She made it!

(Originally posted on Monday, June 13, 2005 by Tim)

So our Thursday quest to get Cathy to graduation was filled with stress and angst, but mostly successful.

As described in the previous post, we had driven over 4 hours to Dulles Airport to catch a flight that would land us at LAX at 9:30 am. Graduation starts at 10:00 am. We had a very stressful morning. It was so stressful that I can?t actually bring myself to write about it at length. Essentially, everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. Well no, we didn?t run out of gas.

Here is a quick summary of what went wrong at Dulles Airport on Friday.

1. It took 30 minutes to get from the parking lot to the airport.
2. United?s e-ticket machines didn?t recognize that Cat had a ticket.
3. United?s e-ticket machines brought up ticket information for ?Andre Jahn? when I inserted my credit card.
4. An alert United employee directed us to the wrong line.
5. Cat got her ticket fixed but couldn?t fix mine because I was still holding our place in the ?wrong line?.
6. We missed our flight and got put on one with an arrival time of 10:30 am. Remember, graduation starts at 10 am.

It was really a very awful morning. Yet despite all the forces of fate against her, Cat still managed to get to graduation in time to be officially ?hooded?. The bulk of the credit goes to the Caltech Graduation Czar, Deborah White, and Cat?s Dad?s mad taxi driver skills. Jim literally sped up the sidewalk at Caltech, Cat jumped out the car, and Deborah rushed her over to the podium where she was slipped in as the last person to receive her degree at graduation. The picture above is not one taken by me, but one taken by an official Caltech photographer and posted on the Caltech website. I think that Cat?s expression adequately communicates what she had been through that morning.

In addition to the picture, there?s a whole video of graduation on the Caltech web site. You can download if for viewing here for broadband or here for modem. Rather than make you watch the entire thing, I thought I?d point out the important parts. It?s best to watch this while listening to the theme to Mission Impossible.

Under the section labeled ?Presentation of Doctoral Degrees.?
22:02 Cat runs onto the platform in the upper right hand corner of the screen.
22:06 Deborah on her walkie talkie calling Cat in.
22:15 Cat?s name is discussed in the background.
22:40 Cat gets her hood!
22:50 Someone says, ?You made it!?
22:56 David Baltimore (the President of Caltech) has to chase Cat down to hand over her diploma. For those of you who can?t read lips, she?s says, ?Where do I go??

I think that Cat and I have really bad travel karma and Jim and Carol have really good travel karma. Essentially, once Jim and Carol picked us up, everything started to go right. An example of this can be seen in the ?Introduction to Commencement? section of the video. Note that at 28:40 there is a 65 second ?moment of confusion?. Without this ?moment? David Baltimore would have begun his concluding remarks before Cat arrived.

So that was our Friday morning. The rest of the vacation has been a lot of fun and mostly stress free. I?ll try to post more later in the week.

Yeah Right

(Originally posted on Thursday, June 9, 2005 by Tim)

I have to write in here more often, or go to Roanoke Airport less, or both. Two posts in a row focused on our travel woes seems like a bit much.

Cat and I are on our way to CA once again. This time we're off for her to walk at graduation and to vacation with her parents for a few days. I'm looking forward to relaxing, eating good food, and spending some time with Cat's folks. However, to get to CA, we have to go through the purgatory that is Roanoke airport. This time we decided to double curse ourselves by choosing Roanoke and the corporate disaster that is United Airlines.

I could speculate that United is yet another terrorist organization trying to drain the productivity from this great land of ours. However, I have yet to see a United employee throwing ducks at landing Delta jets, so I have to conclude that they¡¦re just hopelessly disorganized.

For today¡¦s adventure, we were trying to get to Dulles to catch a connection to LAX. Before we even left the house we were pretty much doomed. The flight we were taking to Dulles comes into Roanoke and then flies back again. When Cat looked up information on that flight, it listed as "Delayed due to equipment swap." I don't think basic math skills are highly valued at United (can you say bankruptcy proceedings). The incoming flight was delayed by 2 hours and our outgoing flight on the same plane was listed as A OK on time! Hold on, it gets better.

