Weather at work

Apparently it will rain, again, on the drive back. As Annie likes to say, "This proves that there is a God and that He hates me." (Except the weather, so far, looks better than it did the Sunday that I drove up here so there may still be hope.)

On Wednesday I spent almost an entire day at the library. It was very restful to be indoors with books while the wind howled outside (the wind was almost Davis-worthy that day). I also got a panini from the cafe, which tasted mostly of boloney and extremely greasy cheese and was, frankly, awful. Then yesterday I went and picked up some decorations for New Year's and waded through a stack of free magazines / catalogues that my parents keep for me because I like the photos. Via has always been fun to flip through, and it's a bit more relevant now that I can go on roadtrips and need to worry about changing the oil on my car and checking the wheels regularly. Kraft also apparently still sends me its magazines (courtesy of a box of cereal from when I was in high school), which I mostly look through because I like staring at photos of food). Then there's Ikea. I still fail at drawing furniture, but I can confidently say it's not due to lack of source material for practice.

It was genuinely cold last night. What's with that?

Today was...well, I did a bit of packing. Christine's directed me to undernet for IRC for books and now I'm downloading Calibre to Ivy, which should ensure that I will always have something not science related to read for the ...rest of my life, probably, even if I don't have the time to set a foot in a library ever again. (X-chat interfrace in Fedora 14 is very good, by the way.) Heading over to Kate's in the evening for New Years (ohmyGodanotheryear'sgone). For some reason my grade still hasn't been posted -- though this is not the first time where the PIs took far too long to grade things. My PI has only sent me two emails in two weeks, which is pretty good. I think I shall go and poke around in the garden, in the mean time.

Well, that was frustrating

I have just spent fifteen minutes trying to upload photos to Facebook. Between the slow internet and the apparent issue between Ivy's Linux and Facebook Flash I have uploaded a grand total of zero photos. Which means the rest of the photos will have to wait until I get my hands on Zen again. Mail me if you want photos before them. I have them from the 18th (Lucy's), 22nd (the get together), 24th (Anna's) and 27th (Valleyfair). Or if you have a specific photo request, like Annie does, I can do that too.

Hmm let's see.... Life has been rather good so far. I have been sleeping for ten hours each day, which feels wonderful and will be a luxury that I miss the rest of the year. Last post where I mentioned what I was doing appears to be the 21st. (In case if anyone's curious -- I'm 95% sure it's the battery circuit that's messed up on the Roomba now, but since it really isn't mine and my parents are the ones who need to deal with it, I didn't dare to try the...more scrappy methods of fixing it.) So, holiday thus far: 18th at Lucy's, 19th driving, 20th recovering & exchanging a lot of text with people about Anna (lol Anna yes there was a lot of texting those two days), 21st was library, 22nd was our get-together. My memory of it consists of Kate asking us to wait for her in a corner in Costco in a very parental way and the rest of us plotting while we waited (dear parents, never leave a group of children unattended for over ten minutes when they have access to the internet) and watching the BBC version of Sherlock (Sherlock looks like Merlin and Watson reminds me of Sam Tylor, it was all very strange) and, you know, gift exchange. We have tried the Brain Wash soda. It tastes vaguely of fruit punch (the soda flavor, which may or may not bear actual resemblance to real fruit punch), except with jalapeno. I have the bottle, which is my primary aim. I am never buying that soda again.

Speaking of which. I have spell-check. It is British. The installation is USA. ...I still have no explanations.

23rd was library again, to return books and get more books. I started on ATLAS SHRUGGED, which is so far very depressing. I picked up a romance novel to make my annual attempt (though I think I forgot to make an attempt last year...oh well). The book is picked by finding the first book that didn't have partially dressed people necking on the front cover but there is a rather vampyric looking lady there, in front of a suitably dramatic corridor. (I think I should perhaps stick to thrillers. They a lot of them have a strong romantic subplot as well, right? They should be easier to get through for me.) I'm not sure if I'll get to it before this weekend, or if I'm brave enough to actually read more than the back cover which, yes, did make me wince.

On the 24th Victoria and I went over to Anna's, where she plied us with tea and cookies and sandwiches and much fun was had with playdoh by all (the next time someone touches that pile will most likely be a year from now). We tried to introduce Victoria to Due South (didn't take, ah well), and was imperially ignored by Isis. At this point everyone's presents has been delivered before Christmas and I am feeling very pleased with myself. Went over to meet with the person who turned out to be my dad's cousin from his mother's side. We were not really sure what I should call him, or his son.

25th: opened the last of the presents -- Lucy managed to completely fool me by putting the book she got for me in a box, so I wouldn't guess what it was. We sorted out the Amazon cards so I got a bunch of giftcards from my parents, and soap. And I suppose the jeans mom got me from Costco should count too. Generally spent the did sitting around and reading stuff.

Went for a very long walk on the 26th, including a detour to the elementary school I attended in 6th grade. (Not 5th grade, De Vargas is too far for even me, on foot.) The weather was excellent. Dad remembered that I liked juice and got me Caprisun, which still brings back memories of junior high and high school. Between that and the walk I spent most of the day drowning slowly and exquisitely in nostalgia. Then I started plotting The Roadtrip that I will take at the end of grad school, since it's going to be going from coast to coast and I need to figure out the logistics in advance. I kept forgetting West Virginia is a state. It was vaguely embarrassing. Anyone has ideas for sights worth seeing? Right now it looks like the trip is mostly national park themed.

The weird Malaysian place that served food in hollowed out fruits was closed yesterday, so Anna, Victoria, and I went to Cicero's instead (it was greasy), before heading over to Valleyfair. The mall was still insanely full of people, and parking was more painful than I want to remember. Victoria was shopping for prom dresses, and Anna steered me around Macy's until we found a black turtle neck sweater that I was looking for. The Sanrio store looked like it got raided (it was disturbing, because I wasn't expecting that store to look so...wrung out), but Anna managed to find enough items to complete the prank she will be pulling on her labmate, to drive him insane. Anna got a fancy pen at the stationary store in Santana Row, and promptly got power-drunk on it. Victoria claimed it was "the most intense clicky pen" she'd ever seen. I don't pretend to understand, but you can ask Anna for a photo, I'm sure.

Today was hanging out with parents day, or something. We went shopping earlier this morning. Now I have random urges to clean things. (Yeah I don't know either.)

This will make sense to less than five people, but sanderling is a bird.

Jasmine soda from "Sweet Blossom" series is awful. It's like vanilla creme soda except a little sour and nothing in it tastes even remotely of jasmine.

This is apparently my life

The mp3 music player system in Onyx is fairly good in terms of sound quality, and the navigation was simple enough that I've been able to figure out everything I wanted to do thus far without reading the manual (me not reading a manual = shocking, yes). However, what is a disadvantageous compared to the other mp3 players I've had so far is the delay. There is an inevitable three second delay between when I press a button and when the task starts and I have no idea why. It is annoying, though not debilitating, I suppose. Or at least not yet. It is possible that with more usage it will be the thing that will drive me insane.

I have also discovered a Roomba in a corner of the room. What appears to have happened is that dad inherited from one of his friends, and that it doesn't work, in the sense that it fails to charge. It's a Roomba Discovery and I'm currently recharging it, after a battery reset, to see if that works. Meanwhile I can't help but think of the Questionable Content comic. (OhmigodwherecanIfindmini-jet-engines?)

Have installed mp3 plugin support on Fedora 14. Apparently all I needed to do was to su to root and then type:

rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm
yum install gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-ffmpeg gstreamer-plugins-ugly -y

and viola.
Flash plugin support was a bit longer and I did it while at Lucy's, before we watched THE MATRIX. I'm pretty sure this is what I did, as root:

rpm -ivh http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm
rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-adobe-linux
yum check-update
yum install flash-plugin nspluginwrapper.x86_64 \
nspluginwrapper.i686 alsa-plugins-pulseaudio.i686 libcurl.i686

Firefox theme and personnas are excellent in Linux, I still prefer QuickJava to NoScript. I got QuickProxy but haven't set it up yet because I haven't needed to access any sciency journals yet. The issue with gmail that I noticed while at Lucy's went away by itself. (??) But the lack of UK-based spell checker in Firefox right now is apparently because there's no working spellchecker, despite of the fact that that option is checked under preferences, so I'll have to sort that out because my spelling is rather atrocious and having something underlined in red at least narrows down the range of things I have to check over, even when I'm typing made-up works such as "sciency" and "phosphorylation".

(The Roomba makes such cute little noises.)

In an earlier discussion with my parents on my life in grad school, mother wanted to know whether or not my thesis advisor is still enthusiastic about my thesis. I was able to reply, with complete honesty, that he is more enthusiastic than I am. My parents were reassured by this. I was trying not to laugh.

Does Smurfs merchandise induce the feeling of nostalgia in anyone besides me?

Jumbles of things

Over the past two dinners I've updated my parents on the newer Fedoras, the existence of Chromium (speaking of which, does anyone else want to try out Flow before I wipe my USB stick?) and the general gadgetry as I know it. In turn my parents re-introduced me to playdoh (don't ask me why mom got me playdoh, I have no idea) (yes they try, they really do, but...). Mom's also swapped my mp3 player (the one with the glitchy earphone port) with an Onyx that...I think my dad got for her, actually, that neither of them really knows how to use. It's kind of like how I got Zen, and the Onyx, I've discovered, have twice the memory of my current mp3 player (4G as opposed to 2), and an fm radio, which I missed when I upgraded to my current one since the one I had from 2006 had a radio built in. Have tried out radio (quality a little iffy, but tolerable) and will try out the mp3 player part tomorrow. I kind of like how it looks. It's tiny, black, and cute (and of course very shiny) --i.e. the design is a bit like a very petite ipod.

