Reset

I'm currently in Day Two of an attempted reset of my sleep schedule. It's not so much a problem for me to keep absurd hours in the summer, because it's possible to bike home most days and therefore I'm not tied to the Purple Line schedule on when I have to leave Evanston (about 1am). Lately though, I've only been able to ride sporadically because of this whole winter deal (and the fact that Evanston doesn't actually, technically plow their roads, to the point that you can discern the line between Evanston and Chicago by road condition) and so it's become somewhat of a concern for me.

Plus, eating lunch at 4pm is not very social of me, and I've been working on fixing that.

So I've decided to try a reboot. I fell asleep at about 10:30pm after Sunday's hockey game, then woke up at 2am, and enjoyed a nice, lengthy 10pm to 4am nap-thing this morning. Hopefully, I'll be able to keep this up, because I really do like shocking my labmates by actually being in the lab before they are.

More updates as they come in, most likely in the form of me passing out on my keyboard at about three in the afternoon.

Weekend 11/4-11/6: A Compendium of Awesome and Suck

I rarely update on here, and it's usually some vague rehash of what's been reported elsewhere or about some event that's widely publicized. So in the interest of letting those people that actually read this know what's going on in my life (which was the goal at my outset), a breakdown of things that were good and bad this weekend.

Things Which Ruled:

1) Having presented on my projects for my job last wednesday, it wasn't actually necessary to spend time in the lab until some ridiculous time on Friday. I got to go home early, and with my newfound freedom and recent paycheck, went out and bought Guitar Hero because I've given up on being a rock star, so may as well play one in a video game. Yes, I know Guitar Hero II is coming out... today. But as I never buy games or systems the day they come out (my Playstation 2 was purchased a mere five and a half years after its release) and figured I should warm up on the first game before I jump into the new. Also, I needed the controller anyway, and buying it with the first game is cheaper than buying it with the second. I'm quite happy with this purchase, and will most definitely be acquiring the second round of Guitar Heroing, solely on the strength of the first five songs on the setlist, mostly because you can't not like Danzig's "Mother" and "Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You" is more hilarious an inclusion than anything. If anyone has any tips on how the hell I'm going to beat "Institutionalized" by Suicidal Tendencies or "Misirlou", I'd be happy to hear them.

2) Good times spent at the Hopleaf Bar. I do not pretend to be a connoisseur of the impressive array of beers served at the Hopleaf, but have decided that I am a fan of Kwak, because it's tasty and hey, silly glasses are fun.

3) I've been watching "The Adventures of Brisco County Jr." courtesy Netflix. I don't really recall this show, but it's goofy, quirky, funny, and stars Bruce Campbell, whose book If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor, I've been plodding through when I'm home. Hurrah for him.

4) Sunday night was the highlight with a Jurassic 5 show (with Clipse opening) at the Patten Gym at Northwestern. I was told that I bought the seven hundredth ticket, but it appeared that about three hundred of that number failed to show up. The show was incredibly good, and well worth more than the $10 the tickets cost. I'd seen them once before, on the 2000 Warped Tour, and was very happy they performed their older material. Clipse... I'm not a huge fan of, though I do have to admit that I hadn't heard of them before attending, and another lab member who is a fan of their music told me today that she was somewhat disappointed by their set. So maybe I just saw them on an off night.

Things which sucked:

1) Occasionally, when I close my eyes and am very tired, I can see the Guitar Hero fretboard coming toward me, haunting my dreams and mocking my inability to fake playing "Bark at the Moon" well enough to please a video game.

2) While the Jurassic 5 show was very good, the organizers of the event made two key errors which resulted in me writing mild things about them on my pointless blog. First, for a ten dollar show at a gymnasium (on a basketball court, to be completely specific), there were an awful amount of annoying people running around trying to get me to join Chase Bank's Facebook group or drink a bunch of Red Bull. But then, perhaps that's the reason tickets were so cheap. The other bit was that the back doors of the basketball court were WIDE FREAKING OPEN, so that anyone walking by or setting up a lawn chair behind Patten Gym could hear the concert better than the people inside, for free. That bit is only annoying because I didn't think of doing that.

