Cake, cake and moooooore cake!

The carrot cake was an epic fail.  It was almost burning on the edges when I took it out, but it still wasn't cooked in the middle.  I ended up having to buy a cake from the store.  Oh well.  The party was really fun though.  We went to dinner and then went to a couple of bars, played some darts, came back to campus and played the drinking game Alex got me.

My mom sent me a lovely birthday package that I just got yesterday in time for my RAMAN CAKE!!!  Yes.  You read that correctly.  I got RAMAN DATA on my birthday.  That means my set up is working.  And now that it has been a few days I've got it working consistently and I have the data that my supervisor didn't expect me to have for another four months.  I guess he underestimated me. Ha!  Anyway, back to the cake.  I made an applesauce cake and Eric made the frosting for me.  Apparently after failing at frosting in his presence twice, he steps in. lol.  Just before I baked it, I got the birthday package with backing soda in it and shortening which helped a lot in the process.  And, one of my flatmates told me the correct way to use the oven. (One of my other flatmates showed me the wrong way, hence, mushy cake.)  Our oven is quite old and all of the writing on one of the knobs is gone.  Apparently I broiled the last cake instead of baking it! Oops!  This one turned out great though.  Everyone really liked it.  Some people even wanted the recipe.

As for colleges, I'm down to 52.  I'm going to start looking at the research interests of the professors now.  This way I can eliminate things a lot faster.  If it doesn't sound really interesting, it's off the list.  I did find someone that specialized in optical hole burning.  I bet everyone reading this thought the same thing I did at first, burning holes with a huge laser.  Though fun, that's not quite what he is doing. He's most likely making different laser modes (A laser mode is based on the number of bright spots and the pattern they are in.  A typical laser is in TEM00 mode with just on circle in the middle.) that aren't normally possible in a laser of that material.

Studying is going ok.  I'm working on Electricity and Magnetism now.  It's worth a lot of the test and I've forgotten a lot of it.  I think I'm going to have to test myself in all areas and hope for the best and review like crazy.  Hopefully I can move on to optics soon, but I don't think I'll spend much time on that since I just took an optics course at Lawrence and I've been working with optics this whole time. 

Well, here's my first shot at pictures.  I don't have many here because I'm on my work computer instead of my laptop, but here's a few.

This is my Raman data.  My data is in the blue, and the accepted data is in red.  Mine isn't as good, but it's clearly the same thing.

 This is our Mexican themed party with a couple of flat mates from Mexico.  I have no idea why I look pregnant in this picture.  I promise I'm not.  My shirt must just be doing weird things.

This last one is of me and Eric and Ali at the faculty bbq.

Well, I hope that satisfies the need for pictures for now.  It'll be a while before there's more.  I keep forgetting to bring my camera places.