Excellence

Observing: Three computers with three operating systems

I was told recently to do everything excellently. This was not to do things perfectly, but to do things the best that is possible. For me excellence is connected to my focus; am I focused on the task at hand or am I trying to do to much.

This surfaced tonight when we had exceptionally odd/bad data collection for at least 20 minutes, but things were poor for about 2 hours. Now if I may, there was a fairly significant earthquake starting that 20 minutes of bad data and that frazzled me. But I have no excuse for the first two hours except I was not focused and I was not being excellent.

So as a result I stopped, took a breath, and focused. No longer does the music matter or what will I do while waiting for the next image, I am going to focus on getting the data¹.

Now I must go back and observe.

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1. A tangent: One of the things that kicked me into focus was the comment that this data only exits once. The light is lost forever if it is not recorded. So remember that you will never have this moment again, what should you be focusing on? ↩

Throwing a Hammer

I found this on “accident” while doing real work. I thought it would be cool to share it as an example of physics and technology coming together to make awesomeness, or just unexpectedness.

Its from Wolfram’s Demonstration site. I have tried to imbed its CDF file (similar to PDF’s if but for Mathematica documents rather then Word documents) with its cool javascript, but alas Worpress does not like me. So the original is here or you can get the CDF from my files. Note the the CDF needs a reader program so just going to Wolfram’s page will be easier.

I would set the height, velocity, x-rotation, and y-rotation as desired. Then if you click the little “+” to the right of the throw slider you will get and extra menu bar. If you hit the play sign you will see the hammer continually being thrown. Its like a movie!

Summer Stuff

So this summer is going to be crazy. I am getting married and moving and starting grad-school in the fall. My fiancee and I are keeping a blog about these and more adventures.

Personally I am working on wedding invitations and studying. When I arrive at grad school I have to take a test. Its a review of undergrad meaning it is very broad but not too detailed. This is a major switch from the upper division classes I just finished. And to be honest this difference is making studying harder. I have always been inquisitive but I want to know new and exciting things, not remember the general stuff that I have heard about. I am all for the new, like the cool stuff coming out of CERN or NSCL. New is always better!

Well I should get back to work, before today gets lost forever.