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It is easier to lead men to combat, stirring up their passion, than to restrain them and direct them toward the patient labors of peace.
- Andrè Gide

070121 Davis, CA
More thoughts on games, largely inspired by the realization that I've been too dang busy of late to play any:
Games are a vehicle for pretend accomplishment. I don't think people outgrow games any more than they outgrow a need for a sense of accomplishment; games simply decrease in importance as the ability for, and rate of, real success increases. Even then, games provide a set of rules for social engagement. People are rarely satisfied with simply sitting around together; there is the drive to "do something", even if it is passive, like watching a film or sports event.

Cold wind howls 'cross roofs,
slanting grey sunlight lacks warmth.
Early spring, Davis.

070118 Davis, CA
Still reasonably busy at work, but my assistant is all trained up and things are settling down a bit. Tomorrow should be OK.

I've made good progress on the home front; I'm now visibly improving things as I go about cleaning things up and putting things away. This is a significant advance; for a while there I'd look about, see lots of boxes and packing material, clean up for several hours and at the end of that look around and still see piles of boxes and packing material.

In other news, I fly to Chicago on Monday for a business meeting and I'll be returning Thursday afternoon. I won't be in Chicago long enough to visit with friends there, but I'm looking forward to the trip. A few days away from the lab bench will feel like a bit of a vacation.

In yet more news, as I've been investigating things in Davis (who's the best local broadband provider, etc.), the Davis Wiki has been quite useful. Davis is a very small town and yet some residents have created this disturbingly obsessive wiki giving massive amounts of Davis-centric information. Want to learn about the Condos I'm in? The wiki has information on the McKeon Condominiums. Want to know about local Broadband service? The Broadband options in the Davis area are carefully reviewed. Of course there are reviews of Davis Restaurants, listings of Vegan options, and much, much more. Like I said, it's a little unsettling to realize how exhaustively this little town has been written up... You almost expect so see pictures of all the residents and little descriptions of how long each one has lived here.

070116 Davis, CA
I will be brief. The good news: I now have DSL operating at home and can do email and such from home. The bad news: The service can be considered to be "Blazing Fast!" (as the advertisements promised) only if you would typically use this to describe the speed of an elderly, arthritic yak, with severe glaucoma. Sigh.

070115 Davis, CA
I bought a new phone and now can use the home land-line that now active. The number is 1-530-756-1539. I have not hooked up an answering machine yet, but at least the line is active. I will have DSL by tomorrow as well, so I will no longer have to stay at work to update this site. Yea! Eventually, I may even have a clean, organized apartment as well.

070112 Davis, CA
I've been as busy as a one-handed orangutan at a lice convention. However, I finally decided to give in and get a land phone line, not because I wanted to suplement my cell phone; I simply want internet service and getting a phone line so I could get DSL was the cheapest option. Supposedly, the phone line was activated yesterday. I say supposedly, because I have not been able to check yet: I have not found a phone in my unpacking yet. I've dug up three mobile phones, several extra lengths of phone line, and several phone line splitters, but no regular phones. I'm sure I have two or three cheap handsets buried someplace, but I don't know where they are just now. Probably, they've remained buried, perhaps they were wrapped up in a blanket and were unnoticed and stuffed in a closet along with bedding I was putting away. Anyway, I'll let you all know when I eventually find a phone and can actually use the phone line. The number will be 530-756-1539, but don't bother writing it down just now; once I have a phone plugged in, I'll repost the number, announce it's activation, and add the number to the Travel Details page and the right-hand information bar. Without a phone, the number is useless.

While I was hunting for a phone, I was opening the few boxes left untouched in the initial box opening and vermin purge of the first few days. It continues to be a discovery session of junk, valued items, and valuable items. The junk is being tossed/recycled as I find it, but even with the junk eliminated from the accounting, my place is stuffed with, well, stuff. I need to get rid of a bunch of things. I'm planning on doing a massive "spring cleaning" to reduce the sheer volume of stuff. I'll be keeping some things that I value (e.g. a cheap fan from Japan that my host-brother gave me 20 years ago) and finding ways to profitably get rid of some valuable things (e.g. some mint condition comics and cards that I don't really care about, but could be pretty nice money if I sold 'em). This organizing of stuff is taking longer than I'd expected, that's for sure.

