For The Hell Of It

Yup. Also, this is funny too.

For Peter

The song really doesn't add up to how great I thought it would be. Peter could hardly breath he was laughing so hard describing it to me.

For Ethan

Ethan and I heard this clip on the radio in the car sometime before we left the Seattle area, and every few months or so, we giggle over it again. Thanks, you tube.

Some Days It Just Doesn't Pay To Get Out Of Bed.

Okay, so it's not really as bad as this lady's is. Or most of this guy's were.

I'm pulling my hair out, though, over some digital photo/blog related madness. It seems there's a few tools out there that will display, randomly or otherwise, all the pictures from your photostream somewhere on your blog - I was thinking either sidebar, at the top, or at the bottom. Now, admittedly, I'm no computer expert. In fact, I'm a computer idiot - really. Just typing this I have to put some paper towels down to avoid drooling all over the keyboard. But for %@$#'s sake, why oh why are they all either in a different format, or different computer language, or utilize something I have no understanding of or access too. Or have a broken site on the net. Or...

Here's some links to view my photos - my Flickr username is the same as my blogger name if any of them don't link directly and you need to type it in. It's just something that I was playing around with the other day - and since I won't pay Flickr $25 a year to get one of their stupid "pro" accounts, I can't normally see some of my older pictures - and I was a bit blown away by how much the kids have grown since we've been back here, and some of the things we've seen and done since we moved out here, and what a goofball I am for taking pictures of some of the retarded things that I have (FYI - I just heard the other day that you shouldn't use the word "retarded" if someone who is mentally handicapped is around. Who knew?). I'll probably put the best of those links into my sidebar, so anybody who cares can hop over and see any pictures that I've uploaded (no, not all of them make it to the blog, although recently most have.).

If anyone who's more computer savvy than I would like to help me out, I'd appreciate it. I'd also like to fix my header - i.e. make it less bland and more personalized, and get rid of those stupid divots that are throughout the page because I made things wider but couldn't figure out how to get rid of the old corners - but I'm too dumb to figure that mucky muck out too.

Excerpt From My Life, September

Here's the latest:

Cooper, caught napping with friends. Why does he look so ashamed?
After nights of scratching at the door keeping me awake, and never being able to allow Cooper out into the yard without a leash. I bought a remote training collar. At first I felt kind of bad about it - after all, the dog responds to being punished much better than the children do - but I must say it is working great. I only had to shock him a few times and then he got the picture. Now, if he misbehaves or leaves the yard, I push the button that makes the warning tone sound and he's falling all over himself trying to please. Hopefully it will carry over to sometime in the future when I try it on the children without the collar.

Yup. Connor showed up in the bedroom the other day after plastering his face with some crappy mail labels we'd gotten. I think he'd removed about half of them by the time we got the camera out.

Okay. Two parts to this story.
One - I had my parents ship one of my shotguns out to me, and it wasn't cheap. (Not to self: send the money to the parents). So I decided to make sure I got some use out of it, and seeing cheap decoys in Ye Olde Cabela's Catalog, I thought I'd try some duck hunting this year. Two: We bought a new refridgerator. The fridge arrived on the same days as the fake ducks and the dog's collar. The fridge also was a real bitch to hook up to the teensy water line that allows it to make ice and dispense pure waters. Since little Master C had already seen the "kucks" and we needed children out of the way, it was time for them to go and see how well they floated. They float pretty well.

Boring Pictures Of Room Remodeling:

Been ripping the plaster out of the walls in the hobo's drug squat work-in-progress room. What a messy job. The picture's blurry because the lighting sucks in the room, and there's so much dust in the air that anytime I tried to use a flash, the picture came out looking like the doorway-in-starfield from the intro to old episodes of "The Twilight Zone."

You know how from time to time there's a news story about people doing this kind of work and they find some old mob money, or a hidden piece of priceless art behind the walls in the old house they've inherited from Aunt Hattie? Yeah, I was just glad that I didn't find any mummified corpses.

Yar! Here there be monsters asbestos. So I ain't touching it. Yet.

See how exciting life is in the post summer-prehunting/winter woods of the north?

Remember This?

