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You could call me Dr. Don, but why bother? (Wednesday Jun 18th, 2008)
I've been
in school as a student for almost all of my life up till now. While
that's a relatively normal thing for younger people, the older you
get, the rarer and rarer it is.
Finally, on Monday I went through the ceremony which marked the end of
my tenure as a student who is actually enrolled in school, and the
beginning of my tenure as a student who happens to also contribute to
and convey knowledge. That's right, I've finally managed to finish my
PhD in Cell, Molecular, and Developmental Biology. It's been a while
getting here, but with my dissertation completed and accepted by
graduate division, my defence completed, and finally being hooded by
my major professor, I'm done!
Getting my PhD has resolved a few fundamental dilemas that I've always
had. First, I now know what to put in that pesky "Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss/Dr"
field. Before, Ms. was technically correct, but no one apparently
knows that means Master and confuses it with an abbreviation for Miss.
Now I just put Dr., and no more confusion. Second, dealing with
pretentious people and physicians who insist on being called Doctor
becomes easier. I can now ignore their silly titles with impunity.
[And yes, those of you who haven't spent an eternity in the ivory
tower should just call me Don anyway.] Next, I now have the covetous
union card that enables me to teach at instutitions of higher
learning.
Unfortunatly, that also means that I no longer qualify for student
discounts anywhere. Of course, I must admit that lately the people at
movie theaters have been looking at me askance when I ask for a
student discount. I'll have to wait 36 more years until I qualify for
the senior discount.
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Joshua Tree (Monday Jun 9th, 2008)
Mark
and I took a trip to Joshua Tree over the previous weekend. We hiked
in towards Pine City on Friday night and set up the tent near the edge
of the day use area. It took us about 10 minutes of wandering in the
dark with head lamps to find an area that was far enough off the trail
and appeared to be flat and rock-free enough to set up a tent. Mark
happened to find a miniature cholla cactus in the dark and of course
managed to stab himself with it, which added to the excitement of
setting up the tent.
When the sun came
up the next day, we were finally able to see where we had actually set
up camp. A series of amazing bolders were to the south east of our
campsite, and we spent some time in the morning exploring them as we
finished off our slightly smushed pop tarts.
We then packed up the tent and our bags and took off to see Pine City
itself (which is in the day use area). It appears to be called that
because of a few ancient conifers which have managed to survive in the
desert, though I'm only guessing based on what I saw.
From Pine City, we took off cross country heading north-west towards
Queen Mountain, where we wandered around through a ton of gullies and
dry washes. (Note of caution: be very careful in areas like this
during the rainy season. Rain miles away can cause flash floods.)
Eventually we found a neat place to camp around noon a bit south east
of Queen Mountain.
We set up the tent, dropped off the packs and then went wandering
around to boulder some of the neat rock formations and lollygag about
looking at the neat scenery. During this entire time, the only
evidence of humans we had seen were a few footprints on the trail into
Pine City, a couple balloons in advanced decomposition, and a single
glint off a car windshield more than 10 miles in the distance.
The next day, we hiked back to the car, and drove back into
civiliation. It's been a while since I've been to Joshua Tree, but
I've remembered now why I like the place. It's really hard to beat for
getting away from human presence into a relatively pristine
environment. [The closer to summer you go, the harder it is to handle,
and consequently, the fewer people you're going to see.]
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Moving on slowly (Tuesday Sep 4th, 2007)
Considering that the last entry here was for 2004, I obviously haven't
been updating this much.
Lots of things have happened since then, but I'll probably actually
get around to describing them once I've finished the email->diary
interface that I'd planned on writing a long time ago.
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Back from Burning Man (Tuesday Sep 7th, 2004)
I recently got back from a really exciting trip to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, just outside of Gerlach, for Burning Man. Chris Martin and myself left from San Fransisco early Sunday morning, and got into camp at Big Time (9:30 and Sedna) a few hours before the sun started to set, which was really awesome. Along the way, we had a bit of fun with my car, as I managed to tweak the left front control arm pretty hard against a bank on a dirt road. Luckily, the car was still driveable, albeit badly, after that incident.
The first few days we helped set up the camp, and spent the nights wandering around the playa checking out the parties and the various installations. This was my first time at Burning Man, and the lengths to which people go to present themselves, their artwork, their camp, and to just have a great time are astounding. Almost everyone is dressed up, or has lights, or is having a great time. It doesn't matter when, day or night, someone is up and wandering around in great spirits.
