got a concerned c...

got a concerned call this morning from emcicle. turns out the deck contractor showed up this morning and began randomly jackhammering holes in the pavement out back of the house preping to pour the foundations for the new deck. issue is, we don't yet have the permit and don't expect to have the permit till december. normally, i really wouldn't care about this thing, but after waiting planning and freaking since june, i am going to play this thing so by the book and not give them any reason to take away my deck permit. several calls to the zoning department later, it turns out that simply digging the footings would be fine (good to get the holes dug before the ground freezes). however when i got home, i discoverd that the holes were dug along the rough lines that i had sketched out for the presentation to the neighbors, lines that were only estimates and not even known to be square. i have a real feeling our back yard is going to end up looking like some sort of mine field before this whole thing is done. about half the back yard is already going to be dead because it spent the whole summer with lumber sitting on it.urg.watched get smoochy tonight. not bad. not great but somewhat entertaining. it had a few good lines. really was a cotton candy movie. sweet and enjoyable but absolutly no substance underneath, the actors played by cardboard cutouts. as said, not bad but not great.

no sex in the champaign room

so i had this dream last night, and its kind of science geeky so i'm going to try to annotate it for the confused.i dreamed i was in the lab and we were having a party, and for some reason i was wandering around swigging from a bottle of champaign. but then i realized that i was standing in the hot room while doing it (hot room is the room we work with radioactivity in, the normal lab prohibition of no food, drink, smoking, gum, applying cosmetics, or doing much of anything that involves going near your mouth or other bodily orifices applies triple or quadruple in that room. the levels or radioactivity we work with a small enough that the only two real dangers that exist are getting it on you and tracking it out of the lab (which means a spanking by the NRC for you, the lab, and the university) or ingesting some of it where as it passes through you it does nasty things to the soft squishy things on your insides. take home message, no eating in the hot room). so in my dream, i'm standing there in the hot room, taking swigs from the bottle touching pieces of equipment that i know are contaminated and radioactive (the 'fuge (centrifuges are always fuck all hot, there's nothing you can really do about it) the water bath, the sink (we wash radioactivity down the sink, perfectly legal under a certain amount but means the sink has a good chance of being hot)) and then touching the lip of the bottle, setting the bottle down on things, basically getting it good and grubby, and then taking big drinks out of it. i woke up in a real freaked out panic and had to lay there and calm myself down for a while before i could accept that it was only a dream and go back to sleep. i don't like dreaming, i think i'm going to go back to not doing it, i sleep better that way.

yaaay...bit the b...

yaaay...bit the bullet and bought the paid account. $2.50 a month, and i really needed to do something with the $10 sitting in my paypal account.lets hear it for up to ten user icons.

installment 1: in which our protaginist learns he must deal with raw sewage

long story short, or medium actually...last night i went downstairs to put in some laundry, and there were puddles and the carpet was kind of squishy. momentary panic, but the area around the hot water heaters was dry. it had rained out, and things seemed to be originating from near the outside wall, so i figure its just ground water seeping in. testing this theory, i find that it doesn't smell of anything but basement floor, and is only slightly soapy (considering that it had flowed under two washers, it is entirely possible it had picked up some laundry detergent). this morning however when i checked it with the upstairs neighbor (after three floors had gotten ready in the morning and had their um... morning constitutionals) the basement was downright stank. and the water was well icky. the third floor neighbor is going to take care of getting a plumber or rotorooter guy in to clean it out, but this still means that we are going to have to swab the whole basement with bleach (the furnace air intakes are also in the basement, so no stank can be tolerated). first off, it is going to be a rather unpleasant job because we must move 3 sets of washers and dryers to clean under them, and because after finishing washing the floor and walls that were wet with unspeakable things we have to wash the two rugs that were in the basement and are now soggy. I think the plan may be to get a trash barrel and mix up a big batch of bleach water. place it outside elevated high enough to get good pressure, and run a hose down into the basement siphoning from the barrel. hose down the entire basement, maybe scrub it with a push broom, and vac up the excess water with two shop vacs (maybe fitted to pull to an auxiliary tank rigged out of a third metal trash barrel). this may make the job less icky, but will still be annoying. thank god for latex gloves though, i plan to swipe a box or twelve from the lab today. should guarantee a fun weekend if nothing else.that was actually pretty long instead of medium wasn't it. well tough. if i have to clean up poop, you can damn well read about it for a little while.

