Blog Archives 050313 to 041231

Old pointless chatter instead of new pointless chatter.

 

050313 Davis, CA, USA
OK. There's a right way to do an international move, and then there's the way I've been doing it. Step one: Totally mis-estimate how much time you'll need to pack. Step two: even assuming your estimation was correct, don't take enought time off to pack and prepare. Step three: Pack all night instead of sleeping the day before te movers come to take the majority of your stuff to storage. Step four: take a day off from packing and then pack late into the night before the other set of movers comes to take the few boxes of things you are shipping to your next posting. Step five: wonder how the heck you failed to notice that pile of stuff that won't fit in your suitcases and should have gone into storage. Step six: realize it will take a fair chunk of the next day to be finally done with the packing away of stuff, but, instead of getting it done, just waste time by posting a six part list of how to do an arduous unpleasant packing job. Yeesh. Times like now, I feel kinda dumb and unprepared. Somehow, amnesia sets in over time and you always forget what a bear packing up and moving really is. Wish me luck.

050312 Davis, CA, USA
I like the previews I have seen of Battlefield 2 (BF2). Most particularly, I like the tracking system, the like of which has not been seen since TieFighter. I like the tracking systems in part because they tell me where to improve; accuracy, shots fired, training in various vehicle systems, etc. I'd like to see the game tracking systems taken to the next logical (or is it illogical) step; use the statistics to inform the robots, thereby letting you fight alongside a simulated army of you. I really like the idea of watching the entire army perform and then using that to determine where you need improvement. For this to work in the game environment fairly, you would need default AI settings to be visible as well, so that you could see if you were better or worse than the AI, and in what areas. Hmm. I'm probably one of very few people who would like that.

050311 Davis, CA, USA
To me, one of the biggest problems with mobile phones, from a user's point of view, is the frequency of unidirectional transmission problems. I hate it when the line is crystal clear for me, but I find out that I have been wasting the other person's time (and my own) by continuing to talk when the other person is hearing only a static-filled mess with perhaps every other word inaudible. I also find it frustrating when the other person hears everything I say, but the call is pointless because I can hear almost nothing of what they have to say. If both parties are experiencing the same quality of transmission, then at least you know much more quickly when to hang up and try again.

050310 Davis, CA, USA
Hm. It was an odd feeling today, when I took two large boxes out to the paper recycling bin. I was recycling the over one thousand scientific papers I had amassed as a graduate student. These papers, many of them heavily annotated, represented the summation of english language papers on the interaction of single metal ions with proteins. After having spent six years building up and critically evaluating the papers, it seemed somehow wrong to simply dump them. Yeah, I'd condensed that information and a bunch of new information from my experiments into my thesis, a review article or two, and a solid paper or two, but it still seemed wrong that the collection of papers was no longer worth having. Oh, well.

050309 Davis, CA, USA
It's funny... I chatted with a few friends recently. Hey, guys, relax. It's not like I'm disappearing from the face of the planet. In modern times, being four states away from your friends is about the same as being half a planet away. In either case, you're likely to call infrequently, and you're likely to be boarding a plane to visit with one another. No biggie. It's a compliment that you don't want me to go, but the distance is not a huge deal in the modern world. A bigger obstacle is the time difference making it harder to make phone calls at a mutually OK time.
Anyway, with that in mind, all locations I visit are still possible choices for a final job assignment. I have no particular urge to stay based in the US, so I'm keeping an open mind about permanently relocating to where-ever seems like the best combination of job and social life. I have really liked Davis. We'll see how I like Copenhagen/Denmark.
Oh, I'm in the middle of final packing up and I don't know what sort of internet access I'll have when in DK, so updates will be spotty for a bit after this.

050307 Davis, CA, USA
Passport arrived this afternoon. Visa paperwork is in order. Looks like I'm really going in one week. Yea!

