Today was the first meeting of my chemistry lab (last Monday was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, so we didn't have a class meeting), so after lecture I went to the science building to buy my lab coat and goggles. My first lab coat!! The sleeves are a little too long, but luckily I know a seamstress who can fix that. It may seem silly, getting so excited over a lab coat, but just seeing it, putting it on, saying "This is mine." makes what I'm doing so much more real to me. I have a lab coat, and I'm going to learn about being a scientist.

We didn't wear our lab coats for the first meeting in the lab, since today was orientation day. Just stepping into the chemistry lab was an adventure for me, though. I've never been in a lab other than the one in my high school (18 years ago!!), so walking through the door was like stepping into another world. It's an ugly, ugly room in the basement of the Fleming building at UH Main Campus. The ducts are exposed, the walls are bare except for marking out the safety stations, and everything looks very industrial. You can't see across the room because the workstation shelves and pipes tower in rows up to the ceiling. But it smells very clean, and the tabletops of the workstations are a smooth and shiny black. There are no chairs - comfortable shoes are a must! Luckily, I have some.

First, the TA, whose name is Xiaohui, had us watch a safety video. We did not meet Professor Vladimir Zaitzev, who is the instructor for the lab - maybe we will see him next week? And isn't that an awesome name for a Potions Chemistry Lab Professor? :D The safety video had clips where people cut themselves on glass, and there was blood, and it was nausea-making. Most of the safety stuff was common sense. Always add acid to water, never add water to acid, and pour the acid over a glass stirring rod to mix it into the water. Some of it made us laugh - seriously, does anyone in the world think it's a good idea to draw chemicals up a pipette with your mouth???

Next, we received our equipment and our assigned locker drawer. Mine is 258, and it is now filled with several beakers, Erlenmeyer flasks, a thermometer, a pipette, test tubes (!!), stirring rods, graduated cylinders, and a Bunsen burner. They are all mine until the end of the semester.

As I said at the beginning of this entry, having the lab coat and the lab equipment make this real for me. Sometimes, it doesn't quite register at this point that I really am going through with the Physics degree. This course in chemistry is the only science class I've had so far, and I won't have my first true physics class until the fall semester. Of course, summer is going to be over before I can blink, which means reality is going to smack me in the face come September when I'm going full tilt with 14 hours of undergraduate work in science and math and 6 hours of graduate work in digital media. Whew!

One of my biggest worries has been my age - not that my age makes these studies difficult for me (it makes it easier, in fact!) but that I will have difficulty or extreme awkwardness interacting with my classmates who are mostly in the 17-21 age group. In chemistry lecture, there's about a 50/50 mix of men and women, but in my lab, by some happenstance, it's about 75% young men, 25% young women, and only one guy that looks like he's closer to my age than theirs (but I'll eat my pipette if he's any older than 26 or 27).

So this is how it happened: after the safety video, the TA proceeded to go over the syllabus with us. It's very hard to hear in the lab with the air vents all blowing (I just hope there's more written instructions than spoken, or my deafness is going to be a problem - not an unsolvable one, but it's such a nuisance to have to stop and deal with that). Anyway, so I wasn't the only one who couldn't hear, but suddenly I'm surrounded by three boys, and I say boys because they look fresh out of high school. And one says to me, "Ma'am, can you tell us what we should write down here?" pointing to the form. And later, when we were sorting our lab equipment, "Miss, which one is the pipette?"

I wanted to laugh and then tell them that this was the first chem lab I'd ever been in, but I bit my lip and then pointed out the pipette - not because I knew what one looked like myself, but because I had spied the poster describing the equipment just off to my left and had been glancing at it to identify my own equipment! I helped them fill out their forms, too, after checking mine with the TA.

So I'm the designated den mother of chemistry lab. I think that's kind of cool.

Eh, I need a break, but I have nothing of real interest to write about at the moment, so... this!  My original LJ name was "moonsongsl". Moonsong was a name I used for myself waaaay back when I first logged on to the Internet. I hadn't even read Elfquest at that point - I just thought the two words looked nice smooshed together. The "sl" part of the name stood for "SilverLeaf", the surname of one of my roleplaying characters. Moonsong started sounding a bit too "little girl-ish" to me as I got older, though.

