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Jul. 13th, 2009 @ 01:38 pm Happy anniversary, us!
Current Mood: celebratory
Tags: ,
Thirteen years ago today, many of you watched as Huz and I became, well... Huz and I.  :)  Thirteen years later, and we're still crazy about each other.  Who'da thunk?  ;)

To celebrate, we've bought ourselves season tickets to Broadway San Jose.  (Minus one - we're neither of us interested in Legally Blonde, and they had this nice Buy Four option.)  Mind you, the tickets haven't shown up yet, and I need to bug the company about it. 

Huz has also been working with some sort of Langevin equation(s) in his programming.  I couldn't remember exactly what sort of Langevin he was fiddling with when I asked him about it, and referred to it as a Langevin whatsit.  A day or so later, he asked me what flavor a Langevin whatsit should be; after a moment's thought, I declared it should be lemon.  (He thought it would be nice to get me a  lemon-flavored Langevin whatsit for our anniversary.)  After some consideration, we decided on what exactly a lemon-flavored Langevin whatsit was:


Which we shall sample tonight.  Happy anniversary, Huz!
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tazz
Jul. 8th, 2009 @ 01:09 pm Ok, the advertising guys can cool it now.
Tags:
Spotted on an Eppendorf product page:

"Eppendorf Research® pro with its unmistakable button nose and merry switch eyes has shown its happy face in many laboratories and so brightened up the tedious daily routine."

Gah.  They'll be selling talking doors next.  Or maybe paying the talking doors to write product descriptions.

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ig-fold
Jul. 8th, 2009 @ 09:21 am Life update
Haven't posted in much too long; my apologies!

Had a lovely super-long holiday weekend - my department decreed that All Regular Employees Shall Take Thursday Off to help us spend down our vacations.  So I spent Thursday taking a kitty to the vet (just regular checkup, no emergencies!), having lunch and hanging out with a work buddy from the Genome Center, rummaging at the library, finishing Chapter 2 of Paper Mario 1K-year Door, and generally relaxing.  (I was sorry to miss seeing [info]nezumiko  - hopefully next time she won't have the flu!)  Friday we both had off.  Um... we went skating, and I think we just hung out.  Saturday I did a pretty thorough vacuuming of the bedroom, which badly needed it.  Privet trees/bushes, to which I'm horribly allergic, are just starting to come into bloom, so anything I can do to lower the amount of allergens around is a Good Thing.  We spent the evening indoors with the kitties with the doors and windows closed, so the noise of the fireworks wouldn't freak them out too much.  Sunday I went to church, we skated again, I cleaned the living room/dining room, and finished Phoenix Wright 2.  (If you make the last couple of in-court choices wrong, you get a surprisingly detailed 'wrong' ending; much more interesting than the usual simple slamming of the courtroom doors.  The 'right' ending is, of course, even better.) 

We also finished reading Neal Stephenson's Anathem aloud to each other.  It definitely deserves its own post, hopefully I'll get to it soon.  For now, suffice it to say that it's a book that demands your close attention on pretty much every page, but is overall worth the effort the reader puts into it. 

Finally, a marvelous video ganked from kayray - College Humor's reworking of West Side Story into Web Site Story.  It's only about 4 minutes long, and extremely well done.  (Worksafe.)

</div>


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tazz
Jun. 29th, 2009 @ 09:21 pm Firefly: Objects In Space
Current Mood: amazed
Tags:
Just watched.  *sigh*  Very amazing.  Crime against humanity that that was the LAST ONE.

Anyone around here own the graphic novels, and can we borrow them?
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tazz
Jun. 23rd, 2009 @ 09:26 am Star Trek silliness
Tags: ,
The Editing Room has come out with the abridged script for the Star Trek movie.  Warning: do not have your mouth full of toothpaste when you get to the "yo mama so dead" part.
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tazz
Jun. 18th, 2009 @ 09:22 pm I'm so proud of Mouse!
Current Mood: pleased
Tags:
You may remember about a year ago, shortly after we got back from China, Mouse Cat - the shyest of our bunch of five - had a burst abscess and a puncture wound.  With some effort, we got him in the house and to the vet, and he largely stayed scared for, well, some time.

