jeff.weblog.ro

chrome

jeff — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 21:31:42 +0000

I’m writing this post in the Google Chrome Browser. �It’s pretty nice, and is fully functional now it seems. �Websites work well, renders quickly, starts up quickly. �It has a similar auto-complete and auto-search functionality in the address bar compared to Firefox . �Only thing missing is plugins, which are still the major bonus of Firefox. �I’m going to use Chrome for a little bit and see how it goes. �One plus: it takes up less screen real estate due to the slick integration of the tabs with the window upper edge.

The BBC is Great

jeff — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 02:02:30 +0000

I highly recommend proxying in to watch BBC .co.uk/iplayer through a UK server!� BBC is awesome!� The new David Attenborough series Life is pretty cool. And, they have all kinds of neat cultural programs, like Blas Ceoil (on BBC 2) where they go to a different local pub every show and round up some decent musicians to play some music (Irish traditional ).� Hooray BBC!� Other than that, there are about a dozen shows about antiques (meh).� And, no commercials?� One-up on Hulu.

Monday morning

jeff — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 12:03:34 +0000

Some bullet points

I think we’re nearly done with holiday shopping!� (Wifey did most of it.)
I know five or six songs on the concertina now!
We still have to do our xmas decorating.� Plan for this evening: set up a tree.� And hope kitties don’t eat it.
Question for any mathy people out there ( Ryan ? Ben?): if I have two sets of points graphed on an arbitrary number of axes (dimensions), how can I quantify how different the two sets of points are?� I can visualize that they cluster separately, but I want to measure how different the groups are on average (maybe a P- val ?).� I have principal coordinates as well as a matrix of distances between points.� So far, I’ve done a T-Test comparing the distances between groups to the distances within groups, but it doesn’t feel like that’s the best way to do it.

Amazing Gypsy Music: Latcho Drom and Tarif de Haiduks

jeff — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 13:14:10 +0000

Wifey and I just watched an amazing movie, Latcho Drom. I guess you can call it a musical, because there’s no dialogue. It’s all gypsy music, starting in Egypt and winding through Turkey and Europe (Romania, Hungary, France, Spain). The movie plays out scenes of gypsy life as it wanders homelessly across beautiful landscapes. The narration comes in the form of seldom-translated music performed by the characters onscreen. Amazing cinematography and amazing music, but don’t expect to know where you are or what’s going on without looking up a guide online. This next scene is my favorite, and features members of Taraf de Haiduks (a Romanian gypsy band, appropriate since my blog host is Romanian!!), who were the reason I wanted to see the movie in the first place. As the violinist sings about the overthrow of dictatorship in Romania, he slowly pulls apart the strings of his violin (which makes a really cool sound).� This singer/violinist is Nicolae Neacsu , who unfortunately died in 2002 (before the film came out).� I suggest hitting the fullscreen button:

You can see the entire 1 1/2 hr movie in high-quality video for free on Veoh (link).(To view long videos, veoh requires you to install a special player and restart firefox, which is a quick and painless process.� I have the AVI version too, if the veoh doesn’t work.)

Things that have happened lately

jeff — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 04:57:56 +0000

I’ve been ignoring the internet for a few (many?) months, so it’s time to get this blog caught up to date. Here is a bullet-point summary of everything (after the jump):

Spring 2009: I got a job as a Research Associate at Cornell, so now Wifey and I both live and work in the same state, which is fabulous.

We bought a house! If I find some photos, I’ll post them. It’s in downtown Ithaca, and it’s a neat old Itallianate from around 1860, move-in condition!

We got to hang out with my mom and dad and aunt, uncle, cousin and cousin’s wife in Maine this summer, which was swell. We ate lobster and oysters, saw puffins and whales, and had fun.

My birthday was awesome! Colleen got a ton of people to surprise me at the bar (had no idea), and I got a bottle of scotch, an Arduino (for some mad science/robot building…), the soundtrack to Where the Wild Things Are which is seriously good (along with the book!), and (most wonderfully): a concertina.

I am completely obsessed with playing the concertina. Right now I’m working on my holiday songs repertoire (Holly and Ivy, Bring a Torch Janette Isabella, Auld Lang Syne)

Wifey’s mom and stepdad came over to visit a few weeks ago and much fun was had. We patched the hole in the wall. This was a hole through which the cats could apparently travel into some vast netherworld. Long story.

We’re hosting thanksgiving this year, just having some friends over. It sounds like it will be tasty. We got a fancy organic turkey from a farm in Vermont !

Oh, and guess what? I started posting stuff in my blog again! And I was pleasantly surprised to find that the blog host had a little makeover while I was absent .

The end.

Whoa…

jeff — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 04:24:45 +0000

< a class=”xirtireh” href=”http://www.comunicatedepresa.ro/it1″ title=” it “>It looks like my blog host finally installed the new version of WordPress… Maybe now my rss feed will stop acting so wacky.

Hello people , sorry I haven ‘ t ” title=”t”>t posted much lately!

(link)

jeff — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 14:28:37 +0000

link

Daisy Owl is funny .

Protein synthesis interpretive dance!

jeff — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 01:27:17 +0000

Awesome video!

This totally groovy video from 1971 shows protein synthesis through interpretive dance. Brilliant.

Via
Molecule of the Day blog.

2009.06.25 Ithaca, NY

jeff — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 03:03:11 +0000

A quick update on me — pretty happy to be doing research and very happy to be in Ithaca again. I need to get some reactors up and running, which means I need to start ordering an unending stream of supplies! I finally just finished revisions to a paper that was (gasp!) still leftover from my thesis! One reviewer asked for chromatograms, which were stored on the harddrive of an old old computer that I hope to god no one is still using. But I was surprised to find out I still know some of the grad students in MN, and we found the data! Huh… I guess it’s only been three years.

There was an awesome thunderstorm today! Fun to walk home in, like getting hit by a tidal wave!

Wifey and I just heard from the bank that we’re good-to-go on buying the house! It’s exciting happiness. Whatever happens, we’re staying here! Time to start applying for grants, and jobs. It’s hard to say what I would prefer doing longterm… I like doing research, and I like teaching. I have to say, I miss teaching… Anyone want to learn some chemistry ? Let me know.

Hooray!

jeff — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 22:06:31 +0000

Google gave me my account back!

My faith in Big Brother , however, has wavered. I’m still considering finding another email service. They gave no explanation for the deactivation — I guess their (lame) empirical algorithms catagorized me as having bot-like behavior.