Final Day of Summer Program

Today was the final day of the summer Oceanography program at Kingsborough. The program was definitely a success. Torwards the end, I was asking students if they'd do it again if the program was offered next semester, everyone that answered said yes, and one kid even wanted the forms for it now. If it's done again, there's a chance it will be expanded. This was a $300k grant, next time it might be as much as $900. That will probably mean more kids. If its done again, hopefully a boat can be requisitioned earlier on.

The major problems during the program were a result of lack of planning, not at the pre-camp stage, but during the actual operation of the camp. None of us were camp counselors, so we had a steep learning curve to deal with while the camp was going on. Things worked out, but this meant that there was a lot of stress going around. A meeting, at least once a week, or heck at least once, with everyone, the instructors and college assistants, would've gone a long way to preventing most of that, I believe.

KCC Summer Program

I've been able to get a job working at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn. I will be working on a special project wherein Middle School Students from around Brooklyn are brought to the campus to attend a summer camp. They'll receive two periods of instruction and science oriented activities, with physical activities in between and after. The program will run from around 9 o'clock, when they get breakfast, until around 5, when their last physical activity is completed. The college is also working on getting sailing ships for the kids to go out on,where they can perform oceanographic experiments.

College Lab Technician Position at KBCC

I've been able to get a job as a College Lab Technician at Kingsborough Community College, within the Department of Physical Science. Specifically, I'll be setting up labs for the Earth and Planetary Sciences section. So I'll be a CLT at KBCC in EPS. The job also includes responsibilities related to the maintenance of the department's Scanning Electron Microscope. Fortunately I had a course on Adelphi's SEM this past semester.

Wedding

Today, 6/2, was the day of our wedding. I am adding this post well after the fact. Everything went well, excluding the preist forgetting my name, and even using the wrong book at one point for the ceremony. The reception was excellent. The next day, we went to my new wife's parent's house to have a family party, and that was very nice too. We went to the Yucatan, the Riviera Maya, for the honeymoon. The honeymoon was great. We thought we lost my wife's wedding Thaali necklace after packing for the flight home, but luckily, after getting home, we found it in with out luggage.

More ex-Moderator Lamentations

I think I've done a decent job of keeping myself from going back to my old discussion site. I want to participate, but I have to resist going back. It just won't work out in the end. A human brain is very good at tricking itself. You'd think that an individual actor can't deceive itself, that it'd be logically immpossible to con yourself into doing something, but it certainly does. I keep thinking, "I will log back on to see if there are any messages for me" or "Maybe they changed their minds" or "I should just go back and participate as normal". I went back once of twice to get particular, specific information from two threads from the past, without engaging in discussion or logging on. But the minute I did that I set about looking around. "Any mention that I'm not a mod" I'm thinking to myself as I search the recent discussion thread titles. Nope, none, which isn't surprising. Then I see that there is already a new interface, a totally revamped frontpage, which was in the works while I was still there, and a re-worked 'member page'. The intention had been for a while to make the member page, which had your profile, into something more like a myspace page, for social networking. So now it displays your recent threads, recent tags, etc, along with the ususal account information. There's also a comments section, where people can leave messages if you've activated it (which it isn't on mine), and a "Friends" list and a "Foe" list. I have to say I am surprised at who's on which. The Foes list, for one thing, I short. And at least two of the people on it seem to have taken it seriously, they're people that I know strongly dislike me. I'd've thought that people would take something like that in a tongue-in-cheek manner, but apparently some people are really wound up.
The friends list illustrates what was so great about that place. "I'm just this guy, see", just a normal, average dude. But on the friends list, there's a bunch of people that I either wouldn't know in real life, or that I wouldn't know in the same way. There's a proud muslim. Knowing muslims is hardly a rarity, but I'd've never had the conversations with that guy that I did if I knew him in real life. They're either socialy inapropriate, or simply the oppurtunity for them just doesn't come up. There's a Thelemite who's a master of occult practice. Maybe I do know someone in real life who is that, but I'd never actually know that they were. There's a hard core brother who doesn't take no shit from nobody. Again, not a rarity, but how much interaction would we actually have had just passing on the street or working in an office? Most people my age already have a set of friends and they're not looking to bring many new people in. And who can really have anything other than a superficial discussion while inside of an office or in the lab or at class? There's a fun and fiesty chick from puerto rico, which I knew before she said she was because she even writes in an accent, so occurs thats where she's from. There's a mason who's simply a master of arcane knowledge, taking tributaries from all the underground streams and traditions. There's shriners, conservatives, the irreverent, the pious, black nationalists, pan-arabists, jewish nationalists, rude bollywood gyals, jews, muslims, hindus, christians, etc. And, again, this is just the tiny list of people from the board that actually marked me down as 'friend', rather than 'foe'. In other words, its a small sampling of the types of individuals that you'd encouter and engage in dialogue with there.
It sure was fun while it lasted.