When I joined unFiction, I signed up with the name "Darkstar October". This comes from the callsign heard over New Mexico from a suspected experimental aircraft flyover - possibly the Aurora project craft. That callsign was "Darkstar November". I figured anyone who was into conspiracy theories or strange bits of Area 51 information would recognize the hommage to the callsign in my name, but no one ever mentioned it. :(

There was already a "Darkstar" on unFiction at the time, though, so after I saw him/her posting, I changed my nick to just plain "October". Since "October" is already in use in most places that require usernames, I usually pair it up with "Dreaming" (a very vague Sleeping Princess reference) - so, "October Dreaming". Unfortunately, that was already taken when I changed my LJ name a couple of years ago, so I just switched the words around.

I'm homesick for Atlantis and the Pegasus Galaxy tonight. That is all.

(and I don't care how dorky this is)

My sister was sweet enough to indulge me in passing some time at the movie theater this afternoon when we saw Sherlock Holmes. Neither one of us likes going to movies much - we don't like being around crowds of people, or sitting near strangers - but on at Tuesday afternoon, we figured it wouldn't be too bad. And Bethany is not really a Sherlock Holmes fan (although we both loved the "Young Sherlock Holmes" movie when we were kids), but she does like Robert Downey Jr. and all. So, we went.

I started reading the Sherlock Holmes stories when I was quite young, maybe seven or eight years old. My grandfather gave me a gorgeous set of the four novels, bound in leather, that I still have, and after I was so enthusiastic about those, my mom got me a couple of the story collections one year for Christmas. I probably even have some old scribbles of juvenile Sherlock Holmes "fan fic" lying around in a box somewhere, almost certainly written after I saw "Young Sherlock Holmes".

(I'm never sure whether I should burn those old stories to keep anyone from seeing them, or whether I should keep them to laugh at when I'm old.)

Anyway, I haven't read any Sherlock Holmes stories in years and years, but I've always remembered them fondly, so I've sort of been looking forward to the movie. I saw some people writing that they found it to be less than impressive, while others loved it. It was cleolinda 's review that tipped the scale for me, though. I'd made plans to see it with a friend in Houston, but after reading her discussion entry, I just couldn't wait. So, thanks for indulging me, Sis!

( Thoughts on the movie, obviously with spoilers )

So, I loved the movie, and now I'm snuggled up in a blanket (it is so freaking cold here right now) reading A Study in Scarlet, thinking about making some hot tea or cocoa to go with it. I will most definitely want to see the movie again with my Houston friends, and the DVD is already on my must-have list.

In other news, I will probably head back to Houston on Thursday evening. :)

Because it was/is fun in friendshipper's LJ. :)

As you guys know, I'm pretty new to fandom culture, although I've been a fan of many tv series, book series, etc. Before Stargate Atlantis, I never read or wrote fanfic; before I joined TarValon.net, I had never participated in a fan community. But I know a lot of you are interested/involved in fandoms; I'd love to see the questions you ask, and if you post this meme in your journal, I'll ask you questions, too!

Ask me one fandom-related question in the comments. This can be fandom specific, general, or about fandom/lj stuff/fic writing/etc. in general.

Just one question, please, but it can have sub-parts.

Question can be as wacky as you want. Ask me about tv shows, characters, fanfic in general, fandom issues/meta, anything about any of my stories specifically. Whatever you want.

My fandoms:
TV Series: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, Leverage, Castle, Babylon 5, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (I would say the Original Series, but I'm waaay out of touch with that one, so no), Veronica Mars, LOST, Sanctuary, Dollhouse, and now thanks to my sister, Burn Notice (only halfway through S2 right now, but by the end of the week...). There are other shows that I watch but that I don't know enough about to call myself a fan: Torchwood (have only seen series 1), Mad Men (only part-way through S2), Big Love (still haven't seen season 3), and Carnivale (never completed watching S2).

Books: The Wheel of Time series

Warning: empress_ehvul, yelenia, you might want to skip this entry - it's all about Atlantis Season 5. :)

I just watched Stargate Atlantis 5.13: Inquisition for the first time. Truth be told, when I was watching SGA this past summer, I skipped a couple of episodes, and I couldn't even watch the end of the series until much later in the year. Some of the writing was very bad, some of the stories ridiculous (Brain Storm, ohmigod), and I was put off by the mishandling of the Jennifer Keller character by the writers (a rant for another post, coming soon). So it ended up that there were a couple of episodes I hadn't seen. Since I'm still in Austin, I decided to finally watch them, especially since I can do so now without being heart-and-soul wrapped up in the series as I was last summer.

