Science Monkey

I turned the chickencam back onto my office last night and it solved a huge mystery! I was convinced that money was disappearing in the middle of the night. I knew that Emma wasn’t taking it (well, I think she’d tell me if she did) and I didn’t think that the cats were stealing it, so I couldn’t figure it out. Look at what the cam caught last night, though:

As a bonus treat for you, I’ve also recorded my first protopodcast. It’s not terribly exciting, but there you go. I recorded myself playing the Sleeping Beauty Waltz by Tchaikovsky. Or, at least, about a minute’s worth. It’s not necessarily amazing or a complex arrangement but…but it’s me, playing the piano, doing something I could not have done three months ago, and that makes me happy.

Sciencemonkey Protopodcast, Vol. 001

My instructor has now moved me to the Prelude to Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. Damn, I love Bach, but it’s just a wee bit harder to play than the previous piece.

It’s time for the weekly seedling update. The weather has been warm enough that I’ve been taking them outside so they can get some actual sunlight, rather than the filtered stuff coming through the windows. I’m turning them around too, so they’ll hopefully straighten back up. Many of the tomatoes had a pretty serious bend in their stems. Heh.

Huzzah! Come watch the mighty mighty Chickencam! For the time being, it only takes pictures of my office, but perhaps you’ll get an eyeful of me working at my desk or one of the cats being bad. Who knows?

It takes pictures every 30 seconds, assuming there’s been a change in the environment. At night I’d just expect a black screen. During the day, I’m curious about the cats.

Look who’s joined the ranks of the attention whores and amateur pornographers! Me! Woo!

Seriously you guys! Pay attention to me!

Actually, I bought it so I can set up a chickencam. I figured I’d do the setup, testing, and tweaking indoors, before adding the extra complications of weather into the mix. So far, I’ve got my linux box (Ubuntu FTW!) able to see the camera and take pictures manually. Still to figure out:
- How to take pictures automatically, say every 30 seconds.
- How to upload (FTP, I assume) those pictures automatically.

If I knew how to write a shell script I think this’d be an easy to trivial problem. Yay for learning linux!

Never mind. I just found webcam, a program to do exactly what I need. Now I just need to figure out how to configure it…:-D Happy Monkey!

Tom let our postdoc go today, because we’re broke. This really sucks. He’s a great guy and a really good scientist, but I’m concerned about him. Because he’s been in Tom’s lab, he doesn’t have any publications yet. He’ll have one soon (assuming it goes out, etc.), but it hasn’t been published yet. There’s one professor in the department who has already expressed an interest in talking with him, so I’m hopeful that he’ll be able to find a new job soon.

Emma and I went out to dinner last night at the Paramount Grill, which must be one of the best restaurants in Gainesville. It’s certainly way up there. We had the flatbread appetizer (always tasty) and she had a berry-something salad. I declined a salad, but had a glass of a splendid pinot noir, from David Bruce, I believe. You wouldn’t believe the beautiful aroma that this glass of wine gave off while it was just sitting on the table. Of course, the single glass cost more than I usually spend on a bottle (or two) of my usual rotgut, so you can take my overenthusiasm with a grain of salt.

For our main course, Emma had a vegetarian pasta which looked lovely and I had a very nice duck breast, rubbed in herbs and pan-seared, served over a tomato-spinach risotto with blue cheese and pine nut garnish. Yum. I haven’t been a fan of duck but am glad I took the chance last night. Exquisite.

For dessert, we shared a caramel pecan tart a la mode that was drizzled with a caramel sauce. Again, very nice. All in all, it was a very nice evening out, which is something we rarely get the chance to do.

What is the point of scheduling a standing data review appointment if you’re not going to be there? I assume it’s not malice but what does that leave?

According to Tom, our fiscal person, “jumped the gun” yesterday. We’re not completely broke. I do wonder, however, by how much he jumped the gun. Six months? One month? A week?

In happier news, I saw footprints today! You may recall my spazzing out over seeing bands on a film last week. That night, I put the film between two intensifying screens and threw it in the -80 freezer. I meant to pull it out over the weekend but…well…I forgot. I remembered it this morning and ran downstairs to develop it. The autorad was overexposed, of course, but there were some very clear, obvious footprints. My loading wasn’t even horrible! Sadly, the region that was the most important to duplicate was too fuzzed out to read clearly, so I have to repeat it, but I’m certainly encouraged.

I also found out today that Tom took my name off of a poster for the Mkrn3 footprinting. Jixiu wrote an abstract for some upcoming local jollification…er…poster session and put my name in the middle of the list of authors, as I’m repeating his footprinting work. Apparently one of Tom’s revisions was to take my name off. I wonder if he’ll put it back now.

Courtesy of the incalculably awesome Merlin Mann, GTD for Scientists (written by Drew McCormack at MacResearch). One of these days I’m going to actually read that book.

I think the lab is in trouble. Jason went to get a PO number today so we could get some sequences run through ICBR (Jingda, who usually does our sequencing, is out of town for the next three weeks). He was denied, because we’re apparently broke. One of the senior fiscal people in the department was reported to have said that the department’s support of Tom is over.

Yikes!

I asked Tom about our funding situation after joint lab meeting (or, as the presenter called it, “supergroup meeting,” which I really liked). He said that we weren’t completely broke just yet, but that things were going to get tight. He claims that it’s the Dean’s Office money that is over and that there is still departmental money for our experiments. I’m not so sure. Tom is going to talk with the department’s fiscal person tomorrow. I’ll report whatever I hear.

Fuck a hairy duck.