Across the Universe

About two weeks ago, I had the electricity turned on at the new apartment and I set up a new Charter Cable Internet account so there wouldn’t be a gap in Internet service between moving out of the old apartment and moving into the new one. After spending several days cleaning the dust out of the new apartment, I began moving some of my books and book cases out of the old apartment.  I rented a U-Haul truck on Thursday (1/12/2012). Melissa and I moved the bulk of our stuff  into the new apartment and the storage unit. I spent the next few days thoroughly cleaning the old apartment and moving the remainder of our belongings.  Everything was finished by yesterday afternoon! Now we have to unpack and organize things. I should find out how much of my security deposit will be returned within 20 days.

The new place is small and the plumbing and wiring leave a lot to be desired. The bathroom sink supplies a mere trickle of cold water—comparable to a water pistol. Our small heat pump shares the same circuit as half of the outlets in the apartment, so it’s quite easy to accidentally trip the breaker. On the other hand,  it is relatively quiet here!  There’s no loud dog barking endlessly next door, the train is not as loud, there is no roar of freeway traffic 24/7, there are no gamers playing FPS video games, and there is no crazy pothead downstairs laughing maniacally at all hours of the day and night—polluting our apartment with smoke. I’ve been resting better without the noise.  Saving several hundred dollars per month on rent is also a major benefit. I may actually be able to earn enough from tutoring to pay my half of the rent…..for the next few months anyway.

Side notes:

I put my three containers of Irish moss (pearlwort or sagina subulata) in the yard last night temporarily until I could figure out what to do with them.  A dog apparently got in the yard during the night or early morning and tore one of the trays apart. So now I know that it’s not safe to put my bonsai in the back yard. The fence apparently does nothing to protect the yard from dogs. I may plant some little bits of the Irish moss in the yard to see if it survives…

My assigned parking spot is directly beside the dumpster.  This seems like a recipe for trouble.

Among the chaos of moving, I managed to apply for UCR’s Dissertation Year Program (DYP) Fellowship. The fellowship is merit-based and more than one person in the Physics Department will receive it this year, so I have a decent chance of success.

Wikipedia and a few other websites will go dark tomorrow in protest of the horrible SOPA and PIPA legislation.

Three long-awaited events occurred today.  In chronological order:

I ordered the Samsung Galaxy Nexus!

Background: I’ve had my current cell phone since the summer of 2008–before I moved to CA. I have been waiting to get an Android phone for a while now, but I’ve been very selective.  This summer, I decided to get the next Google flagship phone with Android 4.0.  The Galaxy Nexus is that phone and it was officially released to the American public yesterday.  Since I waited so long to get a new phone, I had a $100 discount in addition to the regular discounts for buying online and starting a new two-year contract.

My paper has been accepted for publication!

Background: I started writing this paper (which will be part of my PhD thesis) in January.  There were many interruptions along the way.  When it was finally finished and submitted, it took several weeks for the editor to find a reviewer for the paper.  Once the reviewer was found, it took approximately  one month to receive his report.  It took me a while to respond to the comments, edit the paper, and resubmit.  Then nearly one week passed before I received notice that my article had been accepted for publication (in The Astrophysical Journal).

Melissa and I have signed a lease for a new apartment!

Background:  We have needed to reduce our expenses and get away from our current neighbors for over a year.  We should be able to save slightly more than $200 per month compared with the current apartment, so the financial stress will be lowered somewhat. We have also moved to #72 on the waiting list for the UCR student family housing.  In September, we were at >100 on the list.  At this rate, we won’t have to live in the new apartment long before moving into the student housing.  The new apartment is a large studio in an old house in downtown Riverside. Photos of the house are shown below.

The front:

The back:

The first page of the paper:

The phone:

It has been over a month since my last entry and a lot has happened, so I’ll have to summarize quite a bit and omit some things:

I have spent most of my time working on research.  I’m trying to catch up to my self-imposed schedule. I’m almost back on schedule now and I should be completely back on track by the end of February.

Shortly after my previous entry, I successfully compiled the P-GADGET-2 simulation code with several different sets of makefile options.  The code has quite a few conditional compilation options so that the simulations can be customized at compile time.  I’ve also tested a lot of different parameter file options; once the code is compiled, there are still many options that are adjustable at run-time.  I compiled a program called IFrIT with a GADGET-2 snapshot reading plugin so that I could visualize the simulations that I’m working with and easily rotate and zoom to explore the systems that I’ve modeled.

