Amethyst's Shiny Pebbles

Temporary out-of-touch

2009-11-12T21:28:48Z

Tomorrow morning Huz and I are leaving for Houston. We will probably not have access to Internet (no smartphone/iTouch/netbook, at least not yet) till late Sunday night. If you need to get in touch with me, my cellphone will be on basically all weekend.

Requiem recording

2009-11-08T22:53:46Z

As posted earlier, our choir did the Rutter Requiem last Friday night, and our director recorded the performance. Normally I don't do this sort of thing, but here's an .m4a file of me doing the Pie Jesu. (People told me it was really good. After getting a chance to listen to it... yeah, I'm really pretty pleased with it!)

There are hippo races in Australia?

2009-11-06T23:15:56Z

I've done stuff since last Friday, really I have... but I have not the brains to post them. Largely it's involved doing hellalotta transfections this week (none today thank heavens).

The friend in Australia that we'll be seeing in March sent this list of (presumably real) questions that an Australia tourism site received. Answers are funny and occasionally crude, therefore probably not entirely worksafe. Enjoy anyway!

Rutter Requiem TONIGHT

2009-11-06T18:22:46Z

My apologies for the late notice...

The choirs of Christ Church Portola Valley Woodside and Saint Bede's will be presenting the Rutter Requiem in the context of a requiem service tonight, November 6, at Christ Church. My good friend catagon3 and I will be singing the two soprano solos.

Location:
Christ Church Portola Valley and Woodside
815 Portola Road
Portola Valley, CA 94028

Time:
7:30 PM

xkcd randomness while bored

2009-10-31T00:55:12Z

The first xkcd comic that got a full giggle after several iterations of hitting the Random button:

Poor kitty!

Have a nice weekend, everyone!

Happy ten-year anniversary, AoI!

2009-10-30T04:47:18Z

Ten years ago today, Huz released version 0.1 of his 3-D graphics studio, Art of Illusion. It has grown considerably since then (current version is 2.7.2) and has a following that is both reasonably sizeable and quite enthusiastic. Congratulations, Huz - may it continue growing!

WE HAVE TICKETS!!!!!!!

2009-10-30T04:22:52Z

After time on the phone with the lovely tech fellow at Air New Zealand who made *sure* everything went through the second time I tried, we now have tickets to points west (NZ and Melbourne)! Very excited now. :D

Quiet day at home.

2009-10-29T15:33:19Z

I stayed home today with the vague cold-like sensation of having no energy at all. (This, after coming home early from work yesterday, after having spent the morning making sure that whatever I worked on could be easily fixed/recovered if I did something appallingly stupid - which meant I mostly did sequence analysis and figure-building.) I went back to bed for about an hour after dropping Huz off at the train station, and spent the remainder of the day largely hanging out at the computer. I designed a few different itineraries to NZ and Australia to see what dates and order did to prices. I watched Season Two Episode One of Dollhouse over on hulu, which was overall not bad TV but I made sure to visit Wikipedia afterwards to find out more of who exactly these people were. And I played a fair amount of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2, which, some 70+ battles in, continues to be extremely engaging. Didn't play any Scribblenauts today, though I did last night. I continue to find the lexicon impressive, though aspects of control are less intuitive than might be desired. Also, there's a HUGE difference in difficulty between the Puzzle levels (e.g. Reunite the girl with her kitten on the roof) and the Action levels (Starite is shown, need to overcome various difficult and/or dangerous obstacles to acquire it) within the same relative set.

More energetic tonight than last night. I cleaned the bathroom, at least partly, and swept the floor while getting an education on flavors of Linux. Me, I like chocolate. Does anyone make a chocolate-flavored Unix?

Matters of concern

2009-10-28T05:10:47Z

• Prices on airfare to NZ are climbing. I picked the wrong week for the condo; have emailed the owner asking if the same days the previous week (when tix for our desired itinerary are a good $1000 cheaper for the two of us combined) are available. Fingers crossed!

• The SF Bay Bridge is broken. Thank goodness nobody was seriously injured. I wonder when it will be reopened? Thank heavens I'm not trying to commute to the East Bay, but I'm really sorry for everyone who normally uses that bridge.

• Bah, silly minor cold-thing. Not even really symptomatic, just tired and muzzy. No fever, and scratchy throat. NOT H1N1.

• Bah, work stuff (contamination of cell cultures the last couple of times, failure to construct a couple of rather important vectors. We'll get it, it's just taking too long.

Perhaps the most frightening crossover concept I've ever seen

2009-10-21T23:42:54Z

The Classics of Literature meet Charlie Brown, Garfield and Rex Worth in Masterpiece Comics.

(It is, I will cheerfully admit, much more interesting than the straight graphic novel interpretations of e.g. Shakespeare that I've seen.)