Many of the art installations that I happened across were absolutely fantastic. Observer Observed, which the picture on the left (and it's reflections belong to) was an absolutely fantastic cube of half silvered lexan in the middle of the desert that picked up the reflections all around, both of the temple and of the setting sun in the background. From inside, you can actually see out, although a shadowy reflection of yourself is also projected on whatever is outside.
Of course, the man itself burning on saturday night is a really important part of the festivities. I'm told that the man wasn't as impressive this year as it has been in the past, but still, the concept of a huge structure that is only built to be burned in a celebration is rather impressive, even if the flames only reached a few hundred feet into the air instead of thousands. |
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Back from the farm (Tuesday Jul 6th, 2004)
I spent an extended Fourth of July weekend in Ottowa, IL at the family farm learning about what was going on and who the major players were. It's always quite interesting to see how the food that is eaten gets produced and the technology that goes into making it all happen.
We looked at the farm house itself and the old corn crib besides it and checked out what the renters were doing and looked at some of the repairs that had to be made to the farm house as well. We also ended up walking the perimeter of the farm to check the fences and make sure no one had been dumping in the land (and the stuff that had been dumped earlier was being cleaned up.)
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Passing Quals (Thursday Jun 10th, 2004)
Today I managed to pass my qualification exams for PhD with my proposal on Cholesterol and Sphingomyelin enrichment of lipid bilayers and the effect on membrane structure and signal transduction. Now I get to spend the next few years getting the research for my thesis ready so I can actually graduate.
I'll link to my proposal in a bit in case anyone wants to look at it for any reason. |
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Burning in the Desert (Saturday Jun 5th, 2004)
Yesterday I got to wander out into the desert with Addy, Chris, Josh,
Tish, and the rest of the mad people and their soundsystems who were 7
miles off the 15 before Zzyzx. 110F in the sun, a few miles of
ridiculously deep gravel which ate cars for lunch, yours truely
impersonating Peter Solberg in his subaru, and it's a desert party
with all the trappings.
To recuperate from the multi-day no-sleep exuberance that a true
desert party entails, I spent most of last night and today asleep,
until I woke up to finish grading stuff for Bio5B. Yes, terribly
exciting, no? |
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Buried in Books (Saturday Mar 27th, 2004)
Those of you who know me know that I have a penchant for reading lots and lots of books... most of the time I read stuff from the library, but I'm starting to have a relatively substantial collection of physical books of my own. Today I finally got around to putting in some shelving to handle some of the books that have been sitting around everywhere. Unfortunatly, I still need to get bookends to handle the rest of them, but at least its a start towards getting things slightly better organized in my room. |
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Hard Drive Surgery (Monday Mar 8th, 2004)
I recently had to do a wee bit of hard drive replacement surgery on my venerable powerbook g4 400MHz which has served me well for quite some time. Unfortunatly, the 10G drive that it came with has been filled with various amounts of junk almost since I had the thing installed... originally I had left OS 9 on the thing, but as I almost exclusively use Debian these days, my original partitioning scheme was leaving me with little choice but to completely replace the drive.
I settled on a 30G Hitachi drive (used to be IBM) which I had shipped to me along with a FW enclosure so I could easily dd the data back and forth from the current drive to the it's replacement. Unfortunatly, it took a bit for the FW enclosure to get drop shipped from whoever made the silly thing, and so I was sitting staring at a nice 30G drive with no way to install it. The installation went pretty smoothly, and as I type this, the drive is purring away inside the laptop. It's way quieter than the previous drive (even though I thought the previous drive was really quiet compared to the others I've used previously.) |
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Finished Boxes (Saturday Jan 31st, 2004)
I finally finished the boxes that I have been working on for a while. The idea is to start storing some of the books and stuff that I have littering the place in them... we'll see how it actually works out in a few months. |
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Progress in Development (Monday Dec 8th, 2003)
For those of you who follow my cvs and svn trees, I've moved things around slightly. da_db, da_class_modular, and da_reference are now in their own separate SVN trees instead of being stuck in the don_perl module of don_cvs.
I've also been doing a bit of work on the engine that runs this entire site, so I should have the cvs and svn commit tracker working shortly along with a few other improvements.
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Yet another day (Monday Oct 6th, 2003)
Yet another day has come and is going rapidly. Spent this one working on a presentation that I have to give on wednesday and getting stuff in order for a lab experiment that I have to get started on tuesday. When I was returning a few books to the library, I ran across a bit of political grafiti on the election... seems that at least some people think that arnold is going to be a problematic governer.