Went to library today. Got three books. Finished reading one of them this afternoon and wow, I have missed reading fiction. There's something about having that book in your hand.... Am currently pondering whether or not to spend the entire day at the library tomorrow. There're some stuff to work on and the library, under normal circumstances, would be more ideal for my focus. However, it's the holidays and my experience today told me that the library is...rather noisier than usual. Okay, it makes me want to lock myself in the basement of our research building (where I'm pretty sure there is still wi-fi), so I'm still dithering. Maybe staying at home will work if I just drank enough tea?

Completely unrelated to this is the cookie that my mom brought home the other day from work (apparently the management was handing out cookies to everyone or something). I have never cared much about St. Valentines or thought what an ideal valentine should be like. Now I have decided: my ideal Valentine is someone who will bring me a long-stemmed cookie because, seriously, long-stemmed chocolate chip cookie. The only way it can be more awesome is if it photosynthesized, in which case I probably will not eat it, but keep it as a pet and name it Alice.

Over and out.

Gusty trees

Well, I'm back in the bay area now, after the past week's insanity composed of lab wrapup and packing. The weather was (and still is) horrible. The drive up from south Cal involved going through two hills of reasonable altitude (I hesitate to call them mountains, but I'm not entirely sure what I should be calling them when they're high enough to make my ears pop while driving up), and the drive, I can safely say, was the most terrifying driving experience I have ever had in my life. Both places had parts where it was raining so hard that it felt like someone was dumping giant buckets of water on the car, and parts were foggy as well. The Gilroy part was slightly better but it was windy, to the point where the car would be blown partway into the next lane over. Both regions of course, involved sharing roads with giant trucks which always terrified me whenever I drive long distance, even when the weather is good and I don't have to worry about traction and inertia relative to mass and speed. There were parts where I had visibility of around three feet and spent the entire time clenching my steering wheel until my fingers started to cramp (which doesn't actually reduce my chances of accident, but was done to have something to hold on to and make me feel a little better), and the really fun part was how, because of the low visibility, I can't even see the hills around me. It felt as if I was driving through a dream, with the heavy sheets of grey pouring down on all sides and nothing but the yellow lines on my left and two faint glowing spots of red in front of me to let me know I haven't, in fact, wandered off the surface of reality.

Well-- that and the feelings of caffeine and andrenaline burning through my veins, the music turned up so loud that I can feel the bass in my teeth.

(I caved in and bought a mocha. Yes it was really that terrifying -- there was a point where the weather worsened so suddenly in the middle of the turn that I'm pretty sure that I managed an "Oh fucking hell", when the road seemed to suddenly disappear from beneath me -- my classmates would be so proud. And there was a point where Bon Jovi was singing about how it felt like summer and I started laughing because it really, really, didn't.)

But you know what?

Somewhere between the expletives and trying to make sure I don't join the many, many cars parked / being towed on the side of the road, it was fun.

There was a region near Fresno where we crested a slight rise on the Five, and the weather was clear so you can see the acres of orchards in every direction, the yellow grass shot through with green from where life is reviving itself with the much needed water. There were hills in every direction, gold and green with splashes of indigo-violet, and there were layers upon layers of cloud, piled into another, more ethereal landscape on top. Maybe it was the "omg no rain" bias -- and I'll be lying if I said that the process of getting there had no affect on my perception, because the experience in reaching the ending will always influence my perception of the ending -- but that place -- that place / moment / feeling -- it was beautiful.

There was also how, after the initial shock of "Oh God, this is really bad", I got to the part where I was grinning madly (no doubt from the combination of andrenaline and caffeine) and felt really alive after weeks and weeks of fruitless trouble shooting experiments in lab have sent my mind into (what now felt like) a kind of robotic haze. It was how, I think, that the experimence really drove home the feeling of how my life is now in the hands of no one but myself, in the most literal, visceral sense possible. Possibly I could've had that epithany without braving the inclement weather, but I doubt it'd make me feel quite as intoxicated and gleeful.

My least favorite part was, actually, how the glass kept fogging up and I had to turn on the air to get rid of it and the air was really. I was already wishing for gloves about an hour out of LA.

It was ironic that the region with the highest density of accidents was the twenty minute stretch right after I left Lucy's. In fact the first accident I encountered was the one on the highway ramp right outside of her house, which was blocked enough that I ended up going to the next street over to enter the highway. That was also the only real spot of traffic jam that I had to deal with.

That being said, I will never take this kind of trip if there's someone else in the car with me. Or at least, I will break the trip into an additional day or something, and stick to the right most lane. I don't recommend driving six hours in downpour, nor do I feel particularly inclined to do it again, now that I've proven to myself that yes, I can indeed drive for six hours under less than optimal conditions.

Now I'm going to eat dinner, sleep a lot, and possibly regret sounding like an idiot come next morning.

Conclusions

Flow continues to be super shiny, but I have now decided that, post winter quarter (when Lucy and anyone else who might be interested get a chance to play around with this OS) I'm probably not going to be keeping Chromium on Ivy. It isn't so much that Aviary applications tend to mysterious cause the Flash.so to crash or that for any google-linked pages, such as blogspot, there is a disturbing tendency for the browser to say "webpage not available" first, which is blatantly not true because after I click refresh one or two times the page always shows up. Those might be issues with my internet. After all, not everyone is signed on to Google as the ISP. That is not the problem.

Or rather, that is the problem.

The problem is that Flow / Chromium is a browser based OS and the performance is snappy like you wouldn't believe. The problem is that the reason for this snappy performance is due to the fact that the OS itself has essentially no apps. All the apps that it comes with you launch from the internet which (aside from the Aviary issue that I'm still confused about), is okay if your computer is a desktop and you're using it in the office all day or if you're constantly using it in areas with really good wifi. However -- and this is what broke the deal for me -- Ivy is an Acer netbook, built to be portable, and when I'm using it I carry it with me, everywhere. Most of the times there will be wi-fi I can set up. Sometimes there wouldn't. Sometimes I'm on the bus and I need to access my reading for tomorrow. When all the apps are launched from the internet, and there is no internet, there are no apps (and also no files, since the apps that you use save your files online, google-doc style for everything). I can't do anything without the internet, literally in this case with Ivy. It's more than a little frustrating. Perhaps there are other stuff I can buy from the OS store that will run internet-free, but for an OS that I'm just trying out? No thanks.

(Other minor irritations include:

sensitivity for mouse, despite of being on a sliding scale, only comes in three settings: 1, 5, or 10, and even at 10 for the image edit program there is still significant delay between motion and action.

Flow shutdown pathway always makes Chrome thinks that it was closed incorrectly and makes it offer to restore tabs.

Login has to be with your google account username (big brother monitoring feeling much?) and when there's no internet the set up has to be done through the hacker's password.

I have no idea where screenshots I took ended up.)

Think might try Fedora on this too (currently am on Ivy), since Ubuntu apparently didn't agree with it or something.

[edit 20:23]
Actually come to think of it, I might do Fedora before I leave so that way I can see how it runs on this PC and figure out whether to take Ivy or Daemon with me when I go. I'll bring the Live USB though, so people who are interested can run the OS (without installing) on their own computer and play around.

Hihi

Am on Ivy right now typing from Flow. There was a bunch of issues which, I realized about five minutes ago, boil down to one thing: EVERYTHING DEPENDS ON HAVING A STABLE INTERNET CONNECTION. Which ATT mostly failed to provide over here. You log into the OS with your google account, and all the apps load from webpages as well. For a while all things related to google account failed to load, giving me messages along the lines of "this webpage is not currently available", which I think mostly have to do with the fact that for some reason these things are hypersensitive to connection stability. (This morning there was an hour long block where the connection is kind of shifty. Don't ask me why. It happens randomly.) Yahoo loaded fine though, but my point is, if your entire OS is based on the internet, for crying out loud, the launchers should tolerate the fluctuations a bit better. Or reconnect faster. Or something. (I have no idea exactly what's going on in the OS / server system when the google-based stuff failed to launch (well, all except Google.com, which will continue to run, I'm convinced, with minimal interrupted bandwidth until the moment of the apocalypse).

The flash.so files also keeps crashing. It's annoying (and sad -- I was looking forward to trying out the Aviary apps too, since I never tangled with them before -- not to mention I need the image editor to deal with the screenshots). I have no idea what's going on. I need to finish addressing the Christmas cards and try to plan out next week's groceries. Hopefully this will post on the first try. If you don't see my square brackets of edits after this, then it had.

Proof that education cannot cure stupid

I just realized this morning, helped by an email from mom, that the information I've been keeping in the back of my head (i.e. mileage, checkup time) for my car was for my car, and not my dad's car, which I am currently driving and will be putting through the length of California on. This meant, of course, that following the immediate head-desk moment I realized that my schedule for this entire weekend will probably be thrown off because I have to dig out the car maintenance record from somewhere (made dad mail it to me when we switched cars) and figure exactly how much needs to be done and when the shops will be open, and I also should wrap presents and write cards and start packing, as I'm leaving early Sat. morning next weekend and weekdays of grad school are not particularly conductive to anything other than experiments and feelings of sleep deprivation (despite of the fact that I'm not actually sleep deprived).

BUT. Point of stupid number two: I grabbed the nearest jacket when I went out to check various things under the hood and only realized after getting grimy hands that I was wearing a white jacket.

