7/31/17: What is? my life? Pretty great / but bizarre, man

1. 7/31/17
1. Wake up at 5:30 to email Marzhauser, whose German time zone is the opposite of mine, with some tech support questions. Planned to call but was too bleary to be cogent. Went back to bed.
2. Woke up again at 8:30, but could scarce rouse myself until 9. Compensated for my sluggishness by hustling myself out the door with a snack bar for breakfast.
3. My real breakfast was waiting for me in the lab. The microscope I’m working on is usually quiet in the morning, so I’d left my stage on it and planned to reinstall the manual stage in the morning. Instead, one of the lab’s grad students, B, was impatiently searching on my automated stage, turning the knobs attached to the stepper motors by hand (questionable) and with a 1kg slab of dense copper propping up the sample (quite untenable). I didn’t realize how heavy the copper was at the time, so I let him continue searching while I waited for the salesperson from Olympus to arrive. Checked out the coaxial drive, sent some email.
4. At 10 sharp my fine pal Brendon from Olympus arrived outside the lab. I showed him in and explained our predicament. Namely, the motorized stage, which I bought on eBay and was designed for a slightly different microscope, couldn’t be mounted high enough to focus on. All the while B continued searching; I had to ask him to take a break.
5. Brendon assessed the situation with a pro’s eye, and though no immediate solution sprung to mind, he promised me an evaluation soon. So we went to look at the range of travel of the stage, since I’d gotten some weird behavior trying to calibrate it on Sunday. We rearranged cables, booted up the controller, started moving the stage, and lo and behold, the X-axis motor was sticking! Unbelievable. I immediately picked up the 1 kg slab of copper and realized perhaps B’s impatience had been disastrous; the stage is rated for 500g at most. Brendon and I didn’t make much progress diagnosing the problem. I showed him out kindly, and then disappeared in a funk of frustration.
6. After that I got some messages from Gaya. We talked for a while; it was good, we needed to synchronize up. And after that I was ready for lunch. I was very ready.
7. So I hauled my sorry borrowed 1-speed (my bike was stolen from my fenced front yard some weeks ago) to Safeway. [Sorry pal, no complaint intended.] There I acquired veggies and meat and bread and all the necessities; I retired home, where I had a quick talk with my coworker and housemate Andy. Finally, I made myself a delicious lunch.
8. After lunch, I worked a little bit on Babak’s paper, then I biked to the Study Abroad office to ask an insurance question. That resolved, I headed to Babak’s office to check on the status of the research project. He’d made significant and clear progress, enough to get me excited about the paper. He even said that the paper was the first paper he was really happy with at this stage, of all the many papers he’d published en route to his PhD.
9. I had to duck out of the meeting to change into Unit Disk attire and meet the team on the turf fields. My buddy Peter from Math 33x joined. The first round of playoffs, the other team was a no-show, which was disappointing. We sat around, and this goofball Jacob (definitely a dos, in the familial lingo) posed an ill-framed question which I nevertheless endeavored to take seriously. Of course, Swati and the other optimization students actually knew what they were doing, so it was fun.
10. Our second game was the final, against the Mechanical Engineering Mudflingers. The Mudflingers were serious adversaries, and the game was hard fought, extremely hard fought. I played as hard as I could, and the results were high-variance--I made some crucial mistakes, but scored 3 of our 5 goals and assisted a fourth. Unfortunately, the Flingers exploited one of our weaker players for goals, to dominate us 10-5.
11. After that, I managed to convince nearly all the team members to go out for food, which was really fun. I got to talk to Sean, the team captain, about a dynamic father-son duo at MIT who farmed papers from other teams with “open problem sessions”; the other teams, including Sean’s, got prestige from working with the duo, but the duo got names on papers with very little work. And apparently writing papers in math is as much of a painful process as I was experiencing in the Databases lab, even when the results are done and proved. It seemed strange to me that in math, where the results are well-defined, hard earned truths, that the truths couldn’t just be catalogued in a giant database of known propositions, but that an explanatory paper laden with boilerplate needed to be written; and I said as much to Sean. He said steps were being taken in the database-of-truths direction in some fields, eg. the Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, and something similar in graph theory, and that these steps proved very valuable. Also got to talk to Molly, a 1st-year grad.
12. Walked back to CSE with Swati to get my bike, singing all the way. She has great enthusiasm for singing and goofy rhymes :)
13. Went to physics to collect diagnostic information from the stage, and tested the motion again--this time, no sticking! How strange. Found also that some *&()*$)( had taken my power adapter--I would need to recover it in the morning.
14. Returned home, got insurance, wrote this log, wrote diagnostic emails to Marzhauser, and collapsed.