Monday, May 29, 2006
Happy Memorial Day everybody! I played my softball games last week, and I'm still walking. I even felt a little bit better during the second game of the week, on Wednesday. So, my 30-year old body is not completely broken down yet. And I went out to the batting cages this weekend because I cannot hit a softball at all anymore. I've been completely stinking up the place when I come up to hit. But, after practicing in the batting cages, I think I have my stroke back. The Air Force Academy is having their graduation ceremony sometime during this upcoming week. I'm not going to it, I'm not even exactly sure what day it's taking place, but I think things will be hectic around the Academy this week. I know that tomorrow the parking lot where I usually park is closed, so I'm going to have a long walk in to work from a far-out parking lot. It's a good thing that my legs have recovered.
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
I turned 30 years old this past August. It wasn't such a big deal for me at the time, but suddenly I'm beginning to feel my age. I've started playing in the Air Force Academy's softball league. Softball, for those who don't know, is a game often played by middle-aged guys with big guts who drink beer between innings. Things are a little more serious in a league with mostly military guys playing, but still I figured that I was in good enough shape to keep up with the best of them. After the first practice, though, I had to take a day off of work because I thought I was coming down with the flu. My whole body was aching, and the only time that's ever happened is when I'm getting sick. But it turns out that I was just incredibly, ridiculously sore from softball practice. It used to be that, when I played sports, I never had to worry much about stretching. If I didn't stretch, I'd be a little sore the next day, but it was no big deal. Well, we played an pre-season doubleheader last week, and I pulled my hamstring running to first, and once again every muscle in my body ached the next day. Tonight, a week later, my hamstring STILL hurt, and I pulled the calf muscle in the same leg running to first. We have a game tomorrow, and we're going to have just enough people to play if I show up, so I expect that I will show up and that after the game, I'll just amputate my leg and save myself some pain. If this is what it feel likes to be 30, I think I'm just going to check myself into a retirement home when I turn 40.
Saturday, May 6, 2006
Things are going a lot better at work recently. The project I'm working on involves frequency-doubling light by passing it through glass. What that means in layman's terms is that I'm trying to prepare glass slides in such a way that I can shoot infrared laser light into them and end up with green light shooting out. The wavelength of the infrared light is 1064 nanometers (a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter) and the wavelength of green light is 532 nanometers, so what the glass is supposed to do is to halve the light's wavelength, which is the same thing as doubling the light's frequency. Anyway, for a very long time, every time I prepared my samples and shot infrared light into them, I'd get infrared light out, with no green light at all. But just this past week, I tried doing my tests with a more powerful laser, and I finally saw green light come out of my samples. So that's very good news. Besides having a hard time getting my experiment to work, I was also not having a good time at work because for a while I was feeling a lot less pressure to get results. When I first came in, my boss was throwing all kinds of projects and ideas at me, and he was telling me about how it's important to get lots of publications. Which, in science, is pretty much par for the course. You do need to get lots of publications to keep your funding, and you better have a lot of ideas because if you're not thinking 5 experiments ahead, then you're going to fall behind, but it was tough because I was just starting a new job, and I was also learning a whole new field of physics, so it was a really bad time to be telling me how I needed to get started on getting experimental results for publication. But I think my boss realized it, because for the past few weeks, he's let me work on my project without any comments or pressure from him. Next week I'll be going to my graduation, and I'm crossing my fingers that the weather won't be too unbearably hot in Houston. We'll see how it goes.
His name is Wesley Jason BeHanna, and his picture is on the right. As for work, things are moving along slowly, but I am making progress. I think that for one of my experiments this summer, I'm going to be etching glass with