Advogato blog for Wheat

2 Jan 2002

Wed, 2 Jan 2002 02:32:23 GMT

PS2

John bought a PS2.
Been playing PS2 for six days straight now. There is a spot on my thumb where the skin has been worn off, yeah.
Played Baldur's Gate for New Year's Eve.
Twisted Metal: Black is really cool.
Gran Turismo 3 rocks.
Finished Jak and Daxter.
Haven't touched the "computer" in a week.
Tomorrow I return to work, where I have to use one of those "computer" things.

12 Dec 2001

Wed, 12 Dec 2001 09:16:52 GMT

Rollercoaster

Busy hacking away on ye ol' huge Perl code base at work. Much code to clean and improve. Is good.
Renting and watching 'movies' this last week. They are like teevee, only longer, and you don't get the commercial breaks.
Some interesting new projects announced for Zope: ZMailman , the integration of Mailman and Zope, which is highly exciting. And The Jester is working on GroundZero, a clone of PHPNuke. And CMF has just hit 1.2beta1. FSSQL has been merged into the core of CMF, which is good, coz I'll need that for my CMF SQL Poll Product which I'm working on.
Went to the Brinkman lab party, Ursula, Chris and I tagged along with Mike. When Mike said 'party' we reckoned there be lots of people there. Aside from us, there were six people - it's a small lab. It was nice though, we had beer and some great home made sushi, and it turned out that four of us had all been at the Rollercoaster concert in Toronto in 1992 (the Spritualized, Curve, Jesus and Mary Chain tour).

3 Dec 2001

Mon, 3 Dec 2001 07:47:05 GMT

Jim Beam

Rolled in the X-Mas season with a December 1st office christmas party. It was a decent affair. We partook of shots of whiskey and cherry brandy in the late afternoon at Art's place, and upon arrival at Bridges Restaurant, I moved onto Jim Beam at the bartenders suggestion.

The turnout was good. Over eighty people, including the not-too-often-seen-at-social-functions Mehrdad and his wife.

The food was not too interesting, but that was OK, as I wasn't that interested in eating. I didn't want a big meal "slowing me down". Drinks were a little pricey (or a lot pricey, as I was laying out $15 for a double after a generous tip). There was a speech by Marco, and there was swag and gifts given out.

There was to be dancing, but the music was too eclectic a mix for any serious dancing sessions. Scientists aren't always the most eager to get out and there and cut a rug either. Some techs were dancing and Chris L. was a young Don Juan-type on the floor.

Dinner took some time to be served, and it wound up being too late to go out, and too early to go home, so we shuffled off to Boston Pizza and Justin and I recounted old tales of the legendary Stormix trade shows.

And then the next morning I felt rather spun and less than 100%. And in the afternoon I fell asleep on the couch and awoke to Atushi dropping off John from the camping trip.

1 Dec 2001

Sat, 1 Dec 2001 19:35:40 GMT

Ammunition

Discussing nightly dreams has become a topic with the GSC lunchers. I had at three last night:

The first happened maybe around 5 am, as it was punctuated by a rolling over in bed and a glance at the clock. My family went out on the ocean on boat, that contained two huge pontoons, the rest of the boat was made of a mish mash of tarps and cheap plastic. Really slow, and really manouverable, and the name of the boat was Sagedogs. I'm sure there was lots of other stuff going on, but the rest is lost in the fog.

Atsushi came by at 8:30 am to pick up my roommate John for the snow camping trip, and I could hear voices in the other room. I fell back into a deeper sleep around 9 am. This time there was a woman, with long reddish orange hair. And we travelled with a group of other acquaintances, again by boat, to some strange form of 16th century Italy. A dark haired, sinister Machiavellian man who had been wooing the woman and the trip over was there. It got dark and the three of us laid down in some large bed. The man and woman side by side, with me crouched uncomfortably at the foot of the bed. The man got up at some point, and I turned 90 degrees, so that my feet were beside the womans waist and vice versa. At this point we began flirting, playing footsies and kicking the covers around. This went on for some time, as in reality, my covers had done a 90 degree turn at some point in the night, and there was no longer any sheet protection for my feet. Eventually we got up, and the dark haired man came back. He wanted me to leave and I was saying he should go. He became threatining, as he was known to ahve a gang of thieves and thugs under his command. So I took a small, very sharp bread knife, and began hacking the fingers off his left hand. At this point he began screaming and noticed that his fingers were very small. I looked closer and noticed that his hand was the size and shape of a fork. Then I woke up.

