Karmic Blender
I'm feeling very balanced at the moment. Not "balanced" the sense that I'm mentally at ease and in command of my day to day existence. No, more "balanced" in that this week has seen an equal share of very good and very bad events.
On the positive side of things, the election went almost as well as I'd hoped it might. I would have preferred a Lamont victory in Connecticut and the odious Marilyn Musgrave proved not quite odious enough for my hometown district, but I wasn't expecting the Democrats to take back the senate, so I'm very pleased with how things worked out. I also got the pleasure of voting against Rick Santorum in the most passive-agressive way possible. My local district has straight party line voting, so with a single touch of the screen I got the visceral (and possibly vicarious) thrill voting against Santorum and not quite voting for Casey and his anti-choice nonsense. Altogether, a very satisfying experience. Top that off with Santorum getting the taste smacked out his mouth by 20 points, and it's all good. Of course, I did see Bill Bennett talking about Santorum running for president in 08 and other crazy wingnuts floating the idea of nominating him for the Supreme Court, but I'll choose to laugh at those ideas until they become stark horrifying reality.
The other good part of the last week was Eugene's visit to work on our long-delayed modified gravity paper. We didn't get as much done on it as we might have (partly for reasons that will be apparent shortly), but we did hit on an idea that's potentially more interesting and probably more important. I also got to watch Eugene give a talk during the Friday lunch talks we have at Pitt. It wasn't quite as entertaining as the karaoke performance a month ago, but I did enjoy the talk thoroughly. Likewise, it was a big hit with the other people in the department, even if it was an even bet that they didn't really understand much of it (not a slight on them; we just don't get a lot of crazy theory people out this way like you do in a place like Chicago). If the powers that be around here are smart, they'll have him back out to give a faculty talk, but we'll see.
So, what was the karmic price for all of that buttery goodness? Well, Thursday morning I woke up to find that the hard disk on my laptop had apparently died. I tried to do some home-brewed recovery stuff on it, but to no avail. I took it in to the local Apple store and, as I was describing what I'd observed with the laptop to the guy at the Genius Bar, the increasingly ashen look on his face told me that the news wasn't gonna be good. Today, they got in the replacement drive (still under warranty), but they weren't able to mount the old drive. Now, I'm looking at sending the old disk to a data recovery service.
It's an interesting sort of dilemma. 95% of my code is backed up on another disk one place or another. All of the files for my papers (latex files, plot files, images), OTOH, were only on that disk. Likewise for all of my talks, the odd data file, job application stuff, music files, and so on. Basically, I'm looking at somewhere between two to three weeks worth of work to regenerate all of that stuff, at least. That's a fitting number because the price that I was quoted for a full recovery is about equal to my salary for that length of time (it's a sliding scale, based on how much they're able to recover and what sort of heroics they need to go through in order to do it; the best case scenario is gonna run something like $1500, but it could go as high as twice that). Throw in the fact that I'm not gonna have those 2-3 weeks any time in the next 9 months and basically I'm left with the conclusion that, if I'm gonna keep doing astronomy, I've gotta pony up the dough. Otherwise, I may as well just start reading computer science books and concentrate on becoming a full-time Google person. On the plus side, though, now I'll be able to put an exact price tag on what my astrophysics career is worth to me. That, and I think I'll remember to back up my data next time.
On the positive side of things, the election went almost as well as I'd hoped it might. I would have preferred a Lamont victory in Connecticut and the odious Marilyn Musgrave proved not quite odious enough for my hometown district, but I wasn't expecting the Democrats to take back the senate, so I'm very pleased with how things worked out. I also got the pleasure of voting against Rick Santorum in the most passive-agressive way possible. My local district has straight party line voting, so with a single touch of the screen I got the visceral (and possibly vicarious) thrill voting against Santorum and not quite voting for Casey and his anti-choice nonsense. Altogether, a very satisfying experience. Top that off with Santorum getting the taste smacked out his mouth by 20 points, and it's all good. Of course, I did see Bill Bennett talking about Santorum running for president in 08 and other crazy wingnuts floating the idea of nominating him for the Supreme Court, but I'll choose to laugh at those ideas until they become stark horrifying reality.
The other good part of the last week was Eugene's visit to work on our long-delayed modified gravity paper. We didn't get as much done on it as we might have (partly for reasons that will be apparent shortly), but we did hit on an idea that's potentially more interesting and probably more important. I also got to watch Eugene give a talk during the Friday lunch talks we have at Pitt. It wasn't quite as entertaining as the karaoke performance a month ago, but I did enjoy the talk thoroughly. Likewise, it was a big hit with the other people in the department, even if it was an even bet that they didn't really understand much of it (not a slight on them; we just don't get a lot of crazy theory people out this way like you do in a place like Chicago). If the powers that be around here are smart, they'll have him back out to give a faculty talk, but we'll see.
So, what was the karmic price for all of that buttery goodness? Well, Thursday morning I woke up to find that the hard disk on my laptop had apparently died. I tried to do some home-brewed recovery stuff on it, but to no avail. I took it in to the local Apple store and, as I was describing what I'd observed with the laptop to the guy at the Genius Bar, the increasingly ashen look on his face told me that the news wasn't gonna be good. Today, they got in the replacement drive (still under warranty), but they weren't able to mount the old drive. Now, I'm looking at sending the old disk to a data recovery service.
It's an interesting sort of dilemma. 95% of my code is backed up on another disk one place or another. All of the files for my papers (latex files, plot files, images), OTOH, were only on that disk. Likewise for all of my talks, the odd data file, job application stuff, music files, and so on. Basically, I'm looking at somewhere between two to three weeks worth of work to regenerate all of that stuff, at least. That's a fitting number because the price that I was quoted for a full recovery is about equal to my salary for that length of time (it's a sliding scale, based on how much they're able to recover and what sort of heroics they need to go through in order to do it; the best case scenario is gonna run something like $1500, but it could go as high as twice that). Throw in the fact that I'm not gonna have those 2-3 weeks any time in the next 9 months and basically I'm left with the conclusion that, if I'm gonna keep doing astronomy, I've gotta pony up the dough. Otherwise, I may as well just start reading computer science books and concentrate on becoming a full-time Google person. On the plus side, though, now I'll be able to put an exact price tag on what my astrophysics career is worth to me. That, and I think I'll remember to back up my data next time.