once again into the breach

day two of the genome access. once again is going to be a rapid fire tag team class. the whole thing is a really intense review of a huge field, but thankfully is also avaliable to us on the web and in handout form.found myself significantly calmer this morning compared to last after dealing with the whole taxi issue. got here easily via the lab shuttle. the campus here is amazing. its research lab tucked into an historic town. each cottage has been retrofitted with a state of the art research facility. oops, class starting...

an interesting thing happened on the way to the bioinformatics course

First, the flatbush station listed on the commuter rail is not the same flatbush listed on the subway map. flatbush on the com-rail is actually atlantic ave on the subway map. thankfully, i got a little suspicious about the locations of stuff on the map and figured out what was going on. also nicely, i got an express at the first possible opportunity. very good since i made the train by minutes. i seem to still be working on boston time where any trip takes about 30 minutes (add 15 min for each t-line change). seems here in new york every trip takes about 1 hour. anyway, got on the train no problem got to the station, and the two cabs that were there filled up and drove away. i then waited there (calling twice) for 45 minutes for another cab. one finally picks me up, and drives over to another parking lot where they re-arrange the passengers to fill each cab to maximum capacity. it seems to be the policy of the cab company to fill each cab completely and then drop off each person sequencially. that, and the cabs don't carry a meter, they have to call back to the base station and ask to get the price for a ride. got the the genome center and my fair costs 7.25. I give the driver a 20 and a quarter he fumbles for a while and comes out with the extent of his change, 12 dollars (note at this point i'm pissed with the whole cab experience and plan not to tip a dime). begin to launch into something like "well then gimme back my fucking quarter" when the diminishing returns alarm goes off in my head and i say to hell with it, slam the door and go into my class. arrggg. but i'm here now and up to speed. so things are good.

New York, New York

i've been in new york for the past couple of days now, mostly just wandering around the city and looking at stuff. on saturday, when i first got in, i went down and walked around central park. pretty nifty place, skirted the edge of it until i came to the met. museum of art where i hung around for a while and watched some guy paint himself bronze and do the whole living statue routine. his main act seemed to be spooking japanese girls who seemed endlessly amused with the routine. almost lost my favorite flannel, but after aprox 30min of backtracking, found it again. sat. night went to a party with taybin. the friend whose birthday it was became completely drunk and unruly in that falling down a lot and spilling beer on everyone way. i can't really complain much because i know i've been there myself. taybin's sisters were there as was taybin's girlfriend. she seems nice. and not in that "i have nothing good to say so "she's nice"" but she legitimately seems nice. sunday, went to the museum of modern art. they are currently redoing their normal building, so they were in a temporary location in queens with a very limited collection. it was kind of like a best of show. saw 'starry night' a jackson pollock, some picassos as well as a lot of other stuff. the whole exhibit seemed to have a much higher ratio of really cool stuff to what the hell is this crap than modern art normally has. later taybin an i helped his sisters move into their new apartment. and then went for sushi. raw fish is so damn yummy i may have to start experimenting with other raw foods, bacon for example. today was a walking day. i started out down around chinatown just wandering around seeing the streets and neighborhood. ended up wandering through little italy, and then into the restaurant supply district. from there i ended up in the east village then through the edge of soho and into the pantyhose and bead wholesale district. stopped and bought the last issue of transmet (sigh, but a good ending. now all i have to do is read all the previous comics that led up to it) and loitered in union sq for a while reading transmet. finally ended up getting back on the subway a couple of blocks away from times square because i was starting to get a little tired and punchy and didn't feel like dealing with comercialization on a massive scale.tomorrow i leave for the conference at cold spring harbor. yay science geeking.