Second Day of Prep

I arrived at Dr. Farmer's Paleoceanography Lab at Hofstra this morning to start a second session of specimin prep. All went well enough. There were still a few samples that were either lost, or that seem to have too little material in them to be useable. I went back to the first day's worth of prep and collected the ones that also looked like problems. Between tomorrow and the next day I will finish the normal picks, and then also re-do the problem samples. With all that, I should have around 36 samples crushed and ready for the final day of preparation.

New York City Teaching Fellowship

NYC has a programme in which people who have academic degrees, but no teaching certifications, can get those certifications. If you're accepted into the programme, you're put quickly to work in a NYC school, teaching a subject you are qualified for, getting paid as if you were a regular hire, and after about a year you get the certification needed to be a teacher.

I applied to the program, not expecting to get into it. Infact, I applied on the very day of the deadline. There's only a limited number of positions, and thousands of people try to get them. By some miracle, I've been able to advance to the Interview stage. Their website has some paperwork that I need to fill out, and I'll have to decide what category and grade level I'd want to be considered for. I need to schedule the interview for early next week, I think, if I'm going to hope to have any chance. Even then, it seems unlikely that I'll be accepted, its the end of the process, they've certainly filled most of their positions, and might just be interviewing a large number of people, in part to find a small number of the best applicants to fill in the final spots, and probably also to keep a 'buzz' up about the program.

Thesis Proposal

Part of the process of doing a Master's Thesis is proposing the project. It is an odd requirement, since by the time you're presenting the propsal, you're already heavily invested in the project. That goes double for me, since I've proposed my project in the middle of the same semester that the thesis itself has to be completed.

The presentation went well, started at 4:30, with the process of doing a power point presentation and then a question and answer period lasting a little more than an hour. In the week prior I had written up the thesis proposal itself, which ended up being only 5 pages of actual text.

I presented to Dr.'s Christensen, Farmer, Coombs, and Russell, who together make-up my Thesis Committee. I'll have to defend the thesis before them at the end of the semester. Dr.'s Christensen and Farmer of course I am working with, and Dr.'s Coombs and Russell are professors from the department. They did seem genuinely curious about the project, which isn't to surprising. The details of my project are barely within the normal confines of biology, at least here. It seems like everyone else here is doing a genetics project, running PCRs, gels, etc. And then I come in with what looks like spoonfuls of sand 'but I assure you, they're fossils'. True enough, these professors have heard of Foraminifera, and surely are aware that they're marine protists that extend pseudopodia outwards to pick up food particles. But be damned if I've got to deal with actual living ones. These things are dead as dirt. Literally, they've accumulated as dirt. Most biologists tend to think of biology as involving things that were at least relatively recently living.
This idea actually seperates biology into two overly wide domains. Pale-ontology, and Ne-ontology. Everyone in the department here is a neontologist. If they haven't killed it themselves, or known the guy that did kill it, they don't want any part of it.

Fortunately they looked past any of that, I was genuinely concerned that there would be objections to it for being too much of an environmental studies programme sort of project. Dr. Christensen prepped me well for the presentation, I was at least able to prevent myself from trying to speculate too much and rather just admit that I don't know the answer to a question. Speculation, it seems, can be too easily received as bullshitting.

I suspect that the actual thesis defense will be a much more rigourous process. I don't expect to have the thesis accepted right off the bat; that's relatively rare. Equally rare is to have it completely rejected. What normally happens, or so I read, is that revisions are requested, and the degree is awarded sort of 'conditionally'.
One of Dr. Christensen's previous students, from another University, infact has been through many revisions. He defended his thesis before I was even in my Master's programme, and he's been going back and fort with revisions ever since. This is while already being accepted into a PhD programme.
I can't really even consider thinking about the revisions at this point, I just have to work on actually finishing the data collection and writting the initial, pre-defense, draft, first.

