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A Day in the Life of  Your Type is ESTJ Extroverted Sensing Thinking Judging Strength of the preferences % 22 25 25 44 ESTJ type description by D.Keirsey ESTJ type description by J. Butt Qualitative analysis of your type formula You are: slightly expressed extrovert moderately expressed sensing personality moderately expressed thinking personality moderately expressed judging personality Check these links out to find out more http://keirsey.com/personality/sjet.htm http://typelogic.com/estj.html Comment and... 1. I'll respond with something random I like about you. 2. I'll tell you what song/movie reminds me of you. 3. I'll name something we should do together. 4. I'll say something that only makes sense to you and me (or just me). 5. I'll tell you my first/clearest memory of you. 6. I'll leave you a quote that is somehow appropriate to you. 7. I'll ask you something that I've always wondered about you. 8. If I do this for you, you must post this on your journal. You MUST, if you don't, a seal beneath the earth will break, I will come after you and god help you then It is past time for me to update my journal. Since I want to take a break from my thesis work, now seems like a good time to post. *Warning - If you have no desire to read about engineering skip down* The last few weeks have been incredibly busy. I've been doing a lot of work on my thesis. Mostly going to the lab and running samples on the GC. The samples turned out just fine but all the programs that were supposed to help me find the actual concentration of each component in my sample didn't work, or at least I did not know how to make them work. So after spending a few days trying to work out how to make them work I finally just said screw it and went and made my own program to do it for me. This program is not fancy but it works. There was just one problem with my program. I knew that the concentration of ethanol was related to the area underneath the GC curve, but I had no idea what the relationship between them was. So I had to go back and make up several standard solution of known concentration to help me calibrate the results I'd already collected. The new standards worked well and today I managed to construct a couple of different calibration curves that I think are fairly accurate. I've also been working on getting all the GC results analyzed with my program and logged in an Excel sheet so that I will have the numbers when I need them. So it seems that one big hurdle is out of the way. I think I now know the concentration of ethanol in each of my samples. This is very good news. The flip side of this is that now that I've got the ethanol data I need I have to figure out how that plays with the other compounds that are in my samples. I esentially ignored thier existence for the calibration because ethanol and water make up such a huge fraction of the samples, but some of the analysis I've done up to this point looks like as much as 5% of some samples could be other compounds. This could be a problem, but hopefully not much of one. I hope, I hope. So now I am onto working on my model, which is pretty darn close to working as it is now. This is also good news, becuase if I can make it mimic what my sample analysis says I'm pretty much done with the non-writing part of my thesis. I'll still have to run duplicate runs of my samples just to show repeatablility of the method and then some work on the model to explore the important factors in the modeling. Things like how the number of distillation trays affects the model and how the amount of reflux affects the final quality....stuff like that. Then it is sit down and write esentially three peer review articles. This will be somewhat tedious, but not impossible by any means. Today is February 24....I need to have the work and the writing done by early April. So essentially I've got a month and a half to do all of this. It will be busy, but I don't think it will be impossible. Just need to be sure I keep my supply of elbow grease up. *Okay, you can start reading again if you skipped the engineering* So basically I'm going to be rather busy over the next 6 weeks with my school work. Now in that same time period I have some other things I need to be doing. I need to start making an inventory of the things I need to take with me to California. Oh yeah, in case I didn't post this before, I accept my job offer from my cousin in San Diego. I start after graduation. How soon after graduation I don't know. I'll have to work that out too. Spring Break starts friday after next. Allie and I are going to Kiawah Island with some friends of mine which should be a lot of fun, but I may have to spend a decent amount of time writing while I'm out there. The last weekend of spring break I'll be taking Allie home to see South Pittsburg and meet my parents and family. That should be a lot of fun, but it is still a little be nerve racking because I know that Allie is nervous about it. I have no doubt that it will go fine and my parents will like her, but no matter how many times I tell her this it doesn't seem to make any real difference. I also have been looking at getting a new car since I'm getting a job and will have the money to pay for one. My car has been very good to me over the years, even if I haven't been as good to it as