Thoughts on my first official conference as a graduate student
First off, I am not mean enough for the DC area. While I have been to the DC area once or twice as a child, I was just that, a child and I was buffered from the reality of DC by my grandparents and the safety of their van. I didn’t have much trouble making it from my terminal to the metro. I believe I was even fairly successful in determining the route I needed to take to get to my destination. Where I did experience trouble was in determining wether the listed price was for my total trip, including a transfer from the Blue line to the Orange line. The lady at the metro stand wasn’t much help either. She appeared as if she hated her job and as if answering the questions of weary travelers was the last place she wanted to be. I know it is easier said than done, but if you don’t enjoy dealing with customers or providing them with a satisfactory experience, then you would be best to seek employment outside of the field of customer service.
By Jupiter’s Cock!
When first I began watching Spartacus: Blood and Sand, I felt it uninspired; an ill-concieved guise of cinematic bloodshed to cover what appeared to be little more than cock, and breasts and love-making. Each episode contained more nudity than an issue of playboy and sexual exploits to put Emmanuelle1 to shame. What follows is a discussion of my journey through the first season of Blood and Sand. It contains strong language and imagery that some may find offensive. But like the series, this is done in hopes of portraying a factual representation of the events that occurred. (more…)
First Year Down
More quickly than I would have anticipated, the first year of my graduate career has come to a close. What that means for me is that I no longer have to be plagued by the dual (or triple) task of research and class (or TAing, with any luck). It wasn’t bad until this past spring quarter when I actually began to spend more time in the lab. Seeing everyone else working, I wanted to work too and before I knew it, class had ceased to be this daily ritual that I enjoyed, but rather this chore that continually interrupted more important work to be done in the lab. With one small exception, I can now proudly say that shall no longer be the case. I finished a revision for my term paper, due Wednesday and as of this moment, I am a free man. My time is now my own, the spend in the lab as I see fit.
A good thing, too, as I’ll be getting a student to mentor for the summer and possibly more in the fall. It is an experience that I’m looking forward to. One of the things that I need to work on during these next four years are my managerial skills so the sooner I get my minions, the better. If I can find one enamored with organic synthesis, all the better, as I might be able to place all of that work on them, following some training. Which means that I will have to learn more organic synthesis than I currently do. That is something I’m not looking forward to, but I am stoked about the Steglich Esterification I’ll be doing next week. If all goes well, I’ll get my desired ester using a much simpler, and much more to my like, process than the two other proposed ways.
On a side note, I have a couch bum. I refer to him as a bum only because they have spent nearly the last month complaining about having no job while doing little (that I’ve been able to witness) to remedy the situation. Even a temporary outage of our internet connection wasn’t enough to get them out of the house and away from the slavebox. They simply changed to playing a game that was equally as fun on single-player mode as they multiplayer games they are now back to playing. What amazes me is that I stopped rooming with said individual over two years ago because of similar behavior. To think, well over two years later and there has been absolutely no growth at all. It really saddens me.
Charlese
Every now and then I go tooling around youtube. This is usually brought on by a desire to hear a specific song that I haven’t yet added to my library and I invariably get caught up in listening to covers of the intended song. Tonight was such a night and Moondance was the song I sought to delight my ears with. Being such an iconic song by Van Morrison
That is how I stumbled across Charlese, a British vocalist wishing to make a name for herself. The composition was simple, her vocals accompanied by an acoustic guitar played by Matthew Shaw. It wasn’t overworked or over done and I admit that I found it more engaging than the version by Mr. Bublé. Charlese has a deep, throaty sorta sensual sound that easily lends itself to a smokey (or not so smokey, given the times) jazz club in a hole-in-the-wall dive that everyone visits to hear the best music in town. If you don’t believe me, visit charlese.co.uk for yourself and give her a listen. (more…)
EBTG: Low Tide of the Night
There are times when you hear a song and it just seems to resonate so well with your current situation that you would swear that the lyricists peaked into your mind to find inspiration. That is how I feel about Low Tide of the Night by Everything But the Girl. Off of their album, Temperamental
When you’re down and troubled
You don’t tell you friends
You don’t tell your family
I won’t let them talk about me
I’m gonna let nobody down
It is as if, at that moment, we are both living our lives not for ourselves, but because we feel obligated to do so out of loyalty to our friends and family. We endure the pain, put on our mask and play the role that is expected of us so as to keep others from talking about us. As if we know that the talk won’t bring help, but only more pain and ridicule for being being weak or broken or just not right in the head. We have given over to altruism, leading a painful and thankless existence so that others may continue theirs unburdened. ”I’m gonna let nobody down,” except for myself.