De-modded

I ended up being de-modded today. I had been participating on a discussion board since July of 2004, and had be selected to be a moderator on it a while into it. It was a great old time. Wonderful discussion that you just can't have anywhere else. And a variety of people that I'd've never met in my lifetime. I had been getting heavily invovled in a series of conversations about Holocaust Denial on the board, these kinds of conversations aren't, to say the least, dispassionate. One of the peopel running around promoting the nazi propaganda that the holocaust didn't happen/wasn't that bad/or that the jews themselves did it, sent me a long private message, through the board system, attacking me and picking a fight. I send him/her back a short, to the point, beautifully vulgar response. Hey, if they want to pick a fight, I'm not one to dissapoint. But it was one of those moments when you realize right afterwards that it wasn't a good idea. Some of the other nazis that had swept onto the board, and this sort of thing does tend to happen in waves, and it does tie into the Iran Holocaust Conference which at least brought up the idea in the public spotlight again, had been complaining that I was too 'mean', both in the complaints section and also just openly in the threads. Apparently, these people aren't 'sensitive' enough to not rant that the jews were the perpetrators and beneficiaries of the holocaust, but are 'sensitive' enough to bitch and moan when someone frankly disagrees with them. So not too long after having sent the private message I get another one, from one of the three board administrators, quoting my vulgar reponse to the member and informing me that I wasn't going to be a moderator anymore.
What could I say, they were right. As a moderator I represented the board's administration. I thanked the administrator for even letting me a mod for the time that I was. But I can't continue on on the board now. I really loved the board, but I can't even justify to myself anymore spending that much time on it without being 'on staff'. True enough, it sounds silly to refer to a discussion moderator position as a staff position, but we, as mods, were part of the organization, and we did help it move along and advance, outside of normal moderation duties. THe board had grown a lot in the time I was there, and I at least like to think that I contributed to it. Everyone participating on the board did contribute, but I like to think that those of us working as moderators were a part of it, in addition to being contributing participants.
It was great to have all those intruiging interactions with completely different people, to learn from their nearly alien worldviews (infact, a person or two would occasionally claim to be an actual extraterrestrial alien), and to have my own ideas challenged. Thats not something that you too often get in regular life. The people that I personally know aren't, in the end, all that different from me. They're mostly from the same region, living similar lives, and operating in similar manners. But there, you'd be mixing it up with someone who's family was in the Iraqi Insurgency one moment, debating UN policy with people in post-communist era countries the next, or listen in on a debate between a master mason and a Thelema devotee before getting a good lecture on US monetary policy. And usually one of those guys or gals would also be trying to explain a paranormal event that had happened to them, or posting a possible (if improbable) UFO sighting photo that they had taken.
Alas, thats just going to have to be a stage that's over for me now. If I go back to participating as a member, I'll allways be wondering about whats going on in moderation and administration. And in all honesty it'd be almost too painful to watch from the sidelines as the board continues to grow and expand, as it certainly will. And while I was a moderator, I held my tongue. I held back, because we had a certain amount of responsibility in that position. Without that responsibility, who's to say how long it would be before I was booted off altogether? That'd be a bad experience, and it'd, in a way, make at least the time between being demodded and this hypothetical future booting, something of a waste.
All good things come to an end.

Hiring in Advance?

I've had what appeared at first like potential offers to work for some companies. I'd put my resume up on a job search site, and sent out a bunch of inquiries to matches for jobs in biological and geological fields and received a few call backs. But it turns out that they're not really interested in hiring anyone months in advance, before they even have their degree. Which shouldn't've been surprising, but was disappointing.

Rejected by Stonybrook

I had completed my Stonybrook application a while ago and sent it in. I was able to get letters of Recommendation from Dr.s Christensen, Schoenfeld, and Hobbie. I also contacted Dr. Forster at Stonybrook to see if she was taking on any more graduate students. Unfortunately she said she already had 5 students and wasn't looking for anymore, but, she said to contact her again to see if something could be worked out. I responded saying that I'd still like to work in the program, and would like to meet up with her at Stonybrook. She agreed and asked for me to send in a day to meet, which I did. Unfortunately, the next time I heard from Dr. Forster was when I received a rejection letter from Stonybrook. The letter seemed like standard fare, but at least it had been sent directly from her, as she is on the graduate admissions committee, rather than from someone that I hadn't spoken too previously.

