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Because this is the most interesting thing to happen to me all week at work, I bring you camels. You don’t have camels where you work, do you? I didn’t think so.

Yeah, that’s all I got. I mean unless you want to hear about tuning the gains and valve dither rates on a servohydraulic load frame for maximum cyclic actuator displacement in torsion.

When a presidential campaign folds, the first thing to do is thank your supporters. The next thing to do is settle your debts; Bill Richardson did this within a fortnight of his collapse in an email that teased us about an endorsement, faked us out with talk of issues, and then asked for some final donations.

Joe Biden hasn’t sent that email out yet, but we did get an interesting note out of the blue on Friday morning. It’s a text-only, unceremonious forward that only includes the lead-in,

As work in the Senate begins again, I wanted to pass along this
article. I hope you find it interesting.
Joe

The forward is this article from the Politico, “Biden looks overseas.” At first, you get the impression that this is just Joe’s way of reminding us that, as he reassured teary-eyed supporters in Des Moines that last night, he’s not going away, and that we’d be hearing his voice a lot from the Senate once again. The article talks about how senators return to the hum-drum toil of their day jobs after failed presidential bids; how Biden added some serious issues to the debates and campaign discussions by being part of it; and how there are pressing issues for the Foreign Relations Committee to tend to now that the sideshow is over. Good for Joe, right?

Then, discussing Iraq, the author brings up Biden’s Senate clout and makes the easy leap from there to the possible State Department appointment:

“Whatever choice the new president wants [to make], he or she will need congressional support and bipartisan support, and Biden will be crucial,” said Michael Mandelbaum, author of “Democracy’s Good Name.”

“Whoever is president will be courting him,” Mandelbaum added.

Of course, it’s possible that the next president will view Biden as a potential secretary of state.

Sure, sure, we’ve heard this a million times. After some more talk of the issues, the story drifts back to future appointments, and then kicks it up a notch:

Other foreign policy wonks said the same, referring to Biden as sophisticated and a shoo-in to lead the State Department or, alternately, on the short list for a vice presidential nod should Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois win the Democratic nomination.

Despite his foot-in-mouth comments about Obama being “articulate” last February, some said Biden’s foreign policy experience would complement Obama’s perceived inexperience in that area.

“When it comes to VP nominees, Biden is going to be on that list,” said Steve Clemons, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a “radical centrist” think tank based in Washington. Clemons added that he hoped the possibility of being Obama’s running mate wouldn’t “distract” Biden “from the more important function of having the Foreign Relations Committee up and doing its job.”

Again, not exactly breaking news; when people weren’t accusing Joe of running for Secretary of State, they were accusing him of running for VP, and a Biden-Obama/Obama-Biden coupling was the dream of many.

But now Joe is sending this out to his supporters. Just FYI, you know? No appeal for money right now, just something you might want to read over coffee.

Uh-huh.

I tried to get some clarification on this, but one former staffer had no insight on who made the decision to send this out, and another, higher-up-the-chain former staffer hasn’t gotten back to me; for all I know the guy is on a beach somewhere drinking margaritas and looking through the WaPo job listings with nary a Blackberry in sight.

I’d be pleased as punch if Biden got a promotion from the next president — if it’s the only one named in the article, Obama. I’d rather he stay put at the Senate if we get another Clinton White House, as he’d be in a much better position to beat that two-headed cyborg about the face and neck on foreign policy from his committee chair post than if he was another toe-the-line sucker of a Secretary of State like poor Colin Powell. And a VP nod? Again, the most impotent and purely ceremonial of positions in the third Clinton administration, but with someone like Obama who seems open to advice and for the love of God sure needs it on foreign policy, it might actually be a job worth taking. Personally, I’d feel a little sheepish about how adamant I have always been that “I take Joe at his word when he says he’s in this to win or he’s going back to his day job, this isn’t about VP” if he turned around and started courting the VP nomination…but I guess I’d get over that dose of political reality.