We skate on YouTube!

2009-10-19T04:59:41Z

After a fair amount of fuss and bother (if anyone has a better way to rip AV off of a DVD on Macs than VLC, please let me know), I have succeeded in putting our "yeah, we're amateurs, you can tell" video on YouTube! Embedded below:

Penny Arcade does Scribblenauts

2009-10-16T05:23:13Z

No, this doesn't win you a level. (At least, I'm pretty sure it doesn't.)

A pondering...

2009-10-16T04:30:13Z

Often in the evening after dinner, I'm tired, and very much not in an "I wanna practice singing" mood.

Yet, much more often than not, once I start, I get extremely engaged in what I'm doing and generally feel like I've accomplished something come the end of it. (Like, I think I managed to sing the sillily high D - the one up above the treble staff - cleanly, twice tonight. That's once more than I did in lesson this past week!) And I have energy while I'm practicing, once I've gotten into it.

Now, why can't I remember that? Why can't I just remind myself, when I don't feel like practicing, that I'm almost always glad that I've practiced once I've gotten started? Must be a little like various acquaintances and the gym...

Some random stuff

2009-10-13T05:37:58Z

• Air New Zealand has one flight a day from Christchurch to Melbourne... and it's at 6 AM. Hmm, rethinking order of New Zealand islands visitation.

• It's started sprinkling. Go here to read a neat poem about the upcoming storm by my friend nezumiko. Hope the kitty room in the garage doesn't flood.

• Work is busy but cool. We will hopefully get a somewhat important result tomorrow.

• Scribblenauts is also cool (Huz gave it me for my b-day.) However, I do Not Approve of their opinion of Science (try it as an object, then interact with it!). Also, it does not know the word terrarium. Ribosome, I can understand and forgive it not knowing. However, when it doesn't know the word I typed, it comes up with 2-3 suggestions, of which I often won't recognize one!

We did it!

2009-10-11T03:35:01Z

October Challenge was today. We did our first ice dance competition!

It's sort of odd; if you're skating against an actual competitor, the worst you can do is come in second place. It is technically possible to come in as low as third if you're skating "against the book", if you do really atrociously and score low on the point scale.

No worries here, though. We came in first. :) We'll get a DVD of our performance Thursday, which I'll attempt to rip video from and post to YouTube or something, and point folks to any pictures that come out well.

(I didn't even freeze! Rinks turn warmer in the afternoon when the sun's been out all day.)

Birthday dinner at Straits last night

2009-10-06T04:44:40Z

We finished watching our DVD of Ratatouille Saturday night. It was the perfect thing to see before visiting Straits Cafe, a marvelous and amazing restaurant specializing in Singaporean cuisine. They are more than happy to serve their dishes to a group family-style, encouraging everyone at the table to sample every dish. That worked out extremely well last night: the four dishes we had complemented each other very nicely indeed - and completely by accident, too!

(1) Laksa Paella: "Spiced coconut risotto of abalone, shrimp, scallops and sautéed seasonal vegetables." This was a jasmine rice with the aforementioned seafood in it, held together with a creamy orange coconut-milk sauce, and topped with crisp-tender green beans. The seafood was tender and delicate, perfectly cooked. The sauce was a lovely savory creation, and the beans added a nice sweetness and contrasting crunchy texture.

(2) Kari Kambing: "Boneless lamb braised in a spicy dry curry sauce, with potato and carrots." Not sure what their definition of dry is; sauce was typical Indian panang curry consistency. The surprise in this dish, for me, was the potatoes of all things: it's the first time I've seen potatoes well-browned or roasted or something prior to use in a curry dish. Very pleasant.

(3) Origami Sea Bass: "Baked in parchment with ginger, longan, shiitake mushrooms and rice wine." The presentation of this dish is fun: two origami boxes, one atop the other as a lid, with carrot curls and parsley atop the cover. Within, the most subtly flavored part of the meal. The fish portion, while a little small, is done to moist perfection in a clear wine/broth with the aforementioned mushrooms and slices of red and green pepper.

(4) Sambal Udang: "Prawns sauteed in a sambal chili sauce." I'd never had sambal before; now that I've looked it up, I understand why this chili sauce started out spicy, but momentarily brought out distinctly sweet notes - must have been from the brown sugar! Ours had a moderately strong lemon flavor to it as well. Certainly the most interesting dish in terms of bringing together flavors in a way that I, at least, found unexpected.

Dessert (because this was a birthday dinner, and birthday dinners have dessert): Huz and I split a piece of Chocolate Ginger Cake, "Fresh chocolate ginger cake with a touch of molasses and topped with vanilla gelato." The cake part on its own was pleasant, though I wouldn't have called it amazing. It went very well, though, with the aforementioned gelato, and with decorative fruit sauces (one orange-colored, one berry-colored) drizzled around the edge of the plate. A fine ending to a wonderful meal.

