Taken by my sister briaer.

ETA: Folks, you're allowed to laugh. I certainly did. :P

I haven't had an ear infection since grade school. Judging by the unpleasant sucking and clicking sounds my left ear is making, I seem to have one now. Either that, or there's a lamprey in my ear.

Man, you take apart a monitor at a party and everyone wants to know what the hell you're doing.

I mean, L. and I had a perfectly good reason for it: it was a hacker party, we were working on hacking together a high-voltage power supply from a CFL and the flyback transformer from an elderly CRT, the setting and the task at hand seemed to go well together. Within a few minutes of arriving, we met a guy who had taken apart many, many CRTs before, and who was quite happy to hang back and give helpful tips. That was great, and I was equally happy to give the twenty or so people who wandered by in the next hour and a half a quick explanation of what we were up to. ("We're making a Jacob's Ladder, so we need a flyback transformer. Later we're going to use the power supply for another project, but a Jacob's Ladder seemed like a great way to test it.")

Where it got annoying, though was the couple or five people who basically demanded we justify our right to plunge our hands into the guts of a sacrificial monitor. "Isn't that going to release dangerous gases?" No, that's only if we break the tube, and we're not going to do that. "Those transformers can hold a lot of charge even after the monitor's off." Yes, and not only has this monitor not been turned on in two years, L. held a screwdriver across the leads to discharge any remaining charge. "But what do you need that strong of a power supply for?" A Jacob's Ladder sounded like fun, dammit.

The absolute best exchange, though, went something like this:

WELL-MEANING BUT ANNOYING PERSON: Does anyone here actually study electrical engineering?
maradydd, grinning: Not me!
L, grinning even larger: Why yes, in fact I do.

The irony, of course, is that L. is getting his PhD in electrical engineering because that's where they decided to put the cryptographers. Me? I build radios and do the odd bit of electrical work on cars.

I'm half tempted, if I do a hardware project at one of these things again, to print out a sign that reads YES, I KNOW WHAT I AM DOING, PLEASE DO NOT INTERRUPT ME.

Today I went to TAP Plastics in San Francisco and they cut me the plastic pieces I will need to build my very own gel electrophoresis chamber. (Service while you wait, by the way. It took maybe ten minutes, during which time the friend who drove me and I wandered around the store looking at all the cool stuff they had on display and chilling in chairs shaped like giant hands. A+++ will shop there again, if only to spend more time browsing through their photos of neat stuff they made.)

Then I got home and checked the mail and found that my electroporation cuvettes arrived!

Oh, today is a happy happy day. Time to leave positive feedback on eBay for the guy I bought the cuvettes from, fix some lunch, then go down to SuperHappyDevHouse and start building.

*dances the dance of parts that are heeeeeeere!*

My phone has decided that it no longer wants to boot up; it starts to, then resets itself, ad infinitum. I'll get another one at some point, but since I don't live anywhere near a Verizon store, it may be a while. In the meantime, IM is the best way to get a hold of me quickly, and email is better for non-urgent things.

Some years ago, an ex of mine gave me a Hello Kitty pencil box for Christmas. I have no idea why he thought I wanted anything Hello Kitty-branded, or why he felt I was in particular need of a pencil box, but thus was his gift. (He was not, shall we say, the most perceptive soul I've ever dated.)

Its uselessness-to-me aside, I've kept the silly thing, not out of any sense of wistfulness, but because the damn thing is actually really well constructed. It's made of silvery-gray aluminum and solid as hell, with steel-reinforced edges and hinges. The branding is fairly subdued, with hearts and flowers and Kitty faces embossed into the metal but not, you know, screamingly obvious unless one were to look closely. I just haven't had any idea what to put in it. It's too small to hold ammunition, too bulky for a makeup kit, far too large for random desk paraphernalia to become anything other than a tangled mess in it, and while I do actually have a stupendous collection of coloured pencils and drawing pencils (a wonderful birthday present from my husband), they came in nice metal boxes of their own and there are far too many to fit in the Hello Kitty box anyway.

However!

Tonight, while I was rummaging through a box, I found a couple of soldering irons which I don't use at home. My Weller soldering station (also a lovely gift from my husband) is far more versatile, but it's not especially luggable. I also happened across a small multimeter which I don't use at home (thanks to the super-fancy multimeter complete with RS232 port that my dad got me for Christmas a few years ago).