We jump in the car and Cat calls United on her cell phone. It begins with her fighting with their voice recognition system.

Cat: 8077
(pause)
Cat: no
(pause)
Cat: 8077
(pause)
Cat: No
(pause)
Cat: 8077
(pause)
Cat: NO!

I couldn't hear the computer on the other end, but I think I can extrapolate from what Cat was saying. I'd like to thank Mom and Dad for all those expensive years of college, without which I would be unable to accomplish intellectual feats such as this.

Too Happy Computer Guy: Welcome to the United Automated Arrival/Departure system. What flight number?

Cat: 8077

Too Happy Computer Guy: 1775? Did you know that 1775 was the year that the first vintage port was created?

Cat: no

Too Happy Computer Guy: Amazing huh? How many bottles do you think were made that year?

Cat: 8077

Too Happy Computer Guy: That is a whole lot of bottles. They had not quite developed automated bottling methods back then. Do you really think it was that many?

Cat: No

Too Happy Computer Guy: I always get distracted when people start talking about port wines. What was the flight number again?

Cat: 8077

Too Happy Computer Guy: Speaking of port, we have a lovely steak tartar that we server on westbound flights. It is served with the United house port. Shall I replace your reserved vegetarian meal?

Cat: NO!

Well, more adventures have ensued which have resulted in our staying overnight at Brian and Anduin's house this evening (thanks Brian). We're still hoping to get Cat to graduation on time tomorrow. Wish us luck!

Congratulations Dr. S.!

(Originally posted on Tuesday, May 10, 2005 by Tim)

Well, this is 2 weeks delayed at this point. I blame finals week and the nice weather and grant writing and...well you get the picture.

The title says it all. Cat and I journeyed out to Southern California this week for her Ph.D. defense which she passed with flying colors. I was torn on the title for this post. I wanted to name it, Cathy's big adventure after the cornucopia of mechanical problems that Delta subjected us to on Tuesday.

It all started in Roanoke airport. There are several things that I dislike about living removed from civilization and Roanoke airport is one of them. You can't go anywhere direct from Roanoke and it seems like we get delayed 50% of the time leaving the place. The worst thing is that the delays can be caused by events across the country. We have been delayed in Roanoke due to weather problems in Chicago and mechanical problems in San Francisco. As far as I can figure, if one of the luggage guys in Atlanta develops a hang nail, it translates into a delay at Roanoke.

Well, this time the delay was actually caused at Roanoke. It seems that when our plane was landing, it hit a bird. Said bird was clearly trying to get at the pilot because it bounced off the windshield rather than getting sucked through the engines. Come to think of it, the bird may have been a terrorist trying to bring our great nation to its knees by causing delays at Roanoke airport. I wonder if it had a laser pointer? In any case, the bird hit the windshield and took off the windshield wiper. Apparently the FFA considers windshield wipers essential and we couldn't take off until it was fixed. Of course it wasn't that simple. First, we were told our flight was canceled. At this point, everyone gets up and charges the attendant. Cat grabbed her cell phone and ran down to the ticket counter to try and make changes there. I sat and courageously guarded the luggage. I wasn't going to let it out of my sight and allow some crazy plane charging bird get at it.

After roughly 30 minutes, the attendant comes back on and tells us he was kidding, they didn't cancel our flight after all. It seems the maintenance guys were able to pull a wiper blade off an old VW bus out in the parking lot and attach it to our plane with a liberal amount of duct tape. Cathy comes back from the ticket counter and, with high hopes of making our connection, we get on the plane. Unfortunately, an on time take off was not to be. After we get into the plane, we end up sitting at the gate for 40 minutes. Eventually the pilot comes on and tells us that our resourceful maintenance guys forgot to write the make and model of the VW bus in the repair log. For us to take off, this critical information must be inscribed in the tome of repairs. So all they have to do now is find the maintenance guys and get the information they need for the log. This takes another 20 minutes and needless to say, we've missed our connection in Cincinati.