But in the end it is worth it as you don’t force others to question if they did all that they could have. You don’t force them to doubt their actions, to wonder what more they could have done. (more…)
85-90% Survival Rate
I must admit that I do enjoy the fact that no one really knows about this small, insignificant, place on the web that I have claimed as my own. It allows me a certain degree of freedom that I am not afforded in other places. Here, I am allowed to be myself; i am allowed to drop all pretenses that everything is going well and be myself. Here is one of the few places where I am allowed to be honest with myself.
I can admit thing such as displeasure with Seattle. It has nothing to do with the city itself, but rather the situation I find myself in. I can admit my increased dependence on old friends such as Jack and Morgan or new friends such as Spire, Strongbow and Crispin. There is little fear of reprisal or having to assuage to many hurt feelings or distraught thoughts over my well being. There are a few that may stumble upon my ramblings here from time to time, but hopefully they know me well enough that any information here shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. If it does, then perhaps the channels of communication aren’t as open as they should be. Or it could be that they do as I and try to ignore those things that induce uncomfortable feelings.
If you can’t be with the one you love
Love the one you’re with, or so the lyrics go. In my time here in Seattle, I am finding that to be easier said than done. The major fallacy in such logic is that it assumes that there is someone for you to be with in lieu of the one you love. Unfortunately, I do no have that luxury. I tried by way of a dog, but I am not a dog person and I have no patience for dogs. I much prefer the demeanor of cats, as fickle as they may be, and my lifestyle did not mesh well with a small creature that constantly sought validation for its existence. Now the dog is doing much better in the place I wish I were, no longer subject to my changing moods or strict discipline. So I am back to being alone, and still unhappy with the situation that I now find myself in. But thinking that a dog could fill the void that often forms when I find myself alone was a mistake on my part. Lucky for me, the one I love is a dog person and the one that I really purchased the dog for, following the loss of her family pet. He isn’t a perfect replacement, but I do feel validated in the purchase in seeing the joy he brings to both hers and her mother’s life, despite the fact that her mother is some 1700 miles away.
So what is a person, suffering from bipolar disorder, to do in such a situation. I could turn to random strangers – by way of craigslist – to fill the void, as I’ve had no success making any real connections with my peers. Or I could turn to the bottle and reacquaint myself with my friends Daniels and Morgan, loosing myself in research and other unmentionables. It isn’t a very satisfying existence, but in the absence of anyone to talk to or connect with, we have to make due with what we have. And I figured I should do so while I can before I decide to return to the medications that I’ve not felt I needed until I found myself revisiting dark places better left forgotten.
Storage
I have been collecting media for a number of years, some of it dating back to 1996 or earlier. Keeping track of all of this media, while always a headache, was easier in the past due to my primary machine being a self-built windows/linux running behemoth. I still have a behemoth of a machine, but I have found that as I have gotten older and as technology has gotten more mature, I no longer rely upon my desktop machine as much. It still works well for sharing data, but with each new iteration of Windows the process becomes increasingly more annoying and following a hardware/software issue a few years ago, I moved to a regime of housing my data on external units.
I moved to external units as I didn’t want my data to be locked to one machine and it worked well for a while, but now I am realizing the pitfalls of this setup as well. Following that unfortunate incident in ’05, I purchased my first Mac and took my first steps towards moving towards a mac-based ecology. Now I am plagued with several units, mostly based on IEEE-1394a (firewire 400), and no permanent home for them due to a split household. While I technically due have a G4 mini that could serve the task, I would prefer a more independent solution which has lead me to look into network attached storage (NAS) based solutions. (more…)
