This is me, emoting

As someone whose research (and stipend) comes from NIH, I'm required to go through regular "ethics training" which, for someone at my stage of career, means discussion / seminars. This morning we had one on retractions and authorships and make no mistake, it was a good talk, but.

There was this one area of the discussion that bothered me. Enough to post about, even.

Maybe I'll learn tailoring someday

My long sleeve tees are developing holes in them. Given that I've had some of them since high school, this is probably not surprising. I could just order more long-sleeve tees online, except I like nice dress shirts and would like to get more of them but that would mean the horrors of Physically Shopping.

Well that explains it

Science jargons: the reason why the longer I stay in academia, the worse I get at non-scientific communication of any kind. (Scroll down for the chart. Really, all you need to see is the chart to get the basic idea.)

Aspiring minor geological miracle

Dear Firefox,

Are you aware of the fact that with your latest update (version 8), there are now a bunch of incompatibility issues with add-ons & plugins, especially with gmail, such that a) the rich text editor sometimes won't load and that b) the gchat applet never loads correctly unless I turn off my add-ons & plugins?

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.

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?

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.

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.)

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.)

Less vegetabley?

I saw an advertisement from Albertson's yesterday on the side of a bus. I didn't read the find print, but their giant slogan was "MAKE VEGETABLES LESS VEGETABLEY".

Now, I may not have a degree in psychology, but something about this doesn't make sense. Either as a way to appeal to the masses or, you know, in terms of general logic. Isn't this similar to an appeal to make water less watery?

I don't understand marketing people. I never will.

To-do list for this weekend requires some effort into putting together notes for the two hours review session I'm co-running on Monday and working on my take home final (due Tuesday, at which point I get to turn it in during class and take my in-class final. For the same class). I have finished grading the problem set turned in to me on Thursday, and I have just finished taking the final designed for the undergraduates. (And as far as I'm aware, I was the only TA in the class who was asked to do this -- possibly because I'm pretty sure I'm the only graduate TA who manages to give prompt and detailed feedback--somebody better appreciate this.) (Yes it's genetics and I like genetics and the final isn't that bad, but I like weekends with time off even better, not to mention my own take home final is of the horrible, essay-writing type and dammit that's what I forgot -- I need to change the directory of Windows Office on Zen because it's been having trouble locating the executive files ever since the RAM got upgraded.) (Daemon and Ivy runs Open Office which has some formatting issues with MS Office.)

Gah. Time for tea, me thinks.

Hmm

Dad's out poking at my car, despite of the fact that he knows that the wheels have just been changed, along with the oil, and that none of the vehicle's fluids needed to be refilled. It makes him happy, so I'm going along with it. Mom's just been out grocery shopping. In the general spirit of festivities I've decided to go through my closet again to see what else I get to throw away this year (before there were things I could not throw away without getting yelled at, such as the Chinese calligraphy books, now I can get away with donating them --let's face it, penmanship has never been an interest of mine; I'm keeping the Chinese watercolor books instead), since my parents were thinking that moving might be in order within the next few years (still at the thinking stage). Meanwhile, I want to make a post just to remark that my God, when did I get so much stuff?!

Gah

Yesterday's Mid-Autumn Festival. Mom's managed to ship me a small tupperware full of mooncakes, wrapped in more tape (the tupperware, not the pastry) than even my anti-serium shipment, which had to be sent on dry ice in a box inside another box. But hey, food. It was nice of her. I also had grapes, and didn't call my relatives in Beijing like mom asked me to, for which I feel extremely guilty about but I just can't bring myself to, even after I remembered. ...and it's hard to feel happy after that. Even with the mooncakes.

I also forgot to mention that I did, in fact, finish Persuasion during the retreat, and liked it better than Pride and Prejudice. There's less of the witty repartee, but also less of the Prince Charming On A Horse Of White feel. (Oh come on, Bennet was marrying into wealth and class. Even Darcy had said that her family is way below his but he loves her anyway.) (Well, maybe not in those exact words.) Mostly though, I just like Anne Elliot a lot more than I ever liked Elizabeth Bennet, or the Dashwood sisters for that matter (those two seem to spend most of the book moping, if I recall correctly).

Now for something completely different: I nearly got in a car accident with someone this morning. I was going down Grand (post grocery shopping), when a car shot out of one of the small side streets (Grand, Balboa, and Garnet are the three main streets in Pacific Beach, and while they're not quite El Camino they are still the main roads). I'm guessing he didn't see me, because by the time he saw me, he was right in front of me already and of course he stepped on the breaks, because that's sort of the instinctive response. Unfortunately, vector math indicates that means his car is therefore also spending more time directly in front of my car. At that point I was slamming down the breaks but the cars are so close that there was no way I could've stopped in time and so I ended up executing this wild swerve (successfully, thank God) and left some rubber, I think, on the road. (Just to point out that I was close enough to see his head turn and to use the pronoun "he" even though he drove off right after.)

I was very thankful that it was early enough, that the car density was low enough, that I could swerve without crashing into anyone else.

People would've been shocked if they'd heard the stuff that was coming out of my mouth. Even I was somewhat surprised, after I realized that I was, in fact, swearing under my breath. (In my defense my mind was doing that whole slow-motion-before-collision-thing and I was 95% certain I was going to crash.)

I do not like driving. At least, not in urban areas. Affirmative.