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