Or is he courting it at all? Biden also said in Des Moines that he wasn’t going to make an endorsement — another thing I took the characteristically blunt man at his word for. By forwarding this article to all of his supporters before the South Carolina primary and Super Tuesday, which only mentioned Obama by name among people who would be courting Biden’s favor (if not partnership), was Joe giving a wink and a nod toward his favorite “storybook” candidate?

Eeeeenteresting.

We have a couple of long-focal-distance microscopes in our lab that I used on my master’s research; they’re handy for taking hi-mag images and measurements of test specimens that you can’t get up close and personal with using the standard traveling microscopes. The specimens I was testing were being inductively heated with basically a big magnetic coil up to a temperature of 1400F. Not only could you not lean over and stare at them without baking your face nicely, but the rapidly oscillating magnetic field that was heating up the metallic specimen by exciting its electrons would also do the same to, you know, your blood. And that’s just freaky. The tingle means you’re dying!

But that’s not important right now. What is important is that after a few years of sitting idle in dark corners of our lab, someone wants to use them again, and I’m the only person that remembers how to get them working again. I had to go around the corner to a part of the lab we use even less than these microscopes to find the little computer stand that has the control system for the microscopes on it. When I was piling all the cables back onto the various shelves so I could push the little castor-wheeled contraption down the hall, I managed to knock a CD-ROM out of some crevice somewhere.

I opened it up to discover the CD of personal effects I had burned off my old work computer before I left Honeywell in Phoenix, and that I hadn’t seen in about six years.

Among those personal effects are a bunch of photographs that I had made color photocopies of, and then scanned onto the computer prior to cutting the copies up for a scrapbook I made my grandfather one Christmas. You know, old photographs. Some really old photographs, dating back into the 1900s, I think. Yes, the photocopies live on in that scrapbook somewhere, but I had always wanted to compile them digitally someday. Now I have another distraction on my plate.

That’s li’l ol’ me and my Granny back in ‘74. Dig those cabinets. Dig that dress.

There’s Granny and Grandpa in Spain the year before, and I’m pretty sure my cousin Darcy. (If it’s one of my cousins, that’s her, she’s our only girl. And technically, I think that’s either as they were leaving for Spain or just getting back from there; that sure looks an awful lot like their old front door on 53rd Court, which would also explain the presence of my cousin.) Grandpa was always kinda goofy like that, at least, once he was a grandpa. I hear he could be a pretty stern father on occasion, but being a grandpa seems to soften people up a lot, don’t ya think?

I really miss them sometimes. I’m really glad I had to dig through that hole of a lab.

It’s been a while since I actually wrote anything here that remotely engaged you, dear lurker, so today I shall kill two birds with one stone, by asking you for input out of pure laziness.

I need a three-line bio by tomorrow. I am, of course, far too amazing to be contained in such a wee paragraph, so I’m just going to have to make some crap up.

What kind of crap would you make up about me in three lines?

There may be a prize.

My apartment may be a wreck, but my lab is an absolute craphole. Come take a tour of the suck!

Ironic addendum: turns out the Dremel was actually in a logical place, in the giant red tool case in the room I started and ended in. DUH! Why the hell was something where it was supposed to be?

Click To Play

Quicktime format. | Source page.

Waxing philosophical whilst preparing for another NASA teleconference.

Quicktime version. Flash version. Original Blip post.

Yeah yeah yeah, I don’t care about rules, so I’m back-dating this entry two days late and calling it number 16. It was shot on the 16th, I just haven’t had time to edit and upload till now. No one’s watching these, anyways, and it’s all just for practice, so here: for an annoying 16th day entry, an epic of clusterfrack proportions as we try to give directions to two very lost new grad students.

Click To Play

I hope Beck’s record label doesn’t come after me, aw shucks.

Tags: navlopomo07

After the Virginia Tech shooting, Georgia Tech, like many other universities, went to work on implementing an emergency broadcast system involving email and text message alerts designed to freak people the hell out and add to the chaos. Today, we tested that system. About half an hour ago, everyone who had opted into the system got a text message:

ATLANTA CAMPUS, EMERGENCY ALERT. Evacuate campus immediately and tune to local media for additional information. To opt out reply STOP.

An email went out campus-wide as well.