entertained and amazed in that Fox's world's worst _______ sort of way

so for those of you who dont know, i'm been in new york for the past couple of days visiting taybin and generally hanging out. yesterday the two of us left his house and walked smack into the middle of the 3rd avenue festival. this seemed to draw justification from the simple existence of 3rd avenue as a reason to celebrate in the form of a enormous linear street fair running the length of 3rd avenue in Bay Ridge. the one notable occurrence, aside from taybin recieving a christian hiphop cd on the condition that the givers could pray for him, was this: i'm not going to actually say anything more on this; the words of others seem to sum things up properly.first exerps from he manufacturer: > Surviving The Titanic Super Slide challenges you to survive the climb > through the cabin area to the stern of the ship. Once you have made it > to the top of the stern of the Titanic there is one feat left to accomplish. > The wild 25’ ride down the deck of the awesome Dual Slide! This unit is definitely > one for your photo album. The spacious center cabin features an easy to climb > stairway with rails for safety.From an article in a titanic related website: > Millvina Dean, 90, was just nine weeks old when the liner struck an iceberg in > 1912, claiming the lives of more than 1,500 people. > She has branded the inflatable funfair attraction, which is based on the ship's > stern rearing into the air, as "disgusting". > The slide's manufacturers, Cutting Edge Creations, boasts that it `captures all > the excitement of the famed ocean liner on its maiden voyage'. > It offers a bouncy iceberg as an optional extra. > Miss Dean, from Woodlands, near Totton, who lost her father in the tragedy, said: > "This is very distressing.... > International sales director Robert Field said 475 of the £10,000 slides had been > sold in the last four years. > "When it first came out a few people were critical but you're never going to make > everyone happy," he said.and from a 'zine in Plattsburgh NY where one was displayed. > What is Plattsburgh going to sponsor next? How about the inflatable > Hindenburg at the next air show?

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flyrabbit came over for pork chops this evening...

...and afterwords he, emcicle and i decided to go for a drive for the evening, up to the north shore simply go get out. so with a handful of cds and little else we all jumped into the car and took off. ended up first in gloucester, cruising around the city streets and looking at beaches. all in all, a generally nice evening. pretty nice and relaxing just to get out, be near the ocean, and get out for a drive on some deserted roads. found one really nice one that was completely empty, wound through a semi-residential district so there was interesting stuff to look at, and was easy to drive at around 40mph, enough to feel you're going places but slow enough to enjoy having the window open. might have taken a good picture or two, or they could be crap, i have no real idea.so, anyway, i'm back home, and decided that i can't really sleep right now, so instead i'm going to attempt programming. things are deciding to be obnoxious, but i've not broken anything yet so i'm ahead on the plus column.

flyrabbit came over for pork chops this evening...

...and afterwords he, emcicle and i decided to go for a drive for the evening, up to the north shore simply go get out. so with a handful of cds and little else we all jumped into the car and took off. ended up first in gloucester, cruising around the city streets and looking at beaches. all in all, a generally nice evening. pretty nice and relaxing just to get out, be near the ocean, and get out for a drive on some deserted roads. found one really nice one that was completely empty, wound through a semi-residential district so there was interesting stuff to look at, and was easy to drive at around 40mph, enough to feel you're going places but slow enough to enjoy having the window open. might have taken a good picture or two, or they could be crap, i have no real idea.so, anyway, i'm back home, and decided that i can't really sleep right now, so instead i'm going to attempt programming. things are deciding to be obnoxious, but i've not broken anything yet so i'm ahead on the plus column.

yesterday'...

