Bachelor Home-Ec

A quart Nalgene bottle filled with hot coffee, and with a quart's worth of Tang powder added, makes for a rather vile-tasting drink. This is a bit unexpected, since coffee and Tang are the kinds of things that normally go into breakfast.

Compression Algorithms

Office rearrangement. We are all to be moved into newly-ensmallified cubicles (yes, and our red Swingline staplers are to be taken away), with the lab rats getting moved into tiny stalls altogether. Better than lots of open space where the downsized former coworkers used to live. I will take the opportunity to get away from the more stentorian molecular biologists---inverse square is my friend---and hope they don't move in the same direction.

I have decided that it must be a rite of passage among mol-bios to set off a firecracker in each ear when they graduate.

"Here's your diploma, and here's your firecracker!"
(BANG!)
"WHAT?"

Either that, or an inordinate number of them used to shoot mortars when they were younger.

Earth Day!

Wild turkey walking down the side of the road this morning (the bird, not the beverage). I do not know when running-it-down-with-a-Jeep season opens in this state, and didn't get a license anyway, so I guess I shall have to see if my local grocery store sells any bits of endangered animals that I could grill for dinner tonight.

David Szondy at Ephemeral Isle (http://www.davidszondy.com/ephemeral/2009/04/earth-day-2009.html#links) has more to say.

Ancient Mariner

Orbit Marine is the dive shop around here, and has been since 1973. Old building smell actually overwhelms the usual dive shop smell, and the neighborhood, if it's ever seen better days, sure ain't seeing them now. I had a nice talk with the owner yesterday. Ancient Mariner type. B/W photo of him, younger, wearing a two-hose rig, at Guantanamo Bay in 1967, so must be ex-Navy. Has the usual dive-through-the-ages museum in his shop, and one gets the impression that he's personally used all that equipment. Visibility isn't that great in the Sound, but gets better as one heads east toward the open ocean. Many wrecks around here, some of which the Ancient Mariner has salvaged---bits of crockery, and boat parts, and some rifle clips (Krag or 30-06, probably the second) from a military vessel, all corroded and barnacled from many years in the water. There's something about an artifact that was lost to Mr. D. Jones, but that, somehow is back in sunlight again. Even if it was something absolutely uninteresting in its former life, there's something about it now.

Diving season Starts in June. I am on the Ancient Mariner's email list, and look forward to going.

Bridge

According to a local informant, the roads leading to the Bridge of Death are windy and curvy as they are, not for any engineering reason, or even stupidity, but because Yale University had a boat house in the path of the bridge, and was able to argue that eminent domain did not apply in this case. That's a nice advertisement for the Yale Law School! "How good are we? Well, see that bridge... ?"

The boat house is long gone, by the way, and it seems that the city of New Haven has decided that the old bridge was causing too many traffic delays and endangering too many lives, and is building a new bridge. The new bridge will be straight.

The Epicycles of Life

So it's turning out that I am hanging around a bunch of molecular biology, where PCRs and various -ases happen in daily conversation. The daily commute over the Bridge of Death is a part of life, as long drives once were, and I know this area about as well as I knew Detroit back when the Auburn Hills/Ann Arbor corridor was where I tended to live. Now it turns out that I am starting a project to build a production-based deductive inference system, along the general lines of one I used at the U-M AI lab. It is early summer. Similar things prominent on the mental landscape to ones that happened during my master's time, with one exception.

Two Trips to the Beach

Visited Meigs Point at Hammonassett State Park on Saturday, then Sunday (Friday, spent at the office, to take advantage of not having a bunch of molecular biologists (query: what is the collective noun for a molecular biologist? a complex? a sequence? an assembly (no, that's more bio-informaticists)) shouting in my ears). Saturday was raw weather. Leaden skies, cold drizzle, wind and the implication that lightning was possible, if only it would get up some ambition and drag itself out of bed. "Nice place," I thought, "if you're a codfish: cold, dark and damp." Saturday evening the clouds blew away, turning the sky colors that I haven't often seen outside a World of Warcraft screenshot(*). I returned on Sunday, to see what the sea would look like. Sunny day, wind whipping the water into playful waves and the whole place smiling. I've always found it easy to lose myself in looking at the sea.

(*) Yes, this is what I meant to write. WoW and its kin tend to turn the saturation up, just a bit. Ideal-looking people; uniformly healthy trees; stonework at just the right point between newly-hewn and decayed; and skies that are just a bit more like themselves than they usually are in real life.

...And, I'm Back!

Hokay! Interwebs are coming out of the walls of my new apartment (along with the mice), parental units are back in Michigan, and computer box is hooked up once again.

In this case, no stop-gap access from the office, as funsites are forbidden there. And this Hanaseiru Wanpassu site is apparently, a funsite. Zees ees Kaos! Ve do not Funzeit readen heere! Or something. Anyway, back to my usual schedule of posting something every so often.

Next two posts were typed up during the last few weeks.

A-gittin' My Pitcher Took

DMV. Two days' worth. First day, ugly photo; second day, get shouted at by several clerks to I can pick up an instance of the official handicraft of the local prison population and a sticker for my windscreen.

Photo taker woman person creature didn't even give me a chance to make the sort of face I wanted. 40 minutes in line #3 (some non-citizens from a non-friend country ahead of me, to be fair to the clerks, so the one clerk that was working the one open window did a lot of conferring with her three buddies who were taking coffee breaks), to learn that I needed to stand in line #5. Picked up forms from line #5 so I could stand in line #4. Then line #4 again for the pic. By that time I had decided that I would make my best droop-jawed, closed-eyed stoner face, but the photo troll denied me even that pleasure by snapping as soon as I was in frame. "Next!" Picture ended up looking vaguely sleep-deprived or drunk (perfect for the next time I get pulled over for DUI!) rather than like the Last Known Photo that I'd intended. Opportunity wasted. Anyway, got my pitcher took, got the card, came early this morning to stand in line #1 and a quick jaunt to #2, and here I am. I for one can't wait for our national healthcare to start getting managed by these fine folks.

Nezumi-ga Iru

Place has mice. Either that or the next-door neighbors are trying to tunnel through with a blunt spork, one scrape at a time, in the middle of the night, and the upstairs neighbors have remarkably short legs and spend nights running footraces up and down the living room. In short, mice. Also, the laundry room shows spoor of mice.

I have read that aside from renting a cat, which the complex forbids in the strongest terms, a green-flavored, all-organic means of getting rid of mice is rats. To get rid of the rats, the Granola People recommend terriers, which are in turn trumped by wild asses. Wild asses can be evicted by orangoutangs, orangoutangs by mud-puppies, mud-puppies by ibexes---which will pretty much make their home where they please unless they espy caimans. Caimans will only respond to the strongest of remedies: Mme. Speaker Nancy Pelosi herself. Since I do not want to start a sequence of events that can only end with SanFran NaN roaming my apartment, turning off my appliances, raising my taxes and injecting herself with Botox, I guess I'll buy a mousetrap. (One of these days all those face-lifts will fail, suddenly, and Mme. Sprecher NaN will be left looking like a pug dog. I hope it happens in the Congressional chambers. That much stored energy, all going at once, is going to make a bang so loud it will wake up the Congresscritters sitting in the back rows!)