Arriving at Cincinati, we find that Delta has rebooked us on a later flight to Los Angeles. The flight is two hours later, but still gets us in at a resonable hour. I'm thinking, "Ok, not perfect, but it isn't too bad". Of course I should have knocked on wood or sacrificed a small animal or whatever one does to ward off bad luck in that situation. It turns out that our plane in Cincinati is also broken. I actually didn't listen to what the problem was, but they went and put us on a different plane, resulting in another one hour of delay. Cat was enjoying the extra time to work on her thesis and I managed to get this cheerful picture of her. Our new plane is coming in from San Francisco and there are some sort of delays there (probably mechanical). They keep bumping back our departure time and we lose another hour waiting for it to come on. Now, we're looking at getting to the hotel at something like 1:30 am in the morning.

Finally our plane arrives and we board. Then we sat at the gate for over an hour, big surprise huh. Eventually, one of the ground crew comes on the intercom and says, "We've been here at the gate for some time and we just wanted to let you know what is going on. There's a small fuel leak in the right engine and we're waiting for a ground crew to come look at it and tell us if it's too big a leak for us to take off." A SMALL FUEL LEAK! Clearly, someone needs to school these Delta guys in a little creative lying. If not creative lying, how about a little creative not giving out all the details.

So we wait some more. Meanwhile, as is always the case with these things, we have someone freaking out adjacent to our seats. This time the individual is in front of us. He calls the flight attendant over and says, "Can the Captain make an announcement? I'm a liscenced pilot and I'd never take off with a fuel leak." The flight attendent informs him that jets fly with small fuel leaks all the time and that he's welcome to walk up and talk to the Captain or get off the plane if he feels uncomfortable. Well he doesn't talk to the Captain and he doesn't get off the plane. The first thing he does is call his significant other and tell her/him to sue Delta should the plane goes down. Next he and the women across the isle start going on about how crazy it is to take off with a fuel leak and mutually raise each other's anxiety level. The flight attendent finally has to come over and tell him "mostly politely" to quiet down as he's scaring the natives.

Eventually the mechanics get there and determine that the leak is not large enough to prevent us from streaking through the troposphere. The Captain does come on and inform us that the leak is one drop every two seconds. I do a quick (and conservative) calculation in my head and inform the pullus minimus in front of us that it translates into us losing a whole liter of fuel over our four hour trip.

Finally, we pull out from the gate. Yay! We taxi out on the runway. Yay! We're 10th in line to take off. Yay! Well, ok, not yay, but we are in line. Then we sit. We sit for at least 30 minutes before the Captain comes on again and informs us that he has an "indicator" in the left engine and we have to go back to the gate. It turns out that the indicator is a fuel valve that needs to be replaced. We've now been on the ground so long that our flight crew is running out of time before they have to take a break and get us a new crew due to FFA regulations. So we sit on the runway for 25 minutes hoping that we get the fuel valve changed in time. If we don't, they need to get another flight crew and we will certainly be stuck in Cincinati overnight.

Well, people like to say that "Alls well that ends well." They managed to chainge the valve in time and rest of our flight was without event. We landed in Los Angeles at 2:30 am and got to our motel at 3:30 am. Cathy managed to get enough sleep to do very well at her defense and she is now Dr. S. I've attached some of the pictures from her defense below for your viewing.

Picture captions in reading order are:
1. Cathy opening champagne.
2. Cathy, Cynthia (Lab Administrative Assistant) and Marie (Lab Technical writer).
3. Cathy and Steve (Advisor).
4. Cathy and Steve (Advisor).
5. Happy Cathy.
6. Cathy, Rhonda (Lab Manager), Cynthia and Marie.
7. Cathy in the Mayo Labs.
8. Cathy outdoors.
9. Cathy by the DNA fountain.

Spring Flowers

(Originally posted on Sunday, April 24, 2005 by Tim)

My goodness it's been a long time since I've written in here. I could blame the insanely busy school year, but World of Warcraft (the new video game Cat and I are playing) gets some credit too. With all this stuff going on, we haven't had too much chance to try out new meals. It has been old, and easy, comfort food of late. Lots of Boca^TM burgers with corn on the cob and potato soup for us. We do have a new, and easy, vegetable fajita recipe but I'll leave that for a later post. Today I will talk about the flowers in our yard.

