The University of Illinois and hardening up

So I thought I'd try to continue with building some background for the blog with some specifics about the stuff in my life in it.

The University of Illinois

I work at the University of Illinois.  That means I'm an employee of the state of Illinois.  That's good and bad.  The retirement benefits are ok and we enjoy some protections I suppose we might not at a private university.  It also means that we are bearing an certain bureaucratic burden. This burden has been increasing in an attempt to answer what is seen to be a culture of corruption in the state government.  Imagine that.  It's understandable, but it doesn't make it any more fun for an honest man stuck dealing with rules set up to deal with crooks. 

I am an alumnus of the U of I myself.  I took a BS in Engineering Physics in 1994.  It was a great place to be an undergrad.  The town exists largely because the U is here and so it's pretty student-friendly.  There are lots of student-priced ethnic food joints and cool places to hang out that won't cost you an arm and a leg.  This also makes it a nice place to live as an ``adult.''  The educational experience was a notch above.  I was incredibly well prepared for grad school and I had a chance to do research with John Tucker and got my first paper out of it.  The best thing I got out of it was that I met, and in my senior year started dating, the woman who would be my wife. I've attached my favorite picture ever.  Not my favorite picture of my wife, my favorite picture ever.  It pretty much says it all and you can see why this trumps anything else I may have gotten out of the experience.

My feelings about the U of I are best explained in a story about someone who doesn't have much love for the school.  The wife of a friend of mine, an old roommate of mine actually, got all her degrees, including her PhD, at very expensive private schools.  I needle her about this occasionally and she's often looking for ammunition to fire back . It's all pretty good-natured.  Mostly.  Anyway, my buddy and I were talking about how, at something like five or six thousand bucks a year for tuition, it's a hell of a deal.  The physics department is consistently ranked in the top ten in the country, and his home department, ECE (now my home department) floats between 4th and 2nd nationally.  There's frequently a Nobel laureate to be found in the halls and the folks are just plain nice.   So she chimes in with, "That's the thing about you Illini.  You get a couple of you in the room and all you do is go on and on about what a great place it was, what a great deal it was, how much you liked it, how well it set you up for your careers.  My classmates and I don't do that." Well, yes.  Indeed.  We just looked at her and let it sink in for a while.  

Hardening up

So I quit my whining, taped up the pinky that now looks more like a thumb and played ball today like an Illini.  My shot is so bad to begin with that it really didn't matter.  I cleaned out my locker and am planning to take the shoes to Holland in hope of finding a game there and learning the Dutch for ``Foul, you clumsy american!''

Second post and already faltering

Another post.  Mostly just to try to develop the habit.  

Gads.

OK.  I read the first entry and realized there are probably some problems with the approach I'm taking.  I was hoping to write in a somewhat generic style without too much reference to the particulars of my own life.  I was hoping to avoid the narcissism that now seems unavoidable in  these public- diary-type blogs.  Well, it seems generic alright, and so boring I'm not even interested.

So here are some particulars to be followed with more on other nights:

My name is P. Scott Carney.  I am a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois.  I got my PhD in Physics from the University of Rochester in 1999.  I was an undergrad in physics at the U of I.   I grew up in upstate New York.  My wife is a full-time mom and formerly a development officer with the university.  We've been married ten years.  my boys are 5 and 1.  

I'm fairly athletic, or at least active.  I bike a lot.  I am a weightlifter (all one word, if you don't know the significance, you won't care). I play basketball very badly but am getting a little better.  Today I  dislocated my right pinky at two joints playing ball.  Lucky one of my friends on the faculty is a bad-ass martial artist and he came over after four other guys had been tugging at the thing (yes- please pull my finger, no really, look, it's hideously twisted...) and just popped the thing straight.  He might have sneered at us a little for our unmanliness, but I think he's too nice for that.  

I also submitted a paper for consideration in a pretty good optics journal today.  I do this far too often.  That is, I participate in the extreme overproduction of scientific literature.  Much of it goes totally unread because, if it didn't, all scientists would do is read the literature. Sigh... anyway, I try to only submit things I am really excited about and genuinely believe may help someone else in her own research or might be important in another field.  I have to admit though that  after a few years I have become consistently unimpressed with my own work.  So I think the stuff I'm doing now is good and important, but ask me again in 2012.    OK, I take that back.  I still like two of my old papers.  I have 55 peer-reviewed publications.  

OK.  I'm going to take some more pain meds and go to bed.

Here's apic of my poor swollen pinky.  Whah.  And yes, those are diaper ans wipes behind me because that's how I roll.