I am so very clearly doing schoolwork.

As I sit in the learning commons of my college, blaring music on my headphones to spare my ears from the accented babbling of international students, I ponder all of the poor choices I had made during university. I have continued to make these same poor choices during this semester at college, choosing to read poker books or my facebook timeline instead of doing my assigned work or, God-forbid, exercise. So I have decided to come up with my new year's resolution a little sooner.

These resolutions are intended to set me on a course for consistency and hopefully foster productivity.

1. Start to develop an exercise regimen that does not involve me running down the stairs to get the door for the pizza delivery man. Just 15 minutes a day to start, and increasing intensity and duration as motivation allows.

2. Work on the procedure analysis sections of lab reports on the days that labs are performed. This will ensure that information about the lab is still fresh in my mind.

3. Do not use lectures as a place to dick around on my laptop. Even better than that would be to not bring my laptop to school at all.

Now, I resolve to finish up my work for the day.

Wish me luck.

Rebirth

It has been a while since my last post, so it is time for an update.

I finished up my first undergraduate degree in Honours Physics at Brock University. I guess in the spirit of this blog, I will give you an update on how well that went.

I spent the vast majority of time in the last couple of years in university doing things like you'd expect an upstanding young man, such as myself to do. I would sleep sporadic hours, become blackout drunk 2 to 3 nights a week, and sitting in the dark the rest of my nights, staring at various versions of brightly lit rectangles.

In spite of being a lazy piece of crap, in my 4th academic year of university; I had chosen to undertake a thesis in Optical Spectroscopy, supervised by Dr.David Crandles. For a number of reasons, this project took me about 2 years to finish, as opposed to the usual 8 months allowed for an undergraduate research project. Thankfully, Dr. Crandles is a very understanding man, and allowed me to take my time, so I could finish my thesis and be able to graduate. I presented my thesis in July of this year, and I apparently had done very well. My work has been included in some other work by Dr. Crandles, so somewhere out there, there is some research with my name included. (Ain't that some shit?)

The completion of my thesis corresponded to the completion of my degree, and as a result, I celebrated my graduation on October 19th.

Handsome, right? 

At some point in between, I had managed to secure myself a lovely girlfriend by the name of Dorothy, who you can see in the above photo. She loves me, for whatever reason, and we have been together for about 2 years.

Now, I am continuing my education, by taking a post-graduate course in Advanced Lasers offered by Niagara College's Welland Campus. It has been...interesting so far. But that is a discussion for another post.

The Weather Lately.

One day, it's rain. The next it's snow. The next? Probably 10+ degrees and sunny. I'm under the impression these days that either the world is coming to an end, or "Mother Nature" is bipolar...and on her menstrual cycle. Please, for the love of this pressure headache I've been getting due to the sporadic weather...Fuck Off, nature.

People just don't understand hashtags.

I'm #prettysure that #hashtags are meant to identify #subjectmatter in your tweets on "Twitter". But most people just use it at the end of every tweet just to seem like they know what they're doing. It achieves the opposite effect. People are #dumb. =]

Honours Project Fun.

For those of you who don't know, or don't really care what it is I study, I'm in physics at Brock University. Since this is my final year of study, I am doing an honours project under Dr. David Crandles, an experimental physicist at Brock. Probably the nicest guy ever, with a pretty kick-ass beard.

Anyway, I returned to Brock on the 2nd to begin the actual experimental portion of my project. My experiment consists of testing how well a thin film of material reflects radiation in the mid-infrared to infrared ranges, over many different temperatures.

The first day consisted of setting up some fairly intimidating equipment (at least to me, anyway). Everything was looking good, so we evacuated the system and waited for the next day to change the temperatures and all.

The second day, we hooked up a large steel container of liquid helium to the system, and pumped said helium to lower the temperature to around 4K, which is -269 degrees celsius. We did a test run for the data collection, but we found the data to be inconsistent, so we had to call it a day and troubleshoot.

The third day, we disassembled the apparatus and looked for the issues, which, according to Dr. Crandles, was an ice buildup on a detector. So we let it heat up to evaporate the ice.

The fourth day was a repeat of the first day, with me double checking everything this time to avoid any fuckups.

Today, we're trying to collect data again. I hope to God it goes well. This is getting really frustrating.

Procrastination at its finest

It's always so much more appealing to creep facebook, read tweets, or write in this blog than actually be productive. In particular, doing my homework. Do I really care about school? Probably, but not enough to do any work on time, even though it's my last year of undergrad. Ugh.

Irony.

I'm nocturnal. My parents make me sleep in the Solarium when I'm back in Brampton. For those that don't know, a Solarium is also known as a "Sun Room." That is, One wall is all window. So much sun in my eyes when I ought to be sleeping. Best of all? I will be working the graveyard shift yet again this summer. So this whole sleeping during the day...in a solarium, thing? Not going to be good. I'll keep you posted