Changes. Big Changes.

Today is my last day at Aspen Research.

This was not an easy decision as the 8 1/2 years I spent at Aspen were fantastic. The people are all great and are a huge part of reason that I stayed here so long here, far longer than any other position in my career. Please continue to use them for your analytical, compounding and technical consulting needs. The company is poised for fantastic growth in 2013 with the new 72 mm twin-screw extruder coming in and so it will be fun to watch all the big plans come true. It's just that I will be doing so from the outside.

The reasons for my move are personal and will be kept that way, but be assured that the separation is quite amicable on both sides. This means the big green Aspen Research logo on the homepage will be coming down [*], my contact information will be changing and a few other details on the pages will be adjusted.

Sadly for my long-suffering readers, I absolutely plan on continuing to blog, but the blog will be much more personally oriented, or closer to the point, the blog will be more clearly dissociated from my employer to the point of not mentioning them at all. This was not the case at present where an important function of the blog was to help sell the capabilities of Aspen. I expect it to take a few days to learn the ropes at the new place, so there might be a lack of posts for a while.

But I am very excited about what awaits me in my new position. It will be less focused on rheology. In fact I won't be running a rheometer at all, so you shouldn't expect too many posts about ketchup rheology. But don't worry, I still have a killer write-up (or at least, I think so!) on the rheology of a certain consumable liquid that most of us love. The report is in fact so good, that it will to be published in the Rheology Bulletin this January. I will let you know when that happens. (It's an open access publication from the Society of Rheology, so you will all be able to read it.)

So it's not goodbye to you readers, just my colleagues here at Aspen. Again, a wonderful bunch of pretty intelligent people whom I will miss.


[*] I still don't like it and no one here is really sure what it is. We are better chemists here than to think it is CH₅. We know pentavalent molecules exist, but we seldom work with them. A former supervisor thought that it looked like a squashed cartoon turtle. Well, it certainly is unique, or as we would say here in Minnesota, "That's different".