050305 Davis, CA, USA
On flags, banners, symbols, and marks
I suppose the closest thing to heraldry we have in the modern age is trade marks™. When you think about it, that is only appropriate. The age of heraldry began to die as the nobility lost power to the merchent classes, but even then the newly empowered and weathy merchants sometimes bought the right to use emblazons. Even when individuals did not tie themselves to symbols, the guilds used symbols and marks, recognizing their power and utility. In the early modern period, unions and political parties tied themselves to symbols. The power of these symbols can still be felt; the hammer and sickle, the iron cross, or the black cat of the wobblies movement are all instantly recognizable.
Even today, when iconography has largely been left to the major corporations (Disney's mickey mouse ears, Nike's swoosh, etc), the power of symbols is still being used to subtly sway people in politics. For a recent examply, you need look no further than recent developments, like the republicans co-opting the american flag as "their" symbol, by use of the tiny american flag pin as part of a republican politician's reuired suit accessory.
These musing are largely inspired because I think the world would be a more interesting place if the age of personal iconography had not died. As it is, I am a little happier whenever I spot some nice symbols worked into clothing or building or the like. I really liked the company HQ in Lisbon where their symbol was a crossed pair of flying swans. They had it worked into the mosaic sidewalk in front of the building, woven into the cast iron security gate which covered the front of the building when the building was closed, and embossed on the company doors. The symbols that I like the most have heraldic properties, incorporating animals, plants, or inanimate objects, like mountains, the moon, windmills, etc. Still, even the mildly stylized S for Safeway (supermarket chain) or that stupid T for Trump Enterprises, boring and unartistic as these choices are, is better than no symbol.

050303 Davis, CA, USA
Here's another haiku for you. It fails to mention nature, so it's not following standard convention, but then again, it is two AM in the freaking morning.
Noisy neighbors, ugh.
Are they rude or just stupid?
Go to sleep, dumb-ass!
Every few weeks, I have to go down to my downstairs neighbors and explain that playing loud video games, with the explosions turned up, piped through the stereo, after one AM, is simply not appreciated. The stupid git has headphones and he'll remember to use them for about a week or two after I talk to him, but two weeks later he somehow forgets that he's living in an apartment complex with thin shared walls. He moved in four months ago and I've only talked to him seven times. Five of those seven times were after one in the morning, when I went down to remind him of the whole "use headphones if it is after midnight on a weeknight" idea. I am quite tolerant of noisy neighbors, and I don't want to be a hard-ass about things, but don't you think he'd have gotten a clue after being reminded the first few times? Sigh. I guess he can't help being sophmoric a bit, since he is a sophmore.
Anyway, enough griping. I'm going to go have a polite chat with the neighbor and then go back to bed.

050227 Davis, CA, USA
I just went down to the used bookstore in an attempt to convince them to take a few more of my old books. I walked out of there with just two fewer books, as the owner was uninterested in all but three of the books and I traded the three for a little cash and a copy of Basho's Narrow Road to a Far Province. The book is small, thin, is appropriate to what I'm now doing in life, and has Basho's haiku in both english and japanese. I like it. To celebrate, here's a haiku for you.
Snow melts, flowers bloom.
It is time to move, again.
Six months is quite short.

050225 Davis, CA, USA
Talking about names for a moment, I mentioned in an earlier blog post (050125) that McCall was a bit of an odd mixed name, using the scottish Mc and the Call having some sort of irish roots. Well, when a friend in Utah had done a web search attempting to find geneology references for the McCall name, she came up with three sorts of hits; sites claiming that McCall was a Scottish clan that moved to Ireland, sites claiming that McCall was an Irish clan that moved to Scotland, and finally one single site that claimed that McCall was an Irish clan that moved to Scotland, lived there for a while, and then resettled in Ireland. So there you have it; the McCall name is definitely Scottish/Irish or something. Anyway, most of these sites claimed to have the definite right answer and each one had complicated and conflicting heraldry and clan relation claims. Only the last site, claiming the there-and-back-again history, had a pleasantly uncomplicated claim; that site said they were not sure on any sort of official heraldry, but just knew of the battle-standard the McCalls used. Who cares how historically accurate it is; at least it's not ugly.
To all the McCalls reading this now, here's the flag to fly next time we are out conquering our enemies.