I originally chose to skip Inquisition because it was a clip show, and I hate clip shows; I wanted to get on with the main plot line (that desire came to a screeching halt after "The Shrine" - again, 'nother rant for 'nother post). I just never got back to it. At the moment, I'm working on a post-season five SGA fic that will be upwards of 60K when completed, and a chunk of its plot hinges on politics of the Pegasus galaxy. I needed to watch Inquisition to know what that episode added to the canon of Pegasus politics. So today I did.

I didn't hate it, but I have one major complaint. Teyla and Ronon barely had any lines in the entire episode, and the "Coalition" treated them as if they were the same as the Atlantis people from Earth. True, they're aligned with Atlantis and hold a position in the city, but their people are of Pegasus - the Satedan diaspora, in Ronon's case, and the Athosian's in Teyla's. It seemed strange that the coalition didn't want to address their choice to work with Atlantis, didn't want to give them a chance to speak, etc. And the fact that Teyla and Ronon were so completely and utterly silent through the whole episode just... that was very strange and out of character, especially for Teyla, who had in other episodes expressed very strong and very complex opinions about the politics of her galaxy. She and Ronon in their own ways put Rodney in his place when he says that Pegasus is better off with them there than not (which is, obviously, not entirely true).

The episode would have been far more interesting to me if the Coalition and the trial had been part of a truly fair process, and if Ronon and Teyla, as residents of the Pegasus Galaxy, had had a stronger role in the trial. I think the episode writers bypassed a chance to deepen the characters of the two Pegasus residents, choosing to try and fully justify the presence and legitimacy of the Atlantis expedition in the Pegasus galaxy rather than face the more subtle issues.

I loved Joe Flanigan's performance in this episode. I've seen a lot of reviews speak of how off-putting John Sheppard's arrogance was in response to the trial, but episodes in the past have shown that Sheppard's instincts are very, very good. I'll take it as canon that he smelled a rat from the beginning - secret tribunals and proceedings, for one thing - even if it was Woolsey, not him, who figured out what was really going on. In those circumstances, John Sheppard would be less focused on upholding his responsibility for his actions in Pegasus (and we KNOW that he does indeed feel the weight of those actions, despite what he said to the court) and more focused on getting his team out of a bad situation.

Watching the episode did change a few things I had planned out in my story. For one thing, Woolsey made an absolute commitment to the Coalition in regards to participation by the Atlantis expedition in Pegasus politics. What does that mean for Atlantis back on Earth? Will the IOA/SGC choose to honor that commitment and return Atlantis to Pegasus, or will they decide that the commitment is null now that the city is no longer located in its "home" galaxy? I'm glad I watched it; it's given me a lot to think about in terms of the series and in regard to my fic.

Now I have to work up the courage to watch "Identity", which I skipped entirely. I have a post that I've been wanting to write called "The Problem With Jennifer Keller". I need to write it and get it out of my system. The gist is that I don't hate the Keller character; I love Jewel Staite and in fact was very excited and happy to see her in SGA. I was completely sold on the idea that she hooks up with McKay - I read ahead of watching the episodes, I admit - but the writers failed so completely to sell the relationship and then just... mutilated the Keller character to a point that I couldn't find her at all believable anymore. Anyway, that's a post-rant for another day.

Where are you going, where have you been?

( 1999 )

( 2000 )

( 2001 )

( 2002 )

( 2003 )

( 2004 )

( 2005 )

( 2006 )

( 2007 )

( 2008 )

( 2009 )

I'm so thankful for all of you, all of my friends, some of whom I've known for ten years, or nearly ten years, and some of you less than a year. You've all inspired me, held me up when I needed help, let me know when I was being an idiot, cheered me up when I was depressed, and been the best friends a girl could have. I am so lucky to have met all of you, each and every one, and I love you all more than I can say. Thank you so much. *hugs everyone*

I'm already looking ahead to 2010 and beyond. The future is going to be amazing.

My one New Year's Resolution is to try every day to make the world a better place, even through the smallest actions.

I'm being driven mad in the dead dark of night, trying to remember the title of a book I read as a child. I thought it was one of the "Shoes" books by Noel Streatfeild, but my sister has the entire collection, and I've just read through all the books tonight. None of them are the book I remember. But it was a book like one of the "Shoes" books - it was a "career" book about a girl (and possibly her family?) who belonged to a family that had careers in the theater business, specifically ballet, I think. I believe she was an orphan, sent to live with relatives. Here are some of the scenes I remember...