And my cloning still didn't work. Final ligation step failed three separate times with three different preps.

My god, I feel like such an idiot today. I think I can be excused for my abuse of italics. Yes?

Geek humor strikes again

Was lured away by the Chromium OS (which is open source) and made a live USB of the Flow build by Hexeeh. Installed it on Ivy on the off chance the network card is an incompatibility issue after all (hope springs eternal). The live trial is very shiny, the internet works (!?) and now at the end of the terminal for the os install I came across the message that:

Thsi filesystem will be automatically checked every 23 mounts or 180 days, whichever comes first. Installation complete. Please shutdown, remove the USB device, cross your fingers, and reboot.

Now rebooting...

Loaded fine. Very snappy. I'm impressed. Network setup is a snap. Having everything be browser based is definitely strange but the organization is surprisingly intuitive. Internet continues to work. I'm out of time to play around tonight (alas, the list of things to do never ends), but I'll keep you guys updated as I play around with it. Cr has its own applets and programs. I'll post screenshots as soon as I figure out which ones is the image editing prgram.

Laaaaaab

In my dish there're only two
Bacteria colonies, that grew.
But unfortunately for me
(It's an x-gal system you see)
Both of them turned out blue.



Yes I know it's not a haiku and will probably make no sense to people who haven't done cloning but cloning ate my brain. I have dreamed about it week.

Distracted by the shiny

Upgraded my Fedora to version 14 yesterday, which has a new background of intriguing jagged blue thing that I immediately switched away from. Have also learned how to clean up old incompatible system components and now Daemon runs slightly faster, which pleases me immensely. New version of firefox is compatible with more things now (though I still need to manually install JRE plugin, which is annoying) and, for reasons still unresolved, my US English install still has a Firefox with UK English spell checker.

Then I saw the thing about the Chrome OS. I don't use Chrome, mostly because my experience with it so far indicates that it's a fusion (albeit a very shiny, nice fusion) of Firefox and Opera, both of which I have. However, the promise offered by the OS is attractive, even before I got to the bit with the shark shooting lasers out of its eyes (because how can you resist sharks with laser-eyes?). Well, we'll see how that goes.

In the meantime, cloning has officially invaded my subconscious, in the sense that I had a dream last night where all the colonies still expressed beta-gal and the gel dried overnight for some reason. (I guess it qualifies as a nightmare....) I am, also, finally done with classes, with both the requirements for graduation and the requirements for my training grant (well except I still have to go to journal club once a week, but it's journal club). Now the next goal is...publication.

Well.

[edit 8:00]
Have tried to put the new version of OS to hibernation for the first time and the shell script popped up with error, "device failed to thaw". Have no idea yet what that means exactly, yet (error #16, anyone?), but am finding the code uncommonly funny. In the " 'k making defrosting jokes now thx" way.

Day 2

Today involves: writing about Alzheimer's disease, spinal cord injury, and affects of androgen receptor during brain development. The jack for earphones in my mp3 player appears to be going as well since if I move it there will be odd positions where one or the other of the ear buds will not work, and I have checked with the really uncomfortable ear phone that DOES work and have received the same result. I need to do grocery shopping. And buy wrapping paper. It is entirely possible that I have already had too much caffeine already. Oh well. This too, shall pass.

Finals!

For the take home final I am currently trying to model neurogenesis (birth of neurons) in the human neocortex (developing brain) where there is asymmetric division of progenitors (number of cells we start with increases additively) and the total number of cells cycling (number of cells that will keep giving birth to neurons) changes over the course of days. I only have three time points to establish a trend for the cycling bit which means that the accuracy should be shot to hell, except I suspect since I'm dealing with billions in terms of orders of magnitude it may not be that bad. Assuming the length of cell cycle is constant in the neocortex.

This, unfortunately, will be the least painful part of the entire exam.

[edit 16:48]
Does anyone find it strange to read "animal with a window implanted in its skull"?

[edit 18:23]
Have just spent almost two hours reading & writing about brain tumors, central nervous system metastasis, and therapy resistance. Am feeling very depressed now but still must finish this problem....

Missed meeting this morning

Eight is too early
To feel completely betrayed
By public transit

Ah, grad school

Too many papers
Not enough time to read them
This calls for time warp

lol oh dear

Dear Vivarium Staff,

Please check the mice before deciding to leave nesting material in their cages. Those male mice are not pregnant, they are just obese. Allowing them to make giant nests that stuff up half of the cage will not solve their case of dystocia, since they don't have dystocia. Baby mice do not come from nesting fluffs.

Sincerely,

S

Le whhhhhhhhyy

I was originally going to write a post about the new Opera browser that's coming out and how shiny it is, and possibly something about the scientists petitioning for more areas of the ocean being allocated as national parks / conserved areas (along the lines of the coral reef near Australia). Then I got on the bus (came home early to organize things and make lists) and saw one of my classmates that I haven't seen in a while. Turns out? Her lab moved to Germany. She didn't advertise the information and all, so most of us just assumed that she's banging her head against a manuscript or something (given that she's one year my senior academically, it's about the right time frame to start doing that), but that is very much not the case. She had the option of either staying on campus or moving to Germany and chose to move, which meant that she had to accept a terminal masters from our program and is now starting a PhD program in neuroscience at a university in Germany.

She was back for the SfN conference and is staying until just after Thanksgiving, since her family is here. Germany, I was told, is cold. It's already started snowing there. (Admittedly, after south Cal, weather anywhere else in the world is going to be worse in comparison.) I was also told that I should take advantage of the lovely whether here and do something, such as go to the beach. (This was said with no irony of whatsoever, despite of the downpour last weekend, so I am proven once again how utterly spoiled I am by the climate here.)

Mostly I'm still trying to process that she is now attending grad school in Germany. This is the sort of thing that, in our grad program, has the status of being the story that you heard from someone who's heard from someone. Encountering it so directly, as it happens to someone I occasionally hang out with during the program gatherings, is very disconcerting.

Come to think of it

Organizing music files. I wonder if there is such thing as a music tagging system that functions like Delicious or Blogspot, in the sense that you have one item, be it a web page or an entry, that has multiple tags so that you can pull up that one item multiple times depending on which tag you're interested in. That would make more sense than my attempt to organize things by artist or album, because rather than playing everything by an album or an artist, I'm much more prone to be in the mood for a specific type / theme of music. I'd like to be able to pull up, for instance, "The Promise of the World" on a day when I feel like listening to soundtracks from movies on shuffle AND on the day when I feel like listening to different types of waltz. And then Bon Jovi will probably get sorted under "loud" and "road trip" and possibly "Lunatics" while the Animaniac's "Ingredients" will get filed under "sound track", "nerd songs", and "ear worms" (the last along with the songs "Cows In the Morning" from BLACK BOOKS and the ...whatever that song is called that goes "Buono tomato buono tomato buono buono oh! Tomato!" -- because it eats your brain). That would be nice. Does that exist? Because right now my searches for tagging systems via the Magic of Google only gives me "tagging" as in via artist or album which is...still useful, but not what I have in mind.

Got caught in downpour earlier this morning. Everything's wet. Still coughing.

Postdoc's baby's born! Healthy baby girl. Everyone's fine.

Wait, I'm confused

Considering that I am doing dissertation on biomedical science, I consider myself to be, when compared to the general public, relatively well-informed on matters having to do with -- well -- biomedical science.

This appears to not help at all in instances where I flip through the catalogs in the mail and find ones advertising all organic food stuff of some Very Healthy Name or other, proclaiming to feature both probiotics and prebiotics as part of their ingredients.

My first thought was: "What the hell is pro/prebiotic?" Probiotic, by its roots, should mean "for life". I like life. That is something I can get behind. But what is "before life?" Hot magma and UV radiation? On a pizza? I think I'll pass.

Being the good little (obsessive-compulsive) grad student that I am, I immediately went to look it up on the magical all-knowing internet. Wikipedia informed me that probiotic is a term coined to refer to microorganisms that are thought to benefit their host, so...a kind of mutualism like our lovely gut bacteria that digests fiber for us to provide some vitamins. Okay. Prebiotic, on the other hand, seem to mean indigestible components of food that stimulate those probiotics and make THEM healthier (which theoretically will also make us, their hosts, healthier). Sounds good, but this brings me up to a very puzzling discovery:

There's a particular food ad that claims to blend grain and prebiotic fibers, for nutrition and taste, which is all very well. Then it goes on to describe its ingredients as consisting of cheese, veggies, meat, and probiotics.

...so um, are they actively blending in gut microbes and such with their food ingredients? How do they decide which microbes because let me tell you, incorrect sampling and administration of the microflora our bodies carry can cause a lot of problems. (For example, since we were talking about the gut: traveler's diarrhea is a fairly mild case of something going wrong.) Further more, given that this is food that needs to be cooked, and cooking (thoroughly) kills of most of the microbes, if people are going to eat this cooked, the dead probiotics aren't going to be doing us a whole lot of good on the account of them being dead. Unless they sprinkle on probiotics with your mustard and mayo at the end ("I'd like pickles, no onions, and a dash of probiotics with that, please."), which strikes me as, well, surreal. Wholly impractical. Also, going back to point number one above, somewhat dangerous.

Am I missing something here?

Dear diary

Dear Diary,

I have just noticed this by my Fedora 13 install Firefox spell-checker appears to think that it's British. It keeps insisting on the "u"s. I am pretty sure that I'm doing USA English with the OS, so I am, as of now, mostly confused. (Firefox here has a spell-check option but I don't know where the reference dictionary is, or how to change it.) My spelling is shaky to begin with, dear Firefox. Please stop confusing it.