I remember watching this live, and not really thinking anything about the performance "artist" that jumps up on stage for a little impromptu dance, but just thinking "Whoever thinks Bob can't sing has got it all wrong." I think that the way he sings this song live, you know exactly where he was coming from when he wrote a song about being sick of love.

I'll be back Monday with some actual pictures from my actual life.

Watch The Whole Thing

I Have Proof...

...That I do actually work while at work - because I know with the amount I'm able to blog, it must seem like I don't accomplish much in a day. Yesterday I did an after hours (is their such thing when you've joined the grown up, salaried world?) sort for Peter, and he brought his camera along (Some photos presented in black and white for added elegance).

My three lasers - from left to right - the HeNe (Red) laser, Krypton (UV), and Argon (Blue) lasers. The Argon laser is the primary laser and is on all the time, the HeNe laser is on 95% of the time, and the Krypton laser maybe every six weeks or so.

You can see the Argon and HeNe lasers here, as they enter the machine, refracting off a prism. They hit that prism and are sent up at a 90° angle, where they hit another prism, take another right turn, hit a focusing lens, and then enter the flow chamber itself. It's really a bit more complicated than that, but I don't feel like reopening the panel just now to remind myself of what all is in there and how it gets adjusted.

This is the flow chamber, or "interrogation point" or "where the magic happens" as I like to think of it. I've got a little piece of wood stick shoved into the override so the lasers can be seen. From top to bottom, you see the nozzle - the sheath fluid and sample comes out here - the sample itself is injected somewhere inside there, and since it's traveling at a higher speed (pressure) than the sheath fluid, it stays right in the middle of the stream (This is called "Hydrodynamic Focusing," which is an excellent word to break out at cocktail parties) where the machine can get a good, accurate "look" at it.
The nozzle itself is vibrating really quickly, via piezo crystal, at a known rate, which breaks the stream into droplets at a known frequency. I calibrate the machine so I know which droplet a cell is in at what time (this is all calculated by the computer, really, I just adjust to make sure its spot on), and give that droplet a specific electrical charge. The two metal plates you can see in the picture are oppositely charged, so that a charged droplet falling past one of them will be deflected one way or another. Inkjet printers work in the same fashion.
Where you can see the lasers reflecting is an obscuration bar - there are two optics, one straight in front of and one at 90° from the laser beams themselves- these bars block out all of the "unadulterated" laser light so that the only things being registered are photons that have glanced off of - or been emitted from - the cell in question at an angle.

This is where the collection tubes sit - I spend a good portion of my day either: staring at this; or turning my head just in time to see that a collection tube is about to overflow and saying "Oh shit" and throwing everything into standby.

This is also where I spend a good portion of my day staring. The screens you can see are the sorter stream in the upper left hand corner - if I was sorting, you'd be able to see the side streams in the picture. I also have a small red laser that I can focus on my stream at this spot, and a filter I can put in front of the camera so that every morning I can sort some beads and adjust my drop delay - this is what I was talking about earlier w/calculating when a drop is where. It's really about as easy as any visual pattern recognition. Usually.
In the lower left hand corner of the contraption is the droplet break off stream. This camera has a strobe light attached to it that's strobing at about the same frequency as the nozzle is vibrating so that I get a static picture. I have to keep an eye on this to make sure that the droplets look normal and are breaking away from the stream at the right spot, otherwise, I mutter to myself "Oh shit," throw the machine into stand by, yank the sample and collection tubes off, and go about making things right.
The screen on the lower right is an oscilloscope that's right now displaying a bivariate plot of blue laser light that the cells are scattering.
In the upper right is another oscilloscope that shows me the frequency the nozzle is vibrating. I mostly ignore this screen.

This is the final thing that I stare at all day. This is the FACSDiva software - you can see all sorts of dot plots and histograms, and the other windows I use to make some of the adjustments on the machine. There's a second screen to the left, but as it only displays file names and other things that I only have to see between samples, I have it switched over to my second computer most of the time, which is what I'm typing this on.

Here I am, "hard at it." And by hard at it, I mean, "being tubby."

Boring much? I'm sure I've left things out and misinformed in some cases, but that's the gist of how I spend 7/8 of my working day.

I Wonder...