That has largely changed.

The other night, he voluntarily joined us on the couch for some serious petting.  We have photo evidence to prove it!  Here's Mouse, hanging out with yours truly:

And here's a closeup of the kitty, showing just how pleased with life he is at present:

Yay Mouse!  (Now we gotta get you okay with being picked up and held.)

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tazz
Jun. 16th, 2009 @ 12:15 pm Somewhere out there, someone is wondering...
Tags:
...why their sequencing data lines up with Drosophila robo3 instead of whatever they submitted. I'm guessing they're working with (A)H1N1 (the swine flu virus), which is the data I have in my hot little hands.

(Update: I do have to give our sequencing company credit - I informed them of the mixup, and within 15 minutes they'd resolved the problem and gotten my actual data back to me.)
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ig-fold
Jun. 14th, 2009 @ 09:43 pm Great weekend!
Tags: ,
Winding down from a generally fantastic weekend.  :)  We hosted the all-too-infrequent Bay Area Storyreading at our house Saturday night - shouts to [info]nezumiko , [info]orichalcum , [info]cerebralpaladin , and other non-LJ friends.  While the two 3-year-olds were around, we read picture books.  Selections included Two Bad Ants (in which (a) the author had clearly had an ant infestation and took revenge and (b) the moral of the story is that if you do your own thing you'll get into big trouble), the slightly surreal Pete and Pickles (in which a pig and an elephant come to be great friends - the idea was based on a sketch done by author Berkeley Breathed's five-year-old daughter), and the incredibly surreal Hedgie Blasts Off (in which all the scientists are dogs who dress in hazmat suits even when writing entirely accurate orbital equations on blackboards, all the reporters are birds, and Hedgie the hedgehog goes up in a spaceship and saves the day).  Those who could stay later started on Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, which will probably be the semi-official post-bedtime long.  Great stuff.

And today we went and saw Wicked, which was much better than I'd expected it to be given how much I knew its story diverged from Gregory Maguire's book.  It deserves an entry of its own; I hope I get the chance to write about it soon.

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tazz
Jun. 11th, 2009 @ 09:27 pm No topic, just stuff
Tags: , ,
I stayed home today, as I guessed yesterday I would.  I slept better than I had the previous night (the cold had largely moved from drippy to stuffy), but nowhere near enough to make up for the sleep I'd lost the night before.  After breakfast and Huz leaving for work, I went back to bed and slept for something over an hour.  It helped.  As did the Peach Pleasure with Immunity boost that I went and fetched myself at lunchtime.  I'm still not healthy, but I feel a great deal more alert than I did for most of yesterday evening.

I finished Phantom Hourglass.  Last boss battle is HARD, had to look up a second walkthrough to find out how to deal with his nasty spin attack.

I acquired a package of beef jerky at lunchtime too, figuring that something I could chew on without lots of calories might help my sinuses stay clear.  Don't know if it really helped, but it tasted nice.  However, I just noticed that the nice folks at Whole Foods probably paid someone to write the following jingle I found on the back of the package:

Sing this little song the next time you're "home on the range."
  Oh give me a snack
  I can fit in my pack
  Made with beef that's organically raised
  It's seasoned just right that when you take a bite
  By the flavor you will be amazed
  Our jerky's superb
  Low in fat and with protein so high
  That when hunger is strong just remember this song
  Eat beef jerky - it'll satisfy

I can just about hear Garrison Keillor singing it as a parody on Prairie Home Companion.

Finally, I know I've been nattering way too much about Scribblenauts and how much I'm looking forward to it.  But I think I've found a demo of it that will appeal to this crowd.  You can write "Cthulu" and "God" and they fight!
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Back to work tomorrow I expect.  Mooooooooore minipreps!

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tazz
Jun. 10th, 2009 @ 07:07 pm Goods and bads
Good: Phoenix Wright 3 arrived and looks fine.

Bad: I still have a cold.

Good, sort of: I plan to stay home and nurse it tomorrow unless I'm feeling lots better.

Bad: There was a car fire about 2 doors down from our house around 1:30 AM this morning.   We had no clue at the time.