I can't recommend Straits heartily enough to anyone who likes really good Asian cuisine. Overall, it's about the same price as or slightly more expensive than, say, Max's (main dishes range from around $10 to $36). Well worth it if you live in the area and want something a bit different and extremely tasty, and worth spending a meal here if you're visiting the area.

More stimulation of the economy!

2009-10-04T00:04:33Z

Last weekend, we went to our local Honda dealership to ask about a new stereo for my 1998 Accord. (As I'd described previously, it has recently been prone to losing sound during hot weather, and I was getting very tired of it.) Honda, it turns out, wanted to charge me something insane like $800 for a tape deck model basically identical to the cheapo stock unit that was busy breaking. The nice Honda guy suggested going to, you know, a car audio place where I might do rather better.

So today, we went to Monney Car Audio. I'd been leery of going, figuring I'd be faced with slimy salespeople attempting to sell me much more stereo than I wanted or needed. What I found instead was a nice guy, probably in his mid-fifties, who showed me what was probably their cheapest CD/radio/audio jack model, and the model 1 level higher than that (about $60 more), and that's it! He installed the least expensive model pretty much on the spot, and I spent less than $200 on the item+installation. As that's about as much as I wanted to pay for it, without having done any research aforehand, I was perfectly happy. I would definitely recommend the local Monney on the basis of non-obnoxiousness and - I expect - knowledge about higher-end models if that's what you want. Happy birthday, me!

We also went to Kohl's so that Huz could take another look for a black sweater for *his* skating outfit. Kohl's bought out a whole bunch of Mervyn's locations when Mervyn's went under, and it looks, at least during opening weekend, like it'll be a pretty reasonable substitute. Huz found an acceptable sweater and some good flannel shirts. I didn't find much, but I wasn't looking all that hard either.

Oh yah. And I bought plane tickets for Christmas earlier today.

I think we might be done with serious stimulatin' of the economy for a while. Whew!

Skating dress = COLD

2009-10-03T18:45:02Z

Hmm. Polyester/spandex blend lets the wind rip right on through. Tights, despite claims to the contrary, are not as warm as jeans, largely for the same reason. I am going to friggin' freeze during the competition!

I am grateful that, start to finish, it only takes a little more than a minute to do Dutch Waltz twice through, even with slightly fancy beginning and ending. And presumably there will be warm drinks available upstairs during the whole affair.

Songs of Science

2009-10-03T00:41:52Z

I've recently been informed that the Halloween party traditional at the annual department retreat may be replaced by "something that might resemble Oktoberfest and a short-sketch show possibly with group singing." Being the sort of person I am, this immediately provoked a web search for science-based songs that I could sing.

I was already familiar with a few, namely Tom Lehrer's Elements, Monty Python's Galaxy Song, and The Amphioxus Song (the latter stumbled upon when I was working at the genome center and doing amphioxus finishing). And I knew a bunch of programmer/sci-fi filk songs (HAL's Song - it's in the comments, search for "I sent Frank to fix the antenna" and sing it to "My bonnie lies over the ocean", You Can Build a Mainframe From the Things You Find at Home), but those seemed inappropriate for the group. Surely, surely there were more out there.

Surprise! There are!

The journal Nature runs a blog called The Great Beyond that has collected a whole lotta science songs, many with videos. There's possibilities there. They also link in one of those posts to rips of Singing Science records, a six-LP set for kids produced in the "late 1950s / early 1960s by Hy Zaret and Lou Singer. (Zaret's main claim to fame is writing the lyrics to the classic "Unchained >Melody" for the 1955 movie "Unchained", later recorded by the Righteous Brothers and more recently used in 'Ghost'.)" I listened to much of "What is an Animal?" before I broke under the wave of saccharine cuteness-for-5-year-olds and turned it off.

Happy Friday!

A birthday dinner poll

2009-10-01T16:15:09Z

View Poll: Birthday restaurant possibilities

(Normally, we'd have a big family luncheon/dinner with Huz's brother's family, including our small but exceedingly active niece and nephew. But we just had a big family get-together last week, and Huz's parents are doing a lot of cooking for guests in the past month, and thought it would be nice to have a quiet and civilized dinner out. I'm not objecting!)

WTH??????!?

2009-09-29T03:02:45Z

Dear (banking institution),

I have no recollection of telling you to send anything like that much money to my long-distance phone company. Nor can I make the large number match, say, a credit card or insurance bill that I might have paid to the wrong outlet by mistake. Please fix!!!!

