Early Christmas Present

Today I got my unexpected early Christmas gift, two new front tires for the car.

Turns out the recent 'bouncy' behavior that was shaking the steering wheel was due to a rather large hole having been worn through the front-passenger side tire. No kidding, it looked like my last pair of tennis shoes that I wore clear through the toe. It was lucky that I got the car to the shop before the tire actually blew out--that would have been fun to deal with on the way up to my folk's house on Sunday.

-Tim

Mythical Archetypes

If you've ever watched a movie or read a novel from the western, sci fi, heist, sports, or war genres, you've undoubtedly noticed that there are always some characters that seem to fit the same mold no matter which genre they're in. For instance, the "Cocky/Sarcastic Pilot", the "Silent Warrior", the "Spunky Engineer", the "Naive Farmboy", the "Emotionally Distant but Fair-Minded Captain", or the "Mercenary with the Heart of Gold".

Why do I bring this up? Well, like any good genre flick, the prelim exam committee consits of four such Mythical Archetypes:

"The Advisor" - A subtype of the "Teacher/Wizard" category, the Adivsor's job is, strangely enough, to advise the student.

"The Chairman" - Usually an experimentalist in the same field as the student, but as far as I can tell they don't really have any more responsibility or duties than the other committee members.

"The Theorist" - Should at least dabble in the same field as the student, they'll ask questions that make no sense and reference journal articles that the student hasn't read and wouldn't understand anyway.

"The Outsider" - Someone from outside the student's field of research, their job is to ask those insidiously basic questions that everyone else in the room just assumes that the student knows the answer to.

Sometimes, a fifth committee member or substitution is required:

"The Expert" - Replaces "The Theorist" as an experimentalist who is in a closely related field and knows way more about the student's experiment than they do.

"The Foreigner" - Replaces "The Outsider" and comes from an entirely different department or even college on campus.

My committee is almost complete, the next task is just to get them all in the same room together for two hours. No word yet on whether or not they'll do the Wild West Hero Shot, where they all line up in front of some extreme back lighting so an opening door or swooping camera shot can reveal them dramatically.

-Tim

New Toy.

I realize that it's cliché to say now, but it really is true that when you switch to an LCD monitor you recover desk space you never knew you had. After saving up since July, I've finally bought one and it's pretty amazing--I can actually see my desk now.

I went back and forth a few times, but finally settled on the Samsung 205BW. It's a 20.1 inch widescreen monitor (1690 x 1050 pixels) with a TN panel. The TN panels aren't quite as good at color reproduction as the more expensive S-IPS and P-MVA panels, but they're known for extremely fast response times and good black levels.


I went with the widescreen because you really can see more this way. Sure it displays fewer actual pixels on the screen than my CRT did, but since you can see further to the sides than you can up or down more of the screen is useful. You can have two full sheets of paper next to each other, and playing games is down-right cinematic.

-Tim