Monday, October 31, 2005

A White Tie Affair

Every January, the Viennese Opera Ball is held in the grand ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria here in New York. It is a charity ball to celebrate opera and the arts related to the Vienna Opera Ball in Austria, and is attended by dignitaries, ambassadors, and lots of incredibly wealthy people. Tickets start at $750 per person, but if you want to sit at a table and eat dinner, that jumps to $2,500 per couple, or as high as $25,000 for a table. Of course, you get a seven course meal and performances from opera soloists from the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Symphony Orchestra, and a group of professional Viennese Waltz dancers. Cocktails are at 8pm, dinner at 9pm. Dancing goes until 1am when the ballroom closes and the attendees retire to three salons--each with its own string quartet, naturally--to spend the rest of the night socializing until around 4am. Dress is strictly white tie and decorations for men and long ball gowns for women.

On Saturday, my ballroom partner and I auditioned for a spot with the V-Waltz group and were accepted! She will be provided with a ball gown, and I a proper white tie and tuxedo with coat-tails. (It has always been a dream of mine to dance in a fancy ballroom to a live orchestra in tails.) We get dinner, dancing, and all of this for a mere three-minute performance. Can it truly be real? I'm still trying to convince myself that it's actually true.

Oh, and per years of tradition, there will be a parade of debutantes making their societal debut and dancing the Polonaise. In other words, lots of very wealthy girls my age....

Monday, October 24, 2005

Obituary

Tyche, beloved laptop, was pronounced dead at 1:04pm Monday October 24th after a four-day struggle to recover her memory. Late in the evening on the previous Wednesday, Tyche slipped in unconsciousness for reasons not readily apparent. Upon arrival home, her caretaker Andrew found her sitting on the desk in an endless loop of trying to revive herself. He tried everything he knew, but in the end he had to just let her to sleep.

She lay there on the desk, in a coma, until Friday when a doctor was able to come to her home and see her. He tried to revive her with Knoppix, no success. He tried to revive her with his laptop, no success. He finally performed open-brain surgery and removed her hard drive. Connecting her brain to his computer, he found her completely unable to awaken. Finally, he suggested taking her drive back to his lab, to employ more serious resources.

After more than eighteen hours of work, and as her body lay brainless at home,he had results. Her drive was unalterably corrupted, she was going to die. But as she lay in her death throes on the lab bench, he was able to recover her memories, all 30GB of it, and burn it to nine DVD's. At 1:04pm this afternoon, her memories and her still and silent brain were returned to the care of Andrew. She was pronounced officially dead at that time.

Tyche is survived by Andrew, her grieving caretaker, and by her older brother Nemesis, an aging PC who, growing senile and feeble, has retired to the Catskill mountains to live out his days. She will be sorely missed by many for the seemingly infinite supply of music she was always willing to share. Fortunately, her memories remain and can be transplanted into future laptops. In a way, she will live forever.

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Blue Skies

An old friend came to visit last weekend. We met at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle way back in January 2003. I was the only student from MTU there, and didn't know anyone else. She was visiting from Sweden, and hadn't really met anyone else. We hung out together at the conference, and went out around Seattle exploring in the evenings. It was a great trip, and meeting such a good friend made it that much more enjoyable.

Last weekend, she, and two other friends (both Canadian) came to stay at my apartment. They were here for the U2 concert on Monday night, but they came for the whole weekend to see New York. We did the tourist thing, walking around the Battery and up through Chinatown and Little Italy. We went dancing, we went to the Met (the museum, not the opera), we walked through Central Park. It was raining most of the time, and a little cold, but such a wonderful weekend. I so love this city, and to run around with people who haven't spent much time here is fantastic. They were the perfect guests, (which simply means they didn't get me up too early in the mornings!) and we all had a great time. I feel like I've grown much closer to one friend, and made two more.

For your viewing pleasure, I refer you to their pictures of the weekend here, here, and here.

When they left, it rained for eight continuous days.

But since then, everything has looked up. The weather has been beautiful, in the 60's and sunny. I wrote a telescope proposal to get back to the mountains (it's been far too long). I've just been smiling a whole lot more lately. Someone's been helping with that.

Tuesday, October 04, 2005

"Great day in the morning....

....what once was lost, now is found."

Kudos to you if you remember that commercial. Congratulations on having a life if you don't.

So, yes, I'm alive. Yes, I've been busy. Yes, I've been watching the comments on my last post. Yes, I think you're both silly. Did I miss anything? Oh, yes, I'm wearing new socks today.

Busy, busy, busy. My first year research project is finished. [/begin stuff you probably don't care to know] What was originally pegged as a pulsar candidate from coincident radio and x-ray detections turned out to be a high-mass x-ray binary similar to Cygnus X-3. That is, my object is actually a binary system consisting of a compact object (black hole or neutron star) and a Wolf-Rayet star. This is only the second such system (Cygnus X-3 being the first) to be identified. [/end stuff you probably don't care to know] I presented at Astrofest 2005, and had quite the time at Astrofeast 2005. I wrote up a paper on the research. Tomorrow I meet with my committee. They will tell me everything I did wrong, and I will drop to my knees pleading that I have only completed one year of grad school, am young and naive, and will never let it happen again. They will have mercy, or at least pity, and I'll get to start my next project.

Classes have started. I'm taking two, and teaching one. This semester is all about cosmology and extrasolar planets. As for the class I teach, I think I've got a pretty good group this year. (Or am I just saying that in case one of them finds this blog?)

I'll try and update more. I have some new ideas for more Modern-Day Etiquette, and have received some great suggestions from people as well. Lots of things are going on, and since you've nothing better to do, I'm sure you'll read all about them here.

By the way, I just think it's hilarious that this blog comes with a spell checker....a spell checker in which "blog" is not recognized as a word. That delights me to no end.

(And in case you were wondering, it was a VW commercial, circa 1999-2000. The thing that was once lost was a full-size spare tire. And here you thought it went the way of the coelacanth, didn't you?)

(Ha! It didn't recognize coelacanth either.)

(What? Coelacanth? It's a prehistoric fish, thought to be extinct....until they caught one off the coast of Madagascar. Ah, that commercial was so funny at the time....)