I sent a follow-up letter to Dr. Forster to get more information about the specific reasons why I was rejected, and what I can do to improve my chances of getting accepted into another program. Hopefully she will respond and it will be something that I can work on.

New Teaching Assistant Assignment

I've been fortunate enough to get assigned to another TA position. This time it is in Dr. Coombs' "Fundamentals of Microbiology" lab. There is only one section with all the students from the lecture, and it meets twice a week.

The students are going to be working with cultures of microbes, including BSL 2 organisms in the second half of the semester. BSL 2 organisms are 'potentially pathogenic' organisms; they can cause disease. Bio Saftey Level is a rating from 1 to 4, with things like Anthrax being Level 4, and non-disease causing varieties of E. coli being level 1.

Cleaning for Mg:Ca Analysis: Problems and Solutions

I collected around 40 individual G. bulloides for the first 15 or so depth intervals from the core. I seperated them into two sets of 20 individuals each and carefully crushed the test chambers open in prepartion for cleaning them for Mg:Ca analysis. This gave me 30 samples, which were put into certified metal free tubes on a rack. Even though they were certified metal free, I still treated them to a long heated acid bath to ensure that there were no metals that had collected in them, such as with dust. I then went to Dr. Farmer's lab at Hofstra for the cleaning at around 9 in the morning. The rest of the cleaning work was done inside of a negative pressure hood, to prevent metal bearing dusts from contaminating them. They were then put through a series of treatments, the goal of which was to remove all clay minerals and wash away any Mg or Ca crusts (non-biological) that had accumulated after deposition on the ocean floor. A small amount of methanol (for clays) or acids (for leaching) would be added to the tube and then siphoned off. I also treated the samples to a boiling bath of strong Hydrogen Peroxide, to destroy any organic materials that may also have accumulated, using a sonicator at many steps to aggitate the material. Leaching in a weak acid was the penultimate step before final dissoution. It was after leaching, and this was around 6 or 7 at night, that I realized that the tiny amounts of material were missing, they had either been dissolved at one of the acid steps or sucked up by the vaccuum. That was unfortunate.

So several days later I collected a small sampling of forams, not necessarily all G. bulloides, but similarly shaped and with similarly thin test walls, from a 'practice' jar of washed material. There were four tubes, with around 20 crushed individuals in them each. I then used the same procedure as I had previosuly used to clean them, and after the weak acid leach, they were still there and looked good.
So its possible that I had previously sucked them up with the vaccum, or that I had crushed them too finely, which allowed them to dissolve in the various acids. But it looks unlikely that carefully crushed tests will be dissolved by this procedure, which of course is to be expected, since many other workers have used it with success, including Dr. Farmer.

Now I will have to finish picking the foram samples and clean them, hopefully there won't be any problems with this round.

Wintersession

For the intersession during the winter break, I had to.

 

1. I need to contact Dr. Farmer over at Hofstra. (done)
2. Prepare a new outline for a Thesis Proposal (done)
3. Contact Dr. Forster at SUNY Stonybrook about her program (done)
4. Complete SUNY Stonybrook PhD application.
5. Prepare a draft cover-letter for new job applications.
6. Pick 40 G. bulloides to later be analysed for Mg/Ca ratios from all of the 1H1W and 1H2W intervals.

I am waiting on any kind of response from Dr. Forster. I have to wonder at how they react to emails from people that they don't know, asking to work with them and asking about grant money. Seems like it would normally sound suspicious. Maybe I can pretend next time to be a Nigerian Bank Manager.   I suppose that they expect it to be part of the territory that comes with being a professor in a programme.

 

Outlining the a new proposal for my thesis went quicker than expected. Prof. Christensen had previously said that I should use her other student's theses and proposals as a way to structure it. But I hadn't done that. I tried it this time, and it sure was a lot more helpful.  The difficult part was deciding what sections to put everything into, but seeing that other students had just flat out broken it up into the study area, background on the techniques and science, and then an explanation of their method, was just a sensible way of laying it out. This should make the writing of it go quickly.

