Archive for the ‘School’ category

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Caffeine is life blood. . .

April 20th, 2009

After a weekend that was too short for its own good, I’m back at work drinking my coffee and relaxing for a few minutes.  Without this coffee I would probably be passed out somewhere.  I didn’t get to bed until late, thanks to Katie staying up late proofing her Thesis.  On the plus side, she is almost done.  No more of these long nights soon enough.

Katie has been on a rigorous job search, but she has come up empty handed so far.  It really seems like companies are dragging their feet on calling her back.  Either that or they just don’t think she qualified.  I did notice when I started looking for a job that companies care about experience much more than your education.  I was lucky to find a great company that overlooked that and hired me.  If it comes down to it, Katie will start looking for jobs in the RTP (Research Triangle Park near Raleigh-Durham, NC).  We really don’t want to leave the Richmond area though.  Oh well, have to follow where the jobs are.  I can get a job just about anywhere we move.

This past weekend Katie, Dustin, and I went to the XL102 (Rock station in Richmond) Chili Cook-off.  Most of the chili we had was disgusting.  I can’t understand how some of these restaurants have won awards for their chili.  The three of us could kick all their butts with the most basic of ingredients.  The music for they had wasn’t bad, but they had no energy.  Trapt and Amberlin were the two bands we saw live.  Neither one of them performed like I would expect a rock band to.  Doesn’t really matter though, it only cost us like $12 to go and we had a pretty good time either way.

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Posted in Alix News, School

Break time

March 23rd, 2009

So I’m taking a quick break at school from writing (ugh, still at it) my thesis to write a quick update post.

Chase and I are doing well. We’re looking forward to our extended weekend in Titusville this upcoming weekend. I think we both need it to prevent burn out. It looks like we’ll be there for the landing of the shuttle, which I think will be pretty awesome. Plus we’ll get to spend some quality time lounging in/around the pool and not thinking about work or school.

Back to now though, I’m finally working on the last couple of drafts before my thesis is distributed to my committee. To put it in perspective, I give a copy to each committee member. They then have 10 days to read, comment, correct, and review my thesis. Then I defend it–they ask me questions about my work and anything related to it for a few hours. Sometime in those 10 days I’ll give a talk to my entire department on my work (about 45 min). After my defense I’ll have about a week to make any corrections before I submit my final copy to the library, where they’ll look over it to make sure it adheres to all the necessary standards and if it does and I have all my signatures then they’ll publish it and I’ll officially be done. For anyone keeping track I still have to write my table of contents (including the list of figures, list of tables, and list of schemes), abstract, and experimental–and I’m already past 115 pages.

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Posted in Alix News, School, Trips

Snow Day

March 2nd, 2009

Evidently this is the first time since December 2005 the Richmond-metro area has received more than 4 inches of snow. Guesstimating we have about 6-8 inches here at our apartment. Given that, last night VCU said we would have a 2-hour delay. It took them an additional 11 hours (until 8am) to determine that they should probably just close instead. As for driving, based on the traffic reports from TV and Chase’s experience into work today, very few people know how to drive in this weather. The silver lining, I get a whole day without distractions (friends, reactions, Chase) to work on writing and the dogs get to play in the snow.

This past weekend I installed a new processor and motherboard I reformatted my computer so I’m still trying to get everything set up properly. That being said, I have some snow pix, but you’ll have to wait until Chase gets home to see them. and they’re now up in the photo gallery.

3986

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Posted in Alix News, Fun, Pets, School

Writing….

January 19th, 2009

So, as most of you know, I’ve been working on my thesis. Well, the background section at least. Currently, including references, it sits at about 30 pages. I feel like that’s all I’ve been doing lately. It’s kind of starting to drive me insane. But I know the sooner I get it done, the sooner I can defend it and get out of school (finally!). I also know that this section is the one that is going to suck. It’ll probably be the longest section, but everything else is explaining what I did (e.g. results) or how I did it (e.g. experimental) or transitory sections (e.g. introduction and specific aims). So I hope that the bulk of my headache will disappear once this section is more polished.

Before I started writing I thought I had a pretty good grasp of what I was talking about when it comes to this receptor. But, the more I read to get the facts precise, the more I realize it’s so much more complicated than I ever believed. And thus, I get more confused so I have to read more to understand what I don’t understand.

But on a different note, we managed to get a download of Windows 7. Naturally we didn’t put it on one of our main rigs, but still one that would get enough to use to find out how well it works — my laptop. Luckily it’s not laid out much differently than Vista. It’s similar to experiencing Office 2007 when you’re used to Office 2003 in terms of XP to 7. The hiding all open windows features is nice. And with the themes it rotates through a stack of pictures for the background (which for someone who likes to change backgrounds often (i.e. me) it’s nice). Oh yeah, and the jumplists! /smile

Well I’ve wasted enough time here, back to re-reading what I’ve written to expand upon it further.

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Posted in Computers, Rant, School, Windows

Happy Holidays!

December 14th, 2008

For our friends and family that don’t frequent our site, welcome! And for the few that do, welcome back! Just wanted to say Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all of our friends and family.

We usually try to keep the site up-to-date on what’s going on with us; haven’t been but so successful lately. So here’s what’s new (or the same) with us:

Katie’s still working on her Master’s in Medicinal Chemistry. She’ll hopefully be defending late Jan-early Feb. We’re hoping she’ll get a job around here since we’ve gotten attached to all of our wonderful friends here in Richmond. But as any scientist knows, research just doesn’t go the way you expect and always takes longer than anticipated.

Chase is still one of three in the IT department at G.D. But he loves the fact that it’s small enough that every day is different. Right now his department is in the midst of writing a new piece of software for their accountants to use so he’s been quite busy.

In the pet department all of our fish have died, probably due to a fungal infection. But Gizmo and Teddy are doing just fine. Gizmo is just as ornery in the morning as always about going in the kitchen. Teddy has had thankfully much fewer seizures. And this fall they got a new little sister, a little roborovski hamster named Kobito. » Read more: Happy Holidays!

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Posted in Alix News, Car, Fun, Honeymoon, Pets, School, Trips, Wedding, Work