Libraries are Wonderful Things

keith's flight was delayed to lax.... i had already left the house in case their was traffic (as happens in LA) so i kept going to the airport.  i stopped at a grocery store for an apple and a cinnamon roll.  then the flight was delayed again.  so i put barnes and noble into the gps and headed off the 2.5 miles.  no barnes and noble.  then i thought to myself i don't really want a barnes and noble, i want a library.  there was one less than a mile from the failed barnes and noble and i found books, glorious books, and internet. to access the internet i had to get a library card.  i'm thinking i should start collecting library cards.  i should have kept my nevada ones....  interestingly it was easier to get a library card in a county where i am not a resident than it was for me to get a library card at the library 1/3 a mile from my house & po box. 

Awesome Information from Sarah the Guru of All Internet Utility

sarah just showed me how to get rid of the find bar in firefox when done with it (initiate with ctrl F and close with ESC). if you want it to go away by itself after a little bit of time just use forward slash (the button to the right of the period).
this made my day. i've been wanting to know this for a while now (just didn't really know what to search on or even if it existed). yup i'm that nerdy.

An Interesting Color Test

from some weird link that sarah posted in some feed thingy i don't feel like taking the effort to re-find. here's a color test thingy that seems simple but is actually surprisingly difficult. i got a score of 7.... perfection is a score of 0.

An Interesting Article by Desmond Ford

rather than do some useful work this afternoon i have been reading various interesting things like the sections on sustainability in C&EN from Aug 18 and reading some on Desmond Ford since we are going to hear him speak at the Loma Linda campus hill church this sabbath.  here's a link to an article by Desmond Ford and here's a quote that i found poinent.

A vast array of modern sciences blatantly contradicts the literalistic reading of the opening chapters of Genesis. In addition to this fact the church must recognise that its efforts to evangelise the world are largely unsuccessful among educated people because there is this same issue of the great gap between science and Genesis when the latter is interpreted literally. Thus the Christian church today makes progress in the third world but is retreating in the industrialised countries of the globe.

Vista - another crappy view

vista has some internet commercials called the mojave experiment where people are told vista is mojave and then they love it. clearly not actual users given time to realize how it has created new problems. myself, yesterday found a new realm of crappiness when i tried to delete a dll that was part of a program I, wanted to delete. it pretended to be all Unix-y and didn't allow me to have file permissions to delete it. i found some command line instructions for giving myself ownership & permissions for the file. still no delete. had to boot to safe mode to delete a dll. you go mojave. granted some stuff is nice like the integration of good handwriting recognition for the tablet... but if you don't have a tablet stick with XP .

Software List

so i think i finally have my software where i want it on my new tablet for work. for those of you who are truely nerdy and want to know what i consider needed on my tablet here's my list.

• firefox (duh!)
• truecrypt (thanks to kev & neal for encouraging me to encrypt my data)
• 7zip (because i like it better than windows)
• openoffice (i can't stand using word anymore)
• M$office (excel still rocks, unfortunately)
• java (need this for some web stuff and other programs i run)
• flash, shockwave (online homework system we use for two classes needs these)
• quicktime and real player alternative (the real ones are so annoying and these seem to work)
• paint.net (for that quick graphics edit)
• inkscape (vector graphics!)
• exifer (i can't escape this program even though it is no longer being supported. it allows for saving exif data and putting it back on, which doesn't get lost as often as it used to thanks to paint.net, but this program also will redo the thumbnail and allows me to edit the exif, iptc, jpg information in bulk)
• gimp (for any massive graphics editing i decide to do)
• canon utilities (so i can plug my camera on the microscope into the tablet)
• eclipse with texlipse and miktex (for doing TeX projects like writing tests and potentially pdf's for lecture, the miktex takes care of the packages while exlipse and the texlipse plugin allow me to do the editing of my giant basically text file that is then plugged into the actual TeX compiler)
• jabref (a database interface for keeping track of references for use in TeX, makes it so much easier to do a bibliography)
• chemsketch (this is free for educational use, i don't like it as well as chemdraw but that is expensive, i have also used bkchem with good results esp since it saves it in svg so i can edit it with inkscape if it needs more work)
• scifinder scholar (a very, very good searching tool for chemistry put out by chemical abstracting services, CAS, i'm glad that we decided to spring the money from our red budget for this)
• putty (used to talk to the chemistry server neal helped me set up)
• openvpn (so i can dial into the vpn on the campus for servers and scifinder)
• jarnal (an opensource program that allows writing on all sorts of thing, including fake notebook paper, but important to me pdf's. then you can save them as a pdf. this works great on a tablet. so i can write on forms or write on pdf presentations and save the results.)
• pen attention (allows me to use the pen as a pointer in a way by putting a bubble of pink around the pen cursor so that students can see while i wave about on the screen with it)

Reading Online vs. Print

an interesting article from the new york times on kids and reading on-line. it raises many questions for me on how i spend my time as well as what i emphasize in class. should i be requiring the e-book edition of the text instead of the print?

