mindlace

This next semester is shaping up to be interesting.

I’m taking introduction to microbiology, soil microbiology, biochemistry, and two graduate level courses: one on bioinformatics and another on addressing the effects of climate change in Rhode Island.

In addition, I’m teaching another after-school course on the development of vertebrates, and working for Dr. Jenkins exploring Iron and Copper metabolic pathways in a particular strain of algae.

Here’s hoping I don’t botch this semester as badly as I did the last one

I’ve just completed getting ldap cooperating with horde … what this means is that all five of you using mindlace.net services will get One Username/Password to Rule them All: it’ll work for webmail, calendar, dav, subversion, jabber, and even yer blog if’n you like. etc.

Plus, there will be a spiffy note-taking app, a todo-list app, and a server-side filtering app for your imap email.

I also learned, in the way one might describe a cow learning her owner when the searing hot iron presses into her flank and the warm smell of seared cow flesh drifts into the cold morning air, that if you are using Apache 2 and php 5, setting post_max_size = 2048M in your php.ini file is really a fancy way of saying “please drop my POSTs on the floor”. In other words, no form submission was submitted with the form … but the request itself was. These being well behaved php programs, when you send them nonsensical input they give you somewhat reasonable error conditions; it just took me forever to realize that php was eating my POSTs when I had asked it to accept up to two gigabytes of POST data.

I have been hooked by my Evolution of English project and so am burning the midnight oil. I’m a number of algae shy on my herbarium (due Tuesday) and I have to have a presentation on niche consruction for Wednesday. Gods, I wish school was always like this.

Oh yeah… and we’re fucked:

I have succumbed to the desire for a technological fix to my mental malaise and acquired a fossil abacus. I intend to start by running doing
and if that doesn’t work writing something myself.

The presumption is that if I just had some quantifiable data I could more readily understand my patterns of behaviour and be able to review the day’s attention expenditure from the dispassionate view of morning.

I’ve tried a Palm before; it never worked on account of me eventually leaving it somewhere and/or not using it because I have to take it out of a backpack. Gods willing, if I have the device strapped to my wrist I will manage to not leave it at home, a trick I still don’t manage with my cellphone.

It’s funny, how much I wish I could be a robot sometimes. My body betrays me, my mind betrays me, my spirit was sold to preternatural agents long ago; it makes me wish I could just slide into cool, deterministic waters and float to Destiny on the back of my Turing-machine minions.

Of course, it’s really more that I’m their bitch than vice versa. I’m basically installing a timer circuit to compensate for my own baroque experience of unfolding. With this spiffy watch at least I can let the pre-planning part of me beep at the ‘in-the-moment’ part of me and remind me that nobody ever changed the world with a pipedaydream.

Nature Mill makes an indoor composter. It makes me think that an indoor gas-generation device could work.

Kevin Kelley’s tremendous Cool Tools pointed out that Frybrid sells a very nice diesel-svo conversion kit.

Dooce, easily the best ‘domestic writing’ among the writers whose feeds this nesting-happy yuppie reads, bridges the gap between my own gratuitously cerebral ass and her limbic take:

[...] and you can’t wait to get back home so you can read the new research on intracerebral aneurysms because THAT IS WHAT GETS YOU HOT. I‘m not saying that there’s anything wrong with that, but normal people? Normal people want a bag of Doritos and a ball rub and they’ll roll over satisfied.My time would be better spent reading literature, but this is so much more fun

Although, upon reflection, I empathised strongly with her take as well. I’m a total sucker for shows like that, and I have a hard time avoiding emotionally identifiying with even the most crudely drawn character. I have also pined desperately for a chance to read, for example, corticolimbic mechanisms in emotional decisions rather than continue at the social gathering I am in.

It appears, despite someone’s claim of old Mercedes being a horrorshow for parts, that I’m not the only one who is fond of old Mercedes diesels. Though now that I read the entire thing, he claims similar status for them. As Vika’s lovely Carolla edges ever closer to 200k miles, I get more and more excited about the prospect of an old diesel that I can run with biodiesel/vegetable oil.

Anyway, it doesn’t have to be a Mercedes … I need to do some research on what the lowest maintinance old (non-TDI) diesels are.

Sorry for all the image-without-context spamming. I’ve given up syndicating our pictures to this blog – from now on you’ll have to visit the photo site if you want to see the pics. Of course, there’s a syndication feed for that too.

Had an extraordinary time sailing with the estimable J.R. Been working working working, and bedevilling Vika with my peculiar notion of time, unfortunately leading to some sleepless nights. But there will be quite fantastic dishwashing facilities and an industrial strength greywater evaporator. Everything else I’ve wanted to do for the playa has, shall we say, evaporated.

Speaking of evaporation, if you have the chance you must see Steam Boy. Incredibly hard sci-fi played out with remarkable attention to physics, gripping storytelling, and breathtaking animation. If you forgive the steam balls their improbability it’s an extraordinary adventure. Best. Steampunk. Movie. Ever.

If you want to Eat With FoodLab, now is the time to register.

Today was better. I put together a spiffy little frog dissection workbook, and the kids seemed to get into the class. The highlight of the day was experiencing the reactions of the teenager when I pulled her frog’s skull and eyeballs out of her specimen, cracked it open, and showed her how tiny his brain was.

I got reminded that I’m asking some hard questions, and shown the tested reading level of my students. I definitely need to make my teaching more accessable to them. I haven’t been so acutely aware of my lack of Spanish knowledge as in this class.

However, there’s at least one student who is going like me – she’s five grades ahead in her reading level, but she’s getting straight D’s in school. I am trying to think of ways to challenge her and the three other students in my class who seem to want to excel. If anyone has ideas for that that don’t amount to tracking, let me know.