To see a video of a merger simulation that I ran and find out more details, refer to these three research log entries:

http://www.idius.net/first-simulations/

http://www.idius.net/quadratic-spline-interpolation/

http://www.idius.net/and-now-a-two-point-cubic-spline/

I’ve also been working on a C++ code that can read, analyze, manipulate, and save GADGET-2 snapshots.  In order to use the code more efficiently, I spent a few days learning to use the Qt framework for creating cross-platform GUI applications.  Now I can use the program from the command line, call it from a script, or interactively use the program with the GUI that I designed. Using the GUI allows me to explore individual snapshots more quickly, while the command line interface allows me to automate my analysis.

I had wanted to learn to create GUI applications for about ten years, so I was very excited when I learned to do it!  It’s surprisingly easy with Qt. Here are some screenshots of the current (basic) version of my “GSnap” code running in Unity, GNOME 2, KDE, and Windows 7 (I don’t have access to a Mac, so I can’t show what it looks like in Mac OS).

I received the referee’s comments regarding my first paper a few weeks ago and yesterday I finally finished making edits and replying to all of the referee’s comments.  The paper was resubmitted last night.  Hopefully it will be accepted for publication soon!

Melissa and I have been budgeting pretty successfully.  We’re putting a fixed amount of our monthly income into our joint saving account and we have reduced our living expenses.  In addition to that, I started tutoring again in November, so I’ve had some supplemental income lately. The tutoring job has been pretty interesting; A local periodontist who is also a clinical assistant professor at The University of Redlands contacted the physics department at UCR seeking a tutor for his son. His son had a ‘B’ in AP physics, and he needed a tutor in order to get straight ‘A’s.  He is the only 11th grader at his school taking AP physics and he hasn’t learned much trigonometry or calculus yet, but he’s doing pretty well. I replied to the e-mail and got the job.  He paid me $75 per hour for my inconvenience; now his son now has a low ‘A’ in AP physics going into the final exam. It was nice to do some teaching again!

In addition to the extra tutoring income, my mom gave us a small wedding present and she sent two care packages with some food, which helped us save on groceries!

Yesterday Melissa and I checked out a studio apartment that she found through Craigslist the day before. It’s a large studio, which means that it’s smaller than our current apartment, but it’s significantly cheaper and it is in a house rather than an apartment complex, so we will have a yard and fewer close neighbors to deal with. We will save about $230 per month on rent compared with the cost of continuing to live in our current apartment, but some of that will be offset because I’ll be getting renter’s insurance.  The house is within walking distance of the Mission Inn, which means that Melissa can walk to work and we can save slightly on gasoline. I’ll need to either take the bus to UCR (the bus is free for UCR students) or buy a parking sticker and drive. Since the studio is smaller, we will have to put some things into storage until we are able to move into the UCR student family housing. Fortunately, we already have a storage unit that should work.

Melissa’s Verizon Wireless contract ended at the beginning fo December, so she was able to get a new phone at a discounted price.  She now has a Motorola Droid X2.  I’ll have to wait until next year for my next phone  (the Samsung Galaxy Nexus) to become available.

Today Melissa and I have been married for one month and one week.  Melissa is now officially Melissa Stickley on all of her important documents except for her passport.

Since writing my last blog entry, I have finished writing the first draft of my paper and started working on my actual thesis project! I submitted the paper to the Astrophysical Journal yesterday!  In addition to research-related things, I’ve been reading an introductory particle physics book, the Landau and Lifshitz series on theoretical physics, and an interesting history of science book called “The Age of Entanglement”.

Last Wednesday Melissa and I visited my auto insurance agent.  I updated the marital status on my policy, which reduced my annual insurance premium by approximately $300. That helps a bit, but the overall financial outlook for the rest of the year is not very bright.  I spend more than 50% of my income on rent alone. With the exception of February, I have had a net negative income each month this year.  Next month Melissa and I will begin following a strict budget to try to get back on track or at least stabilize the situation.  We are also looking for a more affordable apartment.  Earlier this year, I applied for a rent reduction, which would have saved me about $200 per month. Unfortunately I was ultimately ineligible because I’m a student (I’m not sure why graduate students are ineligible for financial assistance, while wife beating, smoking, drinking, child abusing non-students get special treatment!). The university has special family housing for graduate students, but there is a long waiting list (over 100 people were ahead of us in the waiting list, as of a few weeks ago).  It would be nice to be able to live there, though. The little houses are nicer than our current apartment, the neighbors would HAVE to be better than what we have now, and the rent is approximately HALF of what I’m currently paying.  I’m hoping to at least have a decent tax return next year and a sizable reward on my Costco American Express card. I’m also hoping to be a 100% research assistant during the summer months rather than 45% employee or whatever I am at the moment. I may also try getting out of the student employee union.  I can’t really afford for UAW to deduct from my monthly income.

