The few people who surf their way here might notice a new block in the side bar, Counting the days. I set it up using the MTCountdown plugin by David Raynes. It’s a pretty cool plugin, and easy to use. Just seemed like it would be a neat thing to set up. It’ll be one of those things that changes every now and then when there’s something significant for me to count down to (or count up from).
This, along with the People Visited From and the weather blocks are done using cool MT plugins.
Which Mythological Form Am I?
You are Form 1, Goddess: The Creator.
“And The Goddess planted the acorn of life. She cried a single tear and shed a single drop
of blood upon the earth where she buried it. From her blood and tear, the acorn grew into the world.”
Some examples of the Goddess Form are Gaia (Greek), Jehova (Christian), and Brahma (Indian). The Goddess is associated with the concept of creation, the number 1, and the element of earth. Her sign is the dawn sun.
As a member of Form 1, you are a charismatic individual and people are drawn to you. Although sometimes you may seem emotionally distant, you are deeply in tune with other people’s feelings and have tremendous empathy. Sometimes you have a tendency to neglect your own self. Goddesses are the best friends to have because they’re always willing to help.
Which Mythological Form Are You?
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Scary Movie 3
Went to see Scary Movie 3 last night. Definitely one you can wait to rent, if you even want to do that. I’d recommend skipping it altogether. A spoof loosely based on The Ring. Mostly a series of corny jokes, most of which are spoofs of other horror/sci-fi movies, like in the previous Scary Movies. The movie has its moments, but not very many of them.
Dammit Jim, I’m a physicist, not a programmer!
Somewhere in the back of my head, I’ve been pondering the idea of learning how to write some image processing routines. It’s one of those things that I think about every now and then. I’ve always wanted to write some image reconstruction routines to do some filtered backprojection. Sure, I could probably find some library routines out there that do it already, but you always learn more about a subject when you do it yourself. I’m already familiar with the concept, and it’s not all that difficult. I can use my FORTRAN again! Or maybe I could do something cool on the web! Then I also think about learning how to do other image processing algorithms, like filtering, warping, mapping, transforms. I could do all sorts of cool things to images that I acquire for some of my research.
Other projects come to mind, then I remember all the half finished projects that I’ve got sitting on the backburner waiting for me to get back to them. I’m still trying to learn enough about Visual Basic and using ADO to get my spreadsheets and databases interacting with each other. And then there are the web pages for work I’m maintaining, the web interfaces for my databases that I want to rework, the research projects to do, etc etc.
When I have some spare moments, I’ll sit down and work on some of the programming related projects on my list. Then after working on them for a few days, I remember just how much I hate programming. I really do. I mean, it’s something I can do, and I’ve had plenty of exposure to different programming languages: Applesoft BASIC, Fortran, C, Objective C, a touch of Pascal, and more recently PHP. Maybe it’s just because I’m not proficient enough at programming. I haven’t had much in the way of formal programming courses other than two Fortran courses during my undergrad. Most of my programming knowledge I’ve acquired as I needed it. Most of the programs I end up writing are usually functional, but hardly pretty or elegant. So after a while of pondering how to write something, I’ll get tired and put it away again. Occasionally I’ll get a flash of insight on how to accomplish some task. That’s always a good feeling.
But, I’ve decided I just don’t like programming, and any programming I have to do is just a necessary evil. As long as my programs spit out the right results, I’m happy.
Solving problems
Ever have one of those problems where the more you dig into it to find a solution, the more complicated it becomes?
A couple of days ago, I started digging into a problem we were having with one of our computed radiography (CR) readers. Techs were complaining that they were starting to have to use much higher x-ray techniques than normal to get properly exposed images. So, I head over, and run some quick checks with some of my test objects, and narrow it down to the CR reader. Sure enough, the reader in question was producing a lower exposure index (a number that’s related to how much radiation the CR plate was exposed to) than an older CR reader next to it.
The next day, I head over there with some more test objects to get some more quantitative data, and confirmed just how much lower the CR reader was responding.
Today, I decided I had better check our other CR readers. They were all relatively new (installed April 2003), and I had data for some of them when they were first installed. The testing is something I usually try to do on a monthly basis, but the summer was a pretty busy one, so I hadn’t been able to get to doing my regular tests on them. Much to my surprise, I found all of the other CR readers producing lower exposure index values too. And to make it worse, they were all lower by the same amount. Each of the CR readers runs a set of diagnostics periodically on various systems, which is very useful. A quick check of those results didn’t reveal anything significantly wrong that I thought would cause the problem though. So now, instead of trying to figure out what the problem with one unit is, I have to figure out what could be causing the same problem on 5 different units. Could it be the laser assembly? The light guide? A photomultiplier tube?
At first my guess was the laser starting to fail. But how does it happen to 5 different units by the same amount? A bad batch of lasers perhaps? Who knows. The more I dig into it, the more perplexing the problem becomes.