I'm doing science and I'm still alive

I don't know if anyone still reads this thing, as I seem to have abandoned it for a year. But maybe you're doing that RSS thing that all the kids are talking about.

Anyways, today was my last day at work, which is taking a little getting used to. So, to commemorate that fact, here's a post I had been meaning to make for a while. I give you: the three coolest pieces of lab equipment I've worked with that don't take up a whole room (I'm qualifying that because otherwise the VDD8 would win hands down (with an honorable mention to the VDD2 for reminding me of the Voight-Kampff machine).

Third place goes to the Thermal Desorption Unit, which I've mentioned earlier:

(this is not it, but it's similar)
It wins points for being a clever sort of contraption and for having the best name, but loses points for being a pain in the butt to fix.

Second place goes to the Gas Totalizer:

All the gas totalizer does is measure out a set quantity of gas for the preparation of vapor samples. On the one hand, it suffers from a byzantine user interface and the fact that it doesn't do anything I couldn't do on my own with a mass flow controller and a stopwatch. On the other hand, it's housed in an excitingly classy wooden cube.

First place goes to the bubble meter:

This is used to measure gas flow. It's also a clever little gizmo...once in the past I had to rig up a cruder version of this with a tube and a modified graduated cylinder. What you do is you put some soapy water in the in the cylinder and attach the tube near the bottom, and cause a bubble to form. The bubble expands up the tube, and you can track the increase in volume over time, which tells you how much gas is flowing through the tube. The bubble meter does the same thing, but with fancy electronic sensors, so all you have to do is press a button to operate it. Other things I like about it: 1) it reminds me of the bubble gun from the Ghostbusters video game for Genesis 2) there are very few parts and none of them are user-serviceable, so when it breaks, it's not my problem.

But I guess it's not my problem now anyways.

Onwards!

Bird is the word

Monday night I suddenly remembered something important I left at the lab, so I decided to drive there so I could take care of it quickly. My car had been sitting in the carport for about a week or two, and I discovered that some birds had been nesting directly above it (due to the usual evidence of birds having been above one's car). After a couple minutes on the road, I make a second discovery, which is that I'm covered in tiny bugs.

One scalding and vinegary shower later, I decide that the safest course of action is to assume the worst, namely, that I'm already dying of encephalitis. This evening I emptied a can of the least toxic-seeming insecticide I could find (This is the best thing I've discovered on the Internet today. Unrelatedly, this is the second best.) And tomorrow I'm going to attempt carbon dioxide fumigation.

So, sorry I haven't been updating my blog much. Lots of things have been happening, most of them less gross than this; at some point I'll try to go back and summarize some of the things I've been doing this summer. What's new with you?

All of a sudden, these days

I've been getting into things lately, which is nice. Like, at any given time I'll have a book or a game or a TV show that I'm really into and spend a little time on each day. I realize that this sort of arrangement is so commonplace for normal people that you're probably wondering why I'm talking about it, but the thing is that I've never really been one to spend my free time in an especially concerted fashion. I'd just kind of find something to do, depending on what I was in the mood for that day (hour, etc). ...Especially in recent years, since I often don't have the energy to actively do much after work.

Come to think of it, this change may have begun back with Meteos and Apollo Justice. Then a book or two, and for several weeks it was House, but this has been displaced by Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, which is kind of a weird game. I know this fact has been commented on endlessly, but wow that game is so much darker than its predecessors. In the last game, you were playing as orange star and blue moon and other lucky-charms-based armies fighting to capture the oozium facilities or whatever. In this game, the planet has been bombarded with meteors and you're trying to survive famine, civil war, and biological weapons, and it's all just a little unexpected. The game is also unexpectedly moralistic; there are these overarching themes of hope and duty and such, but, for example, the last mission I completed was like this little epistemological parable about why it's bad to have false hope. But then the tactical briefings still have the same levity as before. It's odd.

Speaking of video games, Cliff Harris never fails to delight

Oh, and the other day I noticed that my shampoo has caffeine in it. Huh.

oh wait

I lied: the most important thing that happened to me this week was the purchase of four liters of Passover Coke. Nom nom nom.

We've both been sound asleep; wake up, little Susie and weep

Not much going on here; the big news for this week is that I've been consistently waking up thirty minutes before my alarm goes off. That's just the most infuriating thing. I've been getting plenty of sleep (mainly because I generally end up crashing around 9), but it just feels like such an indignity, made even worse by the fact that it's self-inflicted.

The other big development is that I've been playing lots of Meteos, which is dreadfully habit-forming (as is Apollo Justice, which I started more recently). It's pretty good; I'll withhold Phoenix Wright comparisons until after I finish it.

Exciting times.

Speaking of games, Gugger brought this to my attention, which is interesting both as a matter of game design and for the obvious moral psychological implications.

Lastly--and in memoriam Dave Arneson--I should have known that this would exist, but somehow I didn't.

Oh, I could hide 'neath the wings

As those of you who have shopped there will know, and those of you who haven't can probably guess, the La Jolla Trader Joe's has a mildly eclectic clientele. Sometimes, as I notice people, I get the feeling that I'm looking into my future. Will I become, for example, the wire-rim bespectacled dude with the heather gray sweater and tan khakis, the color of whose skin, eyes, and amorphous hair all fall somewhere between those two hues? Or will I be more like the one wearing a shiny bottle green overcoat and Matt Brown pants, with weird glasses? Suddenly my destiny is hanging in the balance, right there in the checkout line.
Enough of that...I have other, equally pointless observations to make. For example, speaking of weird glasses, one unfortunate side effect of my new glasses that I've noticed is the sudden desire to punch myself whenever I walk into the Apple Store.
Also, most of you have probably noticed that I sign my emails with a rather succinct "-E." For some reason, though, it feels really weird to get replies addressed that way.
Lastly, and title-relevantly, it turns out that in season 1 of the Tick, Arthur was totally voiced by Micky Dolenz. !!!

Follow my lead, oh how I need Someone to watch over me

Hey, I just discovered that the art for Kudos 2 was done by Jamie McKelvie of Phonogram, so that's pretty neat.

So, Watchmen was pretty good. It could have used slightly less action, I suppose, especially slow motion action, but it sort of goes with the territory. It makes sense for to present Nite Owl's fight scenes using gimmicky action movie effects for the same reason that it makes sense for him to wear that sort of costume. Less forgivable is the fact that he can punch walls and limbs hard enough that they explode.
Actually, I think I'll just follow Drew's example and direct you to to the AV Club's Book vs Film which nicely presents some of the movie's shortcomings and gives a rundown of some of the differences from the original.
But on the whole, I enjoyed it, I really enjoyed some parts of it ("The Times They Are A-Changin'," oh man), and I'll likely want to watch it more than once to catch all the details and references and easter eggs, and am only a little bit deterred from this by the fact that it's slightly shorter than, say, Lawrence of Arabia, as well as my own general disinclination to see dudes' arms getting sawed off.