The Long Summer is Nigh
Aside from a brief flurry of "I'm back!" posts, my return from DAMOP has been pretty much indistinguishable from the time I spent away at the meeting. I blame our lousy academic calendar-- while most colleges and universities are already on break, we're on a trimester system, so the Summer Conference Season actually begins during our school year. The week just finished was the last week of our Spring term, so I had to teach classes, run a review session, grade a big pile of old homeworks, and make up a final exam to give on Monday. It's a big hassle, but at least Sean Carroll feels my pain.
I also spent a couple of days gearing up for Long Summer I, coming soon to a lab near you. I'm officially on sabbatical in the Fall and Spring terms next year, which means I'll be focussing exclusively on research until December. On Tuesday, I spent most of the afternoon doing mechanical drawings (somewhere, my eigth-grade shop teacher sprains something laughing at this idea) for a custom vacuum chamber to be part of the apparatus, while on Thursday and Friday, I arranged to spend a couple thousand dollars on miscellaneous electronics and spectroscopy gear to be used by my students this summer. There'd be a blog post on the corrupting influence of Big Money on Science here, but really, this is chump change.
(I would, however, like to take this opportunity to remarks that Newark Electronics has what may be the least useful catalog and web site in the history of useless catalogs and web sites. They sort the thousands of different integrated circuit chips they carry by manufacturer, which is quite possibly the least helpful thing ever-- I'm looking for a goddamn op-amp. I don't care who makes it, I just want a buffer op-amp, and I don't want to look on seventeen diffferent catalog pages for it.
(Their web site, hard as it may be to believe, is actually worse-- you can search for a part by its Newark stock number, but not by the manufacturer's part number. Well, that's helpful-- if I knew the Newark stock number, I wouldn't really need to be looking it up in the catalog, now, would I?)
Anyway, at last, the term is done. It's all over but for the parading around in silly robes. And the final exams. And sillier end-of-year actiities like this afternoon's faculty-student basketball game for charity...
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