In short, I need to finish this thesis project and move on as soon as possible!

On Sunday, the 14th of August, Melissa and I flew to Virginia in preparation for our wedding. We spent the week before the wedding taking care of the last few unfinished details of the wedding. We…

• obtained our marriage licence.
• painted the lighted wedding arch black so that the bright white frame wouldn’t show (see photos below).
• made the CD that would play during the ceremony
• ran through the details of the ceremony with the planetarium director.
• set up the backdrop and wedding arch in the planetarium
• pressure washed the picnic / cookout area at my mom’s place (the site of our reception)
• made napkins and table cloths for use at the reception
• bought wedding bubble tubes
• finished making the ceremony programs
• assembled the cupcake tree
• made the cupcakes and small cake for the top of the tree

I also had time to prune and trim some of the trees in the yard and updated some of the software on my mom’s computers.

Our wedding was scheduled for 3:00 on Sunday. As late as Sunday morning, the forecast showed rain for most of the afternoon and evening. It actually did rain a bit before the wedding, but we were fortunate in that the forecast for the evening was wrong; there was no rain after the wedding, so we were able to have the reception outside. The wedding ceremony itself went very smoothly. At the beginning of the ceremony, the night sky was projected while an instrumental version of Black Hole Sun played. This represented the beginning of our relationship, since our first date was spent stargazing at El Mirage. The projection of the stars set a nice mood for the rest of the ceremony….in my opinion anyway. The ceremony seemed to whiz by almost in a blink of an eye.

On Tuesday, morning (really more like Monday night), we flew to Cancún for our honeymoon. As evident in the photos below, Cancún is every bit as beautiful as people say it is. Unfortunately, many of the other people visiting Cancún were not pleasant. There were more smokers there than I have seen anywhere else. At times it was impossible to avoid breathing second-hand cigarette smoke because there were so many smokers. People were even smoking at the beach and a few smokers were wading in the ocean with lit cigarettes. There was mold in the ventilation system of our hotel, so that the entire time we were in the building, we were forced to breathe mold spores. The concentration of mold spores in the hotel was mild, however, compared with the high concentration of mold spores in the interior of the tour bus that transported us to and from Chichén Itzá. I developed a sinus infection due to my allergies and the horrible air quality.

Upon returning to California, I learned that someone had dented my car at some point. The driver’s door only opens enough for me to squeeze into the car. I will need to file another insurance claim and get this fixed. I’ve been too sick and exhausted to do anything substantial since returning to California. I’ve only managed to upload a few photos from the wedding and honeymoon to Facebook and do some light reading. I read the book Dreams of a Final Theory, by Steven Weinberg, which I bought at the Green Valley Book Fair in Virginia. I think I’ll probably feel well enough to resume working on my paper tomorrow.

Aftermath: Later, during the week of August 21st,

• There was a 5.8 magnitude earthquake in Virginia.
• Hurricane Irene struck Virginia and devastated parts of New England.
• Muammar Gaddafi was thrown from power in Libya.
•  Apple CEO, Steve Jobs resigned.

Some photos, out of order for the moment…

I’ve been incredibly busy for the last few weeks.  During the week prior to my first university lecture, I made a schedule detailing every weekday during the summer session, I wrote my syllabus, I began formatting the document that would later become the midterm and final exam, I wrote the first homework assignment, and I wrote the notes for the first two lectures. I made some important decisions early in the process.  I decided to…

1. not use the web-based assignment software.
2. grade all of the homework myself, using the lottery and completion system (in which most of the homework grade is based upon completion, but one “random” problem is graded for correctness).
3. write all of the homework problems and solutions myself rather than using the resources provided by the textbook publisher.
4. not use presentation software to present the material; write on the board so as to prevent myself from going too fast and to allow the students to see all of the key steps and ask questions along the way.
5. use demonstrations where possible—mostly to provide some minor entertainment, but also to reinforce principles.
6. use remote-control “clickers” only for attendance and simple polling—not as an intimidation tool.

I had only planned to dress in a nice shirt and pants for the very first lecture, but Melissa strongly encouraged me to wear dress clothes for all but the final lecture.  We went to Banana Republic and bought some new dress clothes, and I bought some new dress shoes at one of the shoe stores in the Ontario Mills mall.

