Category: mostly unimportant

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Of vacations and weddings…

So, we went up to Wisconsin/Minnesota for a little vacation last week, largely because we needed to be in St. Paul, MN on Saturday for Adam Waudby’s wedding. Brooke and I left last Tuesday for Hannibal so we could leave Edie with Brooke’s parents (thanks!) and then continued up to Madeline Island, on Lake Superior, off the shore of Bayfield, WI…and it was a 12 hour drive…a lovely way to spend my 25th birthday, but whatever… We got up there and took a ferry to reach the island, arriving in the 7:00 pm hour or so… We camped at Big Bay State Park, about 7 mi from the ferry landing (big island!), which is nice and far from anything resembling a tourist trap. We made some awesome steaks that night (there’s a picture included at my Google Photos site) and were well-rested for the next day…

Thursday was spent largely exploring the island, walking on the “boardwalk” (as in, a walkway made of boards…clever name, eh?), and then kayaking out in the lake…where I got a lovely sunburn, despite the 70 F weather and partial cloudiness… It got rather cold that night (45 F or so), even though the high was supposed to be ~90 F with a low around 60 F. Moral of the story: never trust the forecast, ’cause if you’re going to northern Wisconsin, it’ll be cold anyway.

Friday we went to Minneapolis-St. Paul for the wedding rehearsal (another 5 hr drive) and a brief stop at the Mall of America. Saturday was spent at the wedding, of course (congrats, kids!), and then we went to Ikea and the Mall (again…) with Mom and Dad. We got a coffee table, a TV stand (of sorts), a wine rack, and a few other small items at Ikea (thankfully, all of which fit in the car with everything else we had…) and didn’t get too much at the Mall.

Now, briefly…the idea of this Mall… For those that haven’t been there, it’s huge. It’s kinda like St. Louis Mills mall, but has four stories (only 3 with stores) and an amusement park (which was pretty impressive). The real downside is the store selection though, I think. As in, I saw at least 3 Starbucks’, 3 Caribou Coffee shops, 2 Claire’s, a two-story Old Navy, and 3 Lids’ hat shops. Now. If you’re going to the mall, do you really need that much coffee? What can you find at one Claire’s that isn’t at the other one (in the same building)? I guess that I was a bit underwhelmed, ’cause while they had plenty of shopping opportunities, it was either the same store multiple times, or all clothing stores… I saw one Radio Shack, no Best Buy/Circuit City, nothing that really interested me (personally). Then again, Mom and Brooke had a good time… 😛

Anyway, we got back Sunday night around 7:00 pm, after picking up Edie in Hannibal. It was a good trip, overall, and we came back pretty well rested and ready to go for work Monday morning…for the most part…

I’ve got pictures of the vacation up, as well as general wedding pictures from the weddings we’ve attended thus far this summer. Check ’em out if you’re curious…

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March of the Giant Penguins

Giant penguin

I know I need to get a “vacation post” up, likely later today, but I just had to point this out… Apparently, according to an article in PNAS (a decent science journal), as reported in National Geographic, giant penguins used to roam Peru. New fossils discovered show that one species lived around 42 million years ago and were 3 feet tall, about the size of a modern King Penguin…but the other kind was 5 feet tall and lived 36 million years ago… It also had a foot-long beak to spear fish; both species were more “warm-adapted” than their modern cousins.

w00t, giant penguins! Let the Linux community rejoice! 😉

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Summer Viewing List

…not to be confused with a “summer reading list,” ’cause that’s so 1992… I don’t really read, that is, so movies will have to do, and more specifically, trilogies. Thus, I’m going to do my best to watch all the trilogies I own this summer. The goal, of course, is to watch each trilogy in one day as best as possible. This may be difficult for some of them, but I’m sure going to try…

So let the list begin:

    Star Wars
    The Matrix
    Back To The Future
    Indiana Jones
    Pirates of the Caribbean
    X-Men
    Spider-Man
    The Terminator
    Ocean’s 11/12/13
    Lord of the Rings

I watched the Star Wars original trilogy this past Saturday whilst playing games with Josh, and I’ve got 2/3 of Pirates watched (…need to re-watch the first one again…) – Spider-man is also getting spread out, in that I need to re-watch 1 and 2, after seeing 3 in theaters a few weeks ago. I’ll try to watch all ten Star Trek movies as well, but those are more difficult to fit into one day, so I’ll have to spread that set out over the entire summer.