Sincerely,

S

Carry on, gang

Today is a national holiday, which means that my class was canceled and that the labs will be locked for those without access cards. However, that does not mean that experiments have stopped or that people associated with experiments get the day off. Consequently I'm going to lab soon and there's a seminar that I'm attending at noon today but hey, free parking on campus!

...which is why I'm currently at home still. I meant to get a bit more sleep in, but when I first woke up this morning I wasn't able to pull out "Today's a Holiday" out of the foggy recesses of my mind and so automatically started blocking out my day in terms of what I must do, when. By the time I got to afternoon and class I realized that there's no class today, my memory caught up, but all gears are running already and my blood pressure is high enough (did I mention I missed the poster printing deadline by 15 minutes yesterday, partly due to an unexpectedly long lab meeting? And that today the printing services are closed?) that I ended up getting up early anyway.

The direct consequence of which is that now I have time to drink tea and... ponder about life. Or something.

(Erk erk I hope the incubation I started last night went okay and I'll have to leave the conference early Monday after all to go to lab to image something and possibly pick up my poster.)

For those of you that I'd initially contacted about FoldIt, today is three months after that round of email and the original deadline for everyone to go through the tutorials. I only know the usernames of two others and no one besides me seemed to have finished the tutorials. Given that I do (to varying degrees) know what everyone's going through right now and I am also aware (to varying degrees) that the years after this will, for most people, get even more insane, not less, I think the most reasonable thing will be to just drop this group project bit. If anyone ever finishes the tutorials within the next few years (at some point at least three months before I start writing my dissertation -- and trust me, you'll know when that time arrives because of the verbal flailing I will commit here) and still feel like giving this a shot...you all know how to reach me.

I have discovered that I definitely now own more than two gigs of music, as that my mp3 player declared itself to be full. I should probably go through and delete all the ones that it doesn't play but that requires more dedication and patience than I can spare at the moment. I have to deal with mice today. I wonder if any will try to bite me?

Off and away! (And maybe if I go to work a bit earlier than usual I can leave a bit earlier than usual? Not that it works that way, but a girl can hope.)

Salsa; the answer is salsa

Today is the start of Radioactivity, Round II. In between all the stuff I went over my poster with my PI and he'd like me to move around and change about half of the figures. Given that the conference technically starts Saturday, I want to be able to pick up the finished poster on Friday. Given the on-campus queue right now, that means I will have to finish my poster by...tomorrow.

I wasn't very happy with this and, at one point where the PI was suggesting other ways for me to analyze the data I flat out told him that I was just going to toss out the other two figures because I don't have the time to deal with them on top of the experiments that I'm running this week. Astonishingly, he didn't lose his temper then, either. I have passed the "talk about data without releasing sensitive data" part, at least -- all the information that could theoretically lead to limelight-stealing has been censored.

Now I just have to shuffle stuff around and make sure all the fonts are the right fonts and size and everything lines up properly. Dammit. I have spent far too many hours doing formatting on powerpoint slides this quarter. I haven't spent this much time eyeballing alignments and making sure the hues of background match since when I did web-designing back in the days. And that was without juggling two classes and four different experiments in three different species. It makes me long for the days when our frustration can be relieved by hauling paper out to the barbecue place by the pool and setting them on fire. I can't set Daemon on fire -- there's too much useful stuff on here and not to mention I'm quite fond of Daemon, what with it being my first laptop. I can draw things burning in graphic detail -- but that requires time, which I'm a bit short on. Thus, as of today, I'm mostly reduced to glaring murder at my slides and sighing.

C'est la vie, right?

Speaking of which: R.I.P., Ivy. The IT (finally remembered to go in today, yes) diagnosis is "most likely hardware problem" and I was informed that it'd cost more to fix it than to just get another netbook. Dad will probably want it for the spare parts, if nothing else, because that's what he does. But he might want to play around with it, back where all his tools are, so we'll see -- there is yet hope for a functional Frankenivy.

Lara sent me the transcript of the closing speech of the Steward / Colbert Rally, which was pretty awesome and also allowed me to track down the collection of truly hilarious signs people were carrying for the event. My current favorite was the one that proclaimed "Guacamole", and then included the ingredients for guacamole. I was remarking to Wendy that perhaps world peace can be achieved through food, and doesn't avocado make everything better? Then after a brief sorting out we realized that neither of us actually eat avocado, thereby provoking outrage from the guys next bay over who heard us, who demanded to know what on earth do we eat our chips with...

...random food conversations are kind of fun, actually, and currently the highlight of the day.

...well that, and the fact that the postdoc's baby's due today! We are all sort of anticipatory today but alas, unlike the other two babies, this baby's parents don't utilize Facebook at all.... (This is the last baby expected in our lab, by the way.)

...okay

Catching up on the internet between cleaning and found that underwater rivers do exist.

Really. WTF nature?

Yesterday I discovered that I left Daemon's power cord at the Lab, so despite of my resolve to Not Be In Lab At All this weekend I had to pop in to grab the charger. Fail, yes. It is, coincidentally, really hard to present data when you can't present data. (This is apparently a valid worry when presenting at large conferences about unpublished research, as that, despite of being considered unethical, people have stolen information and used it to "scoop" other's research.) (For those not familiar with the academia: your standing and survival depend on publications. Your publications is ranked by impact. Your impact decreases exponentially with each paper someone else besides you publish on similar / identical research.)

(It's perfectly possible for someone to be scooped without any data-stealing to occur, I should mention. Especially if you are working on a really popular topic, such as application of stem cells in neurodegenerative disease. Or diabetes. Heck, anything that involves application of stem cells.)

I am twitchy and crazy and the insanity is surely spreading

Dear diary,

Today we (that is, my labmates and I) discovered that our lab may have an imaginary member. You know? Like an imaginary friend? Except in lab. Listed on our approved personnel form for radio-isotopes. We have checked and this "Joseph" person is someone that no one knows and has never, at any point during the existence of our lab, worked in our lab anyway. To top it all off his name is high lighted in the form that was sent to us by the radioactivity portion of the health & safety organization on campus. We pondered this. Perhaps there is an imaginary lab member lurking around which would serve as a better explanation for the missing pens, odd incubator noises, and migrating hole punchers than simply a lab poltergeist. Perhaps he's the Canada of Hetalia, doomed to invisibility while the rest of us wondered at our vague senses of unease.

We do not know the answer yet, though we have emailed to inquire after this mysterious Mr. Joseph. Friday afternoon paperwork can be a source of intrigue and mystery (not of the confused by bureaucratic language sort) apparently. Who knew?

Sincerely,

S

Oh the weepings you'll...weep

I spent a good portion of Sunday thinking about cytosol. It is the most bizarre thing that popped up in my mind while I was drinking tea and infected itself on my brain. It's not even really related to my project -- or at least no more related to my project than anything in the field of biology is, inherently, related to the innards of a cell. Instead I found the word scrolling through my brain like one of those neon marquees that you never see outside of downtown while I drove to lab, it flashed most appalling while I was trying to spot my 2mm long transparent fish embryos floating in their clear fixative (computer no longer being the only source of eye strain these days), and bouncing around like an echo while I drove to the groceries. At which point I was promptly distracted by the fact that the music playing through the speakers seem to contain rather more screaming than usual. It took me a few seconds too long to remember that, oh right, Halloween. And then I got pomegranates, thought about Hades -- and "Myth of Devotion" is a lovely poem, by the way -- and tried to finish putting together my figures.

(I failed. I finished that in lab today, though I still haven't quite figured out how to diagram my results from Tukey's test without overwhelming my graphs with lines. I despise statistics. I really do.)

I want cake. Radioactivity is this week. The paperwork has gone through and I am now officially a Candidate and have used up 7 of my 18 quarters required to graduate. (There was a form and everything.) Also, one of my new litters of mice died, which consequently means that I have no behavioral test to run during Christmas week, so that works out (though it also means another month tacked onto the project). I am presenting in lab meeting this Wednesday.

I just realized that my paragraphs got progressively less coherent. Time to move on then!

Addicted to stress

Lab both days this weekend. Ivy still broken. (Managed to confirm not software issue.) Zen refuses to open old .psd files. Green tea frappe. Data mining. Putting together figures. More tea. Headache started behind eyes and have moved to back of neck. OpenOffice needs custom error bars. Why are all the default chart colors so hideous? Number crunching. Looks like I might be disproving one of my hypotheses (oh snap). How many ways are there to graph pulse blocks anyway?

AWOL for a bit

To those of you who haven't heard yet, yes, Ivy caught a trojan last week (the hiloti one). I was able to catch it at some point, though not before it managed to eat AVG (which detected it as it came in from MegaUpload) and get past the McAfee scan. I was locked out of the school network at one point because it was trying to use my email to spread the virus but I managed to get rid of that bit as well (that was a fun evening at home). The result afterward was that Ivy is no longer contagious, I was allowed back on the network, but the OS is still glitchy.

I wasn't aware of the whole extend of glitchiness until the point where Ivy stopped booting at the login window, which made it necessary for me to ...well it wasn't important. The important part was that I was able to pull out all of my files safely and run a registry scan, which gave me over 1000 errors (I kid you not; I was deeply unhappy with this) in the reg and the option of either paying a rather lot to buy a software to fix it or fix all the errors manually, which I do not have the time to do.