The main character was going to see the ballet with her cousins, and she buys a box of chocolates because she thinks this is what one does when one goes to the theater. Her cousin castigates her for bringing the chocolates, going on a diatribe about how nasty it is that people bring in chocolates with crinkling wrappers to disturb a performance. The main character ends up throwing away the box of chocolates before they go into the theater.

The main character is very unhappy in most of the book, feeling like she doesn't fit in or contribute to the "theatrical" part of the family. In the end, she designs a ballet, a promenade or parade, that is performed in a small theater at the end of the season. It is implied in the book that she will go on to be a choreographer like her uncle, who is a good influence on her throughout the book.

That's all I remember, and I so desperately want to know what this book is. Do you recognize it?

This is a triumph... I'm making a note here...

Yeah, yeah, I know that joke is old. But I really am still alive, despite not having written anything here in nearly two months. Updates in 140 characters or less seem to be my thing these days. Yay, Twitter.

I don't have much to report other than:

1. I survived my first semester of grad school. Yay. It was kind of awful, not because of the classes but because of all the stuff that was happening while I was taking the classes. Some family stuff, and mostly having the Martian Death Flu for the past two months. I've still got a stupid cough, but I think I'm finally almost back to normal, health-wise.

2. I've signed up for next semester's classes:
Digital Media Studies (graduate level):
-- Video Production
-- Digital Storytelling (so psyched about this!!)
-- Creative Writing (not in the DMST program, but DMST had nothing else relevant to my interests for the spring semester. C'est la vie, ya know? I'll give CW one more try, and I can certainly apply it to the other two classes.)

Physics (2nd Bachelor's degree) pre-requisite classes:
-- Chemistry I
-- Pre-Calculus (it's really just more algebra and a basic introduction to the fundamental theorum of calculus.)
I am so ready for Fall 2010, when I finally get my first real physics class, along with astronomy.

3. I'm in Austin, enjoying a long vacation visiting my sister. We are watching a lot of tv and eating all the Christmas candy. She's addicted me to "Burn Notice", which is such an adorable show - it's like Macgyver meets James Bond - very cool. (need to email my Austin friends so we can meet up for coffee - I just haven't had a chance to meet up, yet. :)

What else? I've been reading a lot: I'm almost finished with The Gathering Storm, and I just got a bunch of books from Mom and Dad, too. One of Aung San Suu Kyi's books, and two of Katherine Neville's books. And I still haven't read all of the Feynman books I bought last month - still working on those. He is so funny.

I won't say my life is boring, but I haven't had time to write about it much lately. I'm still reading my flist, though. Hope all of you had or are having lovely holidays! School starts again for me on the 19th of January; until then, I'll probably be lurking around, reading a lot, maybe writing a little bit.

Also, plotting to acquire a telescope. Not sure how this is going to work out, yet, but I'll figure something out. In the meantime, I will beg the use of my friends' telescopes.

UPDATE: And the winner, after counting the votes of the people I bugged in the #unfiction IRC, is "Quintessential Real", with 10 votes. It's the one that will be more difficult to write but will certainly be interesting!! Thanks, everyone!

Quick! Help me decide which story to write! Even if you just pick a random title, please help me choose! :D (These are working titles, btw.) (P.S. - I had to vote on my own poll just to see the answers. My answer does not indicate a preference for that title, just FYI. I really have NO IDEA which of these I want to write more. XD)

Poll #1479037 NaNoWriMo - Possible Stories
This poll is closed.
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 16

Which Story Should I Write?

P.S. again - If you don't have an LJ account, just post a comment with your vote. I don't know how to make polls open to people w/out LJ accounts, sadly. :( It was a spur-of-the-moment poll.

A couple of Christmases ago, David and Bruce got together and picked out a Wacom Graphire tablet for me, because at the time I was fiddling with the idea of learning to draw. I never quite got around to doing that, and the tablet sat on my desk and gave me sad-face looks because I didn't use it except every once in a while. GUILT!

However, with the classes I'm taking now, that tablet has become one of my most valuable tools, and it makes working in Photoshop so much easier. So, thanks, Bruce and David! :)

I swear, this LJ is going to turn into a "photo blog" if I'm not careful. Sadly, I have nothing interesting to tell about my life except that I am so busy with school stuff that I can't see straight. Taking up most of my time lately has been the learning to use software (Photoshop CS4, mostly - and now I finally have my own copy) and doing stuff for my Digital Photography class, which, along with Web Design, has been the most time consuming class I have ever, ever taken.