Sometime in the next few days we'll find out exactly who is going to win the California recall. Kind of disturbing really, that only 900,000 signatures are necessary to force a million dollar election. Oh well. I hope those 900,000 people really understood what they were getting themselves into when they signed the recall petitions. |
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Waiting for writtens (Saturday Sep 13th, 2003)
I've been spending the past three weeks preparing to take my written exams. Yerp. Three solid weeks of studying, with breaks for some of the reasearch that I'm doing and programming a bit on the side. It will be nice when I get these tests behind me on wednesday, and can concentrate on everything else that I am doing.
In the time that I haven't been studying, I've been trying to clean up the backyard here at the house. Seems that it was left to the dogs rather literally, and weeds have built up in the back, as well as a few problems with the sprinkler lines. I'll get around to cleaning that up sometime next week, so we'll see how it all looks in a month or so once the grass has had a chance to sprout and regrow in place of the weeds and everything else that is there now.
My research is progressing slowly, and I've also been spending a fair amount of time looking for contract work so I can pay for yet another year of grad school. Anyone who is looking for contract mod_perl programmers, or expert system administrators, I'm all ears. |
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Back to the Grind (Wednesday Aug 27th, 2003)
I recently got back from my trip all around the baltic on Oceana Cruises. We started in Stockholm, Sweden and ended in Dover, England. Along the way I got to see Finland, Russia, Aaland, Estonia, Belgium, Holland, and Norway. Life on board the ship was pretty nice, and the food was excelent. However, I'm not quite sure if I fit in all to well with the average occupant of a cruise ship. I travel to experience, not to see things. Of course, like any other traveller, there are certain things that I would really like to see along my way. Yet, to live and travel in a glass enclosed box looking down on residents living their lives is not for me. I want to be with the people, walk amoungst them, eat what they eat, see what they see. I want to try to catch a glipse of the gestalt through which they view the world.
For the most part, I was able to do that. My parents, while not as extreeme as myself, also enjoy seeing things through their own eyes, not necessarily just seeing what the preprogrammed tour guides think is important. In fact, only in Russia were we unable to be almost completely on our own in the cities which we visited.
There were so many interesting things to see throughout the trip, that there is no way that I'll possibly recound all of them in a single entry here. Suffice it to say that the experience changed once again how I view the planet, probably as much as my drive through the US changed the way I view the US itself. |
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Devils Tower WY (Thursday Jul 3rd, 2003)
Well, it's now day four of my trip. Everything seems to be going
well. I had pancakes for dinner tonight, with real live maple syrup,
which hopefully will last the rest of the trip home. For some reason,
my powerbook seems not to be charging off of the power supply in my
car... I'll have to check that one out again... could be some polarity
issue, or just the fact that square wave power doesn't agree with it.
Devil's Tower is really, really neat. The monument just raises out
from nowhere like a gigantic pillar of hexagon shaped granite, almost
like a gigantic Atari symbol. Quite a few touristas were around
walking around the tower on the short trail... I ended up walking
around the entire close trail, and then the farther loop... actually,
when all is said and done, I hiked (well, walked really) almost all of
the trails in the park in less than 3 hours.
Hopefully some of the multitude of pictures I took came out. The tower
itself is really impressive, and I'm going to try to get a few shots
when I drive out of this place.
Before I forget, on the way here I stopped at Wounded Knee, and
briefly drove by the massacre site. Eventually I think I come back,
but not until I have a better understanding of the events surrounding
that event, and can appreciate it more. I drove a bit through the
badlands, and saw some of the more interesting geological
formations... some of those pictures ought to be worth looking at.
If I had actually wanted to, I could have gone through sundance, but
I'm not so sure that I do... that film festival has completely
overshadowed the town.
Anyway, the campsites here are pretty nice, the bugs have all been
shot (or mostly so) and so long as the cows stay quiet, I'll be all
right tonight. MOOOOO!!!! |
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Smith Falls NE (Thursday Jul 3rd, 2003)
I finally made it to Smith Falls, NE on what is my longest planned
drive of the trip. I left Pikes Peak, IA at 6A CDT this morning, and
drove for almost 11 hours to get here. Quite a long drive, but at the
end of it, Smith Falls is pretty dang impressive. But first, before I
forget, I should talk slightly about Pikes Peak.
Pikes Peak is a pretty interesting place right on the IA side of the
Mississippi river where the Wisconson river comes in. It's about 8
miles south of the Mounds National Monument, and there are a few
mounds inside the state park as well. The mounds are rather
interesting. I suppose if you were to suddenly come upon one, you
probably wouldn't even know it, as they're pretty unassuming for the
most part. In fact, untill I saw more than one of them, I thought it
was just a interesting coincidence. Unfortunatly, I didn't actually
get to go to the National park's mounds, as I was pressed for time,
and it was nearing dusk when I arrived. However, I took a pretty
decent panorama of the Wisconson side from the Iowa side, so it will
be interesting to see how that turns out.