Of course, all this "family coat of arms" stuff is silly and pointless in the modern world. Besides, to quote from the rec.heraldry Frequently Asked Questions file:
Arms are not associated with surnames, but with individuals and, in some countries, with families. The important thing is who your ancestors are, not what surname you happen to bear. The fact that your name happens to be "Smith", for example, gives you no claim whatsoever on any of the thousands of arms borne throughout history by various people named "Smith."

050223 Davis, CA, USA
I have always like the song "Cat's In The Cradle" by Harry Chapin. For a while, I used to wonder why I liked it so much. I mean, other than for a brief period when I was very young, my father has usually been around, not constantly busy like the father in the song. I realized recently that I like the song and it speaks to me not because my father was too busy, but because it is I who has allowed myself to be too busy.

050222 Davis, CA, USA
Well, my fingers are all healed up. Unfortunately, I still have no feeling in the tip of the right hand middle finger. It's healthy and pink and all that, but now I know why it hurt so much; I sliced right through a nerve cluster. At least peripheral nerves regrow to some degree.
In other news, anyone who checked out my Travel Details page and looked at the listed apartment address in Denmark would be wise to check again. The address has changed. I'm not sure why, but the new apartment address is closer to downtown Copenhagen. I'll keep updating the information as things remain in flux. This just reinforces the usefulness of using my company's Davis branch office as my official mailing address. Flux happens. Heck, I still don't have my visa approved or my passport back yet. A lot more things could change before I manage to go.

050218 Davis, CA, USA
A series of random thoughts for today's post.
"Dosvidanya" - that simple word, used in saying good night to a Russian co-worker) made her really happy. The Russians I've worked with tend to work hard and stay late. I think the Russian tendency towards reserve and bruskness puts some of their co-workers off, but I find them to be really warm people if you think to see past that national characteristic.
"Complicated" by Poi Dog Pondering (off of the album Pomegranate) is one of the best "feel good" songs I've run across.
I have been transient so long now that I find it hard to understand what it means to be settled. Thinking about it, I've been in transient positions almost my entire adult life. College was clearly transient. Grad school was the closest I came to "settling down" in an area and even then it was with a time line; I knew that graduation would mean moving across the country again for the sake of the job. I was in Utah for just over four years, but even then my position was a transient one which I expected to have end in two to three years. I don't really know what it will feel like when I finally have a position I can consider permanent, an area where I have lived long enough to know well without having the knowledge that it is temporary.
I was thinking about that recently, as I was sorting my goods down to the limited subset I could take with me for the next few years (with all else placed in storage)... I had expected the process to be difficult and painful, with treasured object sadly sorted into storage. Instead, I was done in about twenty minutes and it was pretty painless.
Oh, just because this was one of the things I found in a box, I've decided to post a picture of what ghost money looks like.

This is from Taiwan. It is just one of dozens of different kinds of ghost money, which is also known as spirit money or heaven money or hell money. It's a little hard to read, but I think the characters on this are 壽祿福 (traditional chinese, the simplified characters would be 寿禄福 and I think the meanings are something like longevity, good fortune, happiness). Go ahead and do a web search on "ghost money". This can be your excuse to learn a new random thing from the web.

050214 Davis, CA, USA
I should be auditing my household goods in preparation for a mover's survey tomorrow, but instead I decided to post the chinese version of the Art of Reviling. You'll find it linked off of the english version of the Art of Reviling.

050214 Davis, CA, USA
The book give-away is over. The last set of books people requested was mailed out and the remaining books were either taken to a used book store (a handful) or donated to the local public library system (a big sack-full). I'm glad a bunch of friends took me up on the offer to get free books.