3) The group that brought Jurassic 5 to campus appeared to start advertising three days before the show, and did so in a way that's extremely common to Northwestern, that I'd never seen before and which pisses me off. This mode of advertising is to print up a bunch of posters, disperse them to those in your group charged with advertising things, and then to stick them using as much tape as you can to the ground. The problems with this approach abound. If you want to read these flyers, you have to walk around with your head down like, well, me in eighth grade. The flyers become unreadable once it rains (so they're effective for, at most, two days) or when enough people walk over them that they're torn to shreds. That, and no one that puts these things down ever comes back to clean up the mound of tape, so that there are rectangles of masking tape along all the sidewalks on an otherwise very nice campus.

4) The mid term elections are today, which are all fine and good, but it deprives me of the increasingly comic lunacy of negative campaign ads.

Moved

So, I haven't been updating recently. The O'Halloran lab has moved from the dark confines of part of the K wing of the Technological Institute to a ground level crowded little spot in a building across the way. Unfortunately, this has meant that over the last week, all research has been forced to a halt, which I'm not a big fan of as I'd like to put something together to justify the fact that I'm in grad school. And that moving has been an enormous pain.

If I find a digital camera, perhaps, I'll get some photos of this place.

But, moving on.

I'm not going to be too upset when, as I'm leaving this place pretty soon for home, I'm not watching this Pirates-Mets matchup. Maholm has been getting out of jams through the first few innings, but has walked in a run and the best performance in the world isn't going to help if the opposing pitcher (Tom Glavine tonight) is throwing a perfect game through four. Sanchez got the start again, and though he did rush a throw to first on a Glavine chop and was charged wtih an error, I'm glad they've gotten him in to the lineup again. Necessary. Hopefully, they can pull something together to take away from the sting of the 12th inning loss on a walk off homer.

I've finally caved and bought the Da Vinci Code, and I'll be done with it tonight. It's certainly not the revolutionary (in the literary sense) masterpiece I've heard it called, but it's all right, and about up to my expectations for anything that I find in a supermarket at 2am for $8. Then again, a guy that owns Half Baked probably shouldn't be too critical of the media put before him, so I'll leave it at that. I do have two criticisms. 1) If you're going to have 105 chapters in your book, you're probably making the chapters too small. I can't help but feel that they're kind of forced. 2) If you're going to try to sell me a book using the word "since", I'm more impressed by "since the Second World War" or "since Dostoevsky's time" than "since Harry Potter." Nothing against the Potter books, as I haven't read them and so can't comment, but if you're using the word "since" in a context that's supposed to impress me, you're going to have to go back further than 1997.

I might comment on the Moussaoui thing later tonight, but mostly, I'm just going to go home now.

Not for the Faint of Heart

I’ve not been updating this much recently, but that shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, and I really would be seven kinds of shocked if one couldn’t glean that from both the timestamps and the fact that I open every one of these now with the apology that I’ve not been updating recently.

So we’ll continue.

In Murphy News:

• I was not meant to be a butcher (hint: if you really don’t like animals dying for scientific studies, skip this). It’s funny that I’m sitting in a Subway eating a meatball sandwich while I type this, but I really don’t know how cool I am with killing an animal myself. Case in point: I’d like to do some metal studies involving the hippocampus. Not the human hippocampus, of course, but a rat hippocampus. Which means getting a rat brain. I didn’t actually have to extract the brain, of course, as I’d never done it before and would probably have ended up injuring the rat and causing, in a roundabout way, the beginning of a new species of superrat which would subjugate us all. So I watched the physiologist do it. Step One: Knocking the rat out in the desiccator filled with inhaled anesthetic. I’m fine with that. Step Two: Dissecting the rat. Ok. It wasn’t in pain (so she said) and it’s over now. Rat done. Step Three: What’s she doing with that knife? Step Four: She’s not… Step Five: She is. Step Six: Rat head in a jar.
  
