Author: Gene

So a couple days ago I was leaving the lab a squirrel came charging towards me, kinda like a dog trying to get in the door, only tiny. So I closed the door way before it got there, but it kept charging. I steps out of it’s way and it went behind me and sniffed at the door. I turned around and looked at it, it was very cornered, and it just sniffed at me and stuff. I went home. It was a strange squirrel.

Speaking of lab I’ve been having some success in my independent research. We isolated some protein, and know for sure that we have it because of some gels we run. It’s even pure! I’ve also determined where it should come off from my unique column I built by running a protein through of now MW and measuring where it came off. So soon we’re going to start running my protein through the column and actually doing experiments instead of just pre-experiment experiments.

The labs for the actual class are not going so well. We had to retry to run a protein gel to determine that we isolated a protein (different from independent research, same procedure though) and have failed both times it looks like. It could be present in quantities too small to show up with the test we’re using however, so I think we’re just going to carry on as if its there and see if we can detect anything in the later steps. This is happening to the whole class by the way, not just my group, so I don’t blame Laura (my lab partner).

We’re working on decryption software in CS which is pretty cool. I’m working with Keston, which makes things a lot easier on me, since he’s good at doing my work for me, and so we’re pretty far. We’re having some issue that isn’t really our fault, we need the prof to look at it I think. But I think once we fix it will have a program that can derive and decrypt a file with every possibly decryption key up to a designated value. The parameters for determining which key is the right one we don’t have worked out yet. Our current implementation will search for a word in the decrypted message. Later I think we’ll use a dictionary or something. Anyway, pretty neato stuff.

Besides work I’ve also been spending quite a bit of time playing PSU. I don’t really know why. It’s kinda quirky. I can think of a lot of things against it. At least I’m not paying for it. 😛

So I’ve got a plan to select against radicalism in the modern world. It goes like this. If you kill yourself, and in a note you leave before you death you say you killed yourself because of some other individual, that fingered individual must be put to death. In this way the radicals will wipe each other out.
It’s not a perfect plan. People in power positions will drop like flies. You could fake someone’s suicide and kill an additional person. I think I would say anyone under the age of 18 can’t participate. Ooo… maybe you have to be at least 18 and older than the person you desire to kill. /shrug Who cares, it’s the general idea that’s the point. If you’re willing to die to kill someone, you probably both don’t deserve to live. 😛

Also, this. Listen to Penn Radio people.

Saw the movie Big Fish starring Obi-Wan. Eh… 6 or 7.

At Ody LAN there were displays of PSU (Phantasy Star Universe) which is a new MMORPG. It’s fairly interesting. I’ve been playing on someone else’s account. I got to level 9. It’s quite cutesy and fun, but the actual mechanics are fairly simple, at least as far as I understand it. It looks like Ody and Keston might play it quite a lot, so I’ll refrain from reviewing it, at least right now.

Cool brain stuff.

It’s almost time for my final undergraduate class schedule sign up thing to happen. I’ve already scheduled a meeting with my adviser and taken a look at my what I should take. I just tried to check when I’m actually registering but found our college scheduling site is down… awesome.

Anyway, for Jan term I’m thinking about taking woodcarving. 4 arts credits. Jan term should be cool if I take that.

Next semester it looks like:

Intro to Electromagnetism (intro physics semester 2)
Genetics
Ecology (only required class)
Computer Graphics
Physics Discussion
Physics Lab
Genetics Lab

Yeah… not so fun. I might not do the computer graphics class, as it would likely be not very useful as a career thing, although I’d probably find it fun. It would put me up to 16 credits however. There are some more CS classes that I haven’t looked at closely that I might consider as a substitute, but my current plan is as laid out up there.

Mother, there is no glassblowing. Try not to cry, or fret to much over my lost opportunities in life. If you think about it, it wasn’t an opportunity at all, and so I haven’t lost.

8 is fairly enamored with Vox and is even talking about abandoning this in favor of the Vox set up. I do enjoy many features of Vox, but I have some little problems. 8 and I would have to split into separate blogs, at least as far as I know. That’s not so bad, but apparently you can’t customize your sidebar as extensively as we have here, so I wouldn’t be able to have a direct link to all the comics and such. I believe that with all the tagging and organization tools they have available a reasonable substitution could be made, but I haven’t actually invested the time to do it yet.

The coolest thing about Vox is the connections with other bloggers, I think. It’s really easy to find each other, everything is really well reported and documented, and there are feeds for everything. I <3 feeds. My final problem with abandoning this blog is that in the current state we have no archives, so I would not be able to back them up and save them. I like records. Where are my archives?!? I’m going to try to check if I can get to them signed in as 8.

So I woke up suddenly and unexpectedly a little before 7. That’s what happens when I sleep w/ 8. I didn’t realize it was so late so I check Milo to see if 8 had messaged me. She had, but apparently I was right to go to bed without her in this case.

It’s freezing. (Not really, it’s 34 degrees actually, and the fog cleared up just a few minutes ago. Thank you ForecastFox.)

I’m pretty much awake awake now with like 1.5 hours to kill before class. Craziness. This won’t turn out well. I’ll probably die or something. I dunno how it works if you wake up more than 20 minutes before class starts. Doesn’t a demon possess you and make you put ooze in your hair?

So how about that Richard Dawkins, eh? He was on PennRadio recently. I’ve got the download of it. I’m thinking of trying to put it on my Vox just to test the audio option. I should really read his books or something. He’s all over my little internet world atm. I’m pretty sure I’ve said everything he says, but nobody paid much attention. Maybe if I become a professor at Cambridge I’ll get some attention. Maybe it’s the whole “book” thing. 😛 The thing I think is most interesting about his latest book is that fact that he got it published and that it’s doing so well. In Dr. Dawkin’s interviews and stuff he says that he proposed it 6 years ago, and everyone said they couldn’t sell it, but now they can. Wouldn’t it be neat if 8 years of Bush resulted in increased interest in, and respect of, science among the general public? The SEofA jumping in and pushing that respect could result in some major changes around here. Isn’t it cute how optimistic I am? I’m going for cute.