050211 Davis, CA, USA
You know, staying in touch is a royal pain in the ass. Partially, just because it is time-consuming to attempt to keep in touch with more than a small handful of people, but also because of psychology: the perception of your own efforts to stay in contact is always greater than the perception of another person's efforts.
Think about it; you sit down and draft a really long letter to someone and then wait for his or her reply. By the time there is an actual reply, you look at it and it appears pitifully short compared with your original missive. You end up feeling kind of cheated. This can go both ways...
One recent exchange I had with a friend of mine was during a phone call. I'd called her and she complained that I'd never bothered to respond to her email. I'm a pretty bad correspondent, so this wasn't out of character for me, but I've been trying to get better about it of late and have been certain to reply in some form to everything I've received in the last few months. I apologized and asked her to resend the email. After the call, I went digging around in my e-mailbox and found the message she was talking about. I had responded, although with only a few sentences while she had written an entire paragraph. She had taken this as not counting as a "real" response since it was comparatively little. However, in my digging through my email, I had also found why I only wrote a few sentences in response; her paragraph was in response to a quite long nine-paragraph email I'd written, which had initiated the correspondence. I didn't feel I had much more to add that was not in the original email and I didn't feel like I was "cheating" or short-shrifting the conversation since I was counting my original long email as part of my end of the correspondence. It was simple human psychology that caused her to remember the effort of her email and not to keep in mind the effort of my original email. No blame on her for being displeased by my "overly short" response to her response; its just human nature.
Another example comes from when I call people these days. As part of my keeping in touch efforts, I occasionally call friends in other states, more or less at random. Two of the most common comments I get during these phone calls are "You never call me" (said as part of giving me shit for not staying in contact better) and "So when are you going to come visit me?" (presented as part of some sort of attempt at giving me a guilt trip for not having visited previously). While it's nice that the person in question would like me to call more often and would even like me to visit with them, I'm also left with a "what-the-frig?!?!" sort of feeling. So far, I have repressed the urge, to bitch these friends out, but, hey, *I'm* the one who thought to call *you*. Why am I the one catching shit over this? And what's with that cheesy guilt-trip-flavored invitation? When are *you* coming to see *me*? Should I be assuming that you only want to see me if I'm the one making all the effort to travel?
I'm talking about my friends here, so I know that they don't mean anything by it. It's perfectly natural to remember someone when they call, realize that it has been long since you last spoke and mention that. It's also perfectly natural to be aware of your own finances, time commitments, and schedule (which prevent you from easily traveling to see a friend), and (not being aware of the other person's finances, time commitments, and schedule) mention wanting to see that person, suggesting they visit you. But, perfectly natural or not, how about we just leave it at "thanks for calling", eh? Let's just skip the "you never call/email/visit" song and dance.
Oh, as an aside, I have heard recently from one or two people (when I called 'em) that they have been reading the web site, but they have not responded to emails. Er, that's nice, sort-of, since I've been assuming that this is relatively un-read. When a couple of friends (Shula and Patrick) had a really interesting blog going about their many months-long travels around the world, as part of a long honeymoon, I would read it about once every two weeks and I'd catch up on all that they'd be doing that way. I was reading their blog only once every few weeks despite the fact that they were doing interesting things, so I've been assuming that (since I'm not doing much interesting and I'm still in the US) it was probable that people would only read this site once every few months, to see if I'd left the US yet. Anyway, Shula and Patrick's site was really neat. They had blog tools to let you post comments or send email, and yet I almost never responded or sent email. You see, the web site told me how they were doing and so I didn't need to write them to find out. In that way, a blog site results in a purely one way flow. I know *I* was guilty of reading their blog and never writing to 'em, so I can not blame others for doing the same with my blog, which is far less interactive.
Anyway, if you are reading this, then give a thought to dropping me a note at some point. For the purposes of staying in contact, "hi" works just as well as a long letter, so don't feel like you'd have to write some sort of masterpiece.