I could have been, but it is starting to run into lots of problems. Just last week the water pump in the collant system broke and I had to pay $400 to get it fixed. That is not something I want to repeat again with this car. I know that if nothing serious goes wrong the car will last me as long as I need it, but I don't think I want to try driving cross country in a car that has begun to have wear and tear failures. So I went to the BMW dealer to look at and test drive cars. I was very pleased with the way the 325i I drove felt and handled. I've almost decided that I want to get one, but the financing will be an issue until I actually get out to CA and start earning some money. We'll just have to see how it all plays out. Things are going really well with Allie. I can't believe that 3 months ago I was telling myself that I was perfectly happy by myself and that I really didn't need anyone else. Being in a really good relationship for the first time in a long time has been so much better than being by myself was. I know that I don't watch as much TV or read as much as I used to, but that is a trade I'll make everyday. I mean just looking at it Allie vs. Adult Swim or basketball or well pretty much anything and Allie wins everytime. And she likes my friends. This is great, because I'd feel a bit worse about completely dropping my friends to be with her. Oh yeah, don't think that I mentioned this in any of my recent posts, but Valentine's Day was possibly the best day I've ever spent with someone. The entire day was just one long smile. Still makes me smile looking back on it. So that is what is going on in my life at the moment. I'm going to get back to work and probably make another post tonight. The next post will almost certainly be about some of the political stuff that has been going on lately. So consider yourselves warned. Current mood: accomplished. Current music: Jack and Diane - John Mellencamp. I'm just going to make a short list of things that are wonderful today. Top Ten Wonderful Things 10. Hot showers in the morning 9. Feeling spring (warm weather) getting closer every day 8. Small dogs named Henry 7. Books dedicated to my favorite subject...useless facts and random trivia. 6. Customized away messages 5. Leftovers from a good restaurant 4. Down comforters 3. Automated Gas Chromatagraph machines 2. Personal letters (not email) 1. Allie Current mood:  happy.Current music: U2 - Beautful Day. It is time to update my journal again. Things are going well for me here in K-ville. I'm loving life and having a great time. For the first time in quite a while I'm looking forward to Valentine's Day. I think that I'm probably making my friends just a little sick with how much I'm enjoying life as a taken man. I know I don't get out nearly as much as I did before, but I'm also getting more work done on my thesis and having a great time away from work. So basically for the last few weeks I have been going crazy working on my thesis. Let me see if I can give you guys a basic lay out of my day. Wake up, go to school, teach or prepare to teach for a few hours, sit down in fronto of computer and read/write/work on model, maybe eat food at some point, go to lab, do lab work...um...keep doing lab work, oh yeah can't forget, do lab work, leave around 8, attempt to do more work or just give up and go see my girlfriend. Repeat every day. Don't get me wrong, life is good, but sometimes I wonder what on earth I'm gonna do when I don't have to spend so much time trying to get the silly GC/MS to work. I think that today I finally made it work the right way and that hopefully I will not have to do anything except run my samples for a while. If that is indeed how it works out I could be done with my lab work in a matter of just a couple of weeks. That means that I'll only have to finish writing my thesis and complete my model over the next 5 weeks. I can do it, but it may not be much fun for, oh maybe, March. That includes a week of spring break that may not be much more than a week where I don't have to teach. Having all that to do and hanging over my head has made most everything else not Allie rather unimportant for a while. That includes the stuff my cousin and future employer wants me to be doing. I got an email from him today that said essentially, "Hey how is work coming on that program I wanted you to do. I still haven't had time to really look over what you sent me a month and a half ago, but I hope you've made lots of progress." This was not fun. Basically I haven't touched what I'm doing for him in almost a month. That means that sometime soon I have to sit down and attempt to cram a day of work on his program into what I've been doing so far. My only guess is that Sunday I'll just have to buckle down and do work almost all day to make up for the fact that I haven't really done anything for him since Jan. I need to quit thinking of all the stuff that I have to do and focus on small things...you know like writing another 5 pages of thesis over the next few days, or something like that. Yeah, that's the way to do it. Anyway, hope that all of you out there are having as much fun as I'm having and a little bit less of the stress causing stuff that I've got to sift through. Have fun everyone and see you soon. Current mood:  determined.Current music: Outkast - Hey Ya. Current mood:  curious.