In my lab, we all started milling about, making sure we were getting the same info, and gradually came to the conclusion that our work day had ended (and it had just started for some of us! shucks). But what to do next was not exactly clear. A lot of us are basically looking at bicycles and our own two feet to “evacuate,” and if the threat is some crazy emo kid with his grandpa’s guns, evacuating is not a great idea. Our labs have nice, thick doors that lock, and we have plenty of power tools and big steel rods and crap to throw at any nutcases. We can even irradiate the bastard with our mobile X-ray unit if push come to shove. “Ha ha, take that! You will get cancer someday, if you don’t kill yourself first!” So as I weaved in and out of general clusterfuck traffic, I and every other student on the street had an eye out for random commando kids while trying not to get run over by a car.

I only subjected myself to that risk because my building is also next to a giant 40-foot tank of liquid hydrogen that would probably bury us in the rubble next to our X-ray machine if it went pop. Clearly, Georgia Tech is going to have to send out a little bit more detail in future alerts. “Crazy kid with gun” = stay in the damn lab. “Bomb threat” = go the hell home.

They went with the third option in follow-up messages:

Disregard The Previous Message / To opt-out reply STOP

So we all went back to work, or pretend-work as the case may be (hi there).

Except for people in the environmental sciences building. Another message a few minutes later said

ATLANTA CAMPUS, DISREGARD PREVIOUS EMERGENCY MESSAGE TO EVACUATE CAMPUS. EVACUATION NOTICE WAS ONLY FOR THE FORD BUILDING.

Those people must be thoroughly annoyed by now.

I wonder how many people they just got to opt out?

ETA: An undergrad just raised an excellent point. Do on-campus dorms count as that part of campus that has to “evacuate” under such a vague-ass order, and if so, where the hell are they supposed to go? Something for the dorm dwellers to figure out for themselves, for sure, because Georgia Tech sure as hell ain’t gonna tell ya. I would recommend the Vortex.

The Christians are back on campus this week, right on schedule. I already gushed last year about how proud it makes me of our country that we can have public shouting matches like this in the public forum and walk away unscathed, and I’m no less giddy about it this year. God love ‘em, those fundamentalists, for having the chutzpah to stand up to hours of ridicule and argument each day for a week, as they hold up their “Homo Sex is Sin” and “You Deserve Hell” signs while preaching to mostly deaf ears.

Their ability to speak their mind on campus was particularly poignant this week, what with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stirring up all that trouble in New York City the last couple days, so I made the preachers a special sign to add to the gallery of counter-demonstrations.

Several times over the last two weeks, I’ve gotten a phone call from a familiar exchange: 574-631-XXXX. Though the change in area code fooled me once a couple years ago, I’ve since learned to be careful when answering those calls, as it’s undoubtedly a bright-eyed undergrad working in the Development Office at the University of Notre Dame calling to ask me for more money. So, two weeks ago when I got the first call, I ignored it; I’m currently unemployed and wasn’t making all that much when I got a research stipend, so I didn’t need the guilt trip or the eligibility to buy football tickets. (That’s the prime motivator for donating at all: the education was nice and everything, and I want to help out in the future, but when it comes down to brass tacks, we all give money so we can buy football tickets.)

The first week, Notre Dame football was 0-1, falling to my current tormentor, Georgia Tech. That might’ve resulted in some saucy banter with whatever kid called to get my $100.

The second week, after an ugly road loss to Joe Pa and Penn State, would have seen a conversation with the college telemarketer akin to a theological debate about the end of the world, in hushed, foreboding whispers.

The third week, after a thorough, prison-rape 38-0 loss to Michigan…the phone stopped ringing. Four business days into it, I haven’t gotten a single call from 574-631-XXXX, after five previous attempts. Is five the magic number when they give up on a donor? Or did the development office just realize that this wasn’t going to be their best season, either, and wisely close its phone bank until the football team manages to put one in the ‘W’ column?

It’s a strange time to quit asking for money, considering how much they’re going to have to spend to buy that fat bastard Charlie Weis out of his totally undeserved 10-year contract.