Well, with the transition from ANL to RIT, I should probably get to the point of actually making a “Pierce Lab” website or something to that effect. Granted, at the moment the lab is empty, but shortly we should (I hope) have some things arriving.

Regardless though it would be good for me to get something semi official set up. I’m not sure what that would mean for the blog here. It will probably stay, but I’ll take some of the other material and move it over. Or something else. It would also be nice to have a journal club web site. hmmm... so much to do.

Sigh... well, at least they fixed it. Rapidweaver, my old nemesis and blogging software package, suffered a severe setback in Nov-Dec. It would frequently crash, delete entries, and do various other nasty, terrible things. They released an update which I eventually managed to install and now things seem to be ok. We’ll see how long it lasts. In the meantime I hope to add the entries that were lost from Nov and Dec.

For now I’ll leave you with a link, not just a single article, but several from a guy at UCLA that has been generating x-rays using scotch tape. Move over MacGyver. I don’t think they will be replacing synchrotrons any time soon, but it’s a clever example of nature behaving in a way that A) nobody was really expecting and B) in hind-sight makes a great deal of sense.

Hmmm..... perhaps I should really consider a different software package for this little blog. Rapidweaver has struck again. This time deleting my entries from Nov and earlier this month. I’ve got some of the text around here some place and will try to replace those entries that are missing.

Anyone know of a good mac osx software package that will import a rapidweaver blog?

Most everything seems to be back online and so far the software has not deleted anything. That’s a sad qualifier, but true. I’m still missing a few entries that are potentially lost to time. My great “how to visit CP1 and CP2 out in the original Argonne site” is gone, and a few others I’ll miss. But most everything is accounted for.

If this trend continues then I’ll probably begin putting more frequent entries up. It’s a reasonably exciting time right now, I’m just reticent to type up too much of it until I can see whether or not we’ll get another round of epic fail. I’ll also begin including my own thoughts on music I enjoy, maybe books too. I could be opening a terrible time-sink here. heh.

My big plan, if things work, is to begin a “reciprocal space gallery.” In short, there’s a bunch of awesome looking diffraction patterns which should be shared and enjoyed.

Yes, it’s been a while, a few months as a matter of fact. Part of it is certainly my nature drifting between different things. But part of it, and much of the barrier to keeping up the website has been problems with my software. After losing all the entries (and painfully restoring them) a few times, I gave up on things for a while. It’s rather discouraging to record entries and keep things up to date when the software (cough, ahem... Rapidweaver) decides to periodically destroy all the previous entries. Things did not work as intended after the software upgrade. So the solution was to recreate the site from scratch and block copying entries in one by one. The other impediment was of course answering the question of whether or not to continue using this software. For better or worse, it’s what I know so the easiest thing seemed to be sticking with it a while longer.

Ranting aside, I was reminded today by some friends as well as my wife that things needed a face-lift.

For the time being, please bear with me as I recover and restore the website. For now I’ll leave you with a picture of Buckley. This evening he discovered an open guitar case and with his natural attraction towards guitars, he was right at home.

With the advent of the new version of Rapidweaver, along with progression in the (slow) transition from my old laptop to my new one, the website has changed appearances. Eventually I’d like to make it look similar to the old style, but for now a plan “vanilla” has some appeal if for no other reason that it looks reasonable with little effort. So there you go.

Part of the reason for the lack of entries lately has also been this transition between computers as well as a very busy time at work. More about that soon.

We've got a beamrun scheduled to begin this Friday. As such, the blog will probably be updated fairly regularly. We've got a week of time at beamline 12-BM again. I'll post as we go to keep my dear readers (all 3 of you) up-to-date on our progress. It will again be an experiment where I assist. We will be performing some x-ray scattering/electro-chemistry experiments and possibly more metal-oxide surface experiments.

My own beamtime comes up the second week of April. We were initially to have another week in April for a different experiment (where I would again be assisting though not the principle person). We've lost that week due to equipment failure and will try to make up for it a bit in this coming week (by attempting two things instead of just one). The current science budget has further reduced our hopes as we're expecting the APS to be shutdown several weeks later in the year. This will make the available beamtime even more precious and the competition even tighter.

It's impossible for me to state the frustration which I've developed over this software in a form repeatable in polite company. Sparing you that...

I've had several attempted, aborted, entries over the past month which have not made it to the website for a variety of rather poor reasons. Anyhow, hopefully this has been fixed and I can move forward.

As a first step I've enabled comments through Halo-scan.com. While it does allow for a controlled commenting system, and doesn't clutter the actual content of the website with ads, it does have the small flaw of putting a few ads in the comments (which only show up separately). If it gets annoying, or I just get the whim, then I'll attempt to change the system over. However, this was the easiest solution and doesn't make a terrible mess of the website.

Moreover, the webpage software I'm using also is getting an upgrade soon. Once that happens I should have a bit more freedom over things like this and ability to edit the content of the site. So things are still in a state of rapid flux and the site will remain in the nascent stage for a while longer.

I finally broke down and got a real webservice to host the site. In doing so I got to formalize the domain and site names. That brought up an interesting question: should I actually keep the name as The Second Law? In fact, there already is a website with the name of secondlaw.com in use. It's actually an established site with a great deal of content. While I could use "thesecondlaw," it really would just be an attempt to get around what's already there and not very fair to Frank L. Lambert.

So off to choose a new name. I had a few in mind already, but when I went to check them they were already taken. "Reciprocalspace.com" is alreayd registered, though there's no content. So, while not my first choice, I'm happy with this as a name.

I found a few other interesting things (well, probably only interesting to me in this particular time) . The name reciprocalspace.net was actually previously owned by someone previously. However, about 1 year ago they stopped paying

However, does this mean that I now need to stick to scattering experiments?

I suppose this won’t be very different from my previous web-journals that I keep during experiments.  I’ll try to post periodically about interesting news from the lab.  If you’re reading this for the first time, this is mainly for family and friends that have asked me what it’s like to be an experimental scientist and physicist.  What you can find here: a bit of insight into the day-to-day activities of a scientist, things that interest me, and a bit from my life.  Hopefully you’ll find some of it interesting.  At some point I’ll try to expand on the choice of name for the blog.  Frankly it has nothing to do with the photo I’ve got at the top of the main page.
 
I’ve decided to merge everything into a single blog and to update it more often than previously.  Why?  I’m not sure.  Perhaps it’s just that I’m sick today (still) and this seems like a fun way to occupy some of my time. Perhaps it’s just a nice thought to have everything in one place.  It also gives me the chance to do some updating for the website and make a few stylistic changes.
 
So I’m supposed to go to Seattle this week, but I’m not sure if that’s going to happen with my head so full viruses and snot.  The german word for this is “Schleimkopf” : literally slime-head.  And I think I’ve got enough for 10 of them.
 

I decided to stick with the iWeb software because, well, I’m lazy about it.  Right now it works reasonably well for what I want to do and is very easy to use.  I wish it had the ability to categorize posts and sort things.  I also wish it was easy to edit the “themes” in an easy fashion.  But nonetheless it does most everything I desire with minimum fuss.