Writing the notes for each of the three-hour lectures took me between 4 and 8 hours, with six hours being typical. The most time-consuming part of writing the lecture notes was the selection of appropriate example problems. I would brainstorm a few problems and then solve them, but some were too complicated to use as examples or they involved principles that the students hadn’t learned yet, OR they had complicating factors that didn’t clearly demonstrate the concept of interest.  One has to be very careful not to confuse or mislead the audience when designing an example! Even though I prepared pretty carefully, I still made some errors (mainly calculation errors) that had to be corrected on-the-fly during the lecture.  Overall, things went rather smoothly though.

For the exams and homework assignments, I used the newest version of the “exam” class (http://www-math.mit.edu/~psh/) which allows you to easily write the solutions in the same document that contains the questions; when you want to print the solutions, you simply uncomment one line of the source code and recompile the PDF document. Combining this with a few other handy classes and some custom macros made it relatively easy for me to make high-quality assignments and solutions. The last week of the class was too hectic to allow me to write the solutions in , so I had to write the solutions by hand.

I tried to get the students to call me “Nathaniel”, but few complied.  Most called me “Professor” or “Mr. Stickley”.  The “professor” title felt rather odd—partly because I’m a just a grad student and partly because I’ve never referred to a professor as “professor”.  We typically called our professors by their first names or Doctor ____  at JMU and GMU.

The final exam was on Saturday, July 23rd, from 8:00 AM – 12:00 PM and it was graded by 7:20 PM.  I computed the final course grades on Monday and tried to post them, but the system (igrade.ucr.edu) wouldn’t let me press the “submit” button.  After talking with someone in the registrar’s office on Tuesday, I thought the grades would be submitted by someone else. I thought everything was finished by 5:00 on Tuesday, but it’s still not quite over. It appears that the chair of the physics department will have to log in to perform the actual submission tomorrow.

I haven’t yet been granted access the course evaluations that the students wrote, but a few of the students have made rather positive comments via e-mail an in-person. Personally, it was a very fun (and exhausting) experience that made me feel much better about UCR undergrads.  This will likely be my last experience teaching (or TA-ing) at UCR, because of the HST grant.  This was a good way to finish!

Now I’m transitioning back to being just a normal grad student and not “professor” Stickley. I’m also transitioning into a new office.  While I was teaching, a new chemistry professor moved into my office, so I had to move my desk and computer into one of the communal offices.

Melissa has gone through a period of transition as well.  She started her new job at the Spa at the Mission Inn.  It’s the best job she’s ever had. As far as Spa jobs go, it probably  couldn’t be much better.  The facilities are absolutely top-notch—the best of the best, the people she works with are genuinely nice, they’re competent, and they aren’t obsessed with money. It turns out that the Mission Inn Hotel and Spa is a non-profit organization!  They use their revenue to pay the employees and to make improvements to the Hotel and Spa.

In the next few weeks, I have to finish writing the first draft of my paper (which should have been finished months ago) and Melissa and I need to finish the wedding plans.  The wedding is less than a month away!

Note: This entry was written using Firefox 8 alpha 1 nightly build (2011-7-27). It’s quite fast….it’s even faster than Google’s newest Chrome browser when loading some pages.

The events of the last week have drastically changed my outlook for the next two years and beyond.

Starting with where the last post left off…

Melissa started “training” at the Aveda spa, but after a few days, she could not put up with the incompetence, lack of professionalism, and disrespectful attitude of the person who was supposed to be “training” her. The person in question talked horribly about customers behind their backs and didn’t follow standard sanitation procedures (among other things). Melissa only took the job in the first place because we needed money to pay for food, rent, and wedding expenses. The Physics Department is cutting back on the number of TA positions available, which means that I would eventually have an even lower annual income than I have now—unless I could obtain outside funding of some sort. Things were getting desperate.  So desperate, in fact, that I began browsing job-search websites to see what jobs were available for me in the Southern CA area in case I had to start applying in the next few months.

While she was “training” at the Aveda spa, Melissa also worked on building her Rava Beauty portfolio. She has now had two models (other than herself) for the portfolio: Mariana Lazarova (one of my fellow grad students) and Monineath Lim (one of my former lab students at UCR).  The photos turned out quite nicely, but we haven’t had time to find any new models.

Once the Aveda spa job was over, Melissa resumed her job search. Meanwhile, I worked on writing my paper and teaching the freshmen physics major labs and discussions (Phys 41C). Then the NASA astrophysics theory proposal deadline drew near, so I had to switch from writing my paper to writing the proposal.

