Okay. at some point i just realized. i must post for karma reason. yes i’m busy, but i have lots of small chunks of time where i am waiting on something, so i read other people’s blogs. and so i must return the favor.
My conference in san diego was great. If you couldn’t tell, I’d been feeling a little blah about my research leading up to it. The conference is a bunch of people that make thin films and it does two things:
(1) remind me that i am not the dumbest kid in the class.
(2) remind me that though my research isn’t sexy (like nanotubes, nanowires, SAMs, electronic devices), my research is going to have a bigger impact that many sexy projects are. I can reduce energy consumption and material consumption (two things dear to my heart) with my coating in cars, in hard drives, in biological implants (if only i had the stomach that would be some cool research to go into).
I came back with a horrible head cold, but was all refreshed and inspired on a research side.
it is amazing what my personal guilt level can do – i feel so guilty when i don’t run, or if i forget to return something i borrowed, or i forget who i owe dinner. There are three friends i routinely eat out with (one on one). One of them, i have this memory of picking up the tab one dinner and me saying that i’ll get it next time. I cannot remember who. and it is so bothering me. I can just ask around, but i don’t want it to seem like I’m asking to try to get out of it. So i feel guilty. i often wonder what it would be like to not feel guilty even when my brain says that there’s nothing to feel guilty about. i wouldn’t run most days, that’s for sure. About half the mornings i get up to run, i’m driven by pure guilt to go. I know if i don ‘t run that morning i’ll feel guilty for the rest of the day.
stupid magnetic fields. they play a large part in my research (larger that one would think) and the field dies off so quickly that i got new material target to sputter from, the surface is further from the magnets (~1.5 inches) and therefore the field and therefore plasma is weaker and thus my deposition conditions change dramatically causing me all sorts of frustrating issues. i replaced some of the magnets that were definitely loosing their magnetization (due to heat) and now i wonder if i shouldn’t have just replaced all of them. i might go ahead and just do that or i can polish down the thickness of the target. that is the quick fix, but then that effects how it sits in the holder. sigh.
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