Of the nine trilogies listed above, Lord of the Rings will be the most difficult (extended edition, of course!). I mean, Nathan, Jerry and I watched all three in one day back in Undergrad… That’s a good 12 hrs straight, of course… I guess I’m saying that I’ve done it once, so I’m unsure as to whether I need to do it again…but I probably will, anyway…

Obviously, I need to be spending more time in the lab… 😛

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Strange days…

“Times, they are a changin’,” says Bob Dylan… Not that things are drastically different right now from where they were a month ago, but school has certainly shifted to a different “chapter,” so to speak… As of a few weeks ago, I have no classes to attend anymore in graduate school, so I’m working completely on research now. Really, I’ve just been spending the last two weeks getting in to all the literature on the subject(s) I’m investigating, getting papers from the last few years and as far back as 1948…

I guess it’s just that it’s going to be weird getting used to not being spoon-fed information anymore. It’s not like I can go to a textbook for this stuff, or go to a few lectures on a general subject and take an exam after you learn the material… Nope, now it’s reading directly from the fringes of all scientific knowledge, sifting through hundreds of papers and data to try and decide what information to focus on, and what to set aside… It’s just a different kind of learning, a kind that I’m not terribly used to…yet… Kinda like solving a puzzle, really, in that you run across various pieces that you have to fit together. If they fit, you win a Ph.D… 😛

Anyway, life is good, otherwise. We’ve got three weddings to attend in June (let alone our own anniversary…), and we’ll probably spend a little vacation time up in Minnesota while we go to one of them, but that mostly takes care of the weddings for the summer. We’ve gotta figure out what to do with Edie for a few of those weddings, but I’m sure there are plenty of people that’d be willing to watch her (hint, hint…).

Onward, summer!

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Of Generation Gaps and Twitter…

So, before yesterday, I’d never heard of Twitter…I had to learn about it from an NPR podcast I listened to… It’s apparently a new social networking phenomenon (a la Facebook or MySpace…) that tells the world what you’re doing at any given time. You can post, IM or use a cell phone with text messaging to post a short blurb giving everyone an update, and then you can subscribe to these updates by various means… For example, I could subscribe to your Twitter account and anytime you’d update it, my cell phone would vibrate and I’d receive a text message letting me know what’s up. You can write any message you want, from “looking at websites” to “eating a ham sandwich”…

According to the Wikipedia article, Twitter has been around since October of 2006… NPR and the New York Times, amongst others, have done articles about it… Hundreds of thousands of people all over the world use it, apparently…and this leads me to my point:

Why did it take until May for me to hear about it?

I guess it means I’ve reached something of a turning point… Up until now, I’ve kept up with technology and websites relatively well – Truman students knew about Facebook before it was even available for them to join, and well before news organizations jumped on it as a “phenomenon”… And I keep up with geeky things like that pretty regularly looking at sites like Slashdot and Engadget… So do we all eventually reach a point when our knowledge of the world becomes antiquated? You hear stories from parents beginning with “when I was your age…” all the time, and at some point, all of our parents probably realized that they were knowing less and less about the generation(s) that were coming after them… My generation is just barely involved in the whole “social networking” thing, but the high school students at church are all over MySpace – I simply have no interest in it. Back in college, I’d hear about stuff from friends in classes and new sites to visit, but we don’t really talk about such things in grad school…I’d assume that “real world jobs” would be similar…

I guess I just wasn’t planning on hitting this realization just before turning 25… I figured it’d happen after I had kids, and after they got a bit older and started getting into their own interests… I wasn’t thinking that I’d reach a point where I can visually see the generation just behind mine gradually distancing itself from mine…if only in this one sector of our lives…

I’m sure I’m just over-reacting, but with the world moving faster and faster and more information becoming available over the internet, it makes you wonder if the number of years between each generational shift is decreasing… For example, I’ve never thought that my sister and I (separated by 3 years) were in different generations, but maybe we are…

Has anyone else heard of or used Twitter, or is it just me?

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A learning experience…

So, last week was a bit busy trying to work with my first poster presentation of my research.  The way conferences work, you typically make a 4′ x 5′ poster that summarizes the background behind what you’re doing, and then presents data that you can then describe to passers-by.  This is a way at conferences to get your data out there without having to have everyone do a 15 min presentation (although, that’s an option, too).  Tends to be very informal and is an excellent way to get started.

Anyway, the Graduate Student Association (GSA) at SLU holds a Graduate Research Symposium once a year where they have everyone submit posters and abstracts to you can present your data to your fellow classmates, and also get them judged by professors at the school.  From my perspective, this is an excellent opportunity to get experience before the Neuroscience meeting in November (in San Diego!), which will be my first real meeting.  The cool thing about that experience, as compared with the GSA symposium, is that those people will be quite familiar with the basics of the research field, while some of the judges at the symposium yesterday were from the social sciences department, requiring you to define “neuron” or “oxidative stress” to them.  60 students presented posters yesterday for a good three hours and most of the people coming by were professors, rather than students, but that’s to be expected, I guess.

