The Calm Before the Storm

So today was quite the Easter Sunday!

I started the day by packing then rearranging and then packing again so that everything would fit into my car for my last ride from San Diego to L.A. I can't believe I'm already done with my internship at Brain Highways! Luckily for me I don't have any time to dwell on that because production on the new season of Curb starts Tuesday, which means that everyone actually started work today! The director Kelly, my Uncle Scott, his assistant Natalie, Susie Essman (whose assistant I will be) and I met for about 6 hours today, in the middle of which there was a small earthquake (I've decided I'm not a fan). We went over tomorrow, when we're doing dry runs of the limos, seating, lunches, dinners and costume changes. I thought it was funny that one would even have to think to do a dry run of the limos considering we have some odd 50 people over 3 days coming to film different things but apparently that kind of thing is very important.
We then went through the new season of Curb and the talking points that they want the panel to go through. I have three very thick packets of bios to read through by Tuesday morning, most of the faces I recognize but knowing names is what I really have to work on.
The way they explained it is that I will basically be running wild until from 8 a.m. tomorrow morning to about 3 a.m. Friday morning. Why 3 a.m. on Friday? Because lucky me, I am the only assistant under 21 so after the party on Thursday night to celebrate the end of filming I get the job of making sure everyone ends up safely in their hotel.

Other than the limo thing the only weird moment I've had is realizing that how many famous people's numbers I now have. It's very weird when someone says non-chalantly "oo Jerry (Seinfeld) will call you when he's around the corner, here's his number in case you need to call him". It's a weird "what am I doing with these numbers moment" but everyone is nice and low key so although it's strange no one is making a big deal out of it.

Below is a photo of Susie, she is very funny and nice. She knows exactly how she wants things so it's pretty easy to work with her because your never left guessing. Also if I end up going to school in NY it will be nice to know someone so well contected.

I probably won't post again until I'm back in AZ, so until then guys!

Schedules syncing up

Time is coming and I still feel like there is more I want to do, I'll have to start using most of the notes I've taken to make my power point and start preparing for the presentation. There are still calls to make and scenes to be shot but everyone is willing to put throw in their help once schedules sync up. I am facing some typical problems in the editing process with having some sort of attachment to the things I record, making scenes compose of lots of extra clips that don't need to be used. Hopefully sometime this week I will head over to the University to speak to my advisor (sp seriously?) and receive some criticism on my footage to learn what things I should be looking for when filming. On a side note there are quite some interesting things that you can do when you film at home alone; here are a few pictures of the single man dolly with high grade decelerators placed in my doorway and elastic wires used to trigger the extremely complicated accelerating systems. Also included are some pictures of our filming at the University, unfortunately we had to stop filming because it got dark real quick after Collin's soccer game. .

Making work pay

For 2009 and 2010 tax returns people need to see if they are available for the making work pay tax credit. The making work pay tax credit is intended to provide tax relief for working and middle class families, meaning most tax payers will be eligible for the credit, however there are exceptions. First and most importantly you cannot receive this tax credit if you are claimed as a dependent on another taxpayer's return. Why, might you ask, is this the most important exclusion? Well, that's because it means I don't get the tax return. Ruined my day. I have been excited for weeks that I was going to get a couple hundred dollars for a year's worth of hard work, but no instead my parents get to benefit off of me. Life is just one big disappointment. Well, there are other exclusions to the eligibility of the tax credit like you have to work during the year, you have to be a resident, you can't be a pensioner, retired person, or disabled unless you also received earned income during the year, etc. Once again this sucks.

I am the Eggman!

Hey guys, happy easter! So the classes at Live Theatre Workshop have started up and I asked Deborah if I could sit in on her classes as well as doing Wild Things performances. I think that this will allow me to see if she directs differently when she teaches her classes and when she directs plays, which will show me if she directs differently based on age and experience. She agreed, of course. Apart from that, I have continued to work on my paper, and I hope to have around 5 pages done by Friday (but we'll see). Because I'm still receiving so much information on the Live Theatre front, I may have to wait a few weeks before I start the Deborah section.

