Jamie

I’ve been a little absent as of lately. The trip back to the Midwest over the holiday break went fine. The drive was a bit stressful. I’ll fill in more details of that later.

I’ve been playing a lot of World of Warcraft lately. I finally got into a raiding schedule with my present guild and appear to be playing a valuable asset to them so far. I finally feel like I’ve got some pleasure coming back out of it right now. It’s just a matter of making sure I balance my time with the game and real life properly. It appears to be coming along okay right now, so we’ll see how it goes in the near future.

We’ve had some crazy weather lately. We’re in a winter weather advisory for tomorrow. Let us see how that will turn out.

Oooo, apparently there’s a new WordPress available. Let’s hope I don’t toast my blog in upgrading it!


X-posted to my personal blog.

I'm not sure how many of you use Macs, but since I've purchased my MacBook Pro I have become a pretty adamant fan of the Mac operating system. One of my few gripes is the choice of web browsers. Safari is the default for Mac OS X. It looks nice, goes well with the OS, but it has a tendency to stall or not tell you when it's actually done loading a page. Overall, didn't like it. I went back to FireFox, since I was pretty comfortable with it on the PC. I toyed with a few others while I was familiarizing myself with FireFox again.

Shiira was slick and smooth looking, but I couldn't figure the damn thing out. Eventually I gave it up, as their support isn't nearly as forward as some other browsers. I haven't tried out their latest build, so I can't vouch for that.

Opera was a pull-over from my older days on the PC when I first enjoyed tabbed browsing. Opera on the Mac really didn't impress me.

OmniWeb was attempted a couple of times, and none of those times I really enjoyed it that well. It integrates nicely into Mac OS X, shares much of the same looks, but I can't stand the blah look to it, and it seems to have similar stalling issues like Safari did.

To the present day, I kept Camino around as it was designed to be a Mac-specific rebuilt Mozilla based off of FireFox. I really didn't care for the limited looks of it, but man it was a speedy loader of pages. I could live without the plugins and the simple look, but the buttons and fonts didn't look very good.

I read that Camino is going to use a new renderer for fonts called Cairo, designed to make better use of the Mac's OS features. Regardless, the latest nightly build of Camino appears to incorporate this. My webpage fonts look awesome now. I can't believe how crisp the text looks now!

I'd encourage any Mac users to give it a try if they're a fan of FireFox and want to give something a little more Mac-like a try.

Facebook gets bids from Google, Microsoft, people say

So it appears that Facebook is slowly going the way of MySpace, in a matter. I really did enjoy Facebook in its older days, where entry into the site was restricted to those of workplaces or universities.

When they went public and opened their registration to anyone and everyone, I was reluctant at first. They opened it up, I met a bunch of old friends who were now using, "not a big deal" I thought. Then the applications began to appear. Oh my lord, there were a lot of applications. Thankfully, they're not as horrible as they could have been. I can just ignore most of the invitations, although it's a bit annoying to constantly receive invitations. However, this was when advertisements started to show up. Sponsored messages began to show up in my news feed. Typically, only one was to be found in the feed. I thought this was doable. Far more than that in MySpace, with ads and glitter and explosions coming at you from everywhere.

Now, Facebook runs the gamut of the decision to go with more ads or not. The fact that Google or Microsoft may have dibs in that now, makes me worry for the vested future of Facebook. As long as the winning bidder doesn't impose a need to thrust more of their own ads at everyone, I could care less if they want a market share of the fifteen billion dollar company. If they decide to shove even more of them over the pages that people view daily, I'll be quite ready to give things up.

I'll admit it. I'm a bit of an elitist, as some people know. Probably goes with being a perfectionist...I like things how I like them. XuQa seemed like an awfully nice university-based social network back in the day of its inception. Since then, they've turned into a cesspool in my eyes. MySpace was the new fad of the day and I was interested, but ultimately I didn't really feel comfortable with it. Friendster and Hi5 both had attempts as well, but they failed promptly. I had marvelous hopes for Facebook once I gave it a try. I loved the simplicity and the exclusivity of it; clean, sharp, and selective! Alas, it is slowly going the way of the remaining sites.