So, like a good little amateur hacker that I once aspired to be, I swapped to Ubuntu. Which worked gloriously until this afternoon where Ivy's network component promptly died for no reason I can decipher. Both wireless and ethernet are gone right now and the computer's wireless card light is off, and I can't get it to turn back on. Will most likely be troubleshooting that at some point. Or possibly pay the student center people to, because this is now taking up way too much of my time. Meanwhile, 'net time's limited and I need have to put together a poster for the conference, probably on Zen. (Linux is awesome but there is no graphic software like Photoshop, which just doesn't seem to perform as well in Linux as MS.)

Grad school haiku

Idea stolen from Anna.


The month is ending
I watch mice run in circles
And think about life

I know I mentioned Hetalia already but

Poor Canada. Really.

Uber nerd post

I discovered "Axis Power Hetalia" yesterday, both the webcomic and the anime. The anime (the first episode at least) is hysterical in a "wow I can't believe they did that" kind of way (and occasionally the caricature will even ring true). The anime is based off of the comic, which is hugely irreverent and disturbing and amazing. I pondered what would've happened if I'd discovered this during the year in high school when I had world history. It is possible I would've been traumatized, though how something can be so soul-destroying-ly cynical yet cute at the same time is a mystery.

(In case the name didn't make it obvious, it's about the anthropomorphic personifications of world powers, mostly during WWI and WWII.)

Now: onward to something totally unrelated.

We recently had a Stem Cell Awareness day on campus, the discovery of which led me to go up to our post-doc who is working on the (murine; read: mouse) stem cell project and ask, "Are you Aware of stem cells?", to which she replied that yes, she was and so we were all good.

That wasn't the point though. The point of that day was to raise public awareness about the sort of research we do and why it's important. There was a seminar with panels to answer questions from the public. Although I didn't attend and am by no means an expert in the field of stem cell research, I do know there are a few points of stem cell biology that tend to be confusing for people encountering it for the first time:

1) Not all stem cells come from embryos.
True stem cells that we work with are either embryonic stem cells, which does derive from a fertilized egg (when it's starting to divide and is on its way to the "ball of cells" stage), or they are adult stem cells, which can come from a fully grown organism.

2) Not all progenitor cells are stem cells.
To be considered a stem cell, it must fulfill two criteria:
a) self-renewal - the stem cell must be able to divide and grow as a stem cell
b) differentiation - under certain conditions the cell must be able to change into another cell type, and stay that way.

3) The most important aspect is potency.
A stem cell is special because it can become many different types of cells, and so for disease that results from defect and/or death of one particular cell type, we like to dream about a therapeutic procedure where you fix the disease by replacing the dead / defective cells with new, working cells. However, not all stem cells are created equal -- meaning they can't all differentiate into all types of cells, and in this case they are classified by potency:
a) Omnipotent (does anyone even still use the term "totipotent"?) cells - can become anything.
b) Pluripotent cells - can become anything but the placenta, so still very useful.
c) Multipotent cells - can only become one lineage of cells, e.g. only neuronal cells, or only blood cells. Adult stem cells are multipotent.

4) ipSC is supposed to be pluripotent.
Researchers have found a way to take certain cells in the body and reprogram them to become Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells. Which is excellent, except...

5) It's unknown whether ipSC is a true stem cell.
Sure it looks like a duck and it'll quack like a duck, but until you know how to ask the right question -- for instance, "does it have feathers? does it move autonomously?" -- how can you tell apart a very good mechanical wind-up toy from the real duck? My understanding of the ipSC right now is that for the general tests that people can think of testing, they look and behave like true stem cells. But whether the tests we've done are the right, key, tests or whether ipSC is a different animal altogether and we've just didn't test for the right things -- no one knows.
In therapeutic considerations, this brings up additional problems, because ipSC is made by reprogramming a cell. Usually with virus. Virus can change the expression of genes in the cell, which is what the "reprogramming" is all about. Changing the expression of genes is what gives you the stem cell like behavior, but you know what else changing the expression of genes can result? Cancer. (This has been shown to occur, though I should add that one of the ways we test for the stem-cell-ness of stem cells is by seeing if they form the right kind of tumors, because the types of cells the tumor contains give us an idea of the potency of the cell -- but you can imagine the problems if the cell likes forming tumors too much and then metastasized.) We are, essentially, taking a genetic program Nature has perfected through eons of evolution and random sticking in codes that we think regulates certain cell behavior. So yeah: so much we don't know, it's a little scary.

So there you go, five main points people should know about stem cells. From vicarious observation in lab I can tell you that trying to get cells to change cell type is really hard, and often a multistep process. (I had to work with a neural precursor cell line once and I kept getting the cells stuck one step before the final stage and my god, that was frustrating.) I don't think I need to mention this but my labmates seem to think there might be cause for concern, but stem cells don't glow. They are special, but not that special. Unless we infect them with a virus that codes for a glowing protein or stain them with something that glows and then, you know, they glow. But so will any other cell type. (Glowy pulsating heart muscle cells is, frankly, kind of creepy.)

A thousand times: yes

Dear ATT internet tech support staff,

I would like to share a webcomic about our relationship that I recently found. Uncanny, isn't it?

Sincerely,

-S

PI-isms

PI came by to congratulate me on the exam thing this morning and see how I was doing. He always comes by at least once per week and it never ceases to amuse me because a) he teaches one of my classes and b) I see him every day in lab. But those points aside, today I pointed out to him something that the staff in the vivarium did that didn't make sense. His comment was that I was assuming that other people besides me were actually thinking, and whiles this "better be true" in his lab, generally speaking this assumption may be....faulty. I gaped at him for a bit then remarked that was a really very cynical view, to which he replied, "I'm relapsing." For some reason I found this hilarious.

Aside from his apparent bout of recidivism to skepticism (wow that's a lot of "ism"), there was also the part where he reminded me that should I feel uncomfortable talking to him (a laughable notion, since up till now he's the only PI I ever felt comfortable enough to make these sort of commentaries on, sometimes to his face), there are other PIs that I can talk to who are obligated to help me. This particular bit of PI-ism goes, I believe, "If they have the title of "professor", they'd better be professing!" (And then afterwards I of course went to google the term because I've never heard the word "profess" being used that way.)

Now I have the strongest urge to go up to the PIs I know and ask, "Have you professed today?" (And then probably giggle hysterically and blame my PI for the whole thing.)

Not bad for a Monday

I've successfully refrained from checking my school email all weekend, which meant I found out this morning that a) the post-doc's baby was born this weekend and b) I passed the candidacy exam. (The PI who was the one who promised to ask more questions didn't, and made some comments on how the formatting of the titles of the slides should be how I do it for the rest of my career, which I took it to mean that he liked it and tried not to think too much about what my career will be like.) It was a very exciting morning and passaging cells, right after that, seemed anti-climatic.

But passaging cells I did, and now I'm back more or less to your regular feature presentation of experiments with a sprinkling of classes. Currently I have four more minutes before my last incubation is done and I can go home, which gave me the time to type a short entry.

Frilliness

Enough pleasant things happened today that it felt like a day where life rewarded me for attempting to have a life outside of lab. It started off with a nice morning where the neighbor's girlfriend's children did not stay over, thereby waking me up with their screeching on the two days a week where I'd try to sleep in. (I don't think I'm asking for much. Just until 8am is all I ask and my life would be complete. Which it was, today.) Despite of all the timing confusion and email last night I did manage to meet up with Ashley today (it's kind of crazy to think of how long we've been living in the same city together -- and I mean years-- and only met up now), during which I described my recent adventures in grad school and she flailed about wedding planning. I don't remember if I mentioned this before, but she's getting married in February and so she's up to her eyebrows in florists and invites and what-have-you. I promised to help do the placement cards (note to self: go dig out the calligraphy kit Anna gave me and try to find out where in the closet those bottles of ink have migrated to), though I did have to ask her to explain exactly what's entailed in a wedding ceremony, as that I've never been to one before. There's a sort of Mission Impossible feel to it, from what I gathered, and the sort of attention to colors that is frankly astonishing. (White is apparently passe, ivory is in, Ashley's dress is in "almond metallic" or something -- yeah we're not entirely sure about the name either -- but I gather that "soy" is not a romantic enough color for wedding fabric when compared to "almond".) This was made even more absurd by the fact that Ashley has never been to the wedding before either, and neither of us ever really figured out all the details to the enigma of articles of feminine mystique such as make-up and some kind of religious experience involving many pairs of shoes. The ceremony should be hair-raising -- and beautiful and touching -- once she stops panicking about how the wedding is eating her brain and "happy" is the only thing left. (She can't keep on panicking from now to February right? Human psyche can't maintain that high level of constant stress. My Psych101 instructor said so.)

Lunch was Vietnamese. Pho can be quite good but spring roll will never cease reminding me of eating a roll held together by serran wrap. Egg rolls are still better. I now know what a "brisket" is and that the population of trees in Yellow Stone Nation Park is largely coniferous, with a few hardy deciduous species such as cottonwood and aspen.

Speaking of food. Has anyone ever tried matcha? There's this green tea pastry recipe I want to try out but I don't think I can substitute in jasmine and I'm not sure if matcha is anything like plain green tea that you'd get at from Good Earth or something. I'm going to try to make sponge cake tomorrow, though I've never been able to get the hang of beating egg white until they become stiff. I think I should aim for an electric mixture someday. Or a contraption like the one from Annie that Kate and I accidentally creamed the potatoes with, that one time, back in Davis.

