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I am totally missing working the lab, running little experiments growing ecoli and cut n pasting small pieces of dna together.  I really do.   I found this picture today made me a little homesick, the lab is where my heart is…. and what a corny thumbs up…oh lordy.

Lab Home

Hey, I haven’t updated but my other roomate and I were sitting in our living  room when our “crazy” roommate came out and sulkily said she was going out, then came back in 2 minutes later and loudly said, “I am going snowboarding, wow how life is turning around.”

One example of a rollercoaster ride of emotions i plan to keep my distance from.

Time for a little home improvement! Today’s project was two loose pieces of trim.  One of them was never attached, the other was just falling out.

For the first piece, I needed to put a few nails in it. For that I’ve got the ultimate Swingline stapler.  The Whammer 2001.

  I put a nail in every foot or so, but I’m not sure what kind of material the wall is made out of - something pretty hardy apparently.  I had to follow up with a nail punch and hammer to sink them completely in.  Painting may be in order at some point too.

The next one did have nails in it, but they weren’t put in all the way.  Quite a few pieces of trim in the bedroom are like this, but this one actually fell off.  

So I went after it with a nail punch.  It worked, but I’m going to follow up later with some longer nails.  Actually, I may mess with all the trim in the bedroom at some point.  There’s another piece that’s probably going to fall off eventually too.

My next project was to fix the side porch light.  The bulb was dead, and it was falling off of the wall.

I scraped a bunch of spider webs off of it and and removed the old bulb, which had some kind of weird…stuff on it. 

Funny story, we changed all of our bulbs to CCFLs a few years ago, and since we haven’t had a bulb die since then, we had no spares.  So I grabbed one out of a little-used lamp and tossed it in there.  Tightened up all its various nuts and bolts, and put it back together.

Now I don’t have to take out the garbage in the dark.

This is either a very poor example of something you should put on a graduating senior’s iPod, or brilliant political satire.

Jesus Diaz of Gizmodo has written an article entitled “Why we need to reach the stars (and we will)”, which purports to be about the need to continue developing the technologies to make manned spaceflight to distant stars a reality. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against Jesus Diaz or Gizmodo in general. I, in fact, read Gizmodo every day. Both the space and the florid-prose-snob in me have risen up, however, and inspired me to write about how poor a job Jesus Diaz has done in addressing the issues raised by his article’s title, and the practically insulting brevity of this all-important subject.

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Its name is Bob.  

Krysta doesn’t seem super excited about it.  In all fairness it did eat one of her plants almost immediately, but come on, it’s a robot that cleans the floor!  Kelly seems ambivalent.  So is Baxter.

At least Maxine warmed up to it a little.  That’s why she’s my favorite.

I set up WinAmp on my computer, with the add-on BrowseAmp (http://www.thasler.org).  So it can be controlled from a browser by anything connected to the network.  Including iPhones, because we’ve got those here.  I didn’t look very hard for a plugin to do that.  There’s an official one, but it seemed more complicated than I need.  I did have Krysta’s computer set up to stream media to the Xbox 360 (which is in for repair of an RROD), but her computer won’t boot now.  Ugh.  Something else for the to-do list.

We are officially completely moved out of the old place now.  I’ll miss it, sometimes.

Chase bought my bank.  Today I went to log into their site and they say my old password won’t work.  The reason? Special characters aren’t allowed in passwords.

So, everybody, if you’re looking for a bank web site to hack that doesn’t let their users use secure passwords, I highly recommend Chase.

Getting the alarm system to shut up was an ordeal.  It had been beeping a warning every 12 hours (11am, 11pm). “FAMILY ROOM SMOKE SENSOR, LOW BATTERY!”  I finally tracked down where FAMILY ROOM was, and replaced the battery (2x CR-123A Lithium - $9 - Target) in two different devices before it stopped. While I was doing so it warned me that FAMILY ROOM SMOKE SENSOR - TAMPERING! was happening.  Thanks, alarm system!  This thing is ridiculously complex and includes things like sensors on every window and a cellular backup system in case someone…cuts the hardline.

Found three screw tips sticking a good inch out of the wall in the bathroom.  I can’t believe the people who lived here before us didn’t do something about them.  Couldn’t find a corresponding screw on the other side so I backed them out with pliers.  Krysta yelled something like “oh my god what are you doing to the wall” from the other side.  Turns out someone had screwed these in, then sheetrocked over them from the other side.  Repaired the wall on the other side, now I won’t be stabbed whenever I reach for one of my new towels ($9 - Target).  I also finally got myself a real laundry hamper ($12 - Target).