 

As far as cover letters and essays for applications, I have to get going on that.

 

Picking the samples has been a mixed experience. I focused on my previous picks from Jim's material, pulling out what I now recognize as G. bulloides.  I've gotten through all of 1085B 1H1W, and now just have 1H2W to go through.  After that though, I am going to need to either sieve some more material to get up to 40 G. bulloides for each point I want to sample down the core, or go through the rest of Jim's and see if there are any to get from there. I'll probably end up doing both.

More forams

Met with my Professor today to go over what I need to get done before the semester starts. We're going to meet for another couple of days to review what I've gotten done. I need to reorganize my Thesis Proposal, so I can present it to a committee for approval. I also need to actually select who will be on my Thesis Committee too. Apparently I might be able to include Dr. Farmer on this, even though she is at Hofstra (and in a different department on top of that). That should be helpful, since she has direct experience with this kind of work. I will need to contact her soon to set up when to come to the lab and find out exactly how many specimens to pick for each level.
Thats the big task right now, picking the specimens. I started by trying to pick out G. bulloides from Jim's slides, I got through half of one section of the core and was barely able to find one. I think I might've picked too liberally when I was looking for Nq. pachyderma previously, and taken up all his G. bulloides. So I went back to my old slides and really started hitting a roadblock on just what defines which organism. I definitely picked a lot that weren't Nq. pachyderma, in the early slides at least. I was able to get some G. bulloides out of them too. But now I am not at all confident in my understanding of which characteristics define which. Yes, I have Kennet & Srinivasan right in front of me, but the descriptions just seem like they can go either way on so many individuals. I ended up spending a long time in the lab, but got nothing done with it.

Before all that I had to clear up an issue with financial aid. They had cut a refund check for me early in the semester, but when the TAing tuition waiving came through, they shut off the financial aid. That meant that the check that the school had cut for the refund wasn't being covered by my Financial Aide, so now I owed them for it. Luckily, all that needed to be done was to have a stop put on the check.
After that, I gave the biology office my probable schedule for Spring. Hopefully, I will be able to get another TA position. The professor in charge of doling out the positions had only picked up the student schedules earlier this morning, so they shouldn't've assigned anything to anyone yet. On top of that, one student that was a TA last semester isn't doing it again, so that should mean I am pretty certain to get a position.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Got this book for Christmas, which is funny because I had picked it up in a bookstore and thought it looked interested but ended up not buying it. So I lucked out and ended up having it anyway. Just finished reading it, really interesting book. Its about a father and son, neither of which are named at anypoint in the book, wandering through the world after what seems to have been global thermonuclear war. The world is completely destroyed. The inside flap of the dust jacket says that they are walking through "burnt America", which says it all. Everything everywhere is completely burned out. There event happened in the man's lifetime, when his wife was pregnant, and the books starts years later with just him and the kid. The descriptions in the book push the sensations of the charred out world where the only thing that seems to move is a permanent cover of ashes. There's no sun anymore, or at least you can assume it still exists beyond the never ending overcast of the sky. Only a diffuse light exists during the day. McCarthy describes mornings as 'palings', and night is absolute blind blackness. The only things that are alive in the book are humans for the most part. We once hear a dog parking, but that stops before long. Hell, people are capturing and eating other humans, so of course they've done away with dogs, cats, etc. Pets, I suppose, are pretty superfluous in the apocalypse. The only other time any animals are mentioned is during a nightmare of two with hideous monstrous animals, and then one scene where there are snake. A group of men pull open a peice of hill to get at a mass of hibernating snakes within it and just set them on fire. McCarthy describes it as little more than them wanting to destroy something that represents evil.
I don't think it necessary to view the book as a science fiction novel. It doesn't make sense that way. Nuclear war would be destructive, but here, its like every square inch of the planet was hit with a flame thrower. And every animal is dead, there's never any insects, birds, worms, nothing. But humans are still alive. The coasts at some points are completely littered with millions of tiny fishbones, and the oceans are just churning gray masses. The description of rivers are great, they're just these dead, whirling black slicks with greasy froth and scum all over them. The only food that they come across are tinned goods, and it seems to be what everyone survives on, either that or other people. The man and the boy are like concentration camp victims, but they seemed to have walked from Virginia, or even further north, to the southern tip of Florida. So no its not a science fiction book. Its almost more poem than prose. McCarthy also doesn't use much punctuation, which can be annoying, especially with dialog. Its easy to forget who's talking or thinking any particular line, or if its even being narrated when you start reading the sentence, which, I suppose, must be the point.
Its almost funny to even think of it as a "post apocalypse" story. Just compare it to the TV show Jerhico or Mad Max or anything from the 'after the end of the world' genre and you can see that its just completely different. There are hints of the post-annihilation history, but its muddled and infrequent. "Blood Cults" and "bull drums" are completely used as props to reinforce the mood of the book. Its like when a horror movie never gives you a good look at the monster. You know its hideous, and therefore it is, you don't need an accurate and detailed description, its as horrendous as anything you know, because you've more or less made it up.
Its the descriptions that I think come out most stronly in the book. Even though the whole world is nothing by gray dust, black ash, and scorched soot, where even the snow is gray, you still manage to get a 'vivid' impression of it. You can feel how freezing cold it is, with minimal sunlight during the day, and nothing but scavenge wood or gas to burn for a fire.
The story ends oddly, but I guess that McCarthy figured he couldn't have an unhappy ending. You definitely feel completely hopeless for these two completely pitiful people through most of the book. Half the time you just hope that the man snuffs out the kid before some one roasts him over a spit or wears his skin for a hat. If the narrator said "but in reality, this wasn't earth, the man and boy had died in the attack and now they were wandering through hell while everyone else was alive', you'd beleive it. They're traveling down the road, because its the only thing around. Its all asphalt and oil, and the novel appropriately ends with someone telling the boy to get out of the middle of the road. The other thing that I noticed about the novel is the physical book itself. At first I thought it was just poorly cut, but after a little while I realized that the pages must've been made uneven on purpose, gives you a feel for it being something to be left during the apocalypse.