Well, that was entertaining

I have submitted the slides for my Exam of Doom today, which have undergone five different revisions since last week. About a few hours after that I realized this was going to be very different from last week in the sense that, aside from the fact that I don't have to present, the committee is also no longer obligated to pass judgment within 90 minutes. Then Wendy pointed out to me that, if the committee wants to, this thing can be delayed indefinitely because it's an email and there's no reason why PIs can't just email me back continuously to ask me more questions and request more tweaks. After another half an hour of shared flailing and metaphorical nail biting (we work in lab; there are gloves) -- since Wendy's waiting for our PI's revision of her manuscript and the first revision is always brutal -- we concluded that it's unlikely for us to hear back from anyone before Monday and instead of anticipating revisions and soul-destroying comments we'd rather anticipate a baby: one of our post-doc's wife is due to have a baby this week. The baby hasn't happened yet and the week is almost over. We asked him to send us an email if the baby is born this weekend. See? Much better than revisions.

Which means that there is no veggie ramen to night (though I discovered that my teeth have become sensitive to cold, which is mildly depressing -- I suppose my days of ice cube chomping are over), and rather than dealing with this as yet another week with the Exam of Doom hanging over me -- you know what? Enough. If I don't pass I'm not going to deal with it before winter quarter. Fall quarter from here on out will be busy enough as is. I have loads of stuff I still want to do and so I'm drawing a conclusion to this thing tonight and moving on with my life. I should go out tomorrow. I have an odd craving for chicken nuggets. (Yeah, I know. Isn't that gross?)

Going to clean up the kitchen, listen to some music, and turn in early. Weather forecast is most promising.

You lied, forecast; it's drizzling

Due to certain incidents on the bus near a person who always reeked of dirty cat litter, I had a dream last night about fleas. With wings. As in we were maneuvering them with forceps and you can see the tiny, fruit-fly-like wings. Luckily, in reality, I remained blissfully flea-free.

The number of incidents of sniffling on the bus has gone up recently, and the crazy weather no doubt contributed to the percentage. Wendy and I went and got ourselves vaccinated yesterday. Sometime in the afternoon I realized that my arm hurts, and asked her if she was in pain as well. She was, but just hadn't noticed it until I brought it up, and thus allowing me to conclude that I have unwittingly contributed to the pain quota per day. (Pain's gone this morning, though.)

The PI came back yesterday and spent four hours going over everything that needs to be changed in the slides (yes, the ones due tomorrow) with me. (Leading to some jokes between Wendy and I about PI causing pain.) On one hand, it's touching that he's willing to invest that much time on me. On the other hand, ouch. Okay, I'm ready for the weekend now.

AAaaaand now it's back to editing.

Exposure to infants

Yesterday I got to hold a baby! More precisely, I got to hold Wendy's baby since we left the lab at around the same time and her husband came to pick her up and the baby was in the car. (And they are of the opinion that I'm of the age where I should have handled a baby at least once, or something.) He was very warm, and probably would be cuddly if he weren't moving around so much. I spent the first few moments torn between the terror of accidentally dropping the baby (the horror the horror) and the terror of accidentally breaking the baby, given that I wasn't entirely sure where / how hard I should grip to prevent the baby from escaping while he was flailing around. (Babies are fragile, and therefore terrifying.)

Then there's the bit where he was making faces and noises at me and I was trying very hard to figure out if the scrunched up face meant that he was uncomfortable or sleepy or about to spit on me or what (currently: still uncertain to the best of my knowlege). He's at the pre-teething chewing stage though, and made me very glad that I washed my hands before leaving lab because -- potential lab chemical -- baby-- no.

In conclusion: terrifying, confusing, very squirmy. (But cute. He's definitely at the cute stage now.)


[edit 9:16am]
Saw this over at Annie's LJ. To quote / summarize:

I want to do my part not only for the “It’s Get Better” initiative, but to bring to light that bullying in any form is despicable and sickening, especially against those teens who are trying to come to terms with their sexual orientation in some places where being gay, unique and wonderfully eccentric is frowned upon and thought evil.

For every comment left here, I will donate a dollar a comment up to $500.

Wet

Went to part of the airshow on Saturday, which was fun, though v. hot in terms of weather, which makes it all the more surprising when it started raining this morning. Forecast says there'll be showers in the next two days as well.

PI will be out of town until Wednesday, so that's when we'll talk about my slides. Meanwhile I get to figure out how to make my slides less student-like on my own, which I will attempt at least, though "less student-like" is not the clearest set of instructions I've ever received.

Meanwhile, here's a set of numbers that, post-exam, my PI decided I should know. Feel free to use any of these to impress random passerby:

Size of mouse genome: 2.5x10^9
Number of chromosomes in mice: 19 autosomes and 1 sex chromosome (20 total)
Mutation rate in standard large-scaled mutagenesis screens: 10^-6 / bp
Recombination to size ratio in mice: 1 centimorgan approximates 1 megabase

(Those numbers aren't actually directly applicable to anything I'm doing / will be doing in the foreseeable future, but eh.)

Probation!?

I'm on probation. Sort of. All my committee members have signed the form except I'm not allowed to turn it in until I've revised my slides and sent everyone a copy of the revised version. (I'm not considered a candidate until the form's turned in and processed.) Because they didn't like the format of my presentation (i.e. it's still too much at the level of a beginning graduate student and not enough at the level of a scientist). On the plus side? They like my experiments and my data. Given that those two things are what we are generally supposed to be marked down on, I conclude I pretty much suck at presenting stuff. (Which my PI sort of agreed and suggested that I volunteer myself for the seminars and lunch-talks.)

In case anyone is wondering: yes the questioning was gruesome and yes we did use up all 90 minutes.

I was given a deadline of exactly one week for revision. At least one of the committee members has promised (read: warned me about) more comments following.

So now I'm eating ramen, because somehow over the years Oodles of Noodles with veggies has turned into my comfort food of choice. (Oh my god, stupidest way to delay ever. I'm surprised that I haven't started crying yet.) I mean I sort of passed, the people congratulated me and everything...but I really hate the "probation" label (which granted is a term I assigned to myself, but it's technically true).

Have submitted written portion of exam. Oral portion in less than a week. Also have loads of photos from retreat. Will attempt to upload after this.

Heads up

Don't know how many people checks what but: if you received an email from my yahoo account this weekend. That is a virus / spam. Don't click on any links. Avoid opening it if you can. I did not send that and I'll be debugging my account today. Sorry about that.

Like something very squishy

It's a shame that my clearest reflection over what happens and should be happening, these days, happen in the morning in the bus ride to school. Back in the days evening was my thinky time. Now I find myself missing chunks of time -- by which I mean I find myself going from the bus stop at point A to the stop at point M with no memory of what happened in between. The time as I was falling asleep these days -- well, I'm usually so far gone then that there's no way to logically assess anything. Instead my mind usually wonders to inconsequential things that are related to the day, and most of my thought processes at that point, will make no sense if I'm actually awake.

It makes blogging in the evening a bit more difficult, as I realized yesterday. There's a lot of staring blankly at the screen, thinking "I knew there was something else I want to mention" involved. By now, for instance, I forgot what I was going to write about to begin with. If I had to summarize my day in bullet point format, it would go thus:

- campus-wide grad student orientation is today, met international students looking for directions on the bus

- lost a person I was supposed to practice my presentation on, due to scheduling conflict, so I'm down one

- got email notifying me of gigantic mess up with my mice at the other vivarium. Flailed at PI, flailed at vivarium staff. Hopefully this will never happen again or I will go mad. Or cry. Or both. The two are not mutually exclusive.

- helped labmate update lab equipment software, as she uses a mac and the equipment runs a Dell desktop

- directed people to the right exit during lunch

- gave a practice presentation

- went to lab meeting, which was blissfully short; there were cookies

- three new litters of baby mice born today!

- forgot I had a gel running -- all my samples ran off

- Ivy's bios got corrupted again and I couldn't repair it at lab

- went home early to fix Ivy; fixed Ivy

... - sleep

Unexpected problems

1) Guys, I can't turn off my cell phone.

No, really.

I even checked the manual and held down the key all the way until the screen went dark due to inactivity. The phone won't turn off. I'm going to try the battery-out and battery-in strategy later but really, this was not a problem that I would've expected.

2) Went to dentist, discovered two cavities on their way to eating through my enamel. Am scheduled for two appointments (I was told they will be around 30 min ea -- which strikes me as really short) for fillings. Now I am googling what "white filling" is and trying to figure out what the dentist is going to do to me, as that I've never had a filling before and the vague notion I've had of anaesthesia and drills scares me. Just a little.

(I was also informed that I don't have upper wisdom teeth. Just the lower ones, which was confirmed to not to need to be removed, thank God. This strikes me as strange. Must remember to call parents to see who I got this bit of luck from.)

3) The undergrad who borrows my reagents and then forgets to put them back. It's not that she does it on purpose, she's just careless by nature and is in the habit of forgetting to put chemicals / equipment back where she got them from in general and although I'm not in charge of her, it occasionally gets really annoying. Especially when I need something within two minutes in a time-sensitive experiment and my stuff aren't where it's supposed to be.

On the plus side I have:

1) Heard back from PI #5 and the Exam of Doom, as Lucy had dubbed it, will be on Oct. 1st, and I will NOT have to present twice which is awesome. I am contemplating my original plan, from back in winter / spring quarter, of getting the Exam of Doom completed before fall quarter classes start. Getting it done one week after it started is, all things considered, pretty good. Assuming that the stats I'm trying to run on some of the data doesn't drive me nuts and that I actually PASS, of course. Otherwise I'll just be sad.

2) We're getting a rotation student! Which is always exciting. I remember when I was a rotation student. Tempus fugit, indeed.

