Hitting the 'snooze' button on real life

Image (c) Jorge Cham, PhD Comics

Long time, no post.

Apparently, five years of undergrad have not crushed my soul so completely as to have kept me from coming back for more. Hence, grad school. I am working in the Jones lab at UBC, which is an applied physics lab that uses ultrafast optics in order to do a whole bunch of things. It all relies on the huge peak intensity of light that you get when you pulse a laser: Roughly speaking, think of some amount of energy put out by, say, a light bulb. Now imagine that instead of the lightbulb staying lit all the time, you compress all of that energy into a tiny pulse, one millionth of a billionth of a second long. Femtosecond lasers are being investigated for applications into things such as micromachining and even dental surgery. As for me, I'm going to use it to make a source for extreme ultraviolet light:

Outside of work and school, I'm back in the band again (this is my sixth year in the UBC bands...), and I've lately taken up swing dancing -- but I'll leave that for another post; it's getting late and I want to get out of the lab.

Jazz fest recap

So, summer has been busy as usual and I am finding myself not blogging nearly as often as I want to -- there's a lot to talk about!

The Vancouver International Jazz festival was fantastic this year. There was a whole bevy of good free shows around Gastown and such, and the evening concerts were great. I managed to catch:

Above is John Scofield. The video was actually from the concert I attended (though I wasn't the one who took it). He plays around with pedals a lot and has a really interesting sound -- harmonically, too; he plays with lots of crunchy intervals that give him a really unique sound. Energy-wise this was a great show too, as you can see from his solo.

Alas, there was a bit of tragedy associated with that show. It was originally scheduled to be a double bill with the group above, The Esbjorn Svensson Trio. However, about two weeks before the show the bandleader died in a diving accident. It's truly a shame -- Esbjorn Svensson was one of my favourite pianists of all time (certainly my favourite pianist post-Bill Evans), and there would have been many decades more of truly innovative, interesting, and fun music from him.

Brad Mehldau has gained recent fame (and notoriety) by covering popular tunes -- sure enough, as an encore for his Vancouver show he played Radiohead's Exit Music for a Film, from Paranoid Android (the version I put up here is from another show, but it's the same tune). This concert was kind of weird; there were two encores, and really it took until then for the group to really get into it, it sounded. The start of the show was very low-energy and abstract, and I think the vast majority of listeners just weren't ready for that -- I know I found myself drifting off. But it's more on this stuff that the trio sounded more together and interested (not to mention interesting).

I absolutely cannot wait until I head to New York for a few days in August -- the sheer amount of excellent music that I will be able to catch while I am there is staggering!

Iron, cold iron

Oh, right: I graduated. One post in 6 months isn't bad, is it? More to come soon -- plenty to catch up on...
(For the curious, the homework in the background of that is Quantum Mechanics -- specifically, the WKB approximation...)

Hit the ground running

After two months or so of not having blogged...here I am again! (anything to procrastinate on a senior project report, right?)

• So! Apparently it's a new year and all that now. As for resolutions, I don't have much -- notably, I've resolved to...drink more water. Currently there is a litre-bottle of water on my desk that I fill twice daily, and empty. I figure this is the sort of thing that I can actually do in the long-term...hence, setting it as a 'resolution'.
• School is starting up again. Four more months! To finish, what I have left is:
  • PHYS 455 (Statistical Mechanics)
  • PHYS 473 (Nuclear Physics)
  • PHYS 474 (Solid-State Physics)
  • PHYS 402 (Applications of Quantum Mechanics)
  • EECE 450 (Engineering Economics)
  • MTRL 478 (Electronic Materials)
  • ANTH 100 (Cultural Anthropology)
  • MUSC 409C (Jazz Theory and Arranging)
  So, a fairly packed semester as usual -- but hey, anything to graduate on time, at this point...
• The Jazz Arranging course, has, predictably, been introducing me to some pretty good music lately. In particular are big-band albums by the inestimable Gordon Goodwin, possibly best-known for composing theme music for such animated works as The Incredibles. His Big Phat Band is hard-swinging and a lot of fun to listen to! On the other side of the spectrum, what I have playing right now is Pat Metheny's latest album The Way Up. It's wonderful music, which really captures Metheny's masterful use of rhythm and his brilliant partnership with pianist Lyle Mays for some seriously beautiful music. Highly recommended. The class has also made me look at parts of my music collection that I've built but haven't really listened hard to, such as Metheny's Imaginary Day. One tune on there, "Heat of the Day" is totally nuts -- it's nominally in 3/4, but you'd never guess it by hearing it. There is some great virtuoistic work by everyone involved. Great stuff.
• Less eclectic has been my recent acquisition of Radiohead's In Rainbows. Also good music, I think that it's their best album (as a whole) since OK Computer. It's a side of the band that we haven't heard too much of in depth until now, and I like what I hear. It's more organic, and I guess a natural progression for the band as it ages.
• Besides all of this music-listening, I unfortunately don't have too much time for leisure these days (hence the title of this post). Not thirty-six hours after I rang in 2008, was I at the lab working on the last bits of my senior project. Now, we have less than a week to write the final report. This, coming quickly on the heels of a Jazz Arranging assignment that I couldn't finish until literally one hour before it was due earlier today. Amidst all this, there are grad school apps, and the rest of the courses that I need to take to finish. Busy busy!
• During the break, besides lab work, I found myself making food. It's a lot of fun to do when you're bored...it's like arts and crafts, except you eat the results. The fact that you ingest the fruits of your labor really gives an incentive to now shirk hard work in food prep. Thus far I have made chocolate chip cookies (from scratch!), chocolate truffles (dead easy and waaay cheaper than Godiva et al., and tastes as smooth and good!), and a bolognese sauce (also from scratch!). There's a box of cake mix that is also waiting to be made, once I'm done this project report...and now I know how to do a ganache to top the cake! Turns out that truffles are basically a ganache made with a high chocolate/cream ratio to make it solid at room temperature, and that's it. I forsee a tasty cake in my future.
• I'm still playing with the UBC Jazz Ensemble; the weekly big band session definitely keeps me sane. I've put a live recording of us playing Thad Jones' Low-Down here. In addition, I'm still trying to plug away at learning Ravel's Alborada del Gracioso (Aubade of the Jester) for playing sometime, perhaps at the department concert (I need some sort of motivator to get me to learn it!)

That's all for now -- I'm sure I forgot to mention something, but I've got to save something for the next time I procrastinate (hint: I'll be blogging more often, until this report is done!)

Clock out: 3:24am

Not bad for an evening's work. 9 hours, 3 deliverables, 20 pages...

Alternate titles for this post: "What am I doing with my life?", "Watch the pages go by", "Busy", "hgglghfughh", "Sleep is for the weak"