Here's a page about the author, from the looks of his other titles, he doesn't seem like the most jovial guy around:
CormacMcCarthy.com

From his page I see he apparently is the author of "All the Pretty Horses", which was made into a movie. Never saw it.

Random House has a pretty nice looking page for the book, but from the looks of the url it will change with his publication history, so it might not allways be for "The Road".

Last day of TA work for Fall Semester

Today was the last day of TA responsibilities for the Genetics Lab for me. The whole thing's been a really interesting experience. The last lab session with students was yesterday, and today I went in to sort through the genetic samples that were left over, ran the DNA off the last of the gels, and just cleaned the lab in general. The Professor says that there might be a shortage of lab classes next semester, but hopefully I will be able to get another TA position for the Spring.
The lab itself was a lot of work for the students. In addition to the three long term experiments that the professor had designed for them, they also had to design their own fourth experiment. And in addition to the regular assignments of maintaining a lab notebook, and writing lab reports, they also had to prepare a poster presentation of their group designed experimental results, and then each of the two lab sections had a Poster Session. The first lab section only had three groups, so they just presented one at a time to the class. The second lab section had eleven groups. They ended up doing the session in the hallway, and each group ended up presenting to the professor, and then rotated to at least two different selections of other groups. Some of the other professors and workers in the department also attended this micro-Poster Session. I'd say that these students had their work cut out for them, but that now, after all of that, they're really much more prepared than the average biology student at other Universities.

Wascally Wabbit

After the debacle with GMAC, I've been fortunate enough to get a car that I like, the VW Rabbit. The Rabbit is a model that first got started in the '70s, I beleive. After a while VW changed the name to "Golf", and I think that there was a version of the Golf called the "GTI". Now they've dropped the "Golf" moniquer and have gone back to calling it the Rabbit. I love it. It get good gas mileage and has lots of luggage space inside, since its a hatchback. On Black Friday after Thanksgiving, we went out and picked up a new TV at 5 in the morning, to take advantage of the wildly reduced prices. It fit into the Rabbit with no problems at all, plenty of room to spare. Its an automatic transmission, I have no idea how to drive a manual transmission. In addition to regular automatic, it has two other modes. A "Sport" mode, where the gears kick in at higher RPMs, and a "Triptronic" mode. Triptronic is a type of transmission, developed by Porsche, that allows you to Upshift and Downshift through the gears of the transmission, no clutch action required. If you try to shift down into a gear that would over-rev the engine, the computer won't permit it. In some descriptions of Triptronic, its claimed that when the RPM are lower, the computer will remember that your command and then down shift. However I've played around with it, and it doesn't seem like the VW Triptronic at least will do that. It will also downshift on its own if the engine's RPM fall very low.