050208 Davis, CA, USA
My fingers have healed enough for a little typing, although the keys "i", "k", and "," still have to be hit with an alternate finger.
Today's topic: being a sell-out. I was recently chatting with my brother and I was kidding him about "being a good little corporate drone" because he was telling me about a pretty cool service that yahoo provides. Check out launch.yahoo.com to see what I'm talking about. Anyway, I was just kidding about the statement, but outright saying it crystallized a lot of things for me. In academia, lots of people tell you about the bad sides of corporate research. Having little control, highly directed short term goals, seeing promising work shelved, etc. Going to industry is, in some minor way, seen as "selling out" because instead of focusing on basic research and the big break-throughs, it is expected that you will focus on small incremental goals.
However, thanks to shifts in federal funding, it has been a long time since academia has had basic research well funded. Instead, federal grants often have strings attached in the form of "industry partnership" requirements (making the academic lab basically do the high-risk low-payoff portions of corporate research) or strings attached in the form of tightly targeted research money (forcing everyone to work on the fad topic du jour, AIDS, cancer, or the perennial favorite of congress - penile dysfunction in wealthy white men over sixty). Our nation has suffered due to these short-sighted funding policies and, as was predicted in several journals in 1995, these policies have resulted in the loss of american dominance in science. But that topic is an entirely different diatribe, worthy of a lengthy independent section on the importance of basic research in driving the growth of the economy.
Anyway, now that I've made the switch to industry, I'm discovering a lot of up sides to it. For one, I'm finally being paid more than a manager at McDonalds, and for another I'm treated as a professional rather than as a temp worker. Another factor in my being happy with industry is that I was on the market looking for a job for over a year before I took this one. It wasn't that I wasn't getting any offers, but I was waiting for an offer from a company which did not fit the stereotypes that academics hold of industry research companies. Plenty do live up to that stereotype. I'm now with a company that makes an effort to be socially responsible and environmentally responsible while at the same time doing interesting research. I'm still happy with them because these laudable goals appear to be backed by their choices and not just lip service.
All this had me thinking, if this is selling out - being paid decently, treated decently, getting to do interesting work, and being part of a company that tries to do the right thing by people and the world, well then, I'll be happy to be called a good little corporate drone.

050203 Davis, CA, USA
Just a short note since typing is still (literally) a pain. I went through my contract paperwork again recently and noticed that the weight allowance which the company covers for moving is "100 kg of unaccompanied freight". I didn't think about it before, but that means that anything more than 220.46 lbs of stuff which I want to have shipped around with me as I move for the next several years, is stuff that I'll be paying to move myself. Hrm. This sort of changes my plans a little. For example, no more planning on taking my bike with me for the move to Denmark; it will be cheaper to rent a bike for the weekends when I'd like to bike around. It has added new urgency to dumping all unnecessary things. Looks like (unless I decide to simply plan on arranging my own shipping of a pile of stuff) I'll be living pretty darn light for the next few years. I was planning on purging a lot of stuff, but I'd thought I was doing a good job of it until I realized I need to get down to really just 100 kg. That's (guessing here) perhaps two boxes of books, a pile of clothes, and perhaps a small box of assorted electronics, maximum, right? Yikes.
If you consider this to be an extended work trip, this is a really large amount of stuff. However, if you consider this my *life* for the next two years, it really is not all that much stuff. Honestly, I am unlikely to have the room for dragging around that much stuff. I thought I'd done an OK job of purging stuff, but I am now realizing I am far, far from being down to the international gypsy level of stuff. Dang. I have little time and a lot of things to dispose of.

050131 Davis, CA, USA
First things first. I cut two right hand fingers on glass at work. Right on the finger-tips. One just a scratch, but one pretty darn deep. I'm fine, all taped up and didn't need stitches, but I'm not going to type much with only one hand; it is too slow. In a few days, the cuts will have healed enough so I can type more easily.
Next news; it you had trouble accessing this site recently, my brother (who is hosting this site) had first DNS problems and then a loss of internet connection temporarily. It should get better soon.
I'll type more in a few days.

050125 Davis, CA, USA
Time pressure is building. I find myself concerned with the approaching deadline for the next move. Knowing, now, that the my next move will be to a fully furnished apartment, I have a lot of things that need to be disposed of or stored.