I'm just waiting for the day that spammers and bots begin to solicit on Facebook. I've ran into a few accounts that were awfully close. I know I don't use Facebook as much as I did back in the day, but I'm more and more leery that it's going to go down that drain that everything else does.

Why must these all evolve in the wrong fashion?

(x-posted to my personal blog as well)

New blog under construction at my personal webpage! himaythelush.com still isn't up and running (except for the IGPBS site), but I'm building on jamiebaxter.com some more. I've got a blog set up at blog.jamiebaxter.com, but there still isn't anything on the main site yet. I'm trying to settle into a blog theme, and then go with an appropriate color scheme for my main site. Let me know what you guys think!

You know, despite having a nice weekend, I really shouldn't have been drinking with having a cold. Scratchy throat since Wednesday or Thursday, I probably should have been drinking orange juice instead of beer and/or hard alcohol.

Friday night was pretty uneventful...just stayed in and played some video games. Holly was out at her high school's homecoming football game, and I just wasn't up for it.

Saturday was my colleague Kelly's big wedding. It was a really nice, personal wedding without going too overboard. The ceremony took place on a small island-like plot in the middle of a small, shallow pond. All the seating was stadium-style, with steps leading down to the isle. They did the sand-pouring thing (yeah, I know I'm horrible, I don't even know what it's called) to finalize the ceremony. The reception was great, with the stereotypical DJ and music but an outstanding setup for the food. There were four stands serving food, with a wok-style open grill where you could pick your own food, a meat-carver slicing up fresh pork, and lots more food. It was a very nice reception. It was also my first time at an open bar...I had my fair share of whiskey 7's, woo! saboingaden, I'm not sure why I never tried them sooner...you had a pretty good thing going with those!

Anyhoo, my last show of the evening, Robot Chicken, is now on.

I'll blog more tomorrow (maybe even mess with my LJ icons a little bit)!

I just turned to NBC, to find this asinine show called "The Singing Bee." I want to shoot myself.

I've never seen singing turned into such an overly dramatized piece of scary entertainment (using "entertainment" in the loosest sense of the term).

So besides sitting here listening to the music on my laptop, I'm watching ESPN-HD play the Eagles/Redskins game on our 37" HD television. For those of you that weren't aware, I haven't had cable in something over five years now. I was able to get by back in Fargo watching the air stations for football games. I was also able to get NBC in pretty clearly to watch my standard repertoire of comedies/sitcoms/dramas in the select evenings.

Since moving to Buffalo, however, I had been forced to relinquish any hope of pulling NBC in over the air, let alone ABC (the other station I've become interested in). FOX came in pretty clearly, and showed up nicely on the HD television over the hi-def digital broadcast, allowing me to still watch football with a few complaints every five to ten minutes. CBS also came in, but the digital signal was a wreak, so I could watch the analog signal to pick up the other football game(s) on Sundays (I'm slowly becoming more interested in the sport...damn sports city).

I'm thoroughly impressed with the clarity from watching HD stations now (at least when they're broadcasting in HD) and can truly appreciate some of the benefits that cable and/or satellite television now provide. However, it's almost a little disturbing how good it has gotten; many of these HD stations also are received with Dolby Digital surround sound, or some other multi-channel audio. Great picture clarity is one thing...surround sound is another.

I will be the first to admit that at the present time, the surround sound in football is a little wasted on myself, but I'm sure it might grow on me (provided it actually appears to make a difference). I'm praying I don't become overly impressed with the service...I feel a like I should not let myself become too dependent on this stuff considering how crazy the technology is and how addicted to it some people are. Heck, I've already recorded four movies on the DVR (yes, we have DVR service too...I figured I'd give it a try), and I haven't even watched the blasted movies yet. Oye vay!

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My attendance at the gym seems to be adequate for the time being. Considering how my last stint with a solid workout routine worked out a year and a half ago (or so), my trainer suggested that I just stick to doing the required days (preferably two to three) and work up from there. Before I self-destructed my last routine, I was burning away my week five days at the gym: three days (typically Mon/Wed/Fri) doing my weight training routine, followed by an hour of hard cardio on an elliptical machine, and an hour on a treadmill, with the other two days maintaining the same cardio routine.