  I’m not cool with doing that. I accept that these kinds of things have to be done so that we can more fully understand the chemistry of life, but I think I’ll sit back and let someone else decapitate the rats.



• Busy week this week. Group meeting on Tuesday afternoon, which I’m quite nervous about, and softball game on Monday. In case I’ve not said this, I’m involved in a softball team now, which is fine, but the manager signed us up for the wrong league such that instead of playing the Computer Science graduate school, we’re playing SAE tomorrow. Color me all kinds of mercy rule.

Pirates:

• I’m encouraged by what I saw from Duke’s outing on Saturday, and a bit discouraged by Snell’s today. Conflicted about Casey’s injury as he was hitting moderately well and we are paying him more than anyone else on the roster, but at least it gets Craig “Thor” Wilson some playing time (it should be coming over Burnitz, but it’s playing time nonetheless), which is providing us with everything that looks like offense recently. Mostly, I’m just waiting patiently for the first day off, Thursday, so that the relievers can get a modicum of rest. On that note, someone came up to me yesterday to ask why the Pirates have played more games than anyone else. I laughed a little. And then looked sadly at the schedule.



• I realized that I’m not sure what style of announcing I like. Cubs announcers tend to be a little too high on themselves, the Reds announcers were kind of static, saying something only when something happened such that a sizeable chunk was dead silence, but I’m not sure if that’s better or worse than Pirates announcers chatting about their pets and silverware.



• 4-10 isn’t where I wanted to be right now, but it’s hardly the end of the world. Pirates fans in the Pirate Q & A and on message boards have been calling the season lost since the first game. While I’d be surprised to see enough change to get us to .500, it’s just damn depressing listening to the talk of fan revolt.

I'm not poisoned

Quick note while I'm waiting for my solvent to come off.

My blood mercury: 4 ng/mL
Normal blood mercury: 10 ng/mL
Toxic blood mercury: 50 ng/mL

My blood cadmium: <0.2 ng/mL
Normal blood cadmium: 1 ng/mL

My health=fine.

Majoring in Florida

So here's the thing. I'm not a big supporter of Jeb Bush, usually. I'm not so sure that's the case in this specific instance. Quick overview, Jeb wants to start having high schoolers declare a major.

Schoolers? Is that right?

Schooners.

"You know what? There is no Easter Bunny! That over there's just a guy in a suit!"

Ok. Back to the task at hand.

On the one hand, this could very easily turn into a lot of stress for a lot of kids, mostly in pressure from parents who want their kid to be a doctor, and so force the young'n to major in bio or, if they're particularly awesome, chemistry. And that's not good times.

On the other hand, I think that students should be allowed to self-design their curriculum as long as certain minimum criteria are still being met. I like the concept of having to have a minor, so long as that minor is in a field disparate from that of the major. I really do support the concept of a liberal arts education, and think that I benefited from having to go through all of that German/Econ/Psych junk at Allegheny. I disagree with Jebuchadnezzar that this'll stop, or significantly decrease dropouts, but I'll let him have that. If implemented properly, I don't see how it would be much different than the already existing vocational programs, except that it would allow kids that are really into chemistry study more chemistry, those that are really into english focus on that and those that are really into machining work on machining.


Then again, college students can be really stressed out, and many probably don't need that extra pressure. Those that are really driven to study whatever are going to do that regardless of whether there's an actual system designed for them (and they shall weep when I fail them on their lab reports, and such), and they might be successful at that (e.g. R. B.) or they might have an anyeurism, but that's independent of what's going on here, I think.

Final Verdict: Interesting experiment. You Floridians tell me how you like that.