Anyway, I think I did a decent job, overall…certainly for a first-timer.  The data I had wasn’t terribly involved compared with other students there, and I’m not even sure I explained it all in the best way either, but regardless, I felt it helped me out in the long-run.

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The Extent of Education

I’m not really sure what made me think about it today, but my head was spinning around the idea of education and the process of learning. You start out in primary school learning the absolute basics, and things get a bit more complicated in high school. At the end of high school, you decide what interests you and what you want for a career. Let’s say you want to learn about cancer…

Well, then you go to the Harvard of the Midwest and you get a biology degree, taking classes that will teach you about general science, but also a little bit about cancer. Assuming you still love cancer (well, learning about it…), then you go to graduate school to concentrate only on cancer…

…here’s the dicey part… Eventually, you reach the end of education…as in…all education as you’ve known it for the previous 20 years… Because now, you realize that, hey, this stuff I’m learning isn’t in textbooks. The answers to a given question aren’t so easy to look up and find anymore… You can’t ask your parents or teacher a question and have them reply: “why don’t you go look it up?”

Why is this? Because no one knows… By the time you hit graduate school, you’re really hitting the “nitty gritty” of the extent of all human knowledge in that specific subject that you were interested in back in late-high school. There is no more that you can learn from a person, a textbook, or even a primary research article… That’s it.

I dunno…it’s just kinda weird knowing that you could be asked a question and it isn’t simply a issue of not knowing the answer: it’s not knowing the answer because the answer hasn’t been discovered yet by anyone on Earth. Once in graduate school, you’re really at the “final frontier” (insert Star Trek reference here…) of human knowledge on a given subject. So when you’re called an “expert on cancer,” it’s really true because you’ve learned just about 95-99% of everything that can be learned about it.

These are the thoughts I have when studying for exams… 😛

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People are stupid…

Now, I get confused sometimes. Like. I see a plane and think it’s a boat. Occasionally, I mistake cows for iguanas…

…but rarely do I mistake beagles for dachshunds…

It has happened four times now when walking Edie. Twice to Brooke, twice for me (all of mine this week…). “Look at the wiener dog!” is the usual exclamation… Never “dachshund,” specifically…simply “wiener dog.”

Now, I realize Edie has some brown and black coloring in her. And floppy ears. And, because there’s some bassett hound in her, she’s perhaps slightly longer than your typical beagle. But in no way does she at all resemble a dachshund.

Just wanted to clear that up…

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Wii-tastic

I saw this link at a Wii “fanboy” site and just had to mention it… Apparently, the Wii has sold 5 million units world wide since its release last November (so, approximately 3 months). That calculates out to one console sold every 2 seconds!!! In the other console’s lifetimes, the Xbox 360 has sold 9.3 million (in 1 year and 3 months…) and the PS3 has sold 1.9 million (in 3 months). That also represents a net profit for Nintendo of ~$400m (assuming that it costs ~$158 to make a Wii, then sell it for $250, while the retailer gets $12.50/unit) while Microsoft and Sony are losing money in making their systems.

So yeah, the crazy thing is that the Wii is still so hard to find, as I mentioned in an earlier post…

For the record, I’m getting pretty good at Wii Sports, and I’ve got Super Mario Bros. (NES) and Mario Kart 64 (N64) downloaded to the machine…about ready to buy another Wii game to make use of the controller(s), though… Any suggestions?

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Where did all the time go?!

Well, you can tell when classes start up again, you have less and less time with which to waste on television and video games…grrrr…  We had our first exam on Monday (right after Mardi Gras, no less…) and I was in there for a little over 3 hrs; everyone was out by the 4 hr mark…  We probably won’t get the grades back until next week, but I’m told that, so far, I’ve only missed “a few points”, so that’s promising.  Regardless, I’ve got another exam next Thursday already and will have one more just prior to Spring Break.

Speaking of which, I got tickets yesterday to fly down to Texas over the Break, between March 13th and 18th.  Andy S. and Brett have been complaining for, well, years that I never visit, so I’m finally gonna do it…  The sad thing is: this will only be the second time I’ve flown anywhere in a plane…  😛

Anyway, class/lab work is keeping me rather busy…  The weather is improving, at least, so I can take the dog on a decent walk when I get home every day.  Edie and Sam are getting along a lot better now, by the way…  I don’t think they realize that they’re supposed to be enemies…but whatever…

So yeah, just figured I’d update this for once…  I’m hoping to get caught up with the hours upon hours of television saved on the DVR this weekend, ’cause we may plan a trip to Hannibal or Columbia the following weekend(s)…  No time!

(all i wanna do is play my wii…grrrrrr… :-()