Good news, everybody!
Behold, the awesome power of our new refrigerator. The Frigidaire FRT15HB3D has the power to cool fifteen whole cubic feet, drawing an astonishingly low (I guess) 376 kilowatt-hours per year. Take that, thermodynamics!
= August 2006 = Main = October 2006 =
Behold, the awesome power of our new refrigerator. The Frigidaire FRT15HB3D has the power to cool fifteen whole cubic feet, drawing an astonishingly low (I guess) 376 kilowatt-hours per year. Take that, thermodynamics!
Not long ago I decided to re-grow my beard. It's been a few years - time to bring the ol' guy out for a spin.
Fate interceded, though, as the pivotal Itchy Period came on amidst the hottest couple of weeks we've had all year (high 80s!). So the scruff had to go, at least for now... I was suffocating under that thing. But don't worry, all. I've got a good feeling about November.
I'm at at point in my life where I feel it's no longer appropriate to not like certain kinds of foods. In my youth, I was a very picky eater, as are lots of people. But by all reasonable metrics I am now, indeed, grown-up. So I should like grown-up foods. To my credit, the list of things I irrationally shy away from has shrunk considerably since college. I'm down with raw tomatoes, coffee and any sort of raw fish you might want to throw at me. But there are a few hold-outs: non-deep-fried shellfish, eggplant, and most notably, mushrooms.
Mushrooms of all types have long made me uncomfortable. They look strange, they have a weird texture, and their death-eating role in the food chain is a little unsettling. But at this point I just feel guilty - how can I not be excited about an ingredient so frequently used by the Iron Chefs? So I've started a little project: everytime I drop into the Monterey Market I have to go home with a new kind of fungus.
So far, good progress has been made. Our grilled portobellos, though hardly adventurous, tasted pretty good. I fried some chantarelles in butter. They smelled amazing... strongly reminiscent of Christmas for some reasone, but I'm not quite ready for the taste. And I wish I could remember the name of the last batch I picked up, because I dare say, they were very good.
So if anyone out there has advice or mushroom-treatment suggestions for a non-mushroom lover, I'd love to hear them. Because I think this little project is working...
I often forget, hiding in the lab as I do, how much fun it can be being on a college campus. Marie and I have enrolled in a pottery class this semester. It meets tuesday evenings, and last night I was enjoying a pre-class falafel sandwich, taking in the complete anarchy of Sproul Plaza. In addition to your standard throng of people, there was a drum-based Native (Latin?) American dance troupe doing it's thing on upper Sproul, a rock band playing a live set on lower Sproul and a whole crowd of frisbee-throwers, almost hitting everyone in sight. It was fun for some reason... I've been going straight from home to lab and back that I forget these things exist.
I tried in vain to identify the dancers' exact culture-of-origin. The female drummer was wearing a Slipknot t-shirt which, while awesome, provided little information.
The ACS is said and done. My recap post won't be nearly as complete as the Tenderblog, but I did have a few post-conference comments...
* As you can probably guess, I saw a lot of talks. Some very good, many ho-hum, one really bad. As Bill mentioned over dinner, you come away with these conferences learning a few good things you'd like to try in your research, and a whole giant load of really bad things that you're glad you never have to do.
* Why are the Germans so obscessed with measuring the electrical properties of model lipid membranes? It seems like the perfect combination of being really, really hard and not really very interesting. And to everyone laboring to improve bilayer stability... shouldn't the field be more concerned with building this "novel biosensor" we keep mentioning on grant proposals? Let's actually make something useful - then we'll figure out how to ship it across the country. And one more thing - the trend the world has taken in the subfield of putting recombinant proteins into artificial lipid bilayers is pretty strange. The pack has either stuck with the historically successful (i.e. easy) proteins, like bacteriorhodopsin or gramacidin, or jumped straight to G protein-coupled receptors, which are probably among the most difficult to work with in all of biology. Aren't there any labs who want to find something... in between? Aside from our lab, of course. And a couple other outliers which I won't mention by name.
* Damn, just being in the downtown-Union Square-SOMA area is expensive. Eating two meals for four days in the city, plus BART fare sure does add up, and thanks to our fine state-school bureaucracy, we aren't allowed reimbursements for trips with "travel not exceeding 12 hours". We tried of offset the cost today by eating lunch at a super sketchy buffet in Chinatown. There were mixed results.
* My little poster thing went well, though in retrospect most of my group probably would have fit better in a different session. PHYS, not BIOT. Remember that. The only downer was the cash bar. The free(ish) beer at the poster session two nights prior made for a much more enjoyable evening. I got a little more loaded than was probably appropriate.
* And lastly, I was in the same room as Mr. Tenderbutton himself listening to Pete Schultz! Though I had no idea at the time - the room was stiflingly crowded and I have only a vague meta-notion as to who actually authors the blog in question. But the knowledge pleases me nonetheless. This goes up on my list of blog-celebrity-encounters with that time I had a few beers with Matthew Yglesias.
So that was that. Up next on the agenda: convincing my boss he should actually fly me somewhere interesting to do this all over again in a few months. To what exciting conference location will I travel next? Baltimore? Or... uhh... San Francisco?
And did I mention that I cashed in my jetBlue points and "bought" tickets home for Christmas? Well, I did. I'll be back East from December 17 to January 3, so if you live in Our Nation's Capital and have something fun to do on New Year's Eve, do you mind if I tag along?
In a couple of days I'm presenting a poster on my research at the ACS meeting in San Francisco. It's a modest accomplishment, as I could have been doing this sort of thing two years ago if I were a more productive graduate student. But I'm kind of excited, nonetheless.
Following in Charles' footsteps, I figured I should say a few words to remind all four of my bloglines subscribers that things are going well by saying a few words about the upcoming viewing season.
I was impressed and slightly unnerved by the blistering pace with which Marie and I finished watching Veronica Mars. (She totally called the whole thing with Beaver, by the way). For better or worse, we're pretty much sucked in. So there's that to look forward to. It'll compliment House nicely on tuesdays, though after the season premiere I'm not sure House is doing it for me anymore. Can't he just be wrong once or twice and horribly kill some otherwise healthy patient? Maybe I'm more demanding than the mainstream television watcher... I can see the appeal of never wanting to stray from the core formula. It works for CSI, but it gets pretty boring after a couple seasons. So barring some dramatical shake-up, or Dr. Cameron dressing a lot trashier, my affections seem likely to fade.
The kids are all looking forward to The Wire, which remains the sole exception to my rule of ambivalence towards HBO series. But, as I don't really "pay" for television it'll have to be a downloader. In fact, downloading will probably remain my main means of television injection this season. Lost is so much prettier in widescreen, and I like to pretend I have better things to do on Friday night than watch Battlestar. This has the added advantage of keeping me in the dark to other television goings-on.
So that leaves me with my Bravo reality television Guilt Wednesdays... Project Runway has grown into a fun group activity for us grad kids. I'll be pressing those involved to follow the trend right into Top Chef 2.
And that's about all I have the energy for, television-wise. Lazy evenings at home may build onto that portfolio, but only time will tell. Season 3 of Arrested Development is out, so re-re-re-watching all those episodes should help fill in the blanks for at least a month. But maybe I can squeeze in an hour here and there for Survivor: Racism Island.
P.S. How sweet was it when Alton Brown fell off his motorcycle?