Spinning Electrons

Problem: After the initial “put pan on stove, turn heat on”,  the next procedural step in dinner preparation typically tends to be “wait 3-4 minutes”, at which point I wander over to the computer, with the intention of reading just one or two short entries from my RSS feed reader, and end up waking up from my internet browsing 15 minutes later to the smell of burning food on the stove.

So I found the post “Create a simple timer using LaunchBar and AppleScript” by Justin Blanton. However, that approach uses both AppleScript and LaunchBar. I don’t have LaunchBar (or QuickSilver, or QSB) installed, and installing it just for this trivial task seemed overkill. I reasoned that a solution could equally well be built on top of Growl + AppleScript, without the need for LaunchBar.

So here’s my AppleScript+Growl solution. It’s a bit rough around the edges, assumes you already have Growl installed, does no error checking, etc.. Use at your own peril.

set message to ""
tell application "Finder"
 display dialog "Enter the delay in minutes:"
     default answer "" buttons {"OK"} default button 1
 set howlong to text returned of the result
 set duration to howlong * 60
 display dialog "Enter the message:" default answer ""
     buttons {"OK"} default button 1
 set message to text returned of the result
end tell
tell application "GrowlHelperApp"
 set the allNotificationsList to {"Delay Notification"}
 set the enabledNotificationsList to
     {"Delay Notification"}
 register as application "DelayNotify" all notifications
     allNotificationsList default notifications
     enabledNotificationsList icon of application "iCal"
 delay duration
 notify with name "Delay Notification" title
    "Notification" description message application name
    "DelayNotify" with sticky
end tell

Using the “Save As… Application” option you can build an Application which sits on your desktop. Double-click this for each timer you want to set. Less elegant than just typing the command into LaunchBar, for sure, but equally functional, at least for my purposes.

Just to share a view of Mt Hood:

View of Mt Hood

Photos from a visit to the Evergreen Aviation museum are on flickr :

Evergreen Aviation museum

Our paper titled “Electron postgrowth irradiation of platinum-containing nanostructures grown by electron-beam-induced deposition from Pt(PF3)4″ has been published online now. We describe how the microstructure of EBID deposits created from Pt(PF3)4, notably the platinum nanocrystallite grain size, evolves with electron fluence in a controllable manner. The resistivity was observed to decrease as a result of postgrowth electron irradiation, with the lowest observed value of 215 ± 15  uOhm.cm. We demonstrate that electron beam-induced changes in microstructure can be caused using electron fluences similar to those used during the course of EBID and we suggest that the observed effects can be used to tailor the microstructure and functionality of deposits grown by EBID in situ without breaking vacuum.

A. Botman, C. W. Hagen, J. Li, B. L. Thiel, K. A. Dunn, J. J. L. Mulders, S. Randolph and M. Toth; J. Vac. Sci. Technol. B Volume 27, Issue 6, pp. 2759-2763 (2009). doi:10.1116/1.3253551

On 21 December 2009 I defended my doctoral (PhD) thesis at the Technische Universiteit Delft (The Netherlands). The PDF of my thesis can be found on the TU Delft repository or on this website.

On a very, very cold Sunday a colleague and I decided to hike the Angel’s Rest trail – normally a fairly easy hike, however the extreme cold made it somewhat more exciting.

Angel's Rest

(Click on the photo to go to the flickr set.)

Road trip from Portland down along US-101 to San Francisco and back again (via I-5):

Golden gate bridge

(click on image for link to flickr set)

Around Mt St Helens: a flickr set.

Around Mt St Helens

Pittock Mansion :

Pittock Mansion

Besides the well-known Japanese garden, Portland is also home to a classical Chinese garden, which I visited recently. Photos from my visit are here.

Chinese garden