........

Though considering all the troubleshooting and editing and things not working out that I'm experiencing these two days, I'm feeling pretty happy and content with life right now. Isn't that weird?

Well, that could've gone better

My new resolution to update more regularly crumbled in the face of the discovery that The Exam will (most likely) be on Oct. 1st, due to various scheduling conflicts with the different PIs. However, I'm still waiting to hear back from one of them...which actually doesn't make that much of a difference given that with the current four that I have scheduled there is only ONE day when everyone has time free. (They were given the entire month of October to choose from, November being off limits for other activities and December being the No Man's Land of scheduling and fall quarter being the recommended time for The Exam.) So I might need to present twice. Oh joy.

Damnations. I just ran out of tea. Must go make more.

It's close enough to 3pm that I should probably switch to de-caf stuff. Not like I need more reasons to twitch, right? I've opened another bag of the caffeine-free tea that Christine got me. It's called "Caribbean Breeze" and smells like strawberry cough drops. (Tastes a lot like that bright red tea Lucy gave me with the pomegranate and the hibiscus and possibly rose.) And while I'm on the topic I would like to note that the darker of the two green honey sticks left does not taste like apples, but it does taste like some kind of fruit that I can't identify. The lighter of the yellow sticks left tastes like honey, which is very ordinary and surprising that I had to re-examine it but -- well -- it looks very normal.

This is probably going to be a very long rambling post. Forget labels, what blogger really needs is one of those LJ-cut like functions. Since that is clearly not going to happen right now...onwards!

In the reminder of this week I have discovered a way to make myself depressed in under two minutes -- by reading people's comments under the news articles in yahoo, discovered that the other, other post-doc's wife is having a baby (and he didn't even tell us! We saw his wife and figured it out because she looks pregnant) and was helpfully reminded that now, in our lab there is only me and the other post-doc who haven't procreated yet. (They're not counting the undergrads.) ...yes, that's a lot of babies. (Three since January, and I've never even been to a baby shower before the one we threw for the post doc a year ago.) Christ. BABIES. One's due in October and one in November and I really need to go and shop for presents because the lunch-thing we (the lab) are planning on is before The Exam and the weekend before The Exam is off-limits. (For anyone who's curious, that's three boys and one girl. We're in a genetics lab and I'm thinking of ordering this -- yeah? Yeah?)

While we are on the subject of reproducing (and of the remaining babyless post-doc who told me to not worry because I "still have lots of time") I find myself revisiting my stance on dating. As in I really don't actually want to, nor do I want to get married, nor get pregnant and have a baby so why am I doing this again?

After considerable thought, it strikes me that wanting to make friends and go out occasionally is a questionable sort of incentive for dating. The length of time it took me to reach that conclusion makes me feel a wee bit demented.

G2G and SG aren't really doing anything any more (in terms of people messaging and so on) so I'm closing those. I don't want to deal with OC, but I have to admit, the people who have a matching score of 90% or above are really fun to talk to and I think are / will become really good friends (sadly I don't want to date any of them, though they are very nice), so while on one hand I want to just close that account too and say, to heck with it, it's not worth the effort of dealing with all the rest of the people and the messaging, those few people ...might be worth it?

Though with The Exam looming on the horizon, this is not a particularly good time to do anything about it or try to come up with a new strategy. Lucy's introduced me to MeetUp.com so, you know, maybe. Some day. When I'm no longer going insane and pondering whether or not I should make yet another cup of tea.

First years are arriving for orientation next week!
(And I'll be presenting on Friday but I'm trying hard not to think about that.)

Good weekend until yesterday, I guess

Dear Diary,

Over the course of this weekend I have

a) put the finishing touches on my powerpoint (though now I noticed the video clip doesn't work and so I will fix that today, yes I will).

b) fixed Daemon, because the issue turned out to be software after all.

c) spent six hours talking to a friend that I haven't really spoken to in a while who is in the middle of planning her wedding, who now left me with the impression that perhaps the candidacy exam is less scary than a wedding.

d) finished watch the season of DW (11th with Amy) which had more fall-through in plot and science than a sieve has holes, but somehow was still spectacular.

e) cooked pork chops for the first time.

f) made cookies from scratch.

g) scrubbed out the kitchen thing.

Now it's Labor Day and I'm in lab, waiting for the media to warm up and trying to figure out how to schedule The Exam.
Well, at least there's free parking today.

Sincerely,

Yrs Trly.

Lovely morning

Daemon is fixed. It turned out to be a software problem and not hardware, as I'd originally feared (and which I would not be able to fix). I'm still not entirely sure what was wrong so that the network card got permanently stuck on "disabled" but it works now and given I'm not from IT, that's all I care about.

And I updated to Fedora 13 (was previously running 11). As you can see from the screenshot, the new theme is star based and very pretty. I'm also going to use this opportunity to cheer on Lili (short for Linus Live) USB Creator that allows you to make a live boot USB stick (so you don't have to burn the .iso to a CD and thus allows you to save the environment from some more plastic). It is, for one thing, the shiniest thing ever. The user-interface is very aethestically pleasing, very intuitive, and automatically verifies your iso (in case of downloading errors). It's small enough to be a fast download even on my bandwidth, easy to install, and it's fast in what it does. I don't have a screenshot of it since I'm currently on Daemon and Lili is a program that I ran on Zen's Window's XP, but yeah, after years of checking hash and CD writing I'm a little bit in love with this USB image burner.
(Though there was this one "pick your source file" window that came out in French and that was very very strange.)

Right. Now I'm going to make sure I have all the right updates, install them along with OpenOffice, mplayer, and IDEA (why I took the time to fix Daemon this weekend, to be honest -- and yes Daemon's specs is not quite up to par...it's getting to be quite a geriatric laptop now, but I think I can find a way to manage).

I'll figure out the tablet thing next weekend, but that's supposed to be one of the improvements in the newer version, I think.

I now have the strangest urge to watch West Wing. Also, it's time for lunch!

I believe in updates, I do, I do

Another insane (quite) week has passed. In lab we sorted through stuff in the freezer, tried to figure out what to do with the sodium acetate (trihydrate) that's solidified into a chunk, and watched the PI pretend to be a handyman. (He screwed back in a part of the autoclave and failed to fix a chair. The first few moments of watching him come by and methodically flip chairs over -- with no explanation--was very surreal.) There was also the moment when PI Dearest compared my metazoa-wide cloning attempts to collecting Pokemon cards (i.e. "gotta catch'em all" and that one of them might be "magical"), which resulted in the moment where both Wendy and I stared at him like he was insane (aside from the undergrads who weren't there, and the tech who away doing something else, we were the only ones young enough to get the reference) (the lab tech was the other person besides the PI with kids who might be old enough to get the reference). Magic clones. Right. I think I'll go back to my miniprep now. (He also managed to wheedle me into presenting during orientation. How does he do it? I hate public presentations.)

I've twisted my ankle a while ago and, although it didn't seem that bad after the hell that was day two, for some reason I'm still limping a little. This is the main reason (the other one being the gloomy weather) why I had to keep slashing my plans to go visit the beach. Instead I've been puttering around a lot indoors and re-organized all my music files. Sadly, this also led to my discovery that A) I have more music than I thought because for some reason my mp3 player just doesn't play some of the mp3 files (the entire folder of the DW fanmix will play on my computer by not the mp3 player and I haven't the slightest clue why) and B) my mp3 player eats files, and then spit out versions that NOTHING will play (I have no idea why this is either). I've managed to figure out what's missing and what's usable though, for the most part, and that I have at least three copies of "Watch the Sky" in different folders. (It's one of my favorite songs but yeah, that's waaay too much.)

In the progression of the week I've also gotten a parking ticket for forgetting to move my car during the Wednesday every month where I can't park on the street (always inconvenient since I leave / return at a time where all the cars are parked and there is no free spot), received my copy of DS CDs that I ordered in the mail, and discovered that all the worms in the worm bin have perished out of neglect (read: further proof of why I should not be allowed to have pets during grad school).

Lastly I should mention I submitted my first draft of my advancement to candidacy exam to my PI yesterday and he has given me his blessings to schedule the exam in October (also introducing me to Doodle, whose name first made me think that he was making some kind of weird joke again). Given that no one from my little protein group has asked me for a copy of the presentation that I've promised them two weeks ago, does anyone want to volunteer their time some time within the next three weekends to hear me present a much longer version (30-40 minutes), so that I can polish my presentation enough to withstand the 50 minutes (I kid you not) of verbal grilling during the exam? Putting together this bit of fun has been what I spent all my spare time doing this week during lab, and then it's onwards to carrying on the tradition of being twitchy and mad every fall....

Well, time to hit the list of chores.

Developing a healthy case of neurosis, among other things

There was a few rounds of email exchange with a PI who is a collaborator of mine (in the sense that I work directly with him in the other vivarium and not someone in his lab), who also happened to be on my thesis committee, that went something like this:

Me: "...and so given this has happened in the past, I'd appreciate it if all the vivarium can set up a system for double-checking the animals as they are being transferred."

PI replied: "Paranoia is a very, very important trait to cultivate, I'm happy to do the checking in this vivarium...."

Me, post the second shipping mix-up this week: "If unjustified anxiety is paranoia, what's justified anxiety?"

PI, after apologizing for the mix-up: "Woody Allen said that paranoia is having all the facts...."

