North of the Border

His name is Adam and he likes to make tiny nerdy things. He makes dioramas of nerdy stuff, sometimes normal, some times with too many teeth, fingers, and/or toes.

The SEM+EDS machine in one of my school’s materials labs ran 98 and there was exactly one thumb drive on campus that was allowed to be used if you wanted to pull data. The lab coordinator had to pull the output file to his computer and email them, but made it sound like the biggest inconvenience in the world if you, ya know, wanted your data.

My school gave up on printing/binding theses, so they also gave up on thesis formatting requirements. As long as your advisor approved the thesis and the title page had all the relevant info, it could be formatted however you wanted.

After finishing my dissertation, I spent maybe 20 minutes emailing the library staff about dissertation edits (date format/placement on title page mainly) and otherwise was told any other requested changes were optional so long as my advisor signed off. I have to get my dissertation printed and bound myself, but that is a small price to pay compared to the nightmare that is univeristy thesis format compliance.

What state are you in, if you don’t mind me asking? I just moved from Dallas to Los Angeles and there are Wincos in both, just kind of out of the way.

If one is in your area, Winco is your friend then. 24hr grocery shopping. They are also worker owned and have a great bulk goods selection, so they are a better food shopping experience at roughly the same price point.

My goal for the summer was to finish my PhD. I defended on Friday and am now Dr. Drail, so I actually accomplished my summer task for once. I sacrificed all my sleep and sanity to do so, as I was told at the 11th hour to redo a major analysis that made up 1/4 of my dissertation, but I fucking got it done.

Everything should just be in eV. Particle physics natural units are the best.

I gave my PhD dissertation defense on Friday, so I am looking forward to not having anything specific to look forward to.

I haven’t played a video game for any length of time since Elden Ring first came out, so I might play Shadow of the Erdtree. Or maybe BG3. Or maybe I will just do some dnd planning. I want to get some home repairs done, so some of that. Maybe just go chill with some friends. All the little things that I haven’t had the time/energy/bandwidth to do for so long.

I want to enjoy not being consantly anxious about my research and not just be distracting myself from said anxiety, but to truly relax, just for a week or two before I move and have to start job hunting.

The people downvoting you just aren’t ready for a Big-G heavy future. I bet they are doing so with a purposeful grimace and a terrible sound, as they vote your banging godzilla memes down

Blue Oyster Cult guitar fill

I am a physicist. I am good at math, okay at programming, and not the best at using programming to accomplish the math. Using AI to help turn the math in my brain into functional code is a godsend in terms of speed, as it will usually save me a ton of time even if the code it returns isn’t 100% correct on the first attempt. I can usually take it the rest of the way after the basis is created. It is also great when used to check spelling/punctuation/grammar (so using it like the glorified spellcheck it is) and formatting markup languages like LaTeX.

I just wish everyone would use it to make their lives easier, not make other people’s lives harder, which seems to be the way it is heading.

Cividis. Perceptually uniform gradient colormaps are fun for the whole family

I always hit the one in Garden Grove, it was in a mini vegan plaza. Still a Loving Hut and a vegan pizza place in the same plaza. Never got a chance to go to the Santa Anna one.

Former chain of vegan subs out of SoCal named Subvegan had some of the best sandwhiches I have ever tasted, vegan or otherwise. Vegan deli meat and vegan cheese quality vary, but this place had the hookup for the best of both. A 9in sub was $12, loaded so fat it barely closed and was two meals worth for any normal person.

Their italian sub, the Godfather, had (vegan) turkey, ham, salami, provalone, cheddar, pepperoncini peppers, tomato, arugula, olives, onions, mayo, and italian dressing. The bread was always the perfect ratio of crunch to fluffy, their sauce portion was always on point, and their veggies were fresh as fuck. I salivate even just typing it out.

My fiancee and I would order in advance to have a sub waiting for us whenever we visited her family in Anaheim. It was the best. We started making plans in June to move out there so she could live near her parents and they closed their doors in July. Good vegan subs are a rarity, let alone vegan subs that stand out in quality against their non-veg counterparts. I am still in mourning.

Not to dunk on word, if I need slightly more flexibility than a native .txt reader, it will do in a pinch. That being said:

Word: Oh, you want a table? Good luck getting your excel sheet to cary everything over properly, and god forbid you change a formula. You want to write it natively in word? Lol no.

Latex: tabularx goes brrrr

Word: Equations? Have fun properly tracking equation numbers and manually formatting your text to center justified every time.

Latex: $ $, \( \), and \begin{equation} go brrrr.

Word: Figures? Hope you anchored everything properly, it would be a shame if your entire document layout got shifted…

Latex: What the fuck is an anchor? top, here, bottom, those are your options. Add an exclamation mark if you’re feeling spicy.

My former colleague and I both decided on the same template for our dissertation, but hers looked wonky with the default margins. Sacrificing that lamb to have slightly tighter margins was worth it, even if the eldritch ramblings keep me awake at night.

