Amethyst's Shiny Pebbles

Hah - I guessed correctly!

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 17:20:26 GMT

Tales of Monkey Island Chapter 4 is available for download on WiiWare today!

(Now, given that I really need to go out and acquire a medium-size suitcase tonight, will I have time to actually *play* any of it before I fly to Boston tomorrow night? We shall see.)

(See, we have two suitcases in good-to-okay condition. One HUGE one that we bought when we went to China last summer, and one kind of itty bitty one - think pilot-case size - that's going to be less than useful, as I want to take my ice skates with me. An intermediate size would be a Useful Thing.)

I can has faster Internets!

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 06:07:49 GMT

We've been using Earthlink's DSL service ever since we moved into our current house, now over 6 years ago. Recently of late, the service has been really droppy - it'll fail to connect, or connect briefly, drop (briefly or otherwise), reconnect, need a modem reset... It got too obnoxious, so we've switched to astound's cable modem service. It is spiffy! Definitely feels faster, and is significantly faster according to one of those sites where you can check your down/up speeds. It was lovely to be able to watch an episode of The Simpsons (full screen, hi-def) without any annoying pauses. :)

(Of course, shortly I will be at my parents' house in Boston, where they have a fiber optic connection. I'll be very spoiled by the time I get back.)

Good Thanksgiving and long weekend.

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 00:02:01 GMT

We did Thanksgiving yesterday afternoon with Huz's family: his parents live nearby, as does his brother with wife and two kids, and his aunt and uncle drove in from Auburn. It was good to be with them - I don't think I've ever toasted "To family!" with such feeling before. All was tasty: the turkey, sweet potatoes, and stuffing are old family recipes. We cooked green beans and shallots for our contribution. Yay, I can cook green vegetables without ruining them!

Today's been great, really. I slept soundly last night for a wonder, which I needed rather desperately. We spent the morning doing some cleaning, which also needed doing rather desperately. (Now our house won't be quite such a disaster, at least not in the public bits. The office and bedroom are still sadly in need of help. I hope to get to them to some extent in the next day or two.) But it was really wonderful to be able to spend the whole morning focusing on things right here that needed doing and that I could do. Sometimes being useful is itself a great distraction. :)

Then we went out, did some grocery shopping, and acquired Metroid Prime Trilogy, as Huz is nearly done with Majora's Mask and needs a new adventure to play. Thanks to orichalcum and cerebralpaladin , who lent us MP: Corruption so Huz could playtest it! We'll return it when we see you tomorrow.

Time to go clean the bathroom. Whee!

And in the list of random stuff...

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 20:12:06 GMT

Our themostat is having issues... We set it to turn on when the temp dropped to around 63 last night, and it failed to turn on. The house was about 57 when we woke up! The heat turned on when I turned the themostat off and on again, but clearly this is something that Needs To Be Looked Into.

In other news, had a fun D&D game last night. My noble paladin is horrendously embarrased at having been captured by goblins and having to be ransomed by - of all things - a slaver. Her mom, who's the ruler of a bordering region to where we are, is going to be FURIOUS at having to pay the slaver as much gold as Lady Karen has given her a writ for.

Goldilocks as Christian Metaphor

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 22:24:26 GMT

I kid you not! Read the diatribe against 'lukewarm' Christianity here.

How did I stumble upon this site? Well, I was looking for an image of Goldilocks to use in my upcoming lab presentation. See, one particular cell culture format is kind of an inverse of Goldilocks because even though it's sort of the middle of the road in terms of size, it shows considerably less gene expression than any of the others. That's why I was ~~procrastinating~~ looking for a Goldilocks image.

Temporary out-of-touch

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 21:28:48 GMT

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

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 22:53:46 GMT

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 .mp4 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!)

EDITED to add: Our church site has been completely revamped (it's now all Flash-driven and pretty and stuff). Among the other bells and whistles, it's got a "Music Clips" section under Worship. I am rather pleased to note that this piece is one of the three on display (that's where I'm linking the file from now, actually; please let me know if the link quits working).

There are hippo races in Australia?

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 23:15:56 GMT

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

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 18:22:46 GMT

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

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:55:12 GMT

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!

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 04:47:18 GMT

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!!!!!!!

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 04:22:52 GMT

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.

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:33:19 GMT

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

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 05:10:47 GMT

• 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

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 23:42:54 GMT

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!

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 04:59:41 GMT

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

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 05:23:13 GMT

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

A pondering...

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 04:30:13 GMT

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

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 05:37:58 GMT

• 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!

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 03:35:01 GMT

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

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 04:44:40 GMT

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!

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 00:04:33 GMT

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

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 18:45:02 GMT

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

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 00:41:52 GMT

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

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 16:15:09 GMT

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!)