= Such Stupid Things =

There's a little thing we do here at Berkeley in the fifth year of our ChemE PhD. It's a departmental seminar... not unlike a thesis defense, only it isn't graded. The main perk of doing a good job is that it keeps professors from asking combative questions and making you feel like a steaming pile of wasted research grants.

I bring it up, because it's my turn next Wednesday, and I'll likely be spending the better part of the coming week preparing. I've already made a good deal of progress on some critically unimportant aspects of the talk: learning new tricks in Adobe Illustrator, meeting .PNG, my new favorite image file format, and finally obtaining a pirated copy of Helvetica.

The content may be light, but the talk will be pretty. They've gotta give me that.