Good: Uh, I guess that means we have really awesome soundproofing???

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tazz
Jun. 10th, 2009 @ 09:05 am Bleah.
Current Mood: sniffly
Tags:
I has a cold.  It's wet and runny and kept me up a lot of last night.  I plan to leave work early today, and I hope that (1) it gets better soon - we have fun plans this weekend! - and (2) Huz doesn't catch it.  Achoo!
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sleepy tazz
Jun. 6th, 2009 @ 09:47 pm E3 and associated gaming stuff
Last year's E3 was a small, quiet affair filled out largely by independent shows by the video game studios that just happened to be proximal in both space and time to the so-called main event.  This year, it seems like everyone was under one huge noisy tent once more.

Cut for length and gaming natter. But there's pretty vids behind the cut! )
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tazz
Jun. 6th, 2009 @ 08:06 pm Birthday wishes!
Tags:
Happy birthday, haamel!  I hope it's been full of good things: food, drink, gifts.  May the year to come be great.  :)
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tazz
Jun. 3rd, 2009 @ 08:26 am Aw, dangit!
Current Mood: disappointed
Tags: ,
Our city had a special election yesterday on the question of whether to raise property taxes to help pay for K-8 schools.   While there were more yes votes than no votes, we didn't quite get the 66% we needed to pass the measure.

Drat and foo.

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tazz
Jun. 2nd, 2009 @ 09:41 pm And in other news...
.. it's raining.  Fairly hard.  Rare for June in the Bay Area!
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tazz
Jun. 2nd, 2009 @ 09:40 pm Singing event notice!
Tags:
I know this is late notice, but I thought I'd let you know that I'll be singing a fairly long solo as part of an Evensong service tomorrow night.  The details are as follows:

Location: Christ Church Portola Valley Woodside
815 Portola Road
Portola Valley, CA

Time: 7 PM

It's a little off the beaten path.  Probably the easiest way to get there is to take the Sand Hill Road exit from 280 (or up Sand Hill from Stanford Shopping Center); it's about 3.8 miles from 280.  The church will be on your right, and is the one after Valley Presbyterian Church and before the Town Center.  Hope to see you there!
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tazz
Jun. 1st, 2009 @ 01:25 pm Oooo, shiny!
Am watching an auction for Phoenix Wright 3 over on eBay.  I'll check on Friday and see if it's reached the level of the other auctions up.  If so... well, let's say I have another possible option.  :)  (I'm not actually done with PW2 yet, but I'm into the second half of the last case.)

Also, Scribblenauts has a publisher!!  Yay!!!

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tazz
Jun. 1st, 2009 @ 12:05 pm Home again!
We're back from our vacation!

My parents are doing pretty well, it was good to see them.  We went to the special Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts together in the middle of the week.  Special exhibitions at the MFA are usually good; this one was no exception.  :)  What was exceptional, I thought, was that each and every painting had a blurb next to it talking about one or more aspects of the painting: style, content, sweep.  Given that it was an exhibit looking at three rival painters, it sensibly grouped the paintings mostly by subject matter, so that the viewer could see what each man had done with, e.g. Saint Catherine in conversation with Mary and the infant Jesus, St. George and the dragon, portraits, etc.  Fascinating exhibit, and worthy of visit by anyone interested in comparative art study, Titian et al, and/or pretty paintings of people.  Even Dad seemed to enjoy himself.

Friday we took the train down to New Haven for the huz's 15-year reunion, and had a good time.  There were a number of people we knew from his class, and a couple of people outside his class (a friend doing the 20-year reunion who we knew from Storyreading, and - somewhat astonishingly - a lady who worked in the cafeteria of Huz's residential college when we were undergrads and who I would swear hasn't changed at all in the intervening years who was on the catering crew.  We were pleasantly surprised by the food at this reunion - much better offerings than the dining-hall quality food that we had at the ten-year.  We don't know whether this was due to Yale food generally improving, Yale recognizing that 15 years out of college everyone has good jobs and is used to real food, or that as the number of years out of college increases the cost of reunion does too and some of the cost goes to better food, or some combination of the three.  (We will be interested in hearing from the folks going next weekend what the food quality's like for them.)