Oh, and I also dreamed about Maid Marian at some point last night too. Maid Marian was Beej's brother (Beej is my cat), but he was killed by a car four years ago. Not much happened in the dream, I just noticed the cat, and start petting it, saying, "how come I never pay attention to you anymore kity?"

16 Nov 2001

Fri, 16 Nov 2001 07:08:22 GMT

H&E

*sigh*
Work is interesting and challenging and fun. More and more of the biojargon is starting to make sense, so that's nice. Maintaining and expanding a large code base is challenging. At lunch, we've been playing frisbee, which is fun.
Nethack has been all the rage, what with some big month long tournament going on or something. I suck at nethack. I always die on level 4 or 5. I should run away from the tough monsters and eat fewer zombie corpses. But I play fast and careless.
"I tried to tell my kids, you don't realize ... you know, there was a certain charm."

2 Nov 2001

Fri, 2 Nov 2001 04:42:36 GMT

werk

Whew! Halloween partied at the Wett Bar with DJ Doc Martin, who had things moving well and good with his signature jungle bongo-energy spinning. Enjoyed gin and beer and the costumes.
This morning though, at werk. Wow. It was not possible to write code. Me poor head full of cotton balls. Me poor brain.
Preparing to take over the maintainence of the sequencing database for the next two months during Ran's sabbatical absence. There's a whole mountain o' Perl code needing to be maintained. Today spent some more time poking around the glossaries on the web. Restriction enzymes, aliqouts, ET Terminators, BigDye Terminators and more.
Next week I'll also be poking around in Mapping. Mapping seems weird, working with all the image bands they use the object-oriented AceDB a fair bit.
Oh, and I scheduled to do a talk about the Zope-powered intranet in three weeks for the benefit of my co-worker client-base.
I'm gonna but a rabbit!

31 Oct 2001

Wed, 31 Oct 2001 05:13:08 GMT

things

Tomorrow, I hope to score a cupcake in the afternoon.
Myth III is out! I have no fast Mac, I have no Windows! Fawk. Someone should port this to the Linux Computer Operating System.
Kohan is OK. Nice RTS. Only played the solo stuff so far, looking forward to multiplayer - except the servers usually seem fairly empty ...
Justin quit his job. This is the thing to do. Quit your job.
Trakker is fixing boogs all the time.
I have a gun. I don't have to pay.
I built a paper and balse wood airplane.
I painted a ceramic plate. With carrots. With the tight GSC slacker crew.
I stayed up till 7 am playing Axis and Allies: Pacific. Dauntingly long set-up time, and then you're locked into the simulated combat arena of the Pacific.
I stuffed my cat into the arm of a sweater and then she rolled off the couch.
I like rabbits.
Tomorrow is halloween. I'll be a buccaneer I will.

19 Oct 2001

Fri, 19 Oct 2001 06:08:02 GMT

Monkies

<MonkeyMan> Wheat: Innaccessible by a the immense majority (perhaps higher than 90%) of.

11 Oct 2001

Thu, 11 Oct 2001 05:46:14 GMT

biology

"What's python?"
"What's a pathogen?"
Reading about pathogens, as all be doing a bit of touch up to some areas of http://www.pathogenomics.bc.ca.
Bacteria is like little bugs. Real small bugs. There are three kinds of these "mini-bugs": Bacteria, Archaea and Eukarya. Bacteria are the simplest. They don't have the complex cell structure of the Eukarya. The Eukarya are pretty nifty - they weren't discovered until the 1970s - and they can survive in temperatures up to 90 C.
A pathogen is an agent that causes disease. In particular, certain types of bacteria.

1 Oct 2001

Mon, 1 Oct 2001 01:13:23 GMT

Star Trek: Enterprise.

C. Gtk. Glade.

A Gift From Earth.