yesterday's moment of restraint: by late afternoon i had been programming since 8:30, my perl script was misbehaving in an inexplicable way, to my left was a dead laser printer, scanner or pcr machine (take your pick), and hidden behind the door is a large baseball bat. probably would actually have been a needed relaxation as later in the day, the piercing laughter of a co-worker drifted through two rooms and gave me the same urge slightly redirected. today however has been significantly better. the perl script is actually working right now, i've been significantly less busy, and no one is laughing.

accomp...

accomplishments for the day:felt like assfailed to fix anything on the computer i was working on and ended up putting it back the way i found itflipped out at my girlfriend via emailenjoy(ed / ing) a nice pain in the left side of my headopened a window to program and accidentally pasted the text of aforementioned email into the middle of my code, became fed up and closed the window.tried to get a doctor's appointment about the pain in my head (ear actually) and found out that my doctor is only coming in on tuesdays, and every other doctor in the clinic is busy till next friday.went off to the local clinic near work and discovered it staffed by an idiot savant. i would tell her a date and she could instantly calculate that all doctors were booked on that date.came back, stared at the computer basically the only solid evidence that i actually got out of bed and did anything today will be several people whom i truly care about that i've managed to hurt or annoy.

today'z the day

today is the day of our zoning hearing. tonight at between 9 and 9:30 they should begin deciding the fate of our deck. two pieces of good news are that 1) there are no negative comments listed against our project, and 2) i was not caught, expelled or spanked for the little poster printing incident last night. i've been reading the zoning code all morning, beefing up on knowledge of the specific articles that are relevant. have a few more pictures to print and have to go pick up a piece of foamcore to mount the poster on. generally, though, i'm just mentally pacing nervously waiting for tonight and trying to get psyched. grrr tiger claw...

inter...

interesting note:as pork rinds stale, they lose much of their crunchy goodness and instead take on the character of chewing on dead pig.even more interesting note:upon discovering this after the first one, i continued to eat the second and third remaining in the handful i had grabbed.

i got up th...

i got up this morning and had some real aspirations to do some serious work, get shit done and move ahead on my project. sadly enough, that was not to be. instead spent the morning randomly browsing the net looking at random stuff, leaving me feeling unaccomplished and slightly dirty inside. so, i went into work.here, i've still not managed to get a single bit of work done on my project, however, i was able to work on stuff for the zoning board meeting tomorrow. the poster is put together, the only next step is the blatant abuse of school resources (using the departments poster printer).This really should be done at about 4:30 in the morning when no one else is in the building, but i have to go home and paint the porch tonight, so i'm going to try it now and just hope that nobody notices. if i'm expelled, well at least i'll have a porch.

programmi...

programming day today. came into work and spent the day typing trying to get my damn program to work. at around 11 it seemed to be working perfectly, i fed it the the complete dataset instead of the small test set that i had arranged, and suddenly it stopped working all together. an hour of debugging later, i discovered that either the database had suddenly changed an all uppercase table name into all lowercase, or the program had suddenly begun to care that it was lowercase. this irks me, the one thing i like to be able to count on is that the computer is going to behave the same way each time i run it. and i swear that this up and changed on me somehow. anyway, at 1:30 decided that i needed to eat, and grabbed lunch, in which the only notable item was a dove bar that i found encased in about an inch of frost ice in the back of the freezer. it was either that or the ice cream sandwich of approximately the same age, and i went with the dove because its in hermetically sealed plastic.

a story of joints and bush

picked the wagoneer up today from the shop, they replaced the right front u-joint. took the car to sams club in natick. it has a shake at ~55mph and resonates at ~65mph, which would not concern me much for a 15 year old car, except those are strikingly similar to symptoms i noticed aproximately 700 miles before a middle u-joint broke and dropped the axle onto the pavement. on the good note however, my copy of bush, 6teen stone and the science of things arrived yesterday. yay regression back to high school music. can't wait to subject the lab people to this.

