When you're not quite sure exactly what you're doing, sometimes it's acceptable to do nothing at all. Sometimes it's not.

More work on the reference system, spent some time reading, and watching tv. Haven't really watched TV since sometime 3 weeks ago. Still a waste of time. (Although junkyard wars and battlebots was kind of interesting...) Um.. yeah. More eating, and stuff and working, and writing, and sleep. Yeah. Lots of sleep. (We're nearing the end of the quarter. One last week of instruction, then finals. Oooo... yippie.)

Wandered down to fry's to replace my 3 button mouse that had crapped out on me. I hate that place, but when you need something electronic quick, where else are you going to go?

More work on GM's system, looks like it's working now. Got sleep working with benh-2.4.17 on my g4 powerbook.. it's nice. Found gkrellm and it's working really well (after finding bubblefishymon.. quite silly but kind of cute). More reading and stuff to take care of tomorrow. Hopefully the new dual p4 will show up. That will be kind of fun to play with.

Oh yeah... also went grocery shopping and picked up some food so I'll be able to eat and drink for the near future. Also looked at digital cameras. Maybe when I come into some more money I'll pick one up.

You never know what can happen when you snap back into consiousness. All of a sudden, the entire world snaps into place as the dream state that you were in shifts out of focus. I wish I understood the process between conciousness and unconciousness better... of course, I don't think there's anyone who really understands it all that well anyway.

Onto the daily grid. Monitor for our dual p4 arrived, but no box yet. Unfortunatly, it's going to need to be returned... oh well. Got some of the broken nmr data to work, but some of the fids are tweaked, and they won't transfer onto our machine... I'll have to talk to Dan about that.

Heard about MCP-1 and it's interaction with IL-8 in a talk today. Quite interesting... I need to do some more background reading in this area before I'm ready to make a statement about it.. but the research that was presented definetly looks promising. More work on GM's system, and took care of a few minor things on my systems. I'll have to do some more work on GM later.

I'll probably also update my reading list with the things that I've read in the past few days... kind of interesting...

My alarm clock will die.

It's amazing how this civilization runs on such a rigid concept of time. I totally don't fit into it. As you can tell, not much sleep going on here lately. Got samples made in my lab today for PKC assay.

The lab's dual p4 showed up, so that was a great timesuck. It seems to be working pretty well, and I've actually got it setup so I can almost use it do do something or other. Hopefully I'll get to processing the gene array data soon.

Figured out what seems to be happening with the NMR data that seemed to be getting choked by the converter. Probably a fortran library issue or similar, but it works under linux. I'll probably have to play with it some more... ooo joy.

Hopefully I'll get around to updating my reading list. I've read a whole lot of books recently, almost none of which I've bothered to list.... but that will happen one of these days.

Ran PKC assay today, and attended seminar on glial cells. Afterwords I actually got to socialize with some of the people in the class... some of which I've never talked with before... one of the graduate students (now graduated) who is doing postdoc work at USC dropped by after listening to a friends defense, and there was food for people.

Then finished up the assay, froze as I rode my bike home, and took care of a little bit of stuff before sleep. Odly, I had a venti coffe at starbucks, and I can barely feel the effects. I'm definetly a caffeine addict.

Whoa. Way to much stuff got done today. I think I'm going to have to become lazy for the next couple weeks to make up for it.

Registered for classes, took care of a hold on my registration (not in that order), made NMR samples, attended class, started running an NMR sample that I had made previously, got the felix converter working correctly for at least some of its imput set, and read a bit.

Still got a big long push for my single final on tuesday, but I think I can make it until then. Hopefully.

Let's see... went to the last Bio200a class before the final on tuesday. Learned about protein chip mass-spec, the last little bit on snares and copII (sec13/31, sec23/24, and sec1). Then I hydrated the NMR samples, attended a talk on trimeric G protiens in fillamentous fungae (N. crassa).

Finished the samples, and got one started, then came home and started to do some reading, finished CH Cheryh's Dreamstone, and kept the NMR samples going, and tried to figure out how to pull XML data from pubmed using only GET requests. (Couldn't figure it out, so I e-mailed their helpdesk.)

