Imablog Perspectives of a Canadian in the Old/Deep/New/Geographic South: This is where I ramble on about nothing in particular and post a few nice pictures.

My first blog entry

Well, this is my first public blog entry. I've decided to hop on the blog bandwagon and see what the view is like. I'm normally not a very public person, and try to keep most of the things I do pretty low key, so this will be a bit of a departure for me.

Occasionally I'll post significant happenings on my web page, which I guess could be considered a rarely updated blog. Maybe once I get more into this blogging thing, I'll get around to updating my website more often. I don't expect there will be a great deal of activity here at first, so be patient. Plus I'm still learning how this software works.

Stay tuned...

job decisions

About 6 weeks ago, I accepted a research associate position at Duke University. A big jump for me, although mostly in a lateral direction.

My current employer, the Radiology Department at MUSC, likes me so much that they're trying to tempt me to stay with a substantial increase in salary.

Should I stay, even though I've already accepted the new job, or go on to newer fresher pastures and new challenges. It's a tough decision to make, more so because I don't think either decision will be a bad one.

On the one hand, my current location is about as ideal as it gets, aside from the constant worry about hurricanes. And the higher salary is very very tempting.

On the other hand, it's Duke University. In my field, it doesn't get much more prestigious than that. Plus I'll be working with old colleagues again, it's a much larger and diverse population, research is something I've wanted to get into more and I'll finally be in an environment where I can start work on a PhD. And did I mention it's Duke?

Oh, decisions, decisions....

Resurrected website concepts

Those of you who were surfing the web a few years ago might remember a website called SixDegrees, circa 1998-2000.

It was an interesting website based on the '6 degrees of Kevin Bacon' idea. You created an account and linked yourself to friends, who were linked to other people and so on and so on. that way you and your friends formed a network with all the other thousands of people signed on as well. Pick any two people, and the website would compute how many 'degrees' away the two of you were. I always thought it was pretty cool. It shut down at the end of 2000, for reasons I've not been able to find out yet.

Recently a friend of mine sent me a link to a similar site, Friendster.com which is based on a similar concept. It's not quite as full-featured or as easy to find people to link to as the old SixDegrees site was, but this one still seems interesting and worth checking out.

People interested in more ways to meet others (for purposes other than dating) with common interests should check out another website with an interesting concept that I ran into a little while ago: Meetup.

The idea behind this one is simple. They have a big long list of things people are interested in. Software, programming, Slashdot, gardening, etc. Go to the Meetup site, register and tell them where you are. Then search the list for things that interest you, and see who else is interested in the same thing in your location. Then once a month, you vote on a location to 'Meetup' (usually restaurants or bars) and if there are enough of you, you all meet at that location and get together to discuss whatever.

A good concept I think, providing a way for people who probably otherwise wouldn't have the opportunity to meet each other in regular life. I've been to a couple of Slashdot meetups in the Charleston area, although haven't been able to make it to much more for other reasons.

Computer upgrades

I'm stoked. Stuffed a new 160GB hard drive into my computer over the weekend. Best Buy had an amazing deal on them last week. Retail price $199. With $100 in mail in rebates, the price was $111 with tax. 70 cents a gig...can't beat that.

So now I've got the 40 GB that came with the computer, 160 GB partitioned into 30/140 GB and an old 3 GB drive that I've now dedicated to virtual memory. Had to take out the 2nd CD drive, but it wasn't getting used much anyway.

My main reason for getting it was to give me storage space for video capture, with the Pinnacle Studio Deluxe video capture hardware/software I bought a few months ago. The video capturing worked pretty well, but the existing 40GB hard drive I had just wasn't cutting it. The software has some issues, but nothing too major that I've run into.

Now I'll have ample storage to tackle one of my first big projects...converting our wedding video to MPEG format. This video editing thing is going to be interesting and fun I think.

Next upgrade will be adding an extra 512MB RAM (2x256 MB RDRAM). I should do it soon while RDRAM is still relatively cheap.

nifty blogging software

Ok, today I'll plug the blogging app that I'm using here, MovableType.

One of our radiologists asked about possibilities for setting up some kind of online logbook that residents could use to log the procedures they perform. My first thought was that it sounded like something a blogging app could do. I searched the web looking at different blogging apps that met 2 criteria: source code available, and low cost (preferably free). This one had the most features for the best price that I could find. Installed it, got it running, played with it a little bit, then they decided to go with some other software.