After two weeks of that routine, I came down awfully sick with a cold and it wiped out any rhythm and momentum I had for that workout. I just never got back into things. Right now, I'm sticking to a cardio to weights to cardio routine on the three days, and work up to a full five day spread in a couple weeks with cardio on my weight training off-days. I really need to pull through this time around...I'm determined to slim down and tone up before I head back to the Midwest this winter for the Christmas/New Year's holiday season.

I like where I'm at now. The routine is pushing me, but it's not wearing me overly thin. I feel better about it this time...I just need to not get ahead of myself and push myself too quickly.

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Work is the same ol' same ol' still. My experiments are going slowly with me constantly in between getting them setup, and doing necessary cloning to take care of the experiments. I need to just get some stuff together and perhaps get back to some plain old biochemistry...it feels like I'm not getting enough done lately. This is probably what I get for deciding to work on a relatively novel protein, bleh!

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Alright, so the wifey just distracted me, so I kind of forgot what else I was going to "blog." That, and the cat decided my foot would make a nice spot to sit down, and I swear to god you can never figure out what the hell they want. With a dog, it was at least trial and error. Cats? Not so much... Okay, so all that and I want to watch Heroes in about ten minutes. I keep hearing good things about it, so I'm going to watch it (all HD fashion and all, mm hmm!). Hope everyone else is doing okay...I'm trying to make a habit of keeping up on others' (and my own) LJs (probably a nice side effect of having a little more energy and/or motivation from going to the gym).

How many times have you being doing something, stopped, and thought, "why am I in such a hurry to do <insert random activity>" when you've got no reason to?

Boo!

I typically enjoy my read of the headlines on the international CNN news page and perusing through the stories. I had no such luck on this fine day. Lo and behold, who has obtained the international headline spot? No other than Paris. Big whoop. She's out of jail.

What
The
Fuck

All because she probably doesn't want to eat her mediocre food? This is such a sick joke, it's not even funny. It's bad enough I have to deal with people blowing past me doing 15-20+ over the speed limit without a single cop doing a damn thing on the local scene, but when more pertinant shit like this goes unmoderated? No. Fucking no...she got herself a DUI, suspended her license, signed a form admitting she knew her license was suspended, and then proceeded to get pulled over three times while it was suspended.

This country is really getting far too concerned about social images. It feels like we're losing touch with reality and god forbid, some people actually abide by and respect the law.

Maybe it's just the area I'm living in right now that produces this animosity towards the disrespectful (since they're far more abundant here, methinks). Regardless, more and more people are sweet-talking their way out of anything. Being an anal-retentive person, this bothers me to not abide by the rules. But I guess at this point, do the rules really apply anymore?

I've finally got my first propane grill! Woohoo! I have to admit, the instructions on some of these Aldi products need slightly more concise wording, or maybe some wording to start with. Otherwise, nice and cheap wins the deal!

The remainder of my graduate school coursework will be done after this week. The only thing I'll have left is some journal club courses that just require me to attend, and occasionally present a seminar. Not a big deal. All that's left to my graduate career is to finish the research and write my thesis!

I'm looking forward to the weather getting nicer. It was actually pretty nice today, a pleasant change from the rainy week last week. Softball league starts up again at the end of May, so I should get my butt into running a little bit so the 2-3 base sprint when I'm up at bat isn't so exhausting. Maybe even avoid bruising/spraining/doing-whatever-I-did-to my heel that I did last year. I'm still not sure how I managed to get by without getting that checked out professionally.

Time to watch the rest of American Dad. I'll get to posting more when I'm less distracted.