Oh yeah... almost forgot. Today when I was riding to campus on my bike, I almost got hit by a car sized tumbleweed. Yerp. There it was comming down canyon crest. I was riding upwind in what must have been gusts to around 30-40mph, and here it came, barreling down the middle of the street in my direction. Lukily, I was far enough along so I was able to avoid it by speeding up a bit, but it ended up carreeming into the sidewalk/curb about 5 feet behind me. It probably wouldn't have hurt to much to be hit by it, but it definetly would have been embarrassing to be riding down the street with a gigantic tumbleweed attached to you.

Continued studying bio200a, read some papers, finished up the last two remaining figures for a paper which I am a middle author (helical wheel), went to albertos for the first time in quite a long time with paul. Talked with angela and mandee on the phone, both of whom I haven't seen in quite some time.

It's flipping freezing around here, and it's time to go to sleep.

Last bit of studying for my final happened today. Finished making up the outline and stuff like that.

I'll probably post it in a new section for work that I have done somewhere on this website, well after the final. (There are some other things that I want to take care of before that.)

Got to talk with Abe, one of the members of one infinity, hopefully I'll get to talk with the whole group soon... missed them when they were down in LA unfortunatly...

Dogs didn't seem to like it too much when it oddly started hailing today. Can't say that I blame them. (They went into their dogloo to hide... but came out a couple of times because they seemed to be curious about the hail...) After the hail, it was bitterly cold. (It's 37F outside right now... will probably be near freezing soon...)

Took my final today (yeay!) and seemed to do ok. Always difficult to take tests because they are always under sub-optimal conditions where you rarely have enough time and enough information. We'll see where my effort lets me end up.

Did more work with Z on the NMR paper, got felix working, and dePaked some spectra. Looking good on that front. Discussed some other stuff, and listened to Dr. Franci Sladek present research on HNRF-4a iirc... interesting presentation, would have been more usefull if I could stay focused... I was thinking about the aplications of Markov Chains to literature mining, and haven't slept much recently, which isn't good for concentrating on a talk outside of your area.

More spectra processing and coffee, and then got the SGML search feature in my reference system to work with pubmed. Going to need some more work, but at least I found the information that was missing earlier.

Loads of coding dealing with trying to get my reference software to interact with pubmed.

Looks like I'm going to have to duplicate some php code in perl, as php just isn't powerfull enough, nor multi-thread capable enough to deal with pubmed's slow generation of sgml. (I'm going to multiplex to pubmed almost 100 connections, and doing it syncronously isn't going to work.)

Got to take care of making the jacked figures for this paper. Will happen very shortly.

Worked on my references application again, went ot the lab and finished up the figures that were messed up. Ended up not being able to make the NMR figures, but that's not a big deal.

Came home, and had chorizo, and did some more work on the references, porting the sgml part to perl, then went to coffee depot and read some more about MarKov Chains and MonteCarlo simulations. Looking more and more interesting, but I'll have to see exactly how people are applying it to literature mining, as I'm not deep enough into the field to grok that aspect of it.

Back home, got the wheel working on rzlab.ucr.edu, and put up some stuff there [http://rzlab.ucr.edu], not exactly exciting, but at least the reviewers can check the figures and the source code when they go over the paper.

Then I spent some time trying to get mutt to work well with my setup, but unfortunatly, I've become way to entrenched in using pine to switch really easily to a new MUA. Once I figure out the folder filtering commands so I can actually wade through my e-mails, I'll probably begin to switch from pine to mutt, but I dind't have enough time to figure out the mbox-hook.

Well, it's late, and time to go to sleep. Got lots of stuff to deal with tomorrow when I wake up. (Ooo... exciting...)

Well, looks like another day has gone by. Thousands of undergrads are finishing off their finals, hoping to pass classes and not get failed out of the university. I wish them loads of luck.

For myself, I spent the day (well, it was about sunset before I got up, but whatever) working on my reference system, and I finally got links working (well, I should say that I finally got around to getting links working) inside of the diary generation script, which I should probably post once I actually get around to it. (Or maybe I already [http://www.donarmstrong.com/inprogress/diary/diary.html|did]. ) Of course, I haven't posted the version with the working links. I'll do that later.