Gender Words

i recently bough "MySQL in a Nutshell" from O'Reilly. and was intrigued by the usage of her as a pronoun so i did a quick google and found this response from the publisher to another buyer's similar question. my first response to the practice of alternating the gender is YAY! i enjoy having the generic be a woman. trivial? yes. but still when i am reading along and it says "she" i do in fact think 'hey it is talking about me!' which says i am more affected by gender language than i would like to admit. and i would dearly love it if english did come up with a grammatically correct gender neutral set of words for this usage (without it sounding so ugly as we have culturally made "it" sound)

my response to the guy that originally wrote the letter is "dude, if you are going to reject books that contain good technical information merely because they use a pronoun that you find offensive than you don't deserve the knowledge they contain." we all can choose to be offended or not. i personally chose to try my best to not be offended when people assume i am a guy or assume because i am a woman i have a particular role (except pregnancy that is an acceptable assumption of gender role). i don't always succeed but i do know that i wouldn't let it stand in my way of obtaining an education from a person or a book. this guy and his offense to using the feminine form would not be a welcome addition to my classroom.

and as long as i am rambling about gender... i heard on NPR that a postal worker is trying to get permission to wear a kilt to work (technically a male unbifurcated garmet). i think if men aren't allowed to wear kilts then women shouldn't be allowed to wear skirts.

age discrimination

i ran into the site http://www.thingsyoungerthanmccain.com/ and found it funny and generally of like mind to me. i don't believe in age discrimination so i am not fundamentally opposed to having an older president. i do think that in generally older people have additional obstacles but there a wide varients on when old is old. there is a friend here who is approaching 80, but still a good thinker etc. mccain however i think shows his thought age more in this post linked to below than his physical age and i have to agree with the post that i'm not sure a person who chooses to not use a computer can be an effective president.

The computer.

Chemistry in Bite Size

i disclose personal bias in that i own stock in BASF and i wanted at one time to work for them because they really do some great chemistry...

they produce a pretty cool podcast that i just found today on chemistry in everyday life.

An Interesting Tale on How the World is Small

i read spectrum magazine's site on and off... usually what i read is well done.
here's a story that you all might enjoy reading.

an npr story i enjoyed

trash... i have come to believe it should be sorted, that people should be paid to do it and that it is vital for our economy, environment and people.  check out this story about it.

Happy Mother's Day

happy mother's day to my awesome mom!

she came out to help us move into our house.
she did much in many rooms.
here's a small sample below.
she sends me books.
she read books i send her.
there's so much she does and has done (and i am sure will do) for me.

thanks be to God for my mom!

the upstairs bedroom came out really cool. (particularly considering it started with lavender & butterflies.) mom started it all by saying we should paint an accent wall that matched the lampshade so we got some samples from lowe's and picked the color. then we got the curtains at ikea and they go just awesome with the bedspread and sheets i already had. i called mom at least three times for advice on how to finish up with the curtains since i had to hem them. definition for mom: someone who you can call with a question that sounds stupid but you really don't know the answer to and she doesn't make you feel stupid for asking. i ended up folding over 12 cm of material (according to the packaging the material shrinks 4% in the wash so i left some room for them to shrink when i do get around to washing them). i decided to just leave all 12 cm there instead of cutting any off. i think it came out okay. below here is a weird panoramic view of the room. the photo stitching software chopped the bed in half and stretched the door... but it still gives a pretty good sense for the room.






mom also helped decide where some pictures should go and we hung a few. the next best room that mom helped with is the front (is that the living room or the family room i think it is living room....) great room. i would have never thought of putting my bolder boulder poster down here but it works really well with the flower picture that keith took. i also really like the rug that my mom made which you can see of the left side of the picture on the right. she helped put books in the bookcase maximizing interest and space (although there is some blank space now it will fill one i find the box with the bibles). she originally had another picture hanging above the couch by the same artist but keith and i both really liked it in our bedroom (it has lots of details that are good for looking at when going to sleep) so that one ended up there and it isn't as good as the other one but it isn't too bad. the tables are purposefully not exactly lined up and my mom and i both like it that way. keith is stuck with us and our quirky ways =).

finally the downstairs bedroom that we kicked mom out of while she was here (so we could paint it) is finished too. the chocolate wall is really awesome. i think i'll try to get a different bedspread for down here (return the one that is here to our bedroom where i like it). maybe a chocolate and light blue star quilt. but the dark wall goes well with the nightstand and lamp in this room as well. so weirdly both rooms have accent walls to match lamps. but it worked out really well and both rooms look great.
keith is finishing the upstairs edging in the room with no bed and all boxes as i write this. so mom, don't worry we are making progress even after you left =). but it is a really good thing you came or we wouldn't have started and finished so many things!!!

now just to finish stuffing all of last year's finances into a box and get started organizing this year's stuff. you'll note my desk is overloaded with papers. though mom did put a picture and the vase in my area to spruce it up a little bit. as an aside to this post... quicken is lame-o. they stopped letting banks allow the download into the version i have trying to force me to upgrade. well ha on them because i am going to go open source... even though that will take me some time to learn the new program and get my data all in the right categories at least it will be free and better!