"Aha!" I said, and scrounged up the Hello Kitty box.

I am now the proud owner of a portable soldering kit, with a Weller 25W general-purpose iron, a Weller 12W pencil-tip iron suitable for small, touchy jobs (e.g. surface-mount work), half a pound of solder, and a digital multimeter. DevHouse 26, here I come!

writerpo deconstructs this year's election and pulls no punches whatsoever. It is succinct, brutal, and dead-on. Go read it.

I've been back in the Bay Area for a couple of days, and it occurred to me that shortly before I left for Europe, I promised a couple of folks (who are probably reading this) that I would accompany to them to a range and teach them to shoot. Who's up for it? Let's go put some holes in paper!

Does anyone love me enough to get me a variable-volume micropipette for Christmas?

Tuesday night: sat down in a chair on a somewhat slippery patio without looking back to confirm that the chair was actually there. Chair was not there after all. Lost balance, fell into brick windowsill, scraped hell out of right shoulderblade. (Happily, did not rip shirt.) Back muscles now all knotted and achy.

Wednesday night: was carving a piece of Mexican kingwood with my brand-new set of chisels, wood rotated unexpectedly in my hand, chisel slipped. Carved inch-long gash into the base of my left thumb. Did not sever anything important, and bleeding stopped after less than five minutes of direct pressure. Was able to see the underside of my own skin, which is pretty neat-looking; did not, alas, take photos. About then, the burgers came off the grill, so I ate dinner with my left hand on top of my head and then went to the emergency clinic about ten minutes before it closed. Three stitches. Left hand now sore and a bit itchy.

Today: slept a lot.

I'll be in Houston through Saturday afternoon if anyone still wants to get together or anything. Dallas, alas, is probably not happening. Sorry guys. :(

It's all downhill from here. Well, okay, not so much downhill as it is a matter of figuring out all the edge cases, which, as we data miners know, is always the time-consuming part. I'll even toss out a prediction: we'll spend at least the next ten years working on exactly that problem, until someone comes up with a generalization that works and stuns everyone with its simplicity and common sense.

Philosophical question for you, me, and Dr. Shulgin: how would the DEA respond to a researcher using a non-scheduled halogenated phenethylamine with a radioactive tracer to study 5HT-2 receptor activity in a neuron-brained robot? What if the neurons are cloned human neurons?

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Damn, you people post a lot while I'm travelling.

Dear body,

Mere hours before I am supposed to be on a plane to Amsterdam was so not the right time for me to break out in GIANT FREAKING HIVES. Eeuww. Don't do that, it scares my housemate.

I guess those weren't mosquito bites yesterday after all. +1 apartment not infested with mosquitos, minus several million for inconvenience and utter lack of explanation.

On the plus side, Benadryl will definitely help with sleep on the ten-hour flight...

Nothing written using Boost is ever self-documenting.

So no shit, there I was, walking back from lunch with whimsywanderer and davidsarah, and guess what whimsywanderer noticed, just sitting out by the curb?

Yup. I has a fainting couch!

Happy 4th of July weekend, everyone!

A 3'x4' whiteboard fell on my neck about half an hour ago.

I have ice on it, I can walk without running into things, and my vision isn't blurry, but man, have I got a headache. Neck not so happy either. I am not taking the bus home tonight.

I'm with ilcylic on this one. Suck it, San Francisco!

If I weren't off to a hackfest tonight, I'd be going to the range.

Love,

maradydd, happy gun owner

A dear friend is thinking about going to grad school (could be an MS, could be a PhD, depends on what they'll let him get away with), focusing on database internals (the query planner and executor, to be precise). Aside from "Tom Lane's office", anybody got any tips on places he should be considering? He has a bachelor's in CS from McGill and several years of solid industry experience; I figure he should be a shoo-in for a top program. However, I do not know what the top programs are.

jrtom, you were saying good things about UC Irvine, weren't you? I know Berkeley has some interesting work going on with streaming databases, but is that just something they specialise in, or do they have a solid database-backend team?

...and other awesome turns of phrase in this week's Harper's Weekly. (Plus: Rummy refuses to support McCain after Older Than Dirt calls it like it is. Do I see cracks in the walls of the Republican party? Oh please, oh please?)

I think I'm a little manic today.