Transportation woes

I went out with some other grad students for martinis this evening (yes I know it's a Tuesday - I missed drinking over the weekend for both academic and health reasons), and while I had an excellent time, getting home was more of a pain in the ass than usual. First, the bus showed up at West Wash later than expected by about five minutes. Then, it went about three blocks, and stopped in traffic because all the barriers were down at a train crossing. Note that there was no train in sight. So, after ten minutes (which is already a factor of two longer than my entire trip should have taken) the driver decided to turn around and take a detour around the intersection by going one block south. Naturally, when we returned to the correct road, the barriers were no longer down. Point: Mad City PD. Unfortunately for me, upon getting home and turning on my computer, I learned that the west end of campus and surrounding area (my former neighborhood) has basically been locked down since 6:30pm because the cops and security are looking for some suicidal guy with a gun. Oh, wonderful. But, had I known this before coming home I could have saved myself the twenty minute bus ride by simply calling a cab company and telling them I was a student (apparently, as part of the security procedure UW arranged to pay for rides with the major cab companies this evening).

It's the small things

...that are driving me slowly crazy. In New York, there might be sirens at 3am, but the goddamn undergrads don't ride around on leaf-blowers -- I mean mopeds -- at all hours of the day and night because they're two lazy to walk 500'.

In other news, I got pissed off at the gym website, because it lists the building hours, but not the hours that the weight room/cardio stuff is available for rec use. And I don't want to call and ask because then I'd have to interact with either another human being or worse an automated phone system. Then I got annoyed at the fact that I have to get up for class five mornings a week instead of just four (or three last semester).

So now I've decided that if I'm going to get through grad school in the Midwest without annoying the crap out of everyone around me I need to adjust my diet to contain more (a) carbs and (b) chocolate. Excellent.

Quick! Look busy!

Imagine the following scenario: you, a hapless grad student, are given a small task by your advisor to learn how to read your experiments simulated data and make plots with it. Then your advisor leaves the country for a week and a half - and you promptly forget that she will be back in town for at least one day before going out of town again, so you don't get too panicky about the details of your assignment. Then, on the Friday before she returns you realize that you might be expected to have something to show for the week, so you decide to finally track down someone who can explain what you need to do. Once you have a script to crunch through the data and have compiled the necessary software it's 3:30pm. And then the data server crashes. "Great!" You think, "I'm going to have to do this over the weekend." Then when you wake up on Saturday morning, the data server is down *again.* You imagine how bad it will sound when you tell your advisor, "I'm sorry, I couldn't do what you asked me to do last week because the data warehouse went down on Friday and didn't come back all weekend." :-(

Shit.

Hey look! I have a blog!!

Heh. I sort of forgot about that for a while. So here's a random story that I was reminded by while talking to Chris and Karen the other day. At some point over the summer, I got into law school. This might be less impressive, had I actually applied to law school or taken the LSAT (something I debated, on account of the questions being fun, but decided against, on account of it costing >$100). Apparently, I was one of 20 people who Rutgers-Camden decided to accept on the basis of their GPA and GRE scores alone. What I'm curious about is what makes the admissions committee at RU Camden think that someone with my GPA and GRE scores would want to move to Camden to pay to enroll in a program that she hadn't applied for in the first place. Anyway, the (unsurprising) punchline is that I decided to stay in Madison where they pay me and I can go outside at night without getting mugged. Right.

Life post-Germany

I'm too lazy to come up with a coherent post, and I also feel like I need to go find a coffee shop or library where I can set about studying my ass off for quals (I must relearn of undergrad physics in 7 days... if anyone wants to make bets I'll say there are 5:1 odds that I fail miserably). So the following is more or less what I've been up to lately, but in no logical or chronological order.

This week, the powers that be deemed it necessary for me to attend grad student orientation/TA training. This has convinced me of two things: 1) I might be a decent TA but 2) I'm very glad I won't have the opportunity to prove that in the near future. I'm going to be taking three classes, doing research, and trying to learn undergrad physics so I can pass the qualifier this year.

