I'm considering moving the blog from MSN to WordPress. I'm not sure why because it's not like I update it anyways. My life has been incredibly boring over the past month or so. I'm slowly making progress, but I should emphasize slowly. I don't want to get into any techinical details because it can be incredibly boring. Basically, I thought I had a farily well established process to make nanopillars. However, I thought wrong. It's not well established, consistent, reliable, or any other word that would allow me to not spend hours upon hours in the cleanroom doing the same fucking thing over and over again. It would be nice if I could use a certain process, repeat said process, make a good LED, then pack my bags and head to Kyoto for a conference in October. The deadline for this conference is May 10, so I've got about a month to make this shit work. I think my research will be very interesting once I get over this hump, but Jesus it's a big hump.Anyway, enough of the ranting over the tediousness of work. What else has been going (or hasn't been going on) on in my life to make it so boring? The highlight so far was going home a couple weeks ago to Denton. I was able to get away from work, hang out with my parents, and just relax. I didn't even go out to Fry for drinks. I did manage to go to On the Border with Chris and catch up over beers. For anyone that hasn't kept up with him, he's doing well in law school and seems to be enjoying it. My parents and I ate dinner at Jasper's, a trendy restaurant in Plano that's owned by Kent Rathburn, the chef behind Abacus. They have a lot of steaks, but the nightly special is usually fish, so I had halibut. I forget the sauce and sides, but it was a pretty good meal. We had a meritage from Sonoma/Napa from the Artesa Vineyard called Elements. I also stocked up on some cigars from the Cigary in the Shops at Legacy. I'll finally be able to smoke the occasional cigar for the first time in a long time. Related to cigars, I've given up smoking cigarettes socially. I never felt addicted, but after getting sick with nasty congestion twice in two months, I decided my lungs needed a rest. The other major highlight was seeing Jaleel White at a trendy Santa Barbara restaurant. If the name Jaleel White sound familiar, that's because you may better remember him as this man:

 
Yes, we saw Urkle eating dinner. None of us wanted to interupt his dinner, so we convinced a first year grad student (whose Indian, this comes into play in a minute) to ask for an autograph. After a little pressuring, he gives in. The rest of us go outside and try to watch through the window. Not only does Anand get Urkle's autograph on a cocktail nampkin, he drops this little bomb: "You're very popular back in India. Some people even think you're bigger than Ganesh (the god with a lot of arms)." We headed off to another bar, but a couple people stayed behind. Earlier that night we saw this huge L.A. Gear bus driving down State Street. We didn't know what to make of it, other than it was a little weird. After finishing his meal, Jaleel White left the restaurant and got into the bus, moving the incident from a little weird to just flat out bizarre. Apparently this bus drives minor celebrities around and drops them off at local hotspots.