We had our yearly graduate student recruitment again over the weekend. We've got an interesting mix this year...definitely more mixed up than last year's group. Last year's group seemed pretty comfortable with the university, although some had their hearts set elsewhere and/or went elsewhere. Altogether, they all sounded pretty grad-school orientated. This year wasn't as clear cut. We definitely had some students that sounded as if they weren't clear in their objectives with attending graduate school. Now, I can't exactly say that I was the most decided when I got to grad school, but I get the feeling that some of these students were a little less clear in their thoughts for graduate school. I wouldn't want to discourage them from going to grad school, but I hope they get a grasp of what it's going to be like so they don't just expect it to be what they're thinking it is (along the lines of just a continuing student, as opposed to really doing some critical thinking about stuff).

The weather's finally warming up around here. A lot of the snow that's normally around has pretty well melted. I'm kind of looking towards spring and finally getting to drive with my windows down once again.

Okay, I need to finish watching The Winner...it's making me laugh too much!

Okay, not so bored anymore. I'm just running laps to the centrifuge every ten minutes. Not the most exciting job in the world, it's awfully tedious, and I've only got another hour to hour and a half of this.

Bleh!

Someone take my proteins! Please!!!

Yet again, Buffalo weather mystifies me. It was raining this morning. It looked like a nigh blizzard when I left to get some cheap-o Wendy's for lunch. It was sunny on the way back to work after just picking up my lunch, not even eating it yet with the clouds parting. Now, it looks like it's threatening to rain/snow again, and there have been minor rumblings of thunder.

Swing states are good. Swing weather systems are not good. This is far too confusing!

In other news, I'm bored at work. Badly. I've still got forty minutes left on my overexpression before I can start being mean to all those little E. coli buggies. Even the Mountain Dew wannabe (Mountain Frost from Aldi) in my system isn't preventing the yawnage from setting in.

Oh well...at least Wednesday will be a busy day, hopefully.

Happy New Year's! A little late, but hey, it still works!

So we've got more than a few new things going on with the new year. If you haven't already heard from deutschesilke's journal, I got into an accident on Dec. 8^th that totaled out my '95 Monte Carlo. The best part of the entire ordeal was that I got to drive a Dodge Caravan from Enterprise....hah, yeah right. I got rear-ended on the throughway in the middle of stopped traffic by some girl doing about 40 or so. The impact totaled out the front of her vehicle...she didn't even have any fender or bumper left on the front, and the radiator was hanging loose and leaking profusely. Obviously, she could not drive away from the scene at all. However, the impact was so strong that it shoved my car forward into the SUV in front of me. The hood got crumpled back, it trashed one of my headlights in its entirety, and the rear bumper was pretty trashed...although the trunk was completely untouched. Anyhoo, so State Farm (the rear-ender's insurance) cut me a decent check for the car and we used it and some personal savings to put the down-payment on a new '06 Volkswagen Jetta. If you want to see some pics, there are a few linked below.

( Car Photos )

He kind of got the name "Beepo" 'cause it's sort of German I guess, and every time we lock the car it honks. Even if we lock it without the remote and with the key in the door. It honks. If the trunks open still, no honk. Once it's closed, honk! The hood's the same way. It's almost honking overkill! Anyways, it was originally planned that this newer car was going to be better on the fuel efficiency so Holly saved some gas on her drive. Unfortunately, the "new car" came a lot sooner than expected, so I'm kind of bummed to give up driving it and start driving her Ranger now. I didn't even have that car for a year and it was running great...it did a marvelous run back to Minot and back without any problems. So yeah, not the ideal situation, but you do what you need to now, not later. It wouldn't have been such an issue if it happened in the spring or something...I could've at least biked to work. Oh well...

Last week, we just got ourselves a new washer and dryer combo delivered. No more trips to the laundromat anymore! I was originally hoping to hold out until we found ourselves a house to move into, but with the advent of having to buy a new car I don't feel that we will be nearly as likely to get ourselves into a house, especially if we've only got somewhere on the order of three and a half years left here anyhoo. So I think we're going to stick with this place and hunker down until we leave, or perhaps a different place if we can find the hookups. I'm not going to go without these machines now that we've got 'em!