i have no witty tag-line

today was a complete waste in terms of work. basically i've spent the entire past 24 hours trying to figure out how to swing the cost of the new car in a short term kind of tomorrow time-frame. the final conclusion is that all i really need is exactly what i want right now and cheap. as a compromise, i'll be getting something approximating what i want for slightly more expensive then i'd hoped, and not ready till thursday. hurumph. but, things are at least moving. it amazes me though that in a country as obsessed with speed as us that you cant complete the process of obtaining a car loan, insurance, title, registration, plates, and physical car in under 24 hours. i look forward to the day when all will be available through a vending machine. or maybe the car insurance would come pre-installed in the car. for an extra $2k to the sticker price you could plow over line of school children as you exit the car lot and ding a lexus making the left turn on your way to the highway, all hassle and guilt free. or maybe i've spent too much time perusing the world of insurance coverage. I'm having a hard time believing that most liability insurance covers only between $50K-$300K per accident. Considering that most people are driving around a several ton chunk of steel at roughly 60mph, i think it would be really easy to do quite a bit more than $300K worth of damage real fast (reference the line of school children and lexus above). too many hassles.ok, so the basic upshot was that i was really wishing to jump on a bus tonight and run down to nyc, spend the night with taybin, and pick up the car tomorrow morning. it seems that the insurance would be a royal pain in the ass to get covering by today, and there would be no car loan to cover it yet because the loan company moves at a pokey 24 hour decision rate. this all stems from the fact that the car dealership won't accept a credit card for the purchase of a car. urrr. i even had an overnight bag packed.at least this way, the main driver of the car may be able to come along.i think i'm still kind of incensed by the implication that the wagoneer is not good enough though. its got the heart of a good car, it really does, it just needs some work and upkeep and someone to be nice to it. oh, and i feel a little better, apparently the loan company requires only about 3 hours to decide i'm a legitimate risk. yay, i now have their approval to go into debt for three years.

escape from boston

after many trials and tribulations, finally managed to get out of the city for the labor day weekend. made it up to my aunt and uncle's place up on the island in lake george. and have basically been spending the weekend trying to relax a little before jumping back into the bloody frey. on the list of reasons why it was difficult to get out of boston, were that the u-joint on the wagoneer began to go, making it unsafe to drive on the highway (if it decided to drop while on the highway, one of the best things it could do would be tear out the transmission and other large pieces of the undercarrage of the car). so it appears that we are shopping for a used subaru outback. i'm still not sure how i feel about this. i'd really like to still keep the wagoneer, and maybe work on it myself some to make it a slightly cheaper car to own (while i can't repair the ujoint, i could rebuild the carb which it will need soon, and maybe replace the radiator). but the truth is, we're really not a two car family. there is almost never a time when both of us have need a car for seperate purposes. which means that the wagoneer is going to spend most of its time sitting out on the street not running. also part of the problem is that the wagoneer doesn't like emcicle, probably due to the fact that it can sense that she doesn't like it. the car has demonstrated that it works as a knock around errand car useful for some roadtrips, it is just not reliable enough for a daily commute of 60-100 miles. i guess my only decision now is whether i hold on to it and try to keep it running for me, or just let it go and say goodbye. on a related note, i find it very funny that on a printout of the info page on the outback we are interested in, there is a web form to get a price quote. on the printout emcicle has, in silver pen, filled out her first and last name her zip code, and circled the send button. idle doodle of course, but i'm entertained.

decided yesterday...

decided yesterday afternoon that if i was going to actually get any work done, i was going to have to stay home and work from here. this was after i resisted the urge to strangle loud annoying people who kept invading my office (granted its shared, so they have every right to be there) and breaking my concentration. I got maybe three lines of code written yesterday, and resorted to scribbling on the white board and muttering. so, today i'm staying home, and let me tell you, my god it is nice. i'm actually getting work done (current goofing off not withstanding), there are very few distractions, and i have all the iced tea i can drink. the weather here switched from blistering hot to cool fall like weather in about 3 days. its nice right now, but i'm beginning to feel like a puppy with a bipolar owner, i don't really understand the forces at work here, but i'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop. my main concern is that we are completely going to skip the long nice fall that i like and go directly into winter. or that we are already into fall, and i haven't had time to buy pants (all i own right now are cutoff shorts and a pair of wool pants designed to keep german soldiers from freezing to death while fighting a land war in russia.