On Wednesday of last week, Melissa received a call from the Mission Inn Hotel & Spa.  She had sent her résumé and cover letter there several weeks prior, but they hadn’t responded to her, so she assumed that her application was ignored.  That apparently was not the case!  She had an interview on Thursday morning. Later in the day, she had a provisional job offer!  In order to officially be hired, she needed to have a drug test performed and a criminal background check.

On Thursday night, I completed and submitted my NASA astrophysics theory proposal.  It was by far the best proposal that I have written.  I felt very positive about it because I had addressed all of the previous weaknesses of the proposed work and I had some preliminary results to show (from the paper that I’m writing).  I won’t find out the result for this proposal for a while…but that’s okay!

On Saturday, Melissa and I went to Berkeley. Melissa had a Brazilian waxing class in the SF Bay area on Monday and I wanted to visit the main UC campus during the trip. We stayed in a Motel on University Avenue, within walking distance of the UC Berkeley campus. On Sunday we walked around the town and campus a bit.  It’s a very nice campus!

On Monday, Melissa finished her class and then we headed back to Riverside. During the drive back to Riverside, Melissa noticed that she had a text message. Mariana had evidently given Gaby Melissa’s cell phone number. Gaby sent Melissa a message to inform me that I needed to call someone at UCR about accepting a teaching position this summer.  She also said there was more good news:  My HST (Hubble Space Telescope) theory proposal, which was submitted in February, had been approved!  The teaching position in question is a lectureship for Physics 40A (which translates to “Introductory Physics for Engineers and Physical Science Majors” or simply “University Physics I”). I will have to give two three-hour lectures per week and lead discussions / recitations.  In a sense, I will be my own teaching assistant.  I will also have three lab TAs and another discussion TA.

Suddenly, I will have the opportunity to be a Lecturer at the University of California AND I will have secure funding in the foreseeable  future.  This means that, once I am finished with teaching this summer, I will not have to be a TA anymore;  I can finally spend time focusing on my research rather than teaching intro physics and writing proposals! I’ll also have two more things to add to my CV.

In addition to all of the other excitement, our wedding rings arrived via UPS and we have booked the flights and hotel for the honeymoon.

Sometime after 1:00 AM this morning, the weekly party across the street at the Campus Crossing Apartments became much louder than usual. I started getting very irritated because I was trying to sleep…and then I heard what sounded like a gunshot (They often set off fireworks at their parties, but this didn’t sound like fireworks). Then a girl screamed “Oh My God!” quite loudly.  I looked out the window and saw a few people running from the apartment complex, one car full of people drove away, and another car was getting ready to leave when a police car showed up.  Then another police car arrived….and another….and two more…then three more (seven total!).  Then I saw one of the police officers take his gun out and start running around the perimeter of the apartment complex.  Everything got quiet pretty quickly. I went back to bed, so I don’t know what happened next.  I didn’t hear any ambulance sirens, so I’m assuming no one was hurt.

In other news, I found a few potential apartments elsewhere in Riverside that actually don’t look so bad. Most of them don’t have balconies, so I’d have to find somewhere to put my trees.  The apartments are closer to Melissa’s new workplace, so they would be convenient for her.  They are also cheaper than my current apartment–mostly because my current apartment complex is going to start charging for water next month.  They started charging for trash pick-up last year, which added about $10 per month to my rent.  They estimate that water will cost an extra $20 per month….and they don’t have meters on any of the individual apartments, so we are paying for the sprinklers outside, leaks in other apartments, etc.

Melissa got a job at Karen Allen Aveda Salon & Spa at Riverside Plaza.  Her first day of work is tomorrow.  She is also in the early stages of starting her own little business called Rava Beauty.  It will start out just being a make-up artistry business since that can’t be perceived as a conflict of interest with her job at the spa.  I designed a logo for the business with the free, open-source, vector graphics program, Inkscape:

“Rava” is an Esperanto word meaning “lovely”.  Once she has enough “likes” on Facebook, she’ll have the URL: http://www.facebook.com/ravabeauty/

I’m still working as a TA for the freshman physics major class.  It’s fun, but time-consuming, so I haven’t had much quality time to work on research.  I’m ready to finish writing the first draft of the paper when I get a chance.  At this point, I’ve got an almost empty document with the main structure of the paper and a few words.  I’ve barely started writing.

I’ve also given a short tutorial explaining how to use WordPress and I’ve given the first of three graduate lectures on galaxy simulation methods and high performance computing.  I’ve updated the lectures so that they are slightly more informative than last year.