070104 Davis, CA
One piece of good news for the new year is that I have an assistant at work. She's a grad. student at the local Univ., doing an additional program called the "Developed Expertise in Biotechnology" program. As part of this, the DEB students are required to intern for a few months with a Biotech company. So, for discount prices, I'll have a relatively skilled part time assistant at least until the end of March. Up front, that means a little more work for me as I train her in the current procedures, etc., but in the long run, it means that I can be much more productive without killing myself. So far, she is working out great; picking things up fast, relatively independent, etc.

The schedule I had followed previously was one of crushingly long days alternating with fairly light days. Now that I have an assistant for part of every day, I've staggered when I start things so that the work is more even on a day-to-day basis. It's more book-keeping to have a series of staggered starts and staggered processing, but so long as my notes and planning are solid, it all works out. In a way, my refusal to abuse my assistant with overwork is resulting in my finally taking the steps to make my own schedule less bruising.

Anyway, during this initial part where I've been getting the training in and shifting the experiments over to the staggered, interwoven, more even schedule, I've been pulling pretty long hours... because I'm me. Once the DEB student leaves, I've been finishing up those things that took too long to fit in the planned day's work (due to the time taken in showing where things are located or teaching new techniques, etc.) and then setting things up for the next day's work, so there is no need to waste possible training time with things like just waiting for an autoclave sterilization cycle.

Still, I don't regret it at all, because this means that the training time has been quite efficient and the DEB student has been picking things up fast. I don't think it will be too much longer before she's pretty much trained up and I'll have the freedom to work a more 9-6ish shift while still seeing the experimental pace I'd like to see. It's nice to have an assistant.

Oh, in my "spare" time, I have been putting stuff away and attempting to keep up some minor competency in Chinese and Japanese. Simple stuff like remembering that 夀 (longevity) is just an old Japanese form of the Traditional Chinese 壽, which is 寿 in Simplified Chinese. Eh, it's far from maintaining any real competency, but I'm hoping it's enough to keep me from losing my hard-won knowledge too rapidly. If it weren't for the fact that I'm not sleeping much already, I'd be trying to work on the Danish and German as well. Sigh. For all my messing with languages, I'm still fluent only in English. For the rest, it's just scattered phrases and a basic idea of how the language ought to go, were I better at it. Oh well.

070103 Davis, CA
As you may have guessed by my lack of posts of late, I have been busy as all get-out. The shipping company finally picked my things up from storage (at my parents' place in New York) shortly before Christmas. A number of boxes had been stored out back in the "summer house" (a glorified shed). Most of my things were already neatly boxed up but some of the things from inside needed to be packed and some of the boxes from the summer house had split open (from too many things pile atop them), resulting in these needing to be repacked... This becomes important later.

My things were finally delivered on Saturday the 30th. The unloading crew failed to show up, so the driver and I unloaded everything (oof!). After having spent the last month essentially camping in an empty apartment, I was really happy to finally have a table to eat at, chairs to sit on, and some pots and pans. For the first box or two, I was really happy, finding old belongings like old friends rediscovered. Then I hit the unpleasant surprise: I took out a roll of aluminum foil that had been oddly stuck in a box that was mostly bedding and a scattering of dead insects and live larvae fell out. Ick!

Reconstructing things, it seems that I'd left a box of Uncle Ben's instant rice in the bottom of a box of kitchen stuff long, long ago. When that box, stored in the shed, split open, insects found a wonderful food source and breeding ground. The movers had then dumped together all the stuff that was not packed along with the stuff that needed to be repacked (including the insect-laden stuff from the infested box) and then they'd shoved this stuff into any box that was either already packed but seemed to have some space or aggregated the things into new boxes.