things that go poof in the night

right now my head feels like i've taken one of those egg crate mattress pad wrapped it around several times and cinched it tight with a thick leather belt.oh, and my palm pilot glitched, a year of schedules and addresses went poof. i prostrate myself before the goddess of multiple backups in thanks for the blessing of redundant data archiving.

various ruminations (less in the ideas sense, more in the mixing chewed up grass with bacteria sense

breakfast this morning was flat dr. pepper and 20 oz of coffee served with the little spill retardant plastic lid that seems to fulfill some perverse nipple suckling fetish... though the thought of lactating black coffee is horrifying in its own sense. it seems to be assumed that whenever i'm sitting in the office working on the computer i'm not accomplishing anything useful, and thus welcome any and all visitors and distractions. this is however, not true. as i am currently trying to shift gears from project_1 which involves lots of bench work, to project_2 which is all programming. this shift has been significantly hampered by the fact that i just don't seem to want to get anything done today. i am jack's complete and total apathy towards accomplishment. actually, lets get back to the coffee. though i like 7-11 coffee, there is a general ill at ease that i find with it conceptually, having nothing to do with the actual coffee itself. I believe that this stems from its method of dispensing. 7-11 simply has a stack of coffee cups and several industrial coffee machines and warmers so that there are always several pots cooking on the warmers. You just walk in, pour yourself a cup, pay for it and wander out. apparently i have issues with beverages that don't emerge from a machine. soda, for example comes out of the fountain, being produced after you push the button. coffee, when served out of the large vacuum bottles seems normal, you press the lever, and coffee is produced. i just find myself put off by a beverage from the 7-11 not mechanically delivered. one comes to expect a comforting sort of detachment from the experience there, and having to interact with an actual coffee pot kind of ruins that.umm...car's not ready yet, may not be tomorrow depending on whether they get parts or not. grrr. mac os 10.2 released on saturday, and i don't yet have a copy. off my gameideas keep moving in and out of focus.trying to get a sample of industrial desicant for the lab... as of yet unsuccessful.

what would you do?

Yay, klondike day in the stockroom. Buy any enzyme or reagent and get a free klondike bar. this begins to make up for my feeling ill during dove bar day.

5:28 am do you know where your snark is

Its 5:28 in the morning right now, and i've been up for roughly 45 minutes now because the damn fire alarm has now three times chosen to go off with a hellish noise for approximately 1 second every 5-10 minutes. It seems to be done now, but its already too late to get any decent sleep done with. After the third time, i called the cambridge fire department, to see if they wanted to do anything. I expected them to send one maybe two guys over to look it over, and instead 4 cambridge firefighters dropped by in a full size fire truck with the lights going (no siren thank god). its not that i expected them to show up in a pinto, but gee whiz. anyway, the upshot is that they found nothing, the detectors are wired through the 1st floor neighbors box which was just rewired and labeled poorly so i don't know the proper breaker to turn them off, and its now 5:34 in the morning and i'm not going to even bother to get to sleep.narf. though i did manage to see LOTR again last night, and against all efforts did not manage to sleep through it. it still remains a good movie.

Meta-post

Well, i've decided to give this livejournal thing a try, however before i begin, i'm going to ramble for a little while on the whole concept. i know the idea is to have a open forum for your thoughts and stuff, but there is also the thought in the back of my head that all this stuff is for public consumption, so i think that a lot of it is going to be edited before it makes it up here. i am going to try and accomplish two things here, the first is to keep up with the posts and actually use this thing like a journal, and the second is to try and edit as little as possible. i think that the main problem is going to be remembering the litle conversations and thoughts in my head long enough to get to a computer and get them entered into the journal. but here goes:hello world...