That’s a wrap!
We finally finished shooting around 8:00pm tonight, and now I'm not sure what to do with myself. Some of you got email updates during the filming, and I appreciate you being there to hear my rants and excitement. Filming takes a lot of flexibility and patience, and it was quite an experience. I managed to get everyone involved to sign my IRB consent forms too, so all the data I so painstakingly gathered should be usable! Woot!
The series is likely to air near the end of the year or early next year. I'll let you all know as soon as I can. You can see me in my little blue polo talking shop. I also did an excellent job prepping my advisor, and she did a great job during her part. Well, everybody did a great job, but I was mostly concerned with Stephanie's part since it was a direct reflection of my ability to tell a good story about what I know about the engineers' work so far. The engineers assured me that I do "get" what's going on, and that was a relief. Now you can all ask me about ECC, and I can give a decent 30 second soundbyte. The show itself will focus on the material's properties, but my piece focuses on supporting and improving collaborative science and engineering work. Stay tuned for big news about how to get civil engineers from around the world to agree on a testing method for ECC.
Next up, transcription! I've started running Boot Camp on my POS MacBook, and so far, it works ok. I got a student version of Atlas.ti for my qualitative analysis tool, and I'll be poking around in there tomorrow. I have less than an hour of video, but I have pages and pages of notes. I also have about 200 pictures, but I'll spare you most of those.
My Four Eyes
My prescription is too strong and is causing me some serious eye strain. New glasses from a brick and mortar store are way out of my budget. Luckily, the internet is trying to come to the rescue. Here are some sites I know about that sell cheap glasses. Anyone know of others? What do you think of any of these glasses? My face is pretty round, and interesting shapes and/or squared frames work best.
- Roxy - black or red?
- Venice - black or tortoise?
- Durham
- Dakota
- Something with aqua
- P085
- Silver ones
- Blue ones
- Orange ones
You get the idea. There are lots of options. I'm paralyzed by the sheer number of options. Please help!
Heat and Hard Hats
Man, it was hot in Michigan today. Fantastic!
Today was quite exciting for this lowly graduate student. I got to spend the day following a documentary film crew who are shooting footage for use in a Discovery Channel show. The shoot is sponsored by the same Office of Cyberinfrastructure that sponsors yours truly's education and research assistantship. They're shooting for a show called "Material Worlds" from which we'll all be able to learn about properties of various materials, including the "bendable concrete" the civil engineers I work with developed.
We started our day with a few hours at Brighton Block & Concrete learning about concrete in general. Mornings are exciting at concrete plants. Trucks are coming in and out pretty rapidly; guys are driving around on fancy forklifts moving heavy stuff.
We took a lunch break at Sidetrack in Ypsilanti (home of the famous burgers). I was surprised by the ease with which all the producers, cinematographers, civil engineers, and chemists were able to chat about everyone's work. The producer on our shoot also produced all the exterior shots of Washington, D.C. for the movie American Dreamz. You probably didn't see it, but I did, and I remember those shots.
After lunch we headed to the Grove Street bridge in Ypsilanti. The Grove Street bridge crosses I-94 and has 42 cubic feet of engineered cementitious composite in a link slab running through the middle of the bridge. I've heard hours of interview about the Grove Street bridge and the ECC in it, and transcribing some of those hours is what I'll be up to tonight.
Standing in the sunshine in my hard hat, capturing the process on SI's Handycam, I got excited about the project again. Data makes me so happy. Maybe the lesson here is that if I'm gathering data, about anything really, I stay motivated. So, I just need more field days to make this thing work for me intellectually. That's the hypothesis I'll be testing anyway. Earlier in the week I got to see my first tensile test in the ACE-MRL lab, and I got to keep the ECC specimen we stretched out. That little souvenir may go a long way toward maintaining my emotional investment. Isn't it amazing what artifacts can do? Sorry, couldn't help but put a little 504 back in to the mix. Take it up with Radley.
Please take me back!
I have had enough of the Treo 755p and enough of Sprint's subpar service.� I am running back to the loving arms of T-Mobile, but first I'm taking a detour through the rebates of wirefly.com.� I called Wirefly today to make sure that I was eligible for a rebate on a new phone and service plan with T-Mobile and was assured that since I cancelled my T-Mobile account and moved to Sprint, I was in fact eligible.� So, I'm getting a free Blackberry Pearl in the next 2-3 business days.
Going back to the Pearl is exciting.� It's smaller and easier to use than the Treo.� It also looks "cooler" and just generally rocks.� T-Mobile's service is also $45 less per month and includes such niceties as the ability to utilize SpinVox again. Sprint doesn't allow customers to forward their calls to a different voicemail provider, and I've been forced to listen to voicemail again. Bleck.� When I go back to T-Mobile on Friday, I'll get my messages via text again.� Whew!
Stay tuned to read how much this cell phone roulette ends up costing.� I think we all know I'm not getting out of it without spending a couple hundred dollars.