WellAtMidnight

Despite my efforts to remain oblivious to current events, I noticed that today (courtesy of the radio announcers talking instead of playing music) was supposed to be a day of protests, walk-outs and boycotts by immigrants: "A day without immigrants". As I've previously mentioned, I'm the only one in our lab who isn't an immigrant; so you might expect that I'd have a lonely day today.

Well, not so much. Everybody was there, and not protesting about anything other than the experimental results (although there was a boycott by the experiments of any successful results, but that's another story for another time).

So, I did a little digging online. Apparently, this was about illegal immigrants protesting the fact that the government wants to make them more illegal (although the vast majority of the articles I saw referred to them as undocumented, not illegal).

WTF? The logic here seems somewhat confused. X is illegal, but still lots of people do/are/use X. Government response - make it more illegal.

I'm reminded of a quote from one of P. J. O'Rourke's chapters on drugs laws [1]. "Get serious." Either make something illegal and enforce it, or legalize it.

I don't know what to do about illegal immigration. I assume that both of my maternal grandparents were legal immigrants, because their last names were changed (mis-spelled) at Ellis Island. I don't know about my paternal grandparents, seeing as when the people I could've asked were alive, we had other things to talk about (slides and legos, given how old I was). And I don't know what to do about bizarre government/legal logic. But I do know what to do about news like this...listen to the tape player instead of the radio [2].

[1] From "Parliment of Whores". Good book; read it even if you don't agree with his politics
[2] Which I can do that it's warmed up... when it's cold, audio tapes get distorted. Yes, this is crawling partly back under my rock; but that options appear to be laugh, get annoyed, or ignore it.
[3] yes, I'm foot-noting blog-posts. Sad, isn't it?

This morning while I was driving in to work, an old Tom Petty song came on the radio. This reminded me of a time, not the first or the last, that I'd heard it: sitting with some friends around a dying campfire in the middle of the woods. Just relaxing, sitting on some wet leaves and rotting logs, but it was one of those moments that just stuck with me.

There have been quite a few moments that have stuck with me like that, although generally not the one's I'd expect; and sometimes they seem to flow together. Wandering through downtown Chicago, feeling the crowds and buildings; reminding me of backpacking alongside a stream in a canyon in the New Mexico mountains. Watching the sun come up, during a smoking break while collecting data at a synchlotron. Watching the reflection of streetlights on a river from underneath a bridge. Of course, there have also been moments that I'd rather not remember; but I suppose everyone has those.

And tonight I'm having a healthy dinner of coke and animal crackers in lab, wondering why the conference room by the vending machines appears to be have taken over by girls in tank tops, and hoping that smoke doesn't start coming out of the computers. Somehow, I doubt that this will be something I'll remember a few years from now; but you never know.

It's that time of year again. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, and the girls are walking around with few enough layers of insulation that it's possible to tell they're female. So of course, the government decides to try and suck some happiness (and some money as well) away from us peons. Well, the better-organized peons have taken care of this months or weeks ago, but I don't count as well organized in anybody's book.

But for a grad student, tax time is actually somewhat comical. What, you say, have you gone around the bend?. Well, I went around the bend a while back; but bear with me a bit.

Like many grad students, I'm paid of a federal grant. Which federal grant varies with the academic year (and seeming the phase of the moon). Sometimes I get paid bi-weekly, sometimes per-semester. Part of the time I have money withheld for taxes, part of the time I don't.

Following the money goes somewhat like this: 1. The federal government gives me money, 1.(b) the federal government keeps some of the money it gives me, but doesn't keep some of the money it gave me another time, 2. I give money to the federal government (I guess paying taxes isn't giving as such, but I'm trying to simplify things here), 3.it gives back some of the money that it gave me, but withheld, 3.(b) or I have to give the government money because it hasn't withheld enough.

At this point I'm inclined to laugh at the absurdity of this entire process, as it would seem to be much simpler if the government simply gave me less money and didn't make me bother with the paperwork (for that matter, there would be less paperwork on their end as well).