Ooh! Also I enrolled to Willamette last night so I am officially part of their freshman class! Yay!

Hasta la vista, ya'll!

(P.S. I was wondering, how do we know what day or presentation is on? Do we go in alphabetical order or something?)

No More Spinach

This week we decided that the Attriplex hortensis have grown enough and that the experiment can be terminated and analyzed. Desiree and I unrooted all the plants and dried them out in an oven (to constant weight.) We then took the dry weight of all the plants so that we can compare the treatment growths. Just from speculation, the RO concentrate and RO concentrate + aquaculture grew quite a bit more than the freshwater treatment. But statistical test will have to be done to determine if the growth differences are significant. We also took some soil samples of each treatment for possible soil analysis.

Four tanks have been set up at the lab (one 20 ppt sea salt water tank, a 3 ppt sea salt water tank, a RO tank, and a Vsep tank.) The tanks were decided to be used for a bio-analysis for baby Talapia. So we have put 5 Talapia into each tank to see how well they do in the water treatments. -After one day, one small fish died in the Vsep tank, but other than that, the fish seem to all be fine.

Also throughout this week, I have been doing test on the water samples of tanks. Things such as nitrite, ammonia, PH, and electrical conductivity have been tested in the shrimp and fish tanks. When we did the electrical conductivity test on the Vsep water, we actually found out that the run-off is more around 10ppt instead of 20ppt (don't trust engineers to calculate salinities.) But we can just change the 20ppt tank and dilute it to a 10ppt tank so it's not a big deal. We will also later be doing some test on dissolved oxygen within the waters; also the sunlight percent passed through the greenhouse.

As for the shrimp, the shrimp seem to be doing fine and I have been feeding them regularly. So far things have been going well, and it is nice to see some of the projects start to wine down.

The End of Planting?

So this week was all around eventful if only because I am incredibly excited to see the part of the field season I missed during the end of summer last year. I finally figured out how to get at the chip in the back of my phone so I will be attaching some pictures to hopefully give readers a sense of the magnitude of work the whole lab has been engaging in for the past week. If I were to estimate the total amount of seeds that we put down in the field I would say the number is around 30.000 seeds in total, but as a mentioned before, this is the future of paramutation research so a few people wanted to do more, but we ran out of space.

Wednesday was a very interesting day because if you happened to go outside you stood a fair risk getting picked up and blown away. I hope that everyone's idea of a field at this time is that of a dry dusty patch of land, so these perfect conditions of wind and dust made it possible for a massive dust storm to form. At certain points in the measuring of one of the plots I was glad I was holding on to a measuring tape with another person at the end because I could have easily gotten lost in the whirling sands.

Thursday had all the signs of being a generally terrible day for working in the field. It was still just as windy as the day before, and there was a 40% chance of precipitation. If you are like me you would think that a little ground water is just what seeds need, but apparently a hard rain is the most threatening event possible for determining the fate of the Chandler lab. We were dealt a stroke of luck when all that came to pass was a few sprinkles keeping the dust at bay.

Today would have been a very productive day if not for the fact that half the lab had taken it off. I spent part of my day working on a power point for Mario, and the rest of it making seed packets for next week.

Despite today's mellow activities, I still believe there is never a dull moment in the Chandler lab. Projections as to what next week will bring on Monday.

Until then.

Stethoscope Update

So, Since my last post, things have changed a little. Now that I have an idea where to go with the code, I am migrating back to the Texas Instruments chip I plan to use in the final project. I am still, however, coding in assembly, mainly so that I can guarantee that everything runs as I intend, rather than having my compiler decide to "optimize" my code to run how it thinks it should. Hopefully, by the end of the week after next, I will have a preliminary model working that will merely take audio in through a microphone, filter out all frequencies I don't want, then feed that audio back into a pair of headphones. That goal seems fairly reasonable to me.

In other news, I did not get accepted to Penn (surprise, surprise), but did get accepted to Rice. Next weekend I will be out of town visiting colleges, so my blog update will likely come a little sooner in the week, unless I'm working from the skies.

'till then,

Alex Davis