050125 Davis, CA, USA
Today, I'm eventually going to talk about aliases, but I'm going to back into the topic by the same sort of odd leads and thoughts that wandered me into the topic. As you may have noticed, I added a odd burgundy blob to the side of the page, under the Site Menu links. I had decided to fancy-up the page slightly by adding (gasp!) a graphic or two. I had decided to add two graphics; both marks of scholarship or possession. For tourist-y purchases, I've always been drawn to the old symbols of scholarship, brushes, inkstones, caligraphy, etc.
Anyway, the odd burgundy blob is a wax seal, with gold ink in the impression, of the initials K and M, crossed. It's not very clear at the web-default resolution of 72 dpi, but there you go. I picked up the wax, ink, and seal stamp in Florence, Italy. The other graphic I decided to add is my "chop". It can be seen on the top right of pages related to vaguely asian topics or to the right of this text.
The chop is something I picked up in Tainan, Taiwan. There, for legal documents, rather than signing for something, you must acquire and register your "chop" with the government. A chop is a your chinese name chiseled into a stone or metal or wood marking block. Using a stamp pad, you place your chop on a document and it serves as your official signature. In this way, it is much like the old italian signet ring used to be and therefore very much like the wax seal.
Obviously, to get a chop, I needed to have a chinese name. Much like Dzai Fu Wu goes by "Geoff Wu" while in the US, I went by "Lin An Shi" while in Taiwan. I picked the name by translating my own name and looking for similar names in chinese history. My own name name translates to something like "Of the woods" (Keith), "Stone" (Alan), "Son of" (Mc) with the "Call" part of the name occasionally theorized to have something to do with a degenerate version of the name Cu Chulainn, the old irish hero. So, I thought, I have "Lin" (woods) and "An" (stone), but what else is needed so I have a proper-sounding name? I eventually settled on using Lin as the family name, it being a relatively common family name (and it being first in spoken order, much like "Keith" is), and using An-shi as the personal name, in homage to Wang An-shi. Wang An-shi is a really great historical figure. Way back in ~1075 AD, he introduced a whole bunch of very modern and sweeping administrative and fiscal reforms of the government of the time. His aim was to strengthen the central government, but the poor also benefited from reforms such as the graduated land tax, cheap government credit, and reduction of the forced labor levy. Wang revived government price and commodity controls, local police administration, and the militia system. Eventually, as modern, efficient, and progressive as the reforms proved to be, they were too much for the entrenched conservative and somewhat corrupt powers in the government. Wang An-shi was eventually forced to resign and his reforms were undone. Still, the chinese never forgot him.
Just for fun, here's a copy of the business card I used when occasionally tutoring english in Taiwan. "Keith McCall" is printed just below the three characters for Lin An Shi.

This whole thing was a very long and round-about (but hopefully interesting) introduction to the fact that I sometimes go by Lin An Shi when on-line. When I would first sign on to the occasional news-group or discussion group as Lin An Shi, I thought nothing of it. That is, until I was on the receiving end of a few vicious attacks or racial slurs based on the fact that someone else on-line thought that I was asian. I was surprised. It didn't happen often, but occasionally I'd find my opinions derided or discounted purely because I was one of "them". It was much, much worse when I would be "Lin An Shi" while playing first-person shooter games on-line. As a test of the state of things on-line, I started occasionally signing on as "Sarah1", Sarah being the name of my then-advisor's 3 year old daughter. Holy cow... If I'd thought being mistaken for asian on-line was bad, being mistaken on-line for a female was much worse. If I dared excel at a first-person shooter while playing as "Sarah1", the term "bitch" was amongst the milder terms I'd have directed against me. More than once, I had people who were supposedly on my team decide to kill me for "being a bitch". Mind you, I did not change my behavior one bit when changing my screen name. If asked, I always truthfully reported that I was actually a ~30-ish year old white guy. However, daring to be good at a "boy's game" while logged in with a female name was very strongly punnished. It was an eye-opening experience. Since I, myself, try not to be a jerk, I am occasionally surprised by the vast horde of jerks out there. I am unsurprised so many people choose to use entincity/sex neutral on-line names like "ShadowCat42" or "BeepBeepZoom99". If any of you are highly active on-line and use masculine or neutral on-line names, try using an ethnic female name for a bit and see what it feels like. It is interesting.