I cannot even begin to count the number of times the various post-docs / students I've worked with have cracked jokes about certain parts of the protocol being "probably unnecessary" but how it's better to be safe and paranoia's useful. (Doing it with a PI is a definite first, though.) This is one of the oft overlooked facts of doing research in biology, I think -- the development of paranoia and patience, by sheer force of necessity.

...

I have finished the Avatar cartoons and, amazingly, found it to be as wonderful as everyone kept saying. It manages to cover a lot of important issues without making either the main characters, who are kids, less child-like, or dumbing down the concepts. The art / music / style is amazing and I've never seen a western production of anything Asian-based that got so many of the cultural details exactly right. Also? The sense of humor. Oh the humor. It wins at life.

My favorite character is Toph, I ship Zuko / Mai, and I'm heartily thankful I never saw the action movie. Of course I'm not going to let that stop me from enjoying the comments made by people who poke fun of it, the Macarena video being a key example. (It gave me a good laugh, especially the bit near the end with the group earth-bending dance because..."Go Little Rock go!" And then I got the hiccups.) Then there's, of course, Deviant Art, where I was inspired enough by Rufftoon's tea comic to make a new lj icon from it. (For those of you who haven't seen Avatar, the spiky guy in there is Zuko, who, for 99% of the cartoon, seems to be very very allergic of things such as zen, being well-adjusted, and tea.)

Speaking of tea, the dark blue honey stick is the one that I think should be blueberry, though it tasted like grapes. Given that it's blue, however, "grape" doesn't make much sense and I always thought that dried blueberries tasted like raisins anyway, so: blueberry.

And while I'm typing about food, I caved in to my curiosity and brought a dragon fruit (also known as red pitaya, I think).

It tastes, to me, like a strange cross between daikon radish and honeydew melon, with tiny black seeds that crunch between your teeth like the kiwi fruit. Maybe it's just the one that I happened to get, but it was pretty bland.

Lastly, since I have a phone that allows me to upload photos, I'm going to share a random plant photo of the rose I got a while back (yes the one that I insisted on getting because of the flower color, even though the plant looked like it was dying). First rose of the season?

Vexing

After seven day's worth of "meme-ing" here I am again, ready to blog about the inanities of my day. Today's little blurb is brought on by the animal transfer this morning, where there was enough confusion with the vivarium staff to warrant two trips to the vivarium while we sort out the animal IDs (and yes, these are the animals that take six months to get). There was some degree of communication error between the two people in charge, which resulted in the staff writing down "1 animal per cage" instead of the animal's ID number. Luckily, the delivery people were late so we managed to get everything sorted out before the animals got shipped. Then there's the issue of the undergrads in our lab who tend to forget to write down items on the "to be ordered" board when they take the last of something, which resulted in me discovering, mid-experiment, we're all out of the coverslips I use to mount specimens. Round off that which the email to my PI about a certain protocol in which I briefly mentioned at the end, as an aside, that it's been a really long time since I submitted my thesis committee for approval, and is it supposed to take this long?

Turns out that, guys? My PI had already received a letter approving my committee -- guess when? July 28th.

Why do people not tell me these things?

Given that today's August 26th, I am not going to be doing the candidacy exam before the end of August. So if I've spent the in-between-experiment breaks for the past few days frantically putting together figures for that grant that the PI wants to try for and these two days sorting out the transfer paperwork, guess what I'll be doing in the next...oh foreseeable future? (Admittedly these days I don't see very far.)

Well, cheers.

It's summer here. I should perhaps not be so surprised to wake up and find that it's both warm AND sunny outside.

Are they serious?

Exposure to excessive cold or heat will result in malfunction, damage and / or catastrophic failure.

Now I suddenly have a mental image of a doomsday scenario. All caused by one cell phone. Or maybe one type of cell phone. Geez.

You should consult with manufacturers of any personal medical devices such as pacemakers and hearing aides to determine if they are susceptible to interference from your mobile phone. Turn off your phone in a medical facility or at a gas station.

1) Can you imagine what the company consultants would say if you were to really call them up and ask, "Excuse me, but I was wondering if using my cell phone might accidentally deafen / kill me?"
2) Why gas station? The phone is so volatile that it'll set off an explosion?

Never place your phone in a microwave oven as it will cause the battery to explode. Do not dispose of your battery by fire or with hazardous or flammable materials.

This is one of those "Caution, content will be hot after heating" things, isn't it?

Unplug the power cord and charger during lighting storms to avoid electric shock or fire.

Based on this logic you should unplug all power cords and chargers in your house during lightning storms (aka thunder storms). We never did that in Beijing and dad has gone through an experience where the lightning actually managed to make its way inside (but you can't exactly "unplug" the ceiling light in an apartment). Maybe it's a US thing. Annie, let me know if you find out anything? There're, I think, more possibility for this sort of weather where you are now than where most of us are in CA.

Never store your phone in temperatures less than -4F or greater than 122F.

Dude, why would you?

While we're at it: don't ever drop your phone into a volcano, as it may cause a premature eruption and will damage your phone in a way that will void your warranties. Do not throw your phone at people, as it may cause a concussion and/ or damage the inner circuits.

Seriously, people.

Do not place or answer calls while charging the phone as it may short circuit the phone and / or cause electric shock or fire.

I've seen this warning before. I have also placed and answered calls while charging the phone.


In conclusion, aside from the pacemaker bit, the rest of it is pretty similar to what it was 3-4 years ago. Or in other words, it sounds like the phone is not so much a phone as a unstable, explosive tool of the apocalypse.

Oh oh this part is good:

If you are listening to music whilst out and about, please ensure that the volume is at a reasonable level so that you are aware of your surroundings. This is particularly imperative when attempting to cross the street.

On the second thought, no, it's just depressing. A phone manual is giving advise on something that should be common sense. Com'on guys.

(Whilst?)

Also my phone also comes with, it looks like, a small build-in mirror (at least that's what the manual calls it). Why would I need a build-in mirror that's, in terms of practicality, too small to really see anything, on my phone?

Important! You should insert battery before charging.

(And this was in an orange box so that we know it's important.)

Oh my god.

OH MY GOD THERE IS SOMETHING MOVING INSIDE THE FLUE OF THE HEATER AND IT'S QUACKING LIKE A DUCK.

[edit 9:04]
It managed to get back out. I think.
Oh hell. I have no way to check, have I?

Shininess

My phone came!

By which I mean that I checked the tracking number, saw that it has been delivered, and sat around wondering why I didn't see anything yesterday. Turns it that this time they'd left it sitting on top of the mail boxes instead of leaving it in front of the doorstep like they used to (and I don't always check my mailbox on Saturdays). So now it's here, and charging, and supposedly after it finishes charging and I turn it on the new account balance will show up within an hour.

Oh yeah and the cable for it also came, which is cool but, you know, not as exciting as the phone itself.

Off to read the manual.

-----------------------------------
Honey sticks:
The transparent pink one is watermelon, and I have no idea what the palest yellow one (there are four yellow ones) is. It...just tastes like honey.
Watermelon honey + masala chai = weirdest mixture ever. A bit like one of those watermelon jolly ranchers mixed with gingerbread.

Food post, mostly

I was at 99 Ranch today when I saw shao-mai (or "shumai", as wikipedia calls it) and thought, "Huh, I haven't had that in a long time. I wonder why." Then around lunch time I remembered that oh yeah, I don't have the apparatus for steaming things. I mean I figured out a rough estimate using the microwave, but it's not quite the same. The difference (somehow) becomes more pronounced when the food cools, which is a problem for me given that I tend to cook more than I can eat in one meal. Despite of that, the Kimbo shrimp shao-mai was quite good.

I am still sampling different gum. The Trident strawberry one was not very good. It's too sweet for one thing, and has this weird aftertaste like it's thinking about being minty, but never quite got past the thinking stage to the doing stage. To complete the short but very recent dislike of strawberries: one of the ones I got this week had a caterpillar in it. The outside wasn't noticeably marked either. I just took a bite, looked inside the empty space that sometimes form inside the fruit, and saw a very green, very plumb, and no doubt very confused caterpillar.

Now I'm paranoid and don't dare to eat anymore. At least not while I'm occupied with other stuff such as reading.

There was also chayote. One of these days I will remember that one chayote is enough to last me a week, because when I'm buying them I usually think "hmm, vegetable is about the size of my fist. I should get two." Then after I finish cutting one and see the pile of it on the cutting-board I'd think, stupidly, "Oh." And possibly, "Oops. Maybe I can freeze the other one?"
(I also tend to have a similar problem with potatoes, leading usually to a scenario where I'd have one lonely potato sitting in the fridge.)

The darkest red honey stick (there are four reddish ones) is, I think, cinnamon.

And now for something completely different:

Today as I was exiting the store I saw a dog on a car. It was sitting on the roof, over the driver's seat. The car is empty and not moving. The dog (smallish in size) looked kind of bereft -- it'd shuffle around a little, sit down, and stare off into space. I don't think it's tied down, though it was wearing a collar and I didn't get close enough to investigate. But dogs -- even the non-Diefenbaker variety -- should still be able to get off the roof via the hood or the trunk if they wanted to, right?

While walking through downtown PB I also saw, in front of an empty, abandoned store, two TI-83s laying on the ground, side by side. The calculators were off. There was nothing else or anyone else nearby. They were laying face-up in the yin-yang orientation. There were no stores nearby that sold calculators, so I'm at a loss. Besides, those things are pretty expensive so ...I don't know. The little mysteries in life. Or rather, in this case there is only one mystery: people.

Anyone else heard about the window phone 7? I'm actually pretty excited with the policy they're employing to attract developers. Gives the product a lot of potential if it survives the initial debut.