Concerned,
Me

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EDIT: Woops. My bad. I will call long-distance phone company in the morning and see if they'll send me a refund of my massive overpayment.

Recent gaming thoughts/reviews

2009-09-27T01:39:14Z

• New Nintendo Channel on the Wii system: Mixed.
        Bad: Videos are now listed in two columns of eight per page, with whichever title the cursor happens to be hanging over magnified in size. Makes it feel more difficult to navigate from one page of videos to the next (done via arrow buttons at the left and right edges of the screen) - old user interface was better.
        Good: Vids load quickly and cleanly; not really a change.
        Um, I think it's good: Under the "Records" section, you can see how many hours total your system has spent playing the various games that it keeps track of. (Between the two of us, Huz and I put in something crazy like 170 hours on Zelda TP, for example.) I'm not sure I really wanted that much information, but it's kind of neat that it's there. Titles played can also be used to link to 'you might also enjoy this' recommendations.

• Tales of Monkey Island, episode 1: Generally positive.
       Bad: A few low-level things. Load times can be slow; every so often the soundtrack is ahead of the visual. Fixed camera angle sometimes annoying. Guybrush occasionally a pain to navigate. Volume low. One bad puzzle so far (the nature of which requires you to happen to pass your cursor over an object that I'm not convinced is even visible - or if it is, it's so just from one particular angle/spot).
      Good: It's a new Monkey Island game! Guybrush's original voice actor is back. Fun/funny dialogue. Mostly pretty reasonable puzzles so far - the monkey in the mad scientist's den is particularly well done. Will feel familiar and enjoyable to fans of the series.

• Wii Sports Resort: Positive, but very limited experience
       Our local GameStop had this running, so we gave the sword-fighting, frisbee, and archery a try. (These are considered the three best modules by IGN.)
        Sword: Whoa. Apart from failing to understand how to block (I think it might be a button press), it's really quite impressive how 1:1 it is. Like a lot of waggle, it works better if you do it a little on the slow side - while we didn't experience it decalibrating, I can imagine that it could happen pretty easily.
       Frisbee (with the dog): Whoa. Feels like throwing a frisbee (I tried to be gentle; might behave differently if I really flung it hard).
      Archery: Okay, kind of cool. It doesn't feel as 1:1 as the others, but perhaps because of the interface, it doesn't need to feel so much so. What does feel curious is that you have a pointer-like experience in aiming the shot - the camera zooms in closer to the target the farther back you pull the bow, and there's a highlighted circle indicating exactly where you're currently aiming (picture with the vague idea here) - but you're not pointing with the IR, you're holding the Wiimote vertical and angling it to change your aim.
     Overall: May become more seriously interested when the Sports Resort Double Pack (includes 2 Motion Plus units) comes out.

Skating dress saga is DONE!

2009-09-27T01:16:12Z

The skating dress showed up last night! Of course, nothing would do but to try it on basically then and there, and have Huz take photos of it:

Click on any of the images to get to the big version.

Except for the bit of decoration with stretch velvet (pretty much impossible to see in these), the dress is a polyester/spandex blend, and surprisingly heavy - I bet it weighs 3-4 pounds! Apart from my back, which is likely to freeze, it should keep me pretty warm. It's also kind of a shiny black, and because of that I don't really need to do anything to it to dress it up. The skirt is quite long, but I like it that length. It's serged down at the bottom, so I couldn't really shorten it anyway (again, not that I want to).

Anyway. It's here, in plenty of time for the competition, and it fits, and I like it!

Competition details for those who are interested:

Date: Saturday, October 10
Place: Nazareth Ice Oasis, 3140 Bay Road, Redwood City, California 94063
Time: The competition starts at 4; our warm-up time is 4:08 PM. (Almost everyone else who does ice dance in the Bay Area will be down at the yearly dance seminar which takes place the same weekend. There's a total of four couples competing in dance, and we're the only ones in our category.) The competition is scheduled to go till 7:30 or so.

News of the weird - Dead fish like humans!

2009-09-24T00:25:22Z

Ganked from orichalcum , mostly for the benefit of the portion of my friendslist that doesn't overlap with hers:

Dead fish lights up when shown pictures of humans, a study that shows that neuroimaging experiments can give a lot of false positives.

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In other work-related news:

• We've begun the Big Project that I've been making stuff for, like, a year for! On a practical level, this means that I do pretty much the same physical actions day after day for probably about the next month and a half, doing a gazillion transfections. It's tiring, believe me.

• It's nice to have a perfectly sensible explanation as to why a particular cloning didn't work. It helps to have both enzymes functional in a double digest, just for example.

Birthday wishes!

2009-09-23T16:19:55Z

Happy birthday, ladybird87 ! May it be full of good things - especially chocolate!