The work in the lab has been going okay. Some protein that I've been working with is being rather uncooperative in trying to purify it, but apparently that's not uncommon from previous work done with it. I have to start purifying it all over again unfortunately, but hopefully this time will go over a little better. At least I'm making progress though...I've got some of the first steps done, so I'm on my way to my first publication at least (in this lab).

Yet again, I'm trying to do the "I'm going to post more often" resolution. Aside from that, I don't really have too many right now. I'm taking it easy on the getting back into shape thing. I had a sinus infection from Thanksgiving until Christmas because the first time I went to the student health center, the doctor just thought my congestion (thick, yellow, and creating a wretched cough that got worse at night) was viral, and the conjunctivitis was treatable in five days. The conjunctivitis mostly went away but started coming back after I quit the eye-drops, and then the cough turned ridiculous a week later. After it looked like I had tonsilitis, I said screw it and went in again. I got a different doctor at the health center this second time, and she took one look at my throat and looked a bit startled. Said everything sounded like a sinus infection and got me on antibiotics....thank god, I felt so much better after about four days on the drugs. I just wish I got that the first time I went in there. I'm still clearing out some of the drainage and it left me coughing a little last week, but it's pretty much gone now.

I picked up a web domain a while ago...I forget how long. Nothing there yet, but I'm slowly working on stuff. I'm dinking around with Illustrator and trying to create some of my own graphics for it. I might just pull out a theme set from somewhere if I'm really stumped, but I'll have a little more functionality with this site. I've already got a BB-styled guestbook setup for it. I just need to link it up when the rest of the site comes together.

Anyone ever tried out this Gizmo Project for LJ Talk? Looks interesting...

I'm well into my preliminaries for the biochemistry department now. It is a lot easier now that I've gotten past the first presentation of my thesis proposal, but that doesn't make things that much easier. I am stuck writing out a pre-doctoral grant based on my thesis proposal as the written portion of my preliminary...that's a bit of the ugly part. It is not so bad, as I have most of it planned out in my head, but the ugly part comes with the fact that I have to put a lot of detail into each experiment I have in mind to justify and illustrate their usage. I know this is what I will likely do if I continue with my track in research further down the road, but I was hoping for a little bit of a breather before jumping into this stuff!

Monte (my Monte Carlo) is in the shop and has been since Friday night. His brake and ABS lights both came on sometime around two weeks ago, and I have not really driven him since. I had replaced one set of shoes and drums on the rear wheels as they felt worn out, but then I ran into a snag with the other drum: it was seized/corroded onto the hub spindle. It took me nearly a week before I finally found a good way to get it off of the spindle: lots of penetrating oil, a C-clamp and a nail hammer. You could literally watch the brake drum flex and bend outward from the spindle as I tightened on the C-clamp. I kept waiting for it to give and shatter, sending shrapnel into my legs/chest/whatever was close. Thankfully, that never happened; a very dull thud upon hammer-strike let me know the drum finally broke loose. I replaced that set of shoes and drum and checked the brake signals again: both lights were still on, unfortunately. That, and upon driving him briefly, the rear shoes were somewhat out of alignment...there was a slight pulsation during braking, but I had better braking power to say the least.

Since I could not alleviate the warning light issue myself, I decided to take Monte into the garage. Well, the rotors and pads up front were shot (how convenient...I replaced the pads not two weeks ago, but I can definitely attest that one rotor was very likely shot, despite what my neighbor may have thought) and there was a strong pulsation in the rear wheels, found by usage of the parking brake while driving. The garage owner was going to get one of his other mechanics in to deal with the inspection of the drums in back, they have replaced the brakes up front and apparently Monte has great, normal braking again now. However, the ABS light is still being triggered, and they have yet to pinpoint just what part of the system is causing the error. Even resetting the ABS system has not done anything. They just know it is somewhere in the rear brakes that the problem is hiding, according to the computer scanner so far. If the main mechanic (read the one who needed to adjust the rears) had not had a pallet dropped on top of his hand, they might have had a more significant result at the end of today. I cannot blame them...he needed a hospital trip to deal with the hand. I just really hope Monte gets fixed tomorrow...it is becoming a nuisance to be without a car and rely on rides or my bicycle so much as of late.