Cat and I put in some bulbs last fall. It's the first time we've seriously put in bulbs from a landscaping point of view. We did put a bunch in the brick flower boxes at the old place but that doesn't really count in my mind for some reason. Maybe it's because there were supposed to be flowers there.

In any case, we put a few hundred bulbs in last fall running along the fence and right in front of the house by the steps. Most of those bulbs have been coming up this spring. Some sad sad bulbs decided to come up during a warm spell this winter and got themselves a very rude surprise. In addition to the bulbs we planted, there have been some nice surprises in the yard. Apparently someone planted a bunch of bulbs at some point and all the flowers were gone by the time we moved into the house last summer. Either that or all the flowers were keeping their heads down for fear of the old wiring resulting in a fireball.

Of the flowers we have planted, daffodils and tulips have begun to bloom. Unfortunately I only have a picture of the daffodils at the moment. The tulips came up over the last few days and there is a nice variety of red, orange and white. We have a whole army of them that came up along the west fence that haven't bloomed yet. I'm expecting them to look quite good. You might want to click on these pictures to get a better view.

As I mentioned, we have a number of surprises in the yard that we weren't expecting. There are a number of daffodils coming up around the yard. We have a few coming up next to the grape vines. These are right next to the door and the dogs love them. I somehow doubt the feeling is mutual.

We also have a large bunch of daffodils coming up right next to the blackberry vines. The dogs don't seem to like these as much. I think the thorny blackberries and the daffodils have some sort of symbiotic arrangement. I have yet to figure out what the blackberries get out of it. I kept going back and forth on whether or not I should take the blackberries out. On one hand, they are a very invasive weed growing close to the house. On the other hand, they make blackberries. In the end, I was never next to them with a clippers and some spare time on my hands so they will get at least one more summer.

The yard also has a nice collection of purple and white wildflowers in the lawn. I've seen this sort of thing in a few yards around here. It looks very nice. I've been thinking of asking around to see if there is a way to encourage more of these to grow.

We also have this clump of surprise daffodils and crocuses in the front by the steps. These appear to have been growing thick for a number of years. I have a friend in Physics who is good with plants and landscaping. He has said that you need to dig things like this up and split up the bulbs. Digging up bulbs to just replant at the end of every couple years offends my sensibilities somehow. I want to plant bulbs and have them come up forever with little or no maintenance. Maybe if I was to plant roses? You just need to hack those back every once and a while, no?

Finally, we've a bunch of these purple things coming up in the front by the steps. I originally thought I had planted them, but I've found them in a couple of other places in the yard where I do not think I planted anything. When I dug up this section in the front, I dug into a bunch of bulbs that were already there. I think these are some of those I dug up. Note my attractive dead leaf mulch that I put in last fall. This stuff didn't turn out looking as nice as I would have hoped. I may have to consider real mulch next year.

Whining about computers.

(Originally posted on Monday, February 14, 2005 by Cathy)

I'm
having major issues with assembling large documents in Word. I just
assembled a three chapter research proposal that included 5 hours of
swearing and ultimately printing (to PDF) the 65 page document in a
dozen small chunks, reassembling in a different order with Acrobat,
then manually editing the pages in acrobat to fix the page numbers.
Utter misery.

The crux of my problem is that The Desired Format for these
things is body text, then endnotes, then tables/figure legends/figure
(any of which may include references which must be included in the
afore-mentioned endnotes). I used to do my endnotes with EndNote,
which didn't mind much if I picked up the endnotes and plunked them
down in the middle of the file. (It wouldn't do it automatically, but
at least I could do it manually.) Unfortunately, EndNote is
expensive, and I no longer am in a place with a site license.

So I figured I'd use Word's built-in endnotes. How bad could it
be? Bad, very bad. Word doesn't let you move endnotes around in the
document (putting them at the end of the section doesn't work, since
I need some endnotes to show up BEFORE the section that references
them). It doesn't let you cut and paste them to another document so
that you can print the pieces in the right order (unless you want
them all renumbered to '1'). It doesn't handle multiple uses of the
same endnote in a nice way either.