Well, its been a little while since I posted. That is mainly a result of my not being in town and then being busy with the first few days back to school. The last few days have been eventful. I traveled to Houston, Texas for a job interview that I believe went well. The trip was not great but it was not bad either. Just a long day on a plane on the way down when I was not feeling real well, and then a long day of interviews the next day with another set of plane rides tacked onto the end. When I did finally make it back up to Knoxville I got back to school and realized that I had missed a fairly important deadline for submitting some graduation forms. This caused a fairly large amount of panic at first, but again it seems to have worked out okay. After all of this I finally got to see my girlfriend again which made things much better. That brings us to today. I got up and came to school to get a good start on my semesters work schedule. I have made some decent progress so far. I feel like I am just a few steps away from getting this part of my thesis work done. I got some good news from one of my professors as well. He has found someone who has done work very similar to mine in the past and this person may be able to help me. This would be most excellent and cut a few weeks off of the time it will take me to finish up another part of my thesis work. And I also got an offer back from my first job interview in Chicago. This is quite obviously good news. Even though I don't think that I am going to accept that position if the other two jobs pan out, it is nice to have a definite option at this point. So now I'm going to go to my Grad Student Senate meeting and then go work out for the first time in a few weeks. This should be good. I don't know if that is sarcastic or not. Current mood: happy.Current music: The Darkness - I Believe in a Thing Called Love. Some things happen to you in your life that change the way you look at yourself, someone else, or your life in general. Everybody has some of these things. I'm making an effort to start keeping track of these kinds of events. Part of that is this journal. Some of that I just need to jot down so I don't forget why it happened or how it changed me. And sometimes the events are so meaningful or important that a single word or phrase is enough to remind you of them. Just so I don't forget these phrases I'm going to set them down here. They probably won't make any sense to those of you who will read this, but that's okay. They are here just to remind me. 15 Days (Ruby Horror) Stargazing Priceless All About Us Stealing Sleep Velvet Ropes For those of you out there who read this and know what I'm talking about I hope that you look back as fondly on these moments as I do. Each one will be a cherished memory of mine. Current mood: ecstatic.Current music: Fishin' In the Dark - Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Well, I'm reaching a milestone in my life over the coming week. My first real, this is serious, job interviews. After being a student for the last oh....17 years of my life I now must face the ever present "real world". The jobs all sound pretty good and I think I will do well in any of them, but it is gonna be a tough decision. I'm looking at three very different cities assuming that I get an offer from each interview. Chicago, Houston, and San Diego. All three seem like cool places to live. Right now I'm leaning toward taking the San Diego job, but it probably has the most risk associated with it. One of those dang risk/reward situations. If things work out I could be really good, if things don't work out things could be pretty bad. But I guess really all of the jobs are like that. So anyway, i'm off to the airport and Chicago tomorrow. Into freezing weather and lots of wind....fun. I do have a friend up in Chicago that I haven't seen in a while so hopefully we'll get to hang out. That might help make things go a little smoother. But anyway, this is just a way to release a little bit of tension before I head out. I'm gonna be a little stress ball until I get that first part of the interview over with...but i guess that is just the way things are supposed to be. Hope you guys have days that are a little less nerve wracking than what I'm in for over the next week. Current mood:  nervous.Current music: Foo Fighters - My Hero. In my ideal world I would be able to make a living doing something I love. In this world, I think I'm coming close...I think I will be able to make a living doing something I enjoy, but there is a big difference in the two. Like I have told my friends at times, my ideal job would probably be working as a sports announcer. I think that would be something I would love to do. Combine my enjoyment of almost all sports with my desire to perform. In the absence of that opportunity my next ideal job would be as a performance artist of some sort. This brings us to the impetus for this particular journal entry. Over this holiday break from school I have taken the opportunity to do some television watching that I have not gotten to do during school. My favorite show to watch is Inside the Actor's Studio on Bravo. My family and I have always been movie goers. I have spent as much time inside a movie theater or in front of the television watching a movie as I have spent doing just about anything else. This familiarity with movies however has never really bred into me an accurate sense of what it really takes to make a movie. What the actors, directors, producers have to go through to produce the final film that we get to enjoy. For me Inside the Actor's Studio is like that magic movie ticket from the Last Action Hero, it is a license to enter into a previously forbidden world and look around. One of my many faults is that I sometimes overlook the effort of so many people in what I get to enjoy in my everyday life. Movies serve as entertainment, escape, messenger, and release in my life, and every time I see one of those shows it reminds me how much I forget everytime I sit down to watch one. This also serves as a lesson to me about how I deal with other people. I sometimes forget to thank them for everything they have done for me or if I do thank them, it reminds me that there may have been times before that I didn't. These little lessons in life are some of the most important we'll ever learn. I hope to remember this one. And if I don't, those of you out there who actually know me have my permission to remind me and kick me for forgetting. Oh and one more thing, if any of you out there want to be an engineer and let me have you job as a musician/actor/director/artist just drop me a line and we'll see if we can't work something out. :) Current mood: chipper.Current music: none. |
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