So MovableType sat around on my system unused for a few months, until I decided to try out the blogging world. Cranked it back up and here we are now.

Turns out that MovableType (MT) is a pretty flexible app. It's written in Perl, easy to install, and is extremely configurable through the use of plugins, templates and style sheets. One of the plugins lets me put the latest weather for just about any location I can find. Very slick. There's quite the list of plugins available that do many different things. Plugins are also written in Perl, so should be pretty easy to write, if you know Perl (which I don't).

If you're searching for blogging software for your site, I'd check this one out.

MicroBe Cards

Because my wife is a biology person (where I am decidely not), I occasionally end up getting introduced (willing or not) to various biology and chemistry related topics. So when the latest issue of New Trail (the University of Alberta alumni magazine) arrived, arrived I saw an article about something called Microbe Cards that I thought she might be interested in.

MicrobeCards are like baseball cards. But instead of pictures of athletes, you get pictures of different microbes. All sorts of nasty looking germs, virii, fungi and the like.

The front of each card has several pictures of the organism (electron micrographs, microsope images, sometimes x-ray images, etc) so you can see what they look like. On the back of the card is a description of the microbe, effects on people, symptoms, possible treatments, and short descriptions of what the photos on the front are.

Developed by a U of A prof (another reason I'm plugging these cards), the cards are organized in colour coded groups: gram-negative, gram-positive, fungi and parasites, and viruses.

I bought a couple of packs for her and she thought they were just the coolest thing. For their size, they pack a good deal of information for reviewing characteristics of particular microbes.

You can find the cards at Amazon.com or at the University of Alberta Bookstore.

New airport passenger x-ray screeners

An Associated Press article in today's Post and Courier grabbed my interest today. It's about a new airport passenger screening device that uses scattered x-rays to detect weapons and explosives.

AFAIK, many states prohibit the use of radiation on people unless it's for medical purposes. I'm sure that someone will manage to get an exception for these types of machines given time. There are still ethical issues with exposing masses of people to radiation, no matter how low the dose. Most people are paranoid enough about radiation (mostly because of lack of knowledge). Now the TSA wants to unecessarily irradiating hundres of thousands of people with low, but not trivial radiation doses just to get on an airplane?

I smell much controversy coming up if the TSA gets their way with these units.

Family reunions

This time next week, I'll be roasting in some place called Jackson, AL (north of Mobile, AL), where my wife's family is having a reunion. I'm told it will be an interesting time. In preparation, my wife and I are helping construct a family tree. That in itself has been an interesting hobby in development. My side of the family is pretty small so far, but my wife's side just keeps growing and growing.

To help out with our new hobby, I found this cool program called GeneWeb to store the data in. It's pretty easy to use and install, has a lot of features, and it's free!

At the reunion, we're supposed to be manning the registration table, so what I'm going to try to do is either use my digital cam or a webcam to take head shots of various people to enter into our GeneWeb database along with all their family tree related details.

Should be interesting to see how all these people tie together.

FORTRAN .NET?

Good lord, FORTRAN .NET????

What is this world coming to...

Long nights

My wife is spending the summer working in a medical research lab, part of a summer research program at MUSC for undergraduate students. She's got mice to take care of as part of her research project, which means working late during the day, then making another trip in sometime in the evening to do more things with the mice.

So for the last two weeks, and for a few more weeks to come, our daily routine has been:

• Go to work around 8, 8:30
  
• Leave work around 6 (5:30 if she finished early)
  
• Go back in around 9
  
• Back home around 10:30 or 11
  
• Repeat.
  

Long days for her, and for me as well, since I usually go in with her because it's late at night. It's been making for some pretty long work days. Can't wait for it to be finished with soon.

Family trees

Had the in-laws over this weekend, so my wife and I interrogated them to extract their knowledge of family history to flesh out the family tree some more. They managed to provide enough useful information to construct a tree 5 generations deep on her father's side and 4 on her mother's side. Still lots of details lacking, like birth and death dates, locations, etc. But we have names, which is a start. Our tree now has over 300 people in it (small compared to some others I've seen online).

Looking forward to expanding it even more at the family reunion.