Now that we're home, we're discovering that the cats really shed a ton while we were gone.  There has been much hair removal, sweeping, and vaccuuming.  It's getting to the point in the year when the cats shed out their winter coats and I need to vaccuum twice a week to keep the hair density under control.  Woo.  We need to do laundry as well.  In a while we'll go skating for the first time in well over a week, and I will have a voice lesson after having pretty much not practiced in close to two weeks.

Huz finished Phantom Hourglass at my parents and has started Final Fantasy A2.  My current point of pride is that I have gotten to the warp point after level 6 in the Phantom Dungeon with only 29 seconds gone from my hourglass.  (That, of course, is using every shortcut and every golden pot I can get my greasy little hands on.)  Huz is now whacking Ganondorf in Twilight Princess, a reasonable thing to do on the last day of vacation.

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tazz
May. 28th, 2009 @ 11:31 am Bunches of sundry things
Tags: , ,
- The Ginger Peach Tea jam sold by Republic of Tea is really quite excellent.  (I ordered some for my mom, in the assumption that it would arrive sometime while we were visiting.)  There's a strong ginger flavor to it that really makes the jam.  I can't taste the tea in it, but that's okay.

- There's a free iPhone app specifically for browsing and downloading Librivox titles called Audiobooks.  From what I've heard, it's got a fantastic interface for browsing, downloading, and listening to LV books.  Go to the App store, or visit this website for more info.

- We spent time with animals the first few days here.  Sunday night, my brother and his family (two nephews, age roughly two and five) visited us, and Monday we saw a muskrat and a heron.  (Tuesday we got hopefully passable pictures of the muskrat.)

- Watched the Star Trek movie Tuesday night (had lots of fun as promised by virtually everybody) at the Somerville Theater.  Yay for old-style movie houses with front-row balcony seats!  Though it would have been nice had my seat bottom not parted company with the rest of the seat several times.
     - Adjunct 1: there will be a Star Trek movie post later with amused snarkiness
     - Adjunct 2: the crepe place 2 doors down from the Somerville Theater knows how to do strawberries and dark Belgian chocolate.  Yum!

- My bro lent us the Get Smart movie on Sunday, which we watched Wednesday night.  Apart from a few moments that were Absolutely Not Necessary (e.g. upchuck in the fighter plane), it was surprisingly enjoyable.  It was rather refreshing to have Agent 86 be really quite competent as a field agent!  It was a good choice, I think; it would have been difficult to carry off an entire movie-length period of bumbling-incompetent-somehow-saves-the-day-anyway.
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tazz
May. 23rd, 2009 @ 04:57 pm Various
• Suave's so-called lavender and lilac-scented shampoo smells to me neither like lavender nor lilac while using it. It smells quite distinctly of apple.

• Had a lovely (and productive!) day with [info]nezumiko  yesterday.  Acquired new sneakers, new jeans, and new tea and adorable teacup.  Then we went back to her place, watched the last four episodes of Fruits Basket, and made Tea Drinks!  We need to name them though.  The recipes are below.

My drink:
    Brew a cup of Teavana's Rooibos Key Lime tea.  Add a dollop of Bacardi Limon and enjoy!  If you wish, you can also add a small amount of honey, further smoothing out any edge that the alcohol might have.  But mostly it doesn't have any in the first place.  It's a quite refreshing drink, and I bet it would be simply lovely over ice.

Nezu's drink:
    Brew a cup of Teavana's Earl Grey Creme.  (Straight Earl Grey would probably work too; if you do it that way, add a little vanilla extract to the mix.)  Add a jigger of Tuaca (it's an Italian liquer) and enjoy.  It's quite good just like that; add a spoonful of honey to turn it into liquid candy, and some half-and-half on top of that to turn it into a drink you could seduce someone with.  (This is the drink that really needs the name.)

We're now hanging about waiting for Super Shuttle to turn up, which they should do in another hour or two.  We'll be in Boston tomorrow through early Friday, then down to the Ancestral Homeland for Huz's reunion.  See you!

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tazz

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