One of the other pictures is of a deer that was watching me watch it
as I wandered over to a minature falls called Bridal Veil. For those
of you who have seen the big Bridal Veil falls at Yosemite, this was
its midget third cousin. (But still neat in its own little way.)
[Interesting (or depressing?) side note: Mosquitoes in Pikes Peak are
nasty. I think I got bit about 20 times, most of them look pretty
ugly. Worse, the dumb mosquitoes were so huge that their anesthetic
doesn't work very well, so I spent most of the time while cooking
trying to beat the buggers off while avoiding blowing up my stove.]
After leaving Pikes Peak, I drove, and drove, and drove, and
drove. 600 miles in single day is alot of driving, especially when
most of it is done at 55-60mph (US 20 for about 450 of those
miles). But arrive here safely I did. [There are a few pictures of the
drive... US 20 adroitly avoids most property lines, but for miles on
end it is arrow straight (although it does go up and down hills.)]
Smith Falls itself is about 14 miles East of Valentine, NB on NB
12. It's a small park with about 12 or so car acessible spots, and
about 20 primitive sites. I got slotted into one of the car spots,
which is ok... although it really didn't matter to me. The Niobrara
river burbles away right behind me (and a few canoeists have floated
buy in the time I've been typing this.)
The falls itself are pretty impressive, apparently the largest falls
in all of Nebraska. No where near as tall as the falls in my favorite
place, Havasupai, but still pretty nice, and definetly more than I was
expecting.
Anyway, I'm going stick the pictures on this machine, and then close
up shop; I need both hands free to stave of flies.
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Somewhere in IL (Tuesday Jul 1st, 2003)
I'm currently stoped at a Wendy's after having refilled my car at a
local shell. For some ungodly reason I really like Wendy's
hamburgers. I probably should stop eating fast food entirely
though. Anyway, I passed through Chicago very slowly, as the 90/94 was
totally jammed until well outside of Chicago (almost until
O'hare). Chicago looks really interesting, but as I've got 480 miles
to do today, I won't be spending any time there at all. [Perhaps in
the future?]
I'm going to finish off my hamburger, and get back into the car to do
the last leg of today. I only have about 200 miles left. [Another 3
hours or so.]
Almost forgot, I took a few shots of Chicago as I was driving through,
but I haven't really had a chance to check them out. Hopefully they
turned out ok. |
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Leaving Rochester (Monday Jun 30th, 2003)
Well, my time in Rochester, NY is coming to and end. I'm sitting right now in my apartment that is almost completely devoid of stuff; my car is packed to the brim; even my bikes are on top. I went to brainfroot #9 over the weekend, and saw so many people that I had spent fun times with over the year; I'm going to miss every one of them.
Waldo just showed up and picked up my microwave and computer chair (thanks!) and so now I'm typing lying on the floor. Lemme link up two pictures, and then it's time to figure out where in rochester Time Warner Cable's office is so I can return this cable modem.
Well, it's time to hit the road. I'll put up my adventures in about 10 days once I'm plugged back into the information stream again. |
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Last Time at Dickys (Tuesday Jun 24th, 2003)
Well, tonight was my last time at one of my favorite hangouts in Rochester, NY. I can't remember how many times I've been to Dicky's or how many Guinesses I've drunk there. I played for a bit tonight, and hung out for a bit longer; passed my new CD out to some people who I hadn't given it to yet, and said good by to people who I probably won't see again. Ugh. Such an interesting year, filled with so many wonderfull and fun people.
I've been trying to get everything squared away for my long drive back to california. Some things are falling into place, I've now got my tent ready; I've got racks for my bikes, but other things are lagging far behind. Oh well. The 30th is rapidly approaching. Whatever isn't dealt with by then will just naturally be taken care of by attrition. |
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Another Time, Another Place (Saturday Jun 21st, 2003)
Last night, Dave, Chyna and a bunch of other house heads put together an awesome party, both to listen to awesome house tracks spun by some impressive local dj's, and to wish Marcus McGowan and myself a safe and happy trip wherever to Florida and California, respectively. I had a great time, and I think everyone else there had fun. Unfortunatly, it managed to rain lightly around midnight, and started to really pick up at around 1:30, so everyone got a mite bit damp, but no one stopped dancing.
I also was handing out some tracks from my new mix cd. I'll probably ogg's of it up on this server once I get around to encoding them, so those of you who haven't yet hit me up for a copy can get one. |
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