050124 Davis, CA, USA
Yikes! It was panick time this morning; I had just found out that (due to the lead-time the consulate requests) I should have submitted the paperwork for the Work and Residence Permit application forms about 2-4 weeks back. After much running around in circles, I got it all taken care of and Fed-Ex'ed off to the main Royal Danish Consulate General in New York by mid-afternoon today. It should arrive there tomorrow morning. Here's hoping there are no delays.

050123 Davis, CA, USA
Heh. I have had a number of people tell me that I have a really great job and tell me how jealous they are that I get to travel so much. I agree with them that it is a great job and a great opportunity, but I also get a little annoyed because they are thinking only of the "fun" aspects. Often-times these same people who are telling me that they'd give their teeth for such an opportunity would, in truth, not be willing to take the job if they considered the negatives. For me, it is a really great fit. For others, the cultural and linguistic isolation of long stays in foreign countries could be really off-putting. Also, I find that it takes the better part of 3-4 months in a new place to feel really comfortable there, to make a set of new friends, and to learn an area well. This makes the moving-every-six-months schedule quite difficult. Obviously, it doesn't mean the job is any less of a great opportunity, but I wish people would have a more realistic appraisal of the situation before they decided to tell me at great length how wonderful my job is. That said, I'm glad of the opportunity to have this sort of very minor pet peeve.

050122 Davis, CA, USA
Just a little while ago, I finally got around to sending out holiday letters (for the first time in a long time). I thought about it for a bit before adding the web page address to the holiday letter. While the web page was originally meant to be a place where I can update my contact information for everyone to see, I also (over time) started adding random other bits. These other bits include random rants on politics (I'm far to the left of much of the country) and religion (mostly where it ties into politics). I realize that these are topics which can be quite divisive and that some of my random musings or rants are likely to annoy/offend some of the possible readers (primarily relatives), since I'm no fan of our current president. However, rather than censor myself or leave out the web page address, I decided that my relatives and friends should be trusted to take my random ramblings with a grain of salt. Here's hoping I manage to discuss, rather than offend.

050121 Davis, CA, USA
Novozymes has a brief profile written up in Genetic Engineering News, in the Volume 25, Number 1, January 1, 2005 issue. In case anyone is interested, I put the two page PDF here. I'm not sure about the intellectual property rights involved in posting the magazine's article, but this is a private, limited exposure site, and this pargraph contains the only link to the PDF, so I'll just post it and withdraw it if there is a problem.

050117 Davis, CA, USA
Today was one of those incredibly frustrating days. I'd stayed at work late friday finishing up an experiment that was the culmination of about a month to a month and a half worth of work. It had taken me that long, working hard, to generate all the material that was going into the experiment. I found out this morning (monday) that nothing worked. Not even the controls. Ahrgh! In other words the only thing I learned was that I had messed up some aspect of the experiment so badly that I didn't even get enough information to trouble-shoot the mess. Laying down and kicking and beating my hands on the floor seemed to be a viable plan of action for a good 30 minutes after I saw the non-results.
Sigh. I know, I know. If you got it the first time, it would be called "search", not "RE-search". Anyway, I hadn't quite blown everything in the one experiment. I have enough to give things another shot and then remaining traces enough to try to salvage things should that run into difficulties as well. Still, it would be much nicer to be looking at results rather than very expensive wasted efforts. I'll be reattempting the experiment over the next three days. Wish me luck.
In other news, I have updated the Haiku page with random scraps I found on bits of paper I was throwing away. Peruse if you are seriously bored.

050111 Davis, CA, USA
I am finally sending out some holiday letters to people. I know they are late, but this is better than some years when I didn't write any holiday letters and it's better than other years when I wrote holiday letters and then didn't bother to send them. I recently found sealed and addressed envelopes from two years back. The letters were completely ready to go, but had not been stamped or mailed. I probably just carried them around in my bag until they were past date enough that I never bothered to mail them. Somehow, they ended up in a box which I moved with me from Utah to California.
For Christmas this year, my brother and sister-in-law requested that their kids be given stories rather than physical presents. For your amusement, I am reprinting below the story I gave to Alex (age 3.5 years).

