there and back again

[tarahime]

Hope everyone had an awesome Christmas and New Year! I'm trying out my new year's resolution and hoping it sticks after the pitiful blog output I had the last couple of years. This year, I'm going to just do it. Not to rip off Nike, but far too often I come up with ideas of stuff I want to do, but never accomplish them. Not this year.

As such, I want to reconnect with my LJ friends (by posting more, commenting more, etc.)! Even though I've basically moved to Facebook and Twitter, I miss posting inane fandom crap with sprinkles of real life to LJ on a daily basis. I'm not sure how well I'd do at blogging everyday due to my law class, but I can update at least once a week. It used to be daily back in high school and my early years of college. Aaahh in November I will have had this LJ for nine years. That's mind-boggling.

On that nostalgic note, last year ended pretty well. Finished a whole year of grad school, and I went to London for the third time with faeriecross in tow, and I got to do overseas correspondence by covering a lecture at the House of Lords. I was also involved in an award-winning original play as the makeup designer, and was a founder of a social media site for my university. The greatest accomplishment of all was being promoted at work as the A&E editor, which has been a goal of mine ever since I started working at the paper. This year I'm planning on some more trips and adventures, life permitting. It's amazing in a few months I'll be entering the last year of my 20s. omgwtf!

My hair color is awesome and it was a total accident. ...just had to throw that in there.

Other than that, I've been starting some new fannish creations. I want to give Shrine Maiden a new look, write some fic, make some icons and remodel my personal Web site.

Tell me what's up with you my flist! :D

Comments

[tarahime.livejournal.com]

SPSS? That's the program we use to analyze our data.

[beccastareyes]

We use IDL, which is a programming language. Right now, I have a function with two variables* that I'm supposed to fit to the data we have, after I calibrated the data (basically turn it from 'number of electrons recorded at a given time' to 'the percent of starlight from a certain star shining through Saturn's rings at that time').

Except the function needs tweaking depending on things like orbital geometry of the spacecraft that took the data... and right now, there's not enough difference between the two variables, so it tends to give me results that don't look at all like the data, and that break the model.

* Basically relating to what sizes the chunks of ice are in Saturn's rings: one parameter is 'how many small particles for every big particle' and the other is related to the biggest and smallest particles. Some of the starlight gets bent by the ring particles (like how light is bent when there's water droplets in the air, giving you a rainbow), and the amount its bent by depends on what the ring is like.

[tarahime.livejournal.com]

Oh wow, that sounds really cool! At least it's more interesting that doing my empirical data.