New Toy

It has been a number of years since I bothered to have a printer hooked up at home. The new job has me limited in my internet access and free reign to use the computer and being that I am stuck in the Delta for a bit longer I finally broke down and bought a new one. I need to be able to print thesis stuff and scan a few things so I decided to buy a multi-function printer. Long story short I ended up buying a HP LaserJet 3050. I got a good deal on it and then spent a chunk of time getting the drivers installed tonight.
I scanned and then edited the picture above from the original that survived Katrina. For those who don't know what it is, that is the tensile testing results from the nanocomposite fibers. There were a number of curves on the plot that were no good because of clamp slippage. The other problem is that all the curves were the same linestyle....that would suck for black and white printing so I had to convert one to a dotted line. For all your image manipulation needs I recommend the GIMP. I also resized the picture using one of the few good and free tools from Microsoft, the Image Resizer. Just scroll down and select the ImageResizer.exe. Once installed you can select one or a group of pictures and when you right click an option (besides cut, paste, etc) will be to resize. Super simple, super quick.

Oh yeah, this means I can now put this image into both my thesis and the latest paper I am working on!

WTF?!?!

Another boss rant....consider yourself warned! Actually it is 2 rants!

Friday my boss comes to see me with a paper that he has finally agreed to let go out to a journal. He has it in his hand and asks me "You do still plan on learning more about statistics don't you?"
Me: "Ummm yeah, why is there something wrong with the statistics in the paper?"
Boss: "No"

WTF?!?! Where did that come from? I mean really!

So today he brings me a Plan of Work that he was reviewing. I should explain that the Plain of Work is an internal document used to outline a project including such things as literature search, hypothesis, sampling and testing, etc.... This was an update of a previous Plan of Work. I added a part 2 to something he had previously approved! He admits as he comes in the room that he only has a few small things.....mostly grammatical. Now, I will admit that the grammar was not 100% spot on. I threw together a quick document for internal use....I guess I should have done better. Oh by the way, all of his grammar comments were in the original part of the document and not the new part of the document......he missed them the first time.
That is not the problem though, if all you can pick on is my grammar so be it. But no! He then tells me "you know, you don't need to do all variables for all projects" Ok, this may be, but this is a pretty big project and it is designed to allow us to establish some fundamentals, so I think it would be best to do all the variables we can. I explained this thought and he agreed that for this project it is important but he was "...just saying for future reference...." WTF?!?!?! I mean really!

I think Beau and Leslie have hit the nail on the head for this one.........ARGH!

Good news is that it is a short week for me....Wednesday night I am out of here for the rest of the week.

Ahead or Behind the Curve

My boss asked me and my co-worker to turn in our abstracts for a conference for him to review. The conference deadline is Friday and he is asking us to turn them in on Thursday. I told him mine had been in his mailbox since Tuesday and he said he did recall my telling him that on Tuesday. My co-worker said he had not started one yet and was not sure that he was going to do one.
My boss then began "telling us a story" about a previous employee who always had his papers and presentations finished 4-5 months ahead of schedule. Now let's forget that I have only been on the job for a few months, and we can forget that I am head of the publication requirements for an entire year on the job in that short time, but WTF? I turn mine in before he asks about it (oh yeah, did I mention I found out about it on Monday?) and get lectured while my co-worker does not plan on doing one and it is all good.
My response to the story was that once you get ahead of the curve and have been doing the job for awhile you should be able to prepare presentations quickly and ahead of schedule. Perhaps I am ahead of the curve or perhaps I am permanently behind the curve....ideas?

Save the Haus!

Deutsches Haus is home to the best Oktoberfest in New Orleans. The Haus has been a New Orleans fixture since 1928. The city of New Orleans has created an asinine plan to build a new LSU/VA hospital complex right on top of the Haus.

Now I have a few issues with this:
1) I am not a conspiracy theorist, but is it a coincidence that someone was buying up the property all around the Haus right before the announcement of this plan?
2) The city wants to spend $50 million out of $200 million in federal funds dedicated to repair streets and public buildings damaged in Katrina to buy the area around and including the Haus. The city would then give the land to the VA in exchange for the old VA property for the city to lease out or sell. Something does not smell right in that deal............ read about it here.

You can sign a petition to Save the Haus online.

If you get this comic you might be over educated. Thanks to Decorum for the comic.

Long day of writing papers (a new one almost ready to go to my boss for review, an abstract to submit for a presentation next July, and working on a presentation for January as well as two Plans of Work for next month) so more later.

Dating Math

I think this comic speaks volumes.

Check out xkcd for more comics.

Saw an interesting interview on CNN this weekend about global warming. A scientist from the University of Alabama was on. The reporter asked him why he had problems with Al Gore's movie and winning the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on global warming. I thought his answer was enlightening, to paraphrase "....to see someone speak with such confidence on a subject which I have spent most of my life working on and have been humbled and humiliated by the lack of knowledge we truly have on it is mind-boggling...." and "...although CNN reported the Arctic ice pack reaching its all-time minimum for records, CNN did not report that the Antarctic ice pack has reached its all-time maximum....". I thought it was some of the best discussion on the topic in the mainstream media. By the way, the CNN reporter had no rebuttal about the Antarctic ice pack.

Finally, for those who have not seen the story on Lt. Michael Murphy, USN you should. In short Lt. Murphy has been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for actions in Afghanistan as the leader of a 4 man SEAL team.