I was traveling in Portugal a few months ago. Portugal is a country in Europe at the far western edge, tucked between the ocean and Spain. When I was there, I had to carry a dictionary with me all of the time. People there do not speak English, they speak Portuguese. I don't speak Portuguese so the only way I could figure out what people were saying or what was written down was by looking up the words in the dictionary.

When I went to restauraunts to get something to eat, I had to read the menu and look up all the words in the dictionary. Unfortunately, many of the words in the menu were not in the dictionary. Sometimes a soup would be called something like "summer harvest", but that name didn't let me know anything about the soup. Is "summer harvest soup" spicy? Is it hot or cold? Does it have meat or fish in it? I could not tell. So, many times I'd just order some food without knowing anything about it. Every meal was a chance to discover new foods. As you'd expect, trying something new to eat for every meal meant that I found many new things that I liked and many new things that were kind of nasty.

One food I have never liked is liver and onions. My father likes it, but I think it is gross. One of the days when I was in portugal, I ordered "figado com cebola". It turns out that this is "liver with onions" in Portguese. The waiter was happy when I ordered it... He told me it was his favorite. When it arrived and I realized that I had ordered liver and onions, I had to eat it because the waiter was waiting by the table to see how I liked it. I didn't want to hurt his feelings, so I pretended to like it. Afterwards, I carefully wrote down "figado" so that I would remember the portuguese word for liver; I didn't want to order it again. A few days later, I was at a different restaraunt in a different city in Portugal. The waiter suggested I try the "grelhado filete da regiao". I looked at the menu and did not see any liver or "figado" listed. I told the waiter to bring me the "grelhado filete da regiao"... When it arrived, I discovered it was liver and onions. "Grelhado filete da regiao" is portuguese for "grilled fillet of the region" and I guess the region I was in really liked liver, because that was what I got. The next restauraunt I went to, I looked up a phrase first. I said "Eu no quero figado". I was trying to say "I no want liver", but the waiter thought I was saying "Ah, nos quero figado", which means "we want liver". A few minutes later, he came back with a steaming plate of liver and onions. I was getting tired of liver and onions by that point, so from then on I just odered "tosta mista", which is a grilled ham and cheese sandwitch. It would have been nice to try more things, but I didn't want to risk getting more liver and onions.

050105 Davis, CA, USA
Hmm. Talking points/topics. I think there will be only one for today's update. Dedication - Even knowing what you ought to do, it can still sometimes be hard to do it. I've been planning on learning some Danish before I move there. According to the people who've been posted there before, it's not necessary; Danes are required to learn English in school and the ability to speak english is quite wide-spread. Still, I'm not one to go to a foreign country and *not* learn at least a little of the language. So, the original plan was to buy some learning aids and then spent a mere 30 min a day on teaching myself Danish... However, this has not exactly happened. When I get home from a long day at work (analyzing data, memorizing facts), about the least exciting thing to do is to study a language (analyzing grammer, memorizing words). Ugh. Instead I piddle around with things like completely re-reading Clavell's Shogun (1210 pages long) before offering it up on the book give-away page. I'd forgotten how good it is.

Page Last Modified: 2006 04 21, 08:55:31

 

 

Blog archives

• 071211 to 071123 
• 071111 to 071005 
• 070929 to 070802 
• 070728 to 070603 
• 070520 to 070323 
• 070320 to 070228 
• 070218 to 070122 
• 070121 to 061219 
• 061217 to 061119 
• 061114 to 061020 
• 061017 to 060917 
• 060916 to 060817 
• 060816 to 060717 
• 060716 to 060617 
• 060610 to 060518 
• 060515 to 060418 
• 060417 to 060218 
• 060218 to 051228 
• 051222 to 051124 
• 051114 to 051017 
• 051016 to 050918 
• 050914 to 050819 
• 050815 to 050717 
• 050717 to 050612 
• 050612 to 050509 
• 050509 to 050414 
• 050414 to 050313 
• 050313 to 041231 
• 041231 to 040612 
• 040612 to Start