I did all my Quantum Field Theory homework in Latex, the professor required it. My classmates would write everything out by hand and then transcribe it, meanwhile my officemate and I could think/write/math in Latex, so we only had to write our homework once. The prof lifted the requirement halfway through the semester after everyone else complained, but I never looked back.

The only thing that prevented a 100% Latex-only semester was the goddam section where we had to draw Wick diagrams. There just wasn’t a reliable way to draw them on my computer, as the Feynman diagram tools stuggled with the nuances of Wick diagrams. I still included the hand-drawn versions as figures in Latex, but it felt like cheating.

I did figure out how to write the Wick’s theorem bracket notation in Latex though (not that I’ll ever need to again), so that made up for it a bit. I wager that I spent more time researching obscure Latex packages than actually solving the problems that semester.

I love Latex so much, I even made a template for generating profesional looking DND item cards for my table that I submitted to overleaf: https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/d-and-d-item-card-template/ndfdspmmxnrn

There is also a Michael Conklin referenced in the article spiderman pointing meme

I had a bad flea infestation after taking in a stray puppy for all of 1 day before I got it to a rescue. I went from noticing one flea to noticing a couple to seeing them everywhere in a manner of days, about a month after the puppy left us our present. It was a pain in the ass and made me hyper paranoid, so I learned how to handle it the proper way.

I agree with what others have said as a first step: Flea Bath and/or nitenpyram to remove the fleas on the kitty, flea preventative to keep them off. Wash all the fabrics and surfaces, especially near your cat’s hangout spots, and dry on high heat.

Vacuuming daily is a triple threat at reducing the numbers: Sucks up the eggs/larvare/pupae/adults, the vibration and warmth tricks pupae to emerge (they can be dormant for up to 6 months and their shell acts like velcro, making them hard to remove) which speeds up the cycle and reduces the risk of reinfestation, and cleans up the grime that the larvae feed on before pupating. Just make sure you use a bagged vacuum or seal the vacuum waste somehow before tossing it. If the infestation is minor, keeping up to date on the preventative and regular vacuuming should be enough.

If you find more, especially down the road a few months, it probably means an infestation started under your nose. If you can afford it, a pest control pro is the best solution. If you can’t, the best flea killer spray for whole home infestations is Precor 2625. It is a whole home premise spray that kills the fleas at all stages, both on contact and by disrupting their reproductive cycle. You’ll want to either kennel your kitty for a day to apply it, as the contact kill chemical can make cats sick, or at the very least quarantine them and do the spray over a couple days away from them. Get a coverall suit, N95 mask, and spray all low surfaces, all fabrics that can’t be dried on high heat, under couch cushions, all corners and crevices around the floor and your bed, literally everywhere below knee height and anywhere your cat might like to climb or hide.

The preventative is supposed to last 7 months, slightly longer than the longest normal pupae duration, so that multiple flea generations will be affected. I do recommend a second spray 1 month later, just to be safe, and continue daily vacuuming over the entire premise for at least that first month to expedite the lifecycle as much as possible.

I use Tidal for listening to music on my phone most of the time, whether wired or wireless. That, plus USB Audio Player Pro for wired listening, gives a pretty good sound quality over my DAC. At home and in my work office I have dedicated DACs and tube amps for driving my cans (Schitt Modi + Littleblack Mk.2 in my office, Schitt Mobius + Feliks Echo 2 at home).

I use the dedicated DAC on mobile for a few reasons:

1. My phone doesn’t have a headphone jack and I have been dissapointed by most USBC-to-3.5mm dongles’ build quality, so using a higher quality DAC gets around that.

2. I also generally prefer a balanced 4.4mm jack over an unbalanced 3.5mm, both for a more solid physical connection and to reduce crosstalk, and my DAC has both 3.5/4.4mm ports.

3. For wireless. I use IEMs that have a wired connection and the bluetooth adapters/replacement cables are pretty low quality in my experience (low battery capacity, poor sound quality, poor build quality, finnicky connectors, etc.) and a combo bluetooth/wired dac is avoids most of these issues. It also means I can keep the DAC and my phone in different places on my person (great for having my phone on a stand while biking and keeping the DAC in my pocket, or leaving my phone charging while I listen to music in my lab).

No, the Ifi GoBlu. Great sound quality, great aesthetic, convenient size, garbage battery quality. I have had to send it in 3 times for swelling. Each time, I have buckled down more on making sure I was more careful with charging; using a smart charging or low power USBC AC adapter, then using only low voltage adapters, finally demanding they send me an AC adapter designed for it since they didn’t include one.

Such a significant thing to cheap out on with a $200 piece of tech, especially when LiPo batteries are already so cheap. They also refused to send spare batteries as well this last time, which I am more than capable of replacing myself, to save ~3 weeks of time. I have decided that if it happens again, I will just find a comparable size/voltage battery and solder it in myself to spare myself the hassle.