Who would have thought Algebra would be my easiest class this semester? o_o;

Anyway, this past Sunday night, David took me to see the Pearland Roller Derby. A friend of ours, the lovely yelenia, is the newest member of the Trauma Queens. I needed some photos for my series (due in two weeks), so I brought my camera and tripod along to see if I could get any good shots.

Let me just say that if you have never been to a roller derby event, you should definitely treat yourself and go to at least one in your life! It was exciting, fast-paced, and lots of fun. I'm still not completely clear on the objectives of the game, or the rules, but the costumes were great, the skating was amazing, and the whole experience was "full of win", as we say.

I played around with the tripod, manual focus (bad, bad, BAD), and then hand-held shots at slow shutter speed, and I had so much fun shooting the event that I had 300 (three hundred!!!) shots before I knew it, and I was running out of battery. Most of the shots are blurred or badly framed to the point where cropping won't save them; I was really trying to capture the action and excitement of the event, so a lot of the time I was just snapping randomly, or trying to do things like panning the camera with the subject. Some of the stuff I did worked - I think maybe through pure luck - and out of 300 images, I got 10 that I think are good enough to be a series on their own.



As I was putting together my images for the "Games, Gamers, Gaming" series, I realized that it was very Roller Derby-heavy. So I decided to just use the roller derby photos as my series and work some more on the gamers series as my final project. I'm going to take the photos on a flash drive to the Houston Camera Exchange for printing tomorrow.

First, I am happy to announce that I received a perfect score on my first Algebra exam last week. YAY!

So, this is what I've been working on pretty much all week - Assignment #3 for my digital photography class. We had to recreate a photo from the work of either Jerry Uelsmann or Maggie Taylor using our own photographs and Photoshop. It was not. easy. at. all. because I'm truly a dunce when it comes to analyzing and reproducing someone else's art. However, I gave it my best shot, and...

( Here are the results )

I meant to post about this weeks and weeks ago, but I got busy and forgot. The lovely moonfox has planned a chat reunion for #wyverns_library. We will meet throughout the weekend on irc.esper.net, in the channel. Hope to see lots of you there!! :D

Yay, volunteers - solved! Thanks, guys! :D

Does anyone need a website design? I need a client for whom I can design a site as a project for class. I have some limitations in what I'm allowed to do, since this is a "beginning" class, but we do have some leeway. Also, you don't have to use the finished design. I just need someone to give me parameters to work within, as a client would give a professional web designer.

I don't even know what to say, here. After writing my previous entry, I was just going back over some old stuff from NaNoWriMos past, and I found the file I saved from a forum thread where I chatted with Janet Kagan, an author who wrote one of the formative novels of my childhood, Uhura's Song. I still reread that book about once a year. It was so thrilling to discover her doing NaNoWriMo alongside the rest of us - talking with us, encouraging us, giving us advice from a lifetime of writing. I mean, this was a childhood hero, and she was talking to ME, and my story about breaking my arm trying to build a "swagger-lair" amused and delighted her. I even have an email from her, tucked away somewhere, that she sent me in reply to some innocuous writing question. She was so great, so alive.

I didn't know until today that Janet died over a year ago.

I feel like such a jerk for not knowing, for not checking in with her sooner, for not sending her just one more email, or something. I'm just glad that I had that one chance to let her know how much her book delighted me when I was a kid, and how much it continued to delight me as an adult.

So, here's the story of me and the "swagger-lair" (I was still Moonsong back then), as I shared it with Janet in 2003. She had her own spot on the NaNoWriMo boards - she called it "Janet Kagan's Little Corner of Hell Room Party". In return for my story, she shared with us how she came to write Uhura's Song.
If you get a chance, pick up a copy of Uhura's Song or Hellspark or Mirabile. I think you'll enjoy them. I know I have, for a long, long time. I'll never forget you, Janet. Thank you for sharing your stories with us.

Do you remember when...?

It's been seven years since tarlia and penmage and fireborn started a bunch of Wyvernites - me and julseykit and ellenmillion and curvature and a bunch of others - down the path to Doomnation. (I say led because I remember them being the first ones to sign up, but my memory perception could be entirely wrong so you know don't yell at me or anything.)