Finally visited [http://wilwheaton.net/|wil wheaton dot net] tonight. Looks like he likes cake alot. I'll probably have to listen in on them so I can see what they're all about. I'm kind of behind on my music listening as of right now.

Also talked with blakem on [http://www.perlmonks.org|perl monks]. He's doing well, and is going to make a trip down to SD from SF. Told him about the harbor house cafe and some of the other places on PCH. (But I'm always wary of recommending places to go, because I'm never sure of people's tastes... and I like some pretty bizare things...) Also told me about [http://www.perldoc.com/cpan/Parallel/ForkManager.html|Fork Manager] which I'm going to use to speed up the SGML queries to pubmed which currently are sucky sloow. (I don't really understand why it takes them 10 seconds or more to generate a simple sgml query using a uid that should be in their table index. Even if they have 100 million, that lookup shouldn't take more than 32 comparisons...)

Contemplating a coffee table based on a fibonacci sequence for the living room. Probably go to HB or LA tomorrow and look at some wood to make it. (Possibly spar lumber in long beach, as it has really good wood selection, but unfortunatly, doesn't always have larger pieces... and I'm not sure if I can afford a 3.5'x5' piece of maple or walnut.. nor would I do what I'm thinking of doing to such a nice piece of wood...)

Well, normally I try to make my entries before I go to bed, but as it looks like I'm not going to bother with sleeping this morning, I'll write what I did today now.

I did just about nothing today. Yep. That's it. Well, not quite. Did some work on the grand marc system, talked with a ton of people online. Went with paul to the mall on a mission that will be discused later, and saw aaron there, who I haven't talked with in a while. Got discusted at the prices for TriGun and Escaflowne ($30 for 4 episodes!!!!). I also tried to clean up my room, and got partway through with it. I'll probably clean up the rest of it in just a bit.

Also looked for a harddrive for this machine, which is getting ready to go belly up. (Either that, or the kernel version that it is running isn't very happy...) Talked with a brazilian on line, who showed me to a [http://www.rmc.eti.br/hobbies/fotografia/rmc_praias.htm|picture collection] of some interesting pictures of what I guess is his hometown. (Sorry, I don't have any nice pictures of riverside around, alhtough there is a nice picture of a riverside firehydrant in my bathroom...)

Um yeah. Going to be taking paul and sophie to the airport in about 3 hours, which should be fun. (Or at least, they'll have fun when they get where they're going... orlando florida...;-)

Lets see... I took paul and sophie to ontario airport so they could get on a plane to go to sunny florida. Then I came back, looked up some more thrift stores, and wandered to LA to go thrift store shoping. Found three shirts that were usefull, but not the overcoat that I was realling looking for. Seems like I'm going to have to look for and pick up a sewing machine to make the clothes that I want to wear. Oh well.

One of the shirts is an antique christian dior, with a semi-decent conservative design. One is a crappy (but cheap) long sleeve velvet-like thingie, and the other was a cheap (and nice) Ecko shirt. Kind of sad that the selection of mens clothing in thrift stores is so minimalistic. Solution: Men need to begin to exert some pressure on the fashion industry to make better design decisions for males. {Yes, gay men, this means you! As well as the couple of us hetero males who like quality, innovative clothing.}

After that, I wandered around trying to find a locale to void my bladder. I made the mistake of pulling into a K-Mart that was clearly exceeding its parking lot's capabilities. Realizing my innocent mistake, I fled the scene of the crime, but not before ome idiot in a large SUV actually had the audacity to honk at me for not making a right hand turn in the front of oncomming traffic. (He was stuck behind me, and had to wait an extra 10 seconds while I let a car go that would have slammed into the back of me had I gone.) I eventually went, but I should have let the inner dick in me out. My parking brake should have suddenly lept from it's off position to the fully on, the car should have turned off, and the hazards come on. For effect, I should have popped the hood, and proceeded to the front, swearing loudly, and waited for the car behind me to back up against traffic and try to exit using another route. Then, in a coupe de gras, closed the hood, jumped inside, and speed off. But I kept the dick in me under control, and merely decided that the car behind me clearly needed to have a better interface placed between the seat and the steering wheel, as its current design is liable to cause the car undue stress and damage.