Well, either laugh or go drink...

Not only is there so much that needs doing, but there's such a wide variety of it. For example, this past week I ended up doing: plumbing, making figures, attempting to interpret gels and beta-gal assays. That's in addition to the usual problems that come with working with computers most of the time (problems with data file formats; programs either not compiling or failing in bizarre ways).

My big achievement signpost this week: I have now broken every program that I've used for my data processing. With the exception of the most recent one (which I haven't fixed yet) and one program that's only distributed as a binary, I've had to debug everything.

All part of a biology education...

First, I should point out that I've been using the internet since before there was an internet (using BBSes longer back than I care to put a year to...yes, I know the internet was probably around then; but it was in a research lab). Anyhow, over this period of time I've noticed any number of websites decide to redesign themselves. From these observations, I have noticed one consistent theme: all websites get uglier after they're re-designed.

The worst offender in this category is yahoo, which seemed to remake their main page every 6 months or so. Fortunately, they would leave the old page active as a sub-page (for a while, until it got pulled with no warning). This was doubtlessly to increase advertising. In my case it failed, because 1. I know about ad-blockers, and 2. I stopped using the site.

Wired news (yeah, I know...) is actually worse, although less frequent in their redesigns. They'd occasionally have interesting stories, and would have links at the bottom of the page to interesting stories on other sites (these are now gone, courtesy of the last "upgrade"). They used to have a very handy pda formatted page, which was easily readable by Plucker (which I recommend highly, mainly for reading material while answering natures call). But, the urge to upgrade their website came upon them, and they decided to convert to a proprietary program. So, goodbye Wired.

SighSorry about the rant. But if any site designers happen to read this (or the marketing people that seem to be responsible for at least half of the really bad designs), here's a few hints.
1. If anything on your websites moves (animated gif images, streaming video, or the evil flash tags), I probably won't be back.
2. No Flash. Despite Macromedia's claim of 99% installed base, it has 0% installed base on any computer I use regularly or administer (it's one of the programs that I always check for, and uninstall, on a new machine). Why? Well, 99.9% of the time it's used for annoying ads.
3. Usability should degrade gracefully. If something on your site used to work, but now requires me to turn on or install something that's only used for ads, then I'll get irritated.
4. I would make a point about pop-ups, or anything on a website than makes noise. Except that I haven't noticed a site doing those for years. So, good job on that (unless my filtering is just catching all of those).

Why would a big website care about irritating people like me? Well, if you make your money from advertising, and your readers get annoyed and stop reading, who's attention will you sell to the advertisers? I don't block ads for sites that are useful, and have ads that are well behaved.

This is why you shouldn't let rants store up for >7 years or so (the years before that, I was still too new to computers to be annoyed).

There's a surefire way to tell when a scientific person is lying (for that matter, this may apply to any research or academic type).
If this person says that something they're working on (a paper, or a set of experiments) is almost done, they're lying.
Well, maybe not lying, but almost done doesn't mean what you'd normally expect it to mean in terms of how much time is left until it's actually, DONE. Normally, the almost would mean a few minutes, hours, or possibly a day. In the scientific context however, almost done can be several months. It's not uncommon for more time to pass between something being almost done and done then it took to go from the start of the project to almost done.
So, what've I been up to. While, I've got something that almost done...

Just because I tend to get very irritated by Christmas season is no reason for everyone else not to enjoy themselves. So, to any imaginary remaining* readers, Merry Christmas, happy Hananuka, winter solstice, or whatever your other favorite holiday is.

Unless of course you're someone responsible for any of the annoying christmas ads (aka all of them). In that case, I'm asking Santa to bring you an ass-kicking machine, strap you in and turn it on high, and not let you out until they take down the valentine's day decorations.

* Any such readers are probably wondering if I'm dead (no), or if I'd forgotten about posting (no, but things have been a little busy lately).