I’ve updated my Froogle wish list, which is viewable from my profile. I did so for my mother, cause my b-day is coming up. However, anyone is free to buy me things. Those things listed on Froogle are just a general guide, I don’t want the specific item… except for the D&D books. 😛

Earlier today a transformer blew not too far from my house. The explosion was quite impressive, and the loss of power sucked. It was only out for like 30 minutes, and I went to 8’s to chill out anyway, but still.

In blogging news, Vox, which I talked about before, has launched. Go check it out. I think it’s pretty neat, although I couldn’t figure out how to do a blog with multiple contributors. You could read so on my Vox site. Most of the goodness of Vox requires community, so it will take a while to see if it’ll be worth it, but I think it’s pretty slick.

ttfn

For those of you who don’t really know who David Blaine is, here’s the real David Blaine for a minute… exactly.

I managed to make it to my classes today. I slept a bit during Game Night but that’s cool.

I got my Stats test back. I got another high A, but this time I actually legitimately missed a point. I missed a few others due to random professor insanity, but I think this is my first actual mistake in the class. Just thought it should be noted. I thought of this as I was sitting through the class, sleep deprived as I was, as he went over question after question from the test that I got right. /cry

The purpose of this post mostly is to link everyone to Firefox 2.0 which has been released recently. I downloaded it a couple times earlier and had all kinds of difficulties, but I did some research (very little) and figured out what was wrong. When you install it, cause I know you will, if you have any problems try uninstalling whatever version of Firefox you have completely and then reinstall Firefox 2.0. The issue is that although it says you have closed Firefox some processes are still running and that interferes with the installation process.

Firefox 2.0 has several new features, most of which I was already using with various extensions to Firefox 1.5, but they’re all integrated and shiney in 2.0. Spell check is the big awesome thing, there’s also a better RSS set up, and the tabs scroll as opposed to getting tiny, which is useful for those of us who like to have 50 tabs open.

There are also some new extensions already out for 2.0. I’ve started using several from this list. To make this post I’m using Performancing (from the list), so let’s hope it works.

Some extensions that I was using are not currently working on 2.0, so there is a downside. Googlepedia, is one, but I’m sure it’ll get updated soon. Lightboxer, which I showed earlier, is functional for 2.0 with the updated Greasemonkey..

So check it out, it’s definately an improvement on Firefox, and although I barely remember IE, I do know I left for a reason.

So apparently I haven’t updated in a while. Let me tell you about my fall break.

What happened on Friday? I’m sure something happened on Friday. Oh yeah, 8 made me go on this double date with her freshman year roommate and friend Deeksha and her bf. Deeksha is from the United Arab Emerate which is #1 for use of resources per capita. They’re even more wasteful then us. Go them.

So anyway, we went to the Trask brewery, which is mostly just a restaurant, and were served by 8’s roommate who works there. It would be weird if he didn’t. 8 says I was very good and didn’t make anyone cry or feel uncomfortable or anything, so that’s cool. I talked to the other bf about politics and human nature and such w/o him devolving into conspiracy theories or drug policy which he is apparently apt to do, or me devolving into trying to think of ridiculous arguments just to force my “opponent” into coming up with responses to them, which I am apt to do. Did you follow that sentence? Read it again if you have to.

So that was pretty much Friday. I probably hung out with my male friends and such as well, but that’s not worth talking about.

Saturday was Ody LAN, which I wasn’t planning on going to on account of my broken computer and all. So I came home to do some work and Keston and Brandon and Dimitri were converging to go to the LAN so I thought I’d fiddle with my computer just to confirm to myself that I had to miss the Ody LAN this week. So I turned it on and it was as usual. I blew on it, and then turned it on again, and it worked. Oh, Nintendo has trained me well.

So I ventured forth to Ody LAN and we did play many hours of video games, DotA, AvP2, and DoW. I was very hungry, but that’s to be expected. Ooo… I also played Geometry wars for the PC, which is crap, but I beat it basically. I want to play the Xbox version, wanna try and give Bmills some competition. So anyway, I didn’t get to sleep until like 4 am that day.

On Sunday there was Eberron 2. It started at 10 and went until about 5. It was fun. One of the players died of a disease. We woke up one day and he was dead as opposed to just shivering all the time. I’ve never had that happen, it was weird. His character was getting on my characters nerves anyway though, so it’s ok. Sleep at around 7 that day.

Next day was Ody BBQ. 8 went so that was cool. We basically just chill out in Ody’s back yard and eat free food at Ody BBQ’s, so that was sweet. After the BBQ though I had to do work. I wrote 3 of those test question answer things that I had to. I used google docs so my mommy could help me edit them. I also took some breaks to play Guitar Hero courtesy of bmills and DotA w/ Keston and bmills. Bmills kinda moved in over Fall break if you haven’t figured that out yet.

Now is today. Today I have played like 2 hours of Cakemania because 8 found it and made me play it. Well, she made me crack it for her and then I played it some. It’s quite addicting. I also finished my test, and wrote this post. Not much else though. Now I have to figure out how to fall asleep at a reasonable time so that I can wake up at 8:30 tomorrow. /sigh

Yeah, I guess this update is good enough for now. I can’t think of any rants or anything I should do.

Y r u so dumb?!?

Do the links work for you guys? DO YOU EVEN TRY?!?!?!?!111

k sleep now.