I did eventually void my bladder, and managed to travel to my parents home without engaging my postal tendencies against any other drivers. (I try to be a peacfull person, and in my peacefullness, sometimes it is necessary to dispatch people from society so that their logical end does not involve any innocent (or at least not heinously guilty) bystanders (or by-drivers).)

More watching of boring movies, and finally I'm going to sleep.

Went to fix one of my mom's computers in her school, ended up being a proprietary software issue that was pretty easy to take care of once you got into the mindset of it's developers.

Then food, finished watching the shadow, and came home to do some more work on random stuff.

Another day, another dollar, or so they say. Of course, now days, you're not doing to hot if your only getting a dollar a day. $365.25/year isn't going to cut it any more.

On to more pressing matters, loads of people called me today, as it looks like GM is having issues with one of their computers hard drives. I'm planning on going there in about an hour to deal with it. (Lucky me). Once again, I'm in my wierd 12 hours of sleep, 20 hours of awake mode, which I really don't understand, but hey, whatever. I finished with most of the NMR spectra on felix, there were a couple that were slightly tweaked, and Z will have to take a look at

Beyond that, I continued doing work on my reference system, and it now goes from a pubmed id to a full blown reference. I need to get the journal tie in working, as it's not finished yet, but that won't take too long. Next step is to get the full-text and pdf uploads working with my proxy. That will be a couple of days worth of work.

Well, hopefully I'll get some sleep later on today. We'll see about that.

Ya know, I think these diary things are built for people who keep normal daily schedules. I don't, at least, not any type of schedule that I can tell, so my entries are continually off base to what day it is. (I like working at night, but I sleep for about 12 hours at a time, and can easily stay up for 24. Seems like I keep rotating the day around piece by piece.

On to the point. I went to see Lord Of The Rings:Fellowship of the Ring. Really impressive. I think I'm going to go see it again. Some of the CG'd battle scenes are truely magnificent, rivendale and lothlorien are absolutely beautifully rendered and executed. Samaron's tower is really neat. I think I'm going to have to build a couple of those high backed slatted shairs for my room. (Not that anyone would ever be even slightly comfortable in them, but still... they are really cool.)

I'll probably gush some more about it later. (Unfortunatly, it wasn't shown digitally, and there are still the normal minor imperfections associated with film that is prepared chemically. I'm too much of a perfectionist, and the presence of occasional blotches on the film due to improper exposure of the film to developing agent and fixative is really annoying. I don't know of any duplicating group that is doing this correctly yet... of course, it's gotten a lot better... but I want perfection. On a brand new reel that has been shown less than 5 times, 4 1/64 frame size blotches is kind of annoying... plus the assortied squiglies and worms that you usually see....)

I cannot quite write what I have in my mind to say. Something far to powerful for a language built of mere words. Too powerful to be read and easily understood, or at least, too powerful to be within my feeble grasp of language and writing to be able to express it. In fact, I'm only really aware of its power, and barely glimsp at it's edges, not yet seeing the whole structure in it's entirerity. Perhaps with a period of dreaming, this phantom in my mind will become clear enough for me to verbalize it, or at least begin to convey it's message.

Met with raphael and johana (a grad student who is joining us in the lab), and went to lunch at dragon house. Discussed the bioinformatics core of socratech, and I began to visualize a method of data collection that is quite powerfull, part of which is involved in the powerfull vision that I alluded to earlier.

The heater at [http://www.5045kensington.com|5045 Kensington] got repaired, and is now working reasonable succesfully. I also have been reading Snow Crash in one of my marathon reading sessions. I'll probably finish reading it before I am able to go to sleep.

Hopefully I'll be able to hash out this idea and the visualization/data storage system that I am thinking about when I sleep, and tomorrow, when I go to pick up paul and sophie from the airport.

Picked up paul and sophie from LAX, got to drive like a maniac around LA. I swear, you've got to have half a death wish to drive in LAX on a friday evening around 8. I probably cut off 20 cars,, and I only went from terminal 1 to parking lot 2A (about 300 yards).

