The Secret to my Brother's Success

The Penny Dreadful Players are putting on Dan's second full length play this weekend:

Success Has A Thousand Fathers
A student written drama by Dan McArdle
March 3-4 at 8 pm in Greg Hall (810 S. Wright St, Urbana, IL)
Special matinee performance on Saturday March 3 at 3 pm.
$4 at the door

The Saturday matinee performance will feature a FREE
post-performance discussion with the cast & crew
(including the playwright/director), answering any questions
the audience may have from; the issues addressed in the play,
to the production process itself.

I don't know much about it, other than that it centers around the lives of workers in a small town factory and that the critics* are already hailing it as both a "triumph of the human spirit" and a "tour de force".

-Tim


*So far the only critic I've heard from is our mom.

There's Physics in Beer

Science comes to the masses [news.com.com]

It's a great idea, and certainly reaches a different type of audience than The Physics Van and the Whys Guy generally do.

-Tim

It just never ends, does it?

My video card is on its way in for service due to a faulty fan. The fan would just stop spinning at random, driving the temperature of the card up to 90 degrees celsius while playing games. I could restart it by just spinning it with my finger, but that didn't really seem like a workable long term solution.

The card is just over a year old now, and I was sure that the warranty would have expired. But I was never able to find any warranty information on Leadtek's site, and they gave me an RMA so hopefully this will get taken care of quickly.

I am starting to see the sense in just using a game console for gaming, it's just too bad I always pick the wrong one.

-Tim

Connected!

Before we left the lab on Friday, we managed to connect the final two MBE systems and the XPS system to the tube. We now have everything connected and under pressure!


Next up, we need to start making a dent in wiring the electronics.

-Tim

Well excuse me, princess.

Tamara and I went out to check out the new Aldi up on university yesterday and were almost run off the road!

We were in the left lane of Main St., not far from where it meets up with US 130/150 when a large white van turned left out of one of the subdivisions--literally into the space that our car was about to occupy. What's more, as I swerved into the right lane honking emphatically, the van changed lanes too! They nearly drove into our front end not once, but twice.

In lab news, we finally got one of the MBE chambers connected to the transfer tube in the middle of last week. We think we managed to repair the leaky high-voltage feedthrough on one of the tube ion pumps. We have received the funding to go ahead and install liquid nitrogen lines to our lab. And we've started discussing thesis topics with Jim, which is good considering that three of us need to take our prelim exams this semester.

-Tim