(Word also likes to majorly screw up formatting if one dares to
use a master document to join together separate chapters, but that's
another
story.)

I tried yanking my word documents over into OpenOffice
as an 11th hour solution to my problem. No luck, in fact,
OpenOffice's conversion of my Endnotes made them their own separate
sections (I think?), and I couldn't move them in OO either. This
isn't OpenOffice's fault, since it was dealing with my stupid word
file, but I haven't been able to find much about what OpenOffice's
native endnote capabilities are. (I see that it has some, I'd like to
hear from Chez Modi's extensive readership how well they're working for you.)

So here's my question: Suppose you need pretty powerful endnote
and cross-referencing abilities. And you need to deal with 200 page
documents (including figures) without too many hiccoughs, preferably
as sub-documents. And it'd be nice if captioning figures and
cross-referencing to them was less of a pain than it was in Word.
(It's entirely possible to get some adjacent text included in the
figure caption, which makes cross-referencing it VERY strange.)
Should I be using OpenOffice? Should I buy EndNote and just deal with
Word's lousy handling of figures (which might be tolerable if Word
wasn't also screwing up my endnotes). Is there a better piece of
software that won't totally break my (impoverished grad student)
budget? (Aside: I write on a newer machine running XP and a 3-year
old machine running Win 2000.)

P.S. to those keeping track - I'm on a plane to Caltech on Thursday to defend my props at long last!

TY is a Better Photographer

(Originally posted on Sunday, October 31, 2004 by Tim)

Ok, I expected TY to take better pictures than Sam and he proved me right. Click here to see the pictures that TY took. Alot more of them are better including the amazing one at the right.

Dog Cam!

(Originally posted on Sunday, October 31, 2004 by Tim)

Cat and I generally "chat" over ICQ every day. Part of this "conversation" is us sending each other links that we find on the internet while we are "working". One of the links she recently sent led me to the James Bond Spy Camera on ThinkGeek.com. Now I just had to have one of these. It's tiny and it has all sorts of cool features. It can record audio, it can record 30 seconds of video and audio, and best of all, it can be programmed to take a picture every minute for an hour and a half.

What to do with this technology. Well, the web site recommends setting the camera up in covert locations and recording "sensitive data". I'm sure you can easily imagine what they are hinting at here. If not, the ThinkGeek web site has some example user photos. This playing around with such a cool little toy seemed like such a waste to me. You could use this device to do science. With it, mysteries of the universe could be solved. Mysteries like, "What do dogs do when they are out in the yard?"*

To accomplish this task, we needed a way to securely fasten the camera to one of the dog's collars. I wanted a method that would be reversible and robust. This, of course, required a trip to Home Depot. Apparently they have missed us there since school started. The gentleman who we asked for help with our project asked us how the work on the house was going. For those of you who are into investing, I'd hold off on buying Home Depot this quarter. I'm sure their corporate earnings have fallen off now that Cat and I have slowed down on our work on the house. In the end, we decided on a applying a wall mount to each side of the camera. Through the wall mounts, we ran a nylon cable tie and attached a keyring to it. The keyring is then attached to a dog's collar such that the camera is facing forward. The camera is then set to take a picture every minute and the dog sent out into the yard.

Sam was the obvious choice for first yard test. He runs around more than any of the other dogs and his neck is the highest off the ground for better views. You can view his first set of pictures here. I haven't edited his shots except to take out the ones that ended up black do to lack of light. Apparently, Sam runs around alot in the yard. Unfortunately, the James Bond Camera doesn't deal well with pictures taken while moving. All the same, there are a few decent photos in the bunch. You can see our neighbor's house in one and Modi in another. We're planning on sending TY out with the camera this afternoon to see what he comes up with.

*To be honest, using this camera as a DogCam wasn't our idea. Cat found a web site where someone had modified one to work with their cocker spaniel. I'd link the site, but it seems to be gone or down.