After fun in LAX, we stopped at [http://www.dogfriendly.com/server/travel/uscities/pages/Los_Angeles___Hollywood/Restaurant/siterela3.shtml|eat-a-pita ] on fairfax and ate dinner. I love fallafel and hummus. The restaurant was a lot less jumping than it normally is, but it was kind of late, and the night was getting cold.

Then home, more work on my reference system, and time spent washing clothes. I still haven't ironed out my vision, but the reference software is going to be part of it, and it is coming along nicely.

Took care of getting my room semi clean, went and picked up some food from ralph's so I could eat. Also went to walmart (the 24 hour one) and picked up some containers, a gift for randy's party, a paper towel holder, and a set of beer glasses. Tried to find wine glasses, but for some reason, they were totally out of plan, normal, boring red wine glasses. (Either that, or they didn't know that people should want to buy such things...)

More work done on the reference system, going to put the links into it soon so you can upload files, or link out to them. Also have to update the parsing routines there, so you can link to entries on other papers from within the note system.

Will spend the next bit of time before I go to bed trying to figure out how to implement this knowlede base system that I keep envisioning inside of my head.

I'll also have to do some work on the table that I have planned for the front room. Hopefully I'll get it finished in the near future.

Went to randy's party at randy's parents house in Bel Air. Really nice house. His parents definetly did a good job remodelling it from how it originally looked. Paul and sophie are heading up north to visit with paul's parents, and they wandered around behind me as I forgot where pinks was looking for somewhere to eat after the party.

I really should learn how to drive around LA. (Which is sad, because I never really didn't know where I was, I just forgot where other things were...)

Before wandering into LA, I helped paul get [http://www.gnome.org|gdm] configured on his box. The symlink for his X server wasn't set right. (Not quite sure how debian screwed that one up, but whatever...) Also played for a bit with installing various neat toys, like some of the opengl servers. I'll have to get acceleration working on my multi-head display. Right now, no 3d is accelerated, which sort of sucks.

More work on a gift. Hopefully it will turn out ok.

Wandered into the library in the morning to pick up some books (Do Androids dream of electric sheep, cryptonomicon, and a few others). After that, I left riverside for huntington beach, and christmas eve. My mother made rotkohl, roast, salad, and all the appropriate trimmings of a proper german christmas dinner. (I'm way to fond of rotkohl for my own good.) Then christmas presents, followed by midnight mass.

It's always unusual going to church when one is a determinist (in the modern sense of the word), and furthermore, a biologist by training. But I will speak no further of my quandries in that area.

Then we wandered back home, and I took care of some work that had piled up between noon and midnight (although I still have some more to do).

Opened christmas presents from my parents, who picked up a tool set from sears for me. Then I laid about before going to covina hills where my late grandfather's wife prepared yet another dinner for us. It was quite good, and I got to visit with Alexander, who is working on getting his pilot's license in tulsa, oklahoma.

Later, we wandered back to riverside, and me and my brother went to see Lord Of The Rings for the second time. (It's going to be quite a long and painful wait for the next LotR.)

More work, reading, and then hopefully, sleep.

Went to grand marc this morning, and took care of some problems resulting from the failure of a hard drive. Also dealt with a modem issue, one that I haven't had to deal with in quite a long time. (Definetly very annoying!).

Then I came back to the house, continued working on the reference system. You can now upload files correctly, and add links as appropriate.

Next I need to get some icons for it so the add (blah) controls are smaller and easier to deal with. (Right now they are all text.)

Got up, finished off the work on the NMR spectra that needed to be taken care of. The scd plots are now complete.

Did some more work on my reference application, and reduced the backlog of my references.

Worked more on the linking part of the reference system, cleaned up some more of the backyard that needed to be taken care of. Partook in the 2.99 combo special at carl's jr, and continued working on the reference system.

I have to finish the rest of the in-note linking system soon.

I also picked up a copy of the directors cut of Blade Runner, which is pretty good... however there still is some flutter in the digitization, that probably shouldn't have been there. Quite obvious that they used a projector to digitize it. (I wonder why they don't use a whole film scanner... but... )