New Bathroom and House Update

I have been knocking out a ton of work on the house lately. I am just about ready to start plumbing and installing the new bathroom for downstairs. I think I have a final plan for the bathroom thanks to a few friends, this design is inspired by some enlightening comments and ideas from Kathryn.
Hopefully if everything goes well, I will be building the last wall of the bathroom this weekend and installing the plumbing by next weekend. By Thanksgiving the subfloor should be down and finishing of the bathroom can be underway.

The second picture contains the floor plans of the house. Kind of nifty, at least in my opinion.
On the left is upstairs and incorporates the changes I have made although the bathroom for upstairs is wrong because I am no longer adding on a little bit. The kitchen is my rough layout.
Downstairs is on the right. The only thing I know for sure is the rear area. I don't even know what I am going to do with downstairs yet. I know I will need to add a bathroom somewhere, but that is off in the future.

Comments are appreciated.

Government Pay Bands

I am considering applying for a job with my nemesis, the Corps of Engineers. It would put me back in NO, which would be a good thing. The Corps has switched from the GS pay scale to the new idea of Pay Bands. So I decided to try to find some info on Pay Bands. Instead what I found was a semi-coherent rant on the way government employees are evaluated. You have to check it out!

Scary but true!

New Route

I have a new route to help vary the trip from NO to Greenville. I usually shoot up I-55 to MS-27 (72 miles into MS on I-55) and that takes me through Crystal Springs and Utica to Vicksburg. Due north 82 miles on US-61 from Vicksburg will reach US-82 and in another 11 miles to the west I am in Greenville. I am now shooting down US-82 to the east through Indianola (birthplace of BB King) to US-49 which goes through Belzoni, MS (the catfish capital of the world) to Jackson and I-220 to I-20 and then right onto I-55 and due south.

This route is all 4 lane highways and has allowed me to shave 15-20 minutes off the drive. One of the new and interesting sites to see includes this giant cement teepee. Details of the teepee can be found here.

Hiring and Firing

A week in NO at the old job has left me with more questions then answers.
1) How is it that the government can take more then 19 months to finally get around to almost firing (in 30 days) an employee who has been suspended with pay at over $100,000 a year?
2) How can the government hire a manager who has been fired from almost every job he has ever held?
3) How can the government decide maybe they should apologize to someone 3 years after they run them out?
4) Is it normal to admit that you did not hire the smartest person in the job interview on purpose?
5) Is it normal to hire someone but give them no information on who their boss is or what their job is?

Just a few random ruminations that come to mind after a week at the old job..........

Ig Noble Awards

The contrast to the Noble Prize is the Ig Noble Award. As a government scientist I can appreciate them. Check them out. They are presented by the publishers of the Annals of Improbable Research.

This years winners are:
MEDICINE: Brian Witcombe of Gloucester, UK, and Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tennessee, USA, for their penetrating medical report "Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects."
PHYSICS: L. Mahadevan of Harvard University, USA, and Enrique Cerda Villablanca of Universidad de Santiago de Chile, for studying how sheets become wrinkled.
BIOLOGY: Prof. Dr. Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, for doing a census of all the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi with whom we share our beds each night.
CHEMISTRY: Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan, for developing a way to extract vanillin -- vanilla fragrance and flavoring -- from cow dung.
LINGUISTICS: Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, of Universitat de Barcelona, for showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.
LITERATURE: Glenda Browne of Blaxland, Blue Mountains, Australia, for her study of the word "the" -- and of the many ways it causes problems for anyone who tries to put things into alphabetical order.
PEACE: The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, USA, for instigating research & development on a chemical weapon -- the so-called "gay bomb" -- that will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other.
NUTRITION: Brian Wansink of Cornell University, for exploring the seemingly boundless appetites of human beings, by feeding them with a self-refilling, bottomless bowl of soup.
ECONOMICS: Kuo Cheng Hsieh, of Taichung, Taiwan, for patenting a device, in the year 2001, that catches bank robbers by dropping a net over them.
AVIATION: Patricia V. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A. Golombek of Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina, for their discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsters.

Columbus Day Plumbing Fun!

Today is Columbus Day and therefore I get a day off of work. This day celebrates Columbus, who according to my sister, sailed from England to the New World in 1742. Ummmm, it was Spain to the New World in 1492, but close enough.
My day was spent digging old plumbing out from under my house. I drove up to the Delta this evening and will be heading back to NO tomorrow night to work in NO the rest of the week.
I removed a ton of cast iron plumbing from my house today, check out this piece, just the T weighs 16 lbs. For more of today's fun see here.

Code Monkey Part Deux

Have results dribbling in from gin trials and previous projects. Today has been a number crunching day. La sent me this Code Monkey song. It is quite entertaining and I highly recommend it. It is catchy too. I fit in, but not a fan of Tab.

Next week is a crazy week. I am heading to NO this weekend since it is a 3 day weekend. I will be heading back to the Delta on Monday and then after work on Tuesday I will be heading back to NO to work in NO for the rest of the week. I am training two of the people they have hired to replace me.

Speaking of my old job, JC reminded me that I suffer from Cassandra Syndrome. We both thought it would stay behind when I left the old job, but it has somewhat followed me to the new one. Go figure.

The Big Move

My grandparents have been successfully moved from Ruston, LA tom Memphis, TN. All it took was 2 26 ft U-Hauls, 2 F-150s, 2 Minivans, 2 sedans and an SUV. Oh yeah, 80 lbs of dry ice, a dozen ice chests and a couple of cases of beer helped too.
A grand total of about 650 miles were driven over 54 hours, as well as loading and unloading of all vehicles.

I am tired. I am sore. I did see the new John Deere round cotton modules outside of Clarksdale, MS though.

Big plans for this week on a work note, will be heading into a commercial gin to run some trials now that the gins are up and running.