The car has a bouncier ride than I am used to. I've noticed that most companies are claiming that this is a 'sportier' ride. That the American public is moving away from the old feels of some cars, where the smooth ride was important, and are becoming more accepting of the more European style 'sporty' rides. I had an old Mercury Grand Marquis, and driving it was like cruising along on a boat. Now, apparently, everyone wants to feel every bump and joint in the road. Takes a bit of getting used to, at first I thought something was wrong with the suspension!

Malibu gone

So today my '03 Malibu had to be returned. I had thought that I was working with GMAC, I had thought that they were going to let me decide today even (though I was late returning my car after its smartbuy was up) whether to refinance the balloon payment OR get into a new lease. But apparently I thought wrong. They told me today, when I called them to say that I wasn't going to get a new vehicle and, rather, I would sign the contract that they had sent me to refinance the ballon payment, that they didn't want to do that, and that they're requiring me to turn it in to one of their dealers.
So now I have no car. This is wonderful. I had thought all those things because....thats what we'd do when I worked at GMAC, we'd work with people who were overdue on turning in their car, either have them sign an extension while they were trying to make a final decision, or try to get them to sign a new contract. And when I had spoken to the people at GMAC's Midland Center, I made it clear to them that I was trying to decide between the two options, but needed to wait for a certain ticket from my former GMAC co-workers that'd give me a discount on any new vehicle I got into. Later I got a phone call from someone from the Hartford branch, I explained the situation to him, and said I'd be able to get back to him by today either way. I thought everything was fine. Yesterday I get the ticket, contact a couple of dealers, and decided that it wasn't worth getting the new car. I call the guy from Hartford to let him know that I'm going to sign the contract for the refinance, and he tells me no. To turn the car in, now, or else its going to be re-possesed.
I argued with this idiot for a while. In the end, I had no choice but to turn it in, and now I don't have a car of my own. I suppose that its actualy in my favour. THe car was old at this point and had over 50K miles on it. It'd be a bad deal to have to pay around $12K for a 3-yo car with 50K miles on it. I'll have to pay an overmileage charge for part of that of course now also. But you'd think that the guy would prefer that I send in a check. The first payment for the refinancing wouldn't even be due until next month even. How much of a difference does it rationally make if I signed the contract 10 days ago or today, and then sent the first payment in next month??? Not a helluva lot.
And I offered to pay for an extension to cover the time between now and when it was due back, on top of signing the new 36 month refinancing contract. But no, apparently, that'd be against GMAC's interest. Unbeleivable.
So there's simply now way that I'm going to be getting any of the family of GM cars now. Even if other companies would do the same, they haven't done it to me, and if it ever did happen, hell, at least they wouldn't be doing it to a former co-worker. Half the people in that nitwit's office are 'refugees' from my old office too. Apparently it counts for nothing. Heck, he even went so far as to say that 'I should know better then because I worked for GMAC'. Well when I worked for GMAC getting cars that were past maturity and overdue, we'd actually do stuff that made sense. This moron couldn't do anything other than say that the car in his que has to be returned.

TA Work

I've started the TA position, and its pretty hectic. I was told at first that I'd have 3 lab periods, and then a few days before I was told I'd have 2 labs a week. But then it turns out that there are 4 labs a week,, everyday in the late afternoon except Friday. On Friday I need to come in to prepare for the labs on the following week. They're around 3 hours each, and the prep on Friday can take a few hours on its own.

The Thursday Lab actually conflicts with my Marine Geology class, which starts at 6, but the Lab Professor, who is the Head of the Biology Department, is ok with me leaving for that class. Infact, often the labs end a little bit early.

For my research, I need to still pick the samples for the Mg:Ca analysis, and then prep them at the Hofstra Lab. I should hear back from Hofstra soon as to when I can some in and do that, and picking the samples shouldn't take more than one session at the microscope.