I have keys to a bunch of labs and classrooms and offices in the physics building. I also heard a rumor that grad students are allowed to get keys to the library for use after normal library hours, which I hope is true because that would be awesome.

The physics librarian is cool. She made us brownies and let us eat them in the library.

I have an office with cool officemates and a coffee maker. I also have an $800 ergonomic desk chair (my experiment has tons of money). There is also talk of replacing two of the desks in my office because they are old and/or not the correct height.

In celebration of half-price margarita day at Frida's I opted to walk home yesterday afternoon and leave my bike at the downtown office... but I'm not at the downtown office now and getting there is vastly more time consuming on foot.

Yesterday, I filled out a travel expense report. I learned that I will be reimbursed ~$20 for each breakfast I ate in Germany, ~$40 for every lunch and ~$50 for every dinner. Meanwhile, I probably spent less than $80 total on food.

Also, while I'm aware that if I had a real job I'd be earning at least a factor of two more than I'm getting now, I still don't know what to do with everything they pay me... I should probably set up an IRA.

I need to buy a stamp and mail my electricity bill.

And now, for a real post

I wrote this the other day, before I sorted out the proxy server here and got myself completely connected to the Intertron.

Flying to Germany was remarkably painless. I've decided that longer flights are less objectionable than shorter ones, mostly because they use larger planes and sedate me with movies. However, I'm sure there's an upper time limit beyond which all the movies in the world will not make me happy. It's probably about 10 hours.

While I was allowing for several possible travel disasters, there were only three minor issues: 1) I forgot that I had my cellphone on me and set of the metal detector in Madison, 2) they didn't post a gate number for my flight out of Detroit, so I had to track down a gate agent an hour before my flight and ask where to go, and 3) for the short flight between Madison and Detroit I was stuck next to some middle-aged suit who used the entire armrest, in blatant violation of airplane-personal-space-etiquette (does anyone have any thoughts on why it's always male, middle-aged, business types who do this? If they want more space, they can certainly afford to fly first class and save me the aggravation of having to surrender two inches of my own barely adequate space to avoid touching them).

Anyway, I killed a bunch of time in Detroit by walking the full length of the terminal twice (it's quite long), eating lunch, and browsing the Borders where I ultimately bought a new book to read for the last two hours of my stop-over. Once on the plane, which left on time, we were served drinks and a normal airline snack. Then, they had to roboot the entertainment system which, as it was coming back up, displayed a penguin with all the boot messages (Northwest runs linux on airplanes! Awesome.). Then, I started watching Shrek 3 and they brought us dinner, which was reasonably sized and palatable and came with a choice of red or white wine (I decided it would probably be crappy wine and I was dehydrated by then anyway, so I got water). Then, I finished watching Shrek 3 and took a nap (or, more accurately, four), which was hard because the stupid headrest stuck out enough even with the seat all the way back that every time I dozed off my head would fall forward and wake me up (I solved this problem by leaning against the bulkhead, which was better but I woke up anyway because my neck started to hurt). Then, after my last attempt at sleep failed they served us breakfast, which was not as good as dinner but still not too bad. And, since it was my fourth meal in 18 hours, I wasn't too worried about skipping the less appetizing parts of it.

The disappointing thing was that the A330 I was on had a selection of a few dozen movies, but I only watched one because I needed to sleep to avoid being totally delirious once I was on the ground. On the flight back, when I will not want to sleep too much, I'll be on a 757 that has a different entertainment system and I'm not sure I'll get as many (if any) choices. Although, I checked my seat reservation and as of now there isn't anyone immediately next to me, so I might at least have two armrests.

Aaa! Blogger ist auf Deutsch

I had this problem with normal Google too... it took fully ten minutes for me to figure out how to get it to go to the English version instead of forwarding google.com to google.de. But I guess with Blogger it's ok - I know where all the buttons are and it's not like it gets any opportunities to return search results in German...