Chicken or the Egg Type Question

i read a reasonably interesting article from msn about how the economy for men is definitely down while for women it isn't as clear. basically women are more employed than men because they are in sectors that aren't as hard hit by the downturn. however women are in jobs that pay less than men.

so here's my question: do women work in jobs that pay less because (a) the jobs occupied predominately by women (who don't demand raises and still have a stigma of not being the breadwinners so don't need the salary) or (b) the jobs are low paying to begin with and men just don't want to work those jobs?

it is certainly more complicated than a simple question but what i am really trying to get at is maybe women still have some personal building to do in demanding raises or does more work need to be done in raising the pay rate of jobs across the board so that all jobs are worked by men & women because they all pay at appropriate rates.... that kinda rambled and didn't quite make sense... but no time to fix.

Go Metric

i heard on NPR that we are the only big country to not officially adopt metric. our non-standard friends are liberia and burma (or myanmar). needless to say we just aren't standard with the rest of the world. i didn't catch the whole npr story as i was listening while trying to write my synthetic scheme for tomorrow's work in lab. but basically i think the idea was we need to catch up with the rest of the world or it will leave us behind even if we are big. the rest of the world is still bigger. so anyways here's a link with some interesting information on how other countries made the switch to metric.

I Kept Looking for the Mistake

i get e-mail from spectrum magazine and i read the blurb for a story and i read it like three time because i couldn't believe it. here's the blurb followed by a link to the spectrum blog post.

Adventist Political Hopeful Speaks to Neo-Nazi Group

Tony Zirkle, a South Bend, Indiana, lawyer and Republican primary candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives, District 2. On Sunday, he spoke to a Chicago group celebrating the birthday of Hitler. Recently, Zirkle, an Andrews University Theological Seminary student, raised the idea of segregating races in separate states. In 2006, he received 30 percent of the GOP primary vote in Indiana's 2nd District.

What's that book that he recommends in the video?

here's a link to the blog with video

If I had a million dollars.....

i would buy a multifunction solid ink xerox 8560 MFP/D

Local vs. Global

there is some emphasis in some places to buy locally from local businesses. and that makes a lot of sense in some cases. here's two instances of local business and than one case of a global business that i have encountered in the past week that show the positive sides of both.

today i went to the credit union to get a cashier's check. it was very quick, very easy with a low fee. now when i have gone to bank of america in the past it was a long ordeal to get the cashiers check and while i don't think there was a fee the interest rates on the savings account certainly make up for that. the credit union has okay rates, but the service is without parallel and they know who i am even though i don't go there very often.

the post office here where i have my po box i consider to be a local business though some would argue it isn't. but i think a great deal of the money spent ends up going toward people's salaries which are local people mostly. i could be wrong on this and should probably do research to back up that opinion... but they remembered that i wanted the american scientist stamps that just came out since i asked about them and so one of the employees saw me come in to check my po box and came to tell me the stamps were in. that's really good service.

finally an instance of where a global business is good for local people. i was at starbucks spending some gift card money (occasionally a student will give me a gift card to starbucks at christmas, don't worry it doesn't affect my grading). while i was waiting for my coffee a lady behind me recognized a friend behind the counter and the conversation included the barista saying, 'working here and getting health insurance.' yes in general i would say spending $2 on coffee (or more) is a waste of money but having an employer in the community that has health insurance is probably worth that price. so even though i don't often get coffee there i do feel better in that indulgence than buying something from wal-mart.

PO Box part II

another advantage to having to walk to a po box is sunshine. apparently us desk sloths don't get sunshine to manufacture our own vitamin D and thus are deficient. and this leads to all kinds of weird problems. so a few minutes in the sun (without sunscreen) would do us all good.

PO Box

what's cheaper than a gym but gets you exercising? get a po box near where you work, within walking distance and then get your mail sent there. i pay about $6/month to force myself to walk 1.4 mi at least once a week. without that i think i'd be a noodle. and i have to get the mail since important stuff does come every now and again.

Envy

i confess that i am envious of two friends who ride bikes well enough to actually participate in events. i've never been good at bicycling and this past quarter i certainly haven't even come close to keeping in shape. if i ever do decide to take up biking i might do it by joining a team to go on a ride through team in training. apparently you get coached to do some momentous event and all you have to do is raise money for a good cause. i could get behind that. plus then i would get a more rapid rise to competency with the aid of professional coaching. yup i believe you work harder with someone telling you to work harder.

Post-Pre-Thumb Hole

i finished the thumb hole and then made it all the way to the end, even knitting my final row and binding off. but i'm going to undo it. the thumb hole needs to be bigger. i thought about just leaving it because i can make it work but i think i'll be happier if i just redo that part. so here's some pictures before taking it apart.