2010-12-10, 15:55, as predicted or requested by mom, that's when little potato popped out and made his first out-loud cry announcing the commnecement of his marvelous journey to our world. Look at him!

Mommy and Daddy are both doing great, btw.

Baby shower! Many many thanks to the girls who helped me deliver this surprise, you can see the big smile on Shibing's face! Potato must be very much satisfied too, as the pile of gifts awaits.

This is Zou Bo's birthday. We sat together at the Presidio Social Club after dinner to chat a bit more. And, these little brioche beignets are amazingly good! French name, yet it reminds me a lot of the hometown Ci-Ba, sweet rice cake fried to a golden and crisp crust.

Happy birthday Zou Bo!

My favorite white chocolate macadamia!

This is no iAds for apple, but the pic is indeed snapped from the new iPod touch. While people are mostly disappointed with the mere 1 Mp spec, I'll have to say under normal lighting condition, it is effectively 1/4 Mp, more disappointed? The shots do look great on the retina screen since it is hard to see the grainy rendering of how the image processor can salvage from the minature pinhole and sensor. On the other hand, if you don't resize them by half in each dimension, they will look horrible on a normal screen.

After all, who cares? As long as it renders the color right, most people would not complain about my cookies on the right, or?

Thesis submitted! Never thought it would be such a rush in the end ... so instead of my original idealistic plan of writing down all the thoughts and ideas, I have to dump all sorts of old stuff together and compile and edit so it seems to be "One Book".

New job starts at XPP soon, very different but exciting as always. I guess with the more demanding schedule in the near future, life asks for a lot more planning.

Potato is giving stronger kicks everyday!

Was quite a surprise to see this 50+ year old car crash site lying in the middle of the coastal trail in Mt. Tam. State Park.

Someone must have been mesmerized by the spectacular view of the ocean and forgot that he's driving my favorite roller-coaster ride on the Marin pacific ridge.

POTATO is a BOY!

As we discovered and confirmed this morning at 8:00AM at the Stanford Children's Hospital. Both Shibing and I were feeling hyper drowsy for such an early morning appointment but Potato seems more than awake and happy, wiggling his little arms and legs all the time!

Like most, I was never too enthusiastic about electronic readers. Won't you be sad seeing 'to hold and to flip' is replaced by 'to click and to press'? I have all the reason to dislike the concept especially because I believed this whole idea is a conspiracy against people like me: I was convinced that after I bought an e-book and finished reading it and enjoyed the story, I was the type of the person who would immediately order the 'real' version and happily let it rest on my beloved bookshelf.

Stanford library was kind enough (or Amaozn was evil enough?) to let student borrow books on kindle, and Shibing took one home, and it was slow, so slow that I couldn't remember any stone aged electronics being slower. Maybe it's as slow as my Walkman. There's an experimental web browser, which browsed truly like a cow. I hated it for two days since the only fast operation on kindle was to buy books, and I am a cheapskate who hates paying for 'virtual' stuff.

Well ... my own kindle arrived last week. I felt so thrilled and now I read all the time.

I'm sure Andreas will love his picutre.

Well, this is a rare view inside the RCI main chamber, taken during the 16 inch flange swap before our beamtime. Inside you see three piezo stages that are in charge of positioning our samples and diodes and all sorts of other things into the micro focused x-ray laser beam.

YES! This is what high-vacuum stuff are supposed to look like!

We had lots of fun at LCLS. Being the actual frontier of scientific discoveries, the near experimental hall was filled with excitement. I'm sure the discovery of the 'inner beauty' of the $60,000 Princeton camera was one of the highlights. Does anything here look high-vacuum compatible to you?

Well, vacuum is the least of our problems with those precious puppies ... considering two of those cameras died of natural cause in three days. Good news is, all things fixed and it did produce clean diffraction signals and we had single shot images!

This will enjoy the title of zutee's most expensive shot for a while. Taken with the 4M pixel 16-bit ADC black-white Princeton Instrument vacuum-compatible soft x-ray CCD at 1MHz and a piece of black spondge in hand as the shutter, those dim florescent lights in the far background easily saturated the detector. Unfortunately the operation was performed in air as a test so I couldn't really show off much how COOLer the CCD actually can be: -40 degree!

PS: how interesting, that they picked the number -40 to avoid confusion on units.

March wasn't the easiest months for us. We had plenty of technical problems and things went quite a bit slower than we wanted. Apparently things are indeed moving along if you are willing to look at a longer time scale. Yesterday, Andreas started taking pictures of his master piece and thinking about talks and slides while Benny works on the stand motor clibration. Me? Of course taking pictures of the duo and having fun with my new 10-24 mm Nikkor lens.

We were told we had the inversed color-code for our new big toy but we don't really care. It looks good, and it works! I'm hoping to post the first diffraction pattern soon!

Went skiing with Dave in Homewood. Perfect weather for a spectacular view over the whole Lake Tahoe area.

Here you make a left turn, plunging down is the Face Run.

Wouldn't call it a short excursion, taking the train through Bern and then Interlaken, then Lauterbrunnen, then Kleine Scheidegg ... on that little rock up there sprouting over a hundred meter of ice, watching the Aletsch glacier roaring down south on the other side ... btw, this is the north face of Eiger.

By now I guess I finally figured out that I don't like this whole blogging business that much, or maybe it's just me being lazy. Anyways, I figured that one photo per season might be something I could handle so here comes the first updates of 2010. And if you do see more stuff get posted, that indicates boredom. What am I doing now? Waiting for the UPS guy to deliver the awesome Nikon 10-24mm AF-S!

Yesterday we put the frame for our LCLS experiment chamber together and now it's rolling! Thanks to Andreas & Cat & Han. Other than a few holes that was counter bored from the wrong side, and some parts interferences, we all agree Benny did a great job to putting this together. Of course, the more difficult jobs are yet to come and the final judgement won't be how pretty our instrument looks but the data it churns out.

Finger crossed.