Seven years, y'all. The nostalgia. This November marks my seven-year NaNoWrimo anniversary (even though the last couple of years I've been a lame participant). I was such a terrible writer in 2002!! XD But it was such a turning point in my life - connecting with local writers, connecting with my writerly LJ friends, all of us cheering each other on, the challenges, the outtakes, our stories - "Something In the Water" by tarlia is still a story I reread every now and then, to this day ('cause I have the word doc file downloaded long, long ago).

ciri asked us all questions about our NaNoWriMo goals and aspirations, and, if I remember correctly, wrote an article on us and NaNoWriMo.

Just going back and reading over our journal entries from that time - the excitement we had for our stories, the glory of staying up late into the night to write, jumping onto chat in the wee hours of the morning to happily complain with each other about the rigors of the "writing life", all of it - makes me almost wish for those days over again. We all had our life dramas going on, but I guess you don't know how happy you were at a point in time until you look back there and see the magic that was taking place when maybe you didn't even recognize it for what it was...

We were still writing "Friday Five" entries back then, too. And pasting funny bits of chat in our journals every now and then. I miss a lot of what we did with these journals back then.

And I still miss fireborn .

NaNoWriMo has come a long way, too - from being a kind of geeky writer fringe event to a major international annual event that donates to charity and offers valuable craft resources to writers. It's been amazing to be part of this little bit of history.

One of the most challenging (for me) classes I have this semester is digital photography. It's challenging because I'm not naturally an artistic person, but I do want to learn to be a better photographer. Making time to photograph, thinking about how to compose shots, remembering the mechanics of my camera and how they work with light - all of this is difficult for me. But I'm still excited about the class and really enjoying it.

Our last two assignments in the class are to produce two series of work - 8-10 images that are thematically linked in some way. I've given a lot of thought to my "themes", and if I don't start photographing now, I won't be able to finish the assignments in time, even though they're not due until close to the end of the semester.

My first series theme is "Games, Gamers, & Gaming" because playing games is such a huge part of my life (despite the fact that I don't have nearly enough time to play, ever.) I took some shots at David's "Twilight Imperium" game event this past weekend and got two good, useful photos out of it. I plan on being around with my camera for the first Halo ODST party, whenever/wherever that's going to be; and I'm going to host some game nights at my place - Rock Band, DDR, role-playing games and board games. But I'd also like to include street games and stuff like SF0 in my series.

One street game that I'm completely in love with and have never gotten to play is Journey to the End of the Night. It's a race across a city, with checkpoints and puzzles and chasers and danger and excitement. It turns out that there's a JttEotN event in San Francisco on Halloween weekend. I'm seriously considering hopping on a plane to SF and attending the game. I'm going to contact the organizer to see about getting permission to photograph, but since the game takes place entirely in public space, I don't think that will be a problem. I even found a hostel near the event where I could stay for less than $100 for the entire weekend.

I wish there were more of these types of game events around Houston. If they're out there, I'm having a hard time tracking them down. I'm thinking about organizing a Cruel 2 B Kind event, or trying to round up some friends to do a few SF0 tasks with me. The thing about this series is that I don't want "posed" photographs - I want the photos to be dynamic and representative of the ideals of "play" and "game". We're playful creatures. I want to capture the excitement and motion of the playfulness of human nature.

At the moment, I'm torn between presenting the photos in black and white - I love the look of b&w photos, especially with regards to photos of people - but many games and their participants are so colorful, it seems a shame to not use the colors in some way. I guess I can worry about that when I finish the series.

Anyway.

My second series is "Women in Science, Technology, and Engineering". I don't know many women scientists or engineers, but I plan on getting to know them! It's a shame that I'm not doing physics this semester; this would be a lot easier. But I plan on going to talk to the department heads at UH - chemistry, physics, engineering, computer science - and ask them how I might approach some of the students about photographing them for the series.

So, that's what's on my mind. It's been storming all day, and I'm alternating between math, dms theory, and a writing project, thinking about this photography stuff in between all that. I think I'm going to take a break now and go watch some more Numb3rs.

When I first went away to college and had my first (basic level, not university level) physics class, the evil I dreaded every week was the time we had to spend in lab. I never could make the equipment work right. My measurements were always skewed so badly that writing a lab report was a nightmare. Also, I didn't even really know how to write a lab report in the first place...

Uncertain Principles has a great entry about the purposes and problems of labs. It gives me a little insight into why, maybe, labs were so dreadful for me then and, if I prepare NOW, why they won't be so dreadful for me next fall. Especially seeing as how I'll be spending significant portions of time in a lab from then until maybe-forever-who-knows. I must not dread labs. So I need to give some thought as to how I'll approach and prepare for lab time.