Speaking of biking, I am severely out of shape. I have been too sedentary since I started my preliminaries and it is starting to catch up to me. Riding my bike to school exhausts me more than usual...I am running out of breath a lot more. I have also put on about ten pounds...not exactly what I was hoping for. I need to start getting into the gym on a regular schedule, and I keep waiting on Monte to get up and running again to do so. I can go to the gym at 6am, work out until 8 doing cardio work such as the elliptical and treadmill (my hope is to get up to 45/45/45 minutes on the elliptical/treadmill/stationary bike and then start mixing them up in one solid workout) and then head directly to work. Then my evening is completely free, and I do not have to worry about how enthused I am to exercise...it will already be done! First, I need to start getting to bed at a more reasonable hour...lately it has been 11pm onwards to midnight before I crawl into bed, and that surely cannot happen if I will be getting up at 5am.

My desktop got a recent upgrade...instead of the striped 80GB hard drive pair I was running on (basically a fast 160GB drive setup), I am now up to a pair of 320GB drives in a similar setup (about 600GB usable space) so I think I am going to start backing up iPod-compatible versions of my movie library for traveling. I can just dump the video files onto my iPod when I am on a trip and voila! Instant movie theater! Kind of... Only burdened by the fact that it will take me a few months to encode and compress all of them...it takes a half hour to extract the working video and audio files and somewhere on the order of two hours to encode the suckers. Lots of processing time....ew!

The Sims 2 is hilarious and addicting at the same time! Although, for anyone trying to install it within Mac OS X, I have a pointer or two for you in the event that the game loads, but you cannot do anything after that. There is no freaking support anywhere for my issue, and I just put a couple of thoughts together to get it to work. Email me if you have this issue and I will let you know how to remediate it...those bastards at Aspyr, grrrrr!

So okay, back to the injured ankle/heel. Three weeks ago (as of Tuesday this week) during our weekly softball game, I just made my first at bat of the game as a blazing run to first (the ball shot straight down in front of me, nearly fouled) and on the over-run to first base, I stepped on my heel wrong somehow. Suddenly the entire base of the heel of my foot hurt like hell and I couldn't put pressure on it. I hobbled back to first, as I got there before the throw, but I really didn't think I was going to be able to run to second, it hurt that bad. Next hit was luckily the last out of the inning, and I hobbled back in. I ended up pulling myself out of the rest of the game, as I was having a hard enough time just managing to walk on it. Over the next couple days, the bruise became apparent...I had a ring around the back of my heel, and I was even bruised through the callous of my heel...that explained why it hurt so much to walk! Well, nearly 3 weeks later, I'm finally doing pretty good, although I want to avoid extended periods of time on my heel. It's worse when I have shoes on, but that's about it.

Holly and I gave the smoker a try today. It worked okay...I had some issues with the coals staying heated throughout the smoking process (they died out about two hours into the ordeal) and the chips burned up rather soon. I wasn't expecting the chips to go up so soon, as they had been soaked for about thirty minutes. So I'm going to try some other coal next time (I was using "authentic" hardwood charcoal, I believe it was called) and hopefully the pork roast will turn out better. I thought it was pretty tasty and moist myself, but Holly said she couldn't really tasty the smokey flavor in it.

I finally picked up a dedicated mouse for the MacBook Pro at home from Best Buy. I got an opened-box Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 6000. I highly recommend it for anyone looking for a wireless, optical mouse. It's not cheap at almost $60 in most places (I got it for $40 open-box) and it's a little differently shaped to get used to, but after a couple days of using it, I really like it. It uses an infrared laser underneath, so you don't even get that annoying light underneath it. Also, it transmits via RF, so you don't even need the receiver visible, although I'm sure that helps with usable distance. Very nice!

The new IGPBS students to this year start tomorrow. Ahhh, my how the time has flown since I was a first year, just having moved to Buffalo for the first time and starting at a new school. Now I just have to worry about going through my preliminary exams and such. Looooovely...

I think that's it for the night. I'm ready for some warmth in bed!

Guten Nacht