I recall learning once, it was either in an art class or a biology class (biology is more likely, but then, you've never met any of the art teachers I had), that back in Victorian times, women who wanted to lose a bit of weight could procure for themselves capsules that contained tapeworm segments. They'd take the capsule, be infested, lose the weight, and then take mild poisons to kill the worm(s). Why am I bringing this up?

In the news right now is the story of those poor souls who have been infected, via spinach, with Eschirichia coli O571:H7, which for those of you without access to scientific and medical journals, is one of the strains of E. Coli that can give you explosive diarrhea, among other nasty things.

And then I turn on the TV, or surf the internets, and get constantly bombarded with images of unhealthily skinny, weight obsessed young women (and men, I just heard of "manorexia"). Now, seeing as how it's 5-10 days of, erm, discomfort; and *only* 3-5% of victims (i.e. extremely old, extremely young, and the extremely infirm) progress to Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome (kidney damage), of which only 5% experience serious deathage...Is it a stretch at all, then, to imagine some dumb, image obsessed person rapping on a grocer's back door, crack deal style, and requesting a bag of tainted spinach? These are the same people that will cram back fistfuls of diuretics for the same effects (or is it affects - I just looked up the difference between the two, and only managed to confuse myself more. But I digress). Nothing drops pounds quick like a case of the shits!

Anywho, whenever I think up things like this, I'm either in the shower, or on the commode. Maybe if I stopped using either one, I'd be more normal?

I Almost Forgot!

Yar! It do be tha' day of the year again. 'Tis like Christmas, Thanksgiving and Easter wrapped all in one and made to walk the plank only with a wee bit of the 'ole inanity in the stead of presents and vittles!

Django!

I have aspirations of playing like this that I know I'll never reach. If you're into any music that involves guitars as anything but a part of the rhythm section, you can thank this guy. There'd be no Jimi, no Jimmy, no Eddie, no Yngwie, etc without Django. And he played like this with only two fingers on his left hand.

That's "Chow-Dah!"

If I would have heard of this six weeks ago, I never would have bought all that poison:

Yellow Jacket Stew or S-Ka-V Oo-Ga-Ma

Gather yellow jacket combs (nests)

Pick out the grubs. Be careful to keep them intact.

Put the grubs in the oven on a pan to brown.

Make a soup of the browned grubs by adding them to water with some grease and a little salt.

Here's a link to some more delicious Native American recipes. Keith - wanna try some of these, buddy?

I'll be off house hunting if anyone needs me.

Pencilnecks, S&M, and Space

Remember this song? (Some language in the song is NSFW or "adults.")


I haven't laughed this hard since the time I saw that guy light a fart with one of those tiny oil lamps that was on the table at an Olive Garden.


I'll give you $5 if you wade in the fountain:

Home Deco With The Pious

Honey, can we get one? Please, please, please?

Edit: Dammit - I thought it was life sized! Oh well, first there is a mountain then there is no mountain then there is...

This Countdown Is Final!

Some of you may call this "cheesy" or "dumb" or ask "are you retarded, Brandon?" But I call it "inspiring," "thoughtful," and "great."

Also, before last Wednesday, I had no idea this song was about the end times. I just thought it was about some guys, some hair, and some kick-ass guitar solos getting onto a rocket ship and cruising past Venus.

Who The Hell Are The Beachles?

I saw this thing, and it's got me quite vexed. I can't decide if I think it's neat like a new pair of slacks, or a complete abomination like a damned baby dracula. On the one hand, you have two of the best albums, EVAR, all mixed and mashed up in creative ways - the God Only Knows/Within You Without You tastiness is a good highlight. On the other hand, I'm not sure if I think most of it works. The terrible Sloop John B/Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite! is a low point. But I demand that you all listen to it, repeatedly, and then tell me next Wednesday what my opinion should be.

""What's that, Jimbo?"

"I LIKE SPAGHETTI AND I WAS BORN WITH BOTH BOY AND GIRL 'PARTS.' I like spaghetti and was born with both boy and girl 'parts.'"

A Tear For Steve

Man, I haven't been this bummed since the last time I sat on my nuts.

Reflect amongst yourselves.

Note: The crocodile in this picture is not real. A fake sauropsid was used to avoid rocking your face off with the awesomeness.

Update: In the heart?