So, rather than slowly unpack and put away a box at a time, I ended up opening up every box on the first day in order to locate and purge all the dispersed insect-infested items that had been spread throughout the shipment. I had to be zealous; I had no urge to either infest my house or to cause the spreading of potentially damaging insects from one coast to the other. It was very late at night before I was satisfied that I had hunted down the last of the horrid little things.

Anyway, by the end of the first of the year, I had everything under control, the insects and insect debris purged, and most things put away in at least temporary locations. The next step is to give everything a good cleaning/dusting and then to organize it. Messy as the place is now (packing supplies all over the place), it looks cozy and I finally have a good feeling for what my home will look like once it's all put together.

061227 Davis, CA
I'm back from my Christmas visit with my brother, sister-in-law, and micro-herd of nephews. The nephews continue to be really winsomely cute. The visit was, as always, short but really nice. I'd felt like I was being somehow cheap by bringing the kids stories (one page stories about things that their father and I did when we were little boys) instead of physical toys, but the kids liked them. I continue to be the uncle with the inexhaustible supply of stories and so stories are what they always want from me. Little do they know that I've come darn close to running out of new story ideas repeatedly.

One thing I was thinking about, shortly before Christmas, was the idea of getting my parents' help to trace my family lines back as far as my parents can trace them. If possible, with pictures of the people, hopefully a small black and white picture of the person in the fullness of their life. By that I mean when the person is neither baby-fresh and unfinished-looking nor shrunken and deminished by time. On my father's side, it should be possible to trace the tree back a ways and there may even be pictures to go with many of the names, but on my mother's side the tumult of world war II and emigration has erased much of what was.

I know that one's family history is an illusion, ultimately meaningless to the world as a whole and certainly meaningless even to me, other than how it may have shaped the people who shaped me as I grew up. Still, it is interesting to me, and that is enough.

061219 Davis, CA
My family was looking for suggestions for gifts for me and one of the things I put on the list was an architecture book (for small house designs). In a phone call with my parents, they mentioned that the inclusion surprised my sister, but caused my father to reminisce about one of my first designs: A spherical bedroom with a firepole in the center.

Anyway, I continue to think about my "dream house" even though I can not afford to have a house built any time soon and I may never have a house built to my specifications. Still, I think about it off and on, refining my thoughts on the topic of houses. Y'all might find my musings on this topic boring, so previously I've (mostly) resisted the urge to natter on at length on the topic... Well, your luck has run out because I'm giving in to the urge now.

A little while ago, I was thinking about attempting to maximize living space in a smaller house and one of the ways of doing this is to eliminate hallways whenever possible. Having the dining room and the kitchen and the living room all have access to one another without extra walls or hallways consuming space is a way of maximizing the space. Often two of the aforementioned three rooms have no clear separation other than a demarking ceiling or flooring change. This opens up the space, preventing otherwise small spaces from feeling cramped.

Despite the advantages to be gained from the elimination of hallways, hallways should be judiciously included in floor plans. A hallway creates a common space and allows neighboring rooms to be considered private space. This may be one of the reasons that even cramped floor plans tend to put bedrooms off of hallways rather than having them exit directly into a more purpose-driven room (e.g. kitchen). In a highly cramped floor plan, there are distinct gains to be had from occasional psychological division of the space. If, for example, one person is practicing guitar in the dining room and another person is playing Xbox in the living room, concentration is very difficult when the space is shared, as in the open floor plan, but much easier is even a symbolic barrier (e.g. a folding screen) is in place to reinforce a psychological space separation.

Oh, as a total aside, musing on this has reminded me of a feature I've always disliked: two door access to a bathroom. Often this can be found where one door is direct access from a bedroom and the other door is either to a hallway or to another bedroom. The bathroom, certainly arguably one of the more private of house rooms, is, in this layout, turned into a connecting space much like a piece of hallway, which is arguably one of the most common of spaces in a house. The only solution is to permanently lock one of the two doors, which is nearly as silly as putting in the two doors in the first place.

That's all. I'm now officially done boring you with house design musings. Try taking a walk through your house/apartment some time and think about it as an architect might. It can be pretty interesting.

Page Last Modified: 2008 04 14, 16:51:05

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