized a strawberry picking outing, followed by strawberry shortcake extravaganza. The strawberries were pretty good, the shortcake very good, especially since I didn't have to bake it ;)! The rest of the day was spent bumming around the Commons and reading books in used book stores.
Sunday I wanted to go canoing in Cauyuga Lake, but forgot that this was the busiest day of the year and, therefore, no canoes were available anymore. So I took advantage of the beautiful day and went hiking at Buttermilk Falls instead. The falls were very nice, but even nicer was the walk itself - I inadvertently climbed up to above Ithaca College, which is on a hill opposite Cornell's hill, so I got great views of both Cayuga Lake and Cornell as I walked down to the Commons and back up the other side of the valley.
Monday I spent being an unabashed bum - I was definitely feeling the ten or so miles from Sunday, so I lazed about, watched DVD's, and did laundry. And I saw the DC, NYC, and Boston fireworks on TV. Boston was the best, followed by NYC and then DC - sorry Will, Sa'am, and co!
This week is my week of movies - today I went to see Paul Fierlinger's Drawn from Memory (he's an animator from Czechoslovakia, and he's coming to talk tomorrow (I'm there...)), Thursday is the Sea Inside, then Masculin Feminin and Inside Deep Throat - yipee!