Happy Birthday to Canada! Living in the US for the past 7 years, I've missed the Canada Day celebrations. Canadians aren't really known for being overly expressive in their patriotism and we're not big flag wavers like Americans are. But on July 1st of each year, everybody who admits to being Canadian does so proudly and loudly. And usually with much beer and partying.
Well, we've finally decided to take the plunge and make the move to Raleigh, NC. It meant turning down a very tempting offer to stay, but I think in the long run everything will work out. Moving is always a pain in the butt, but I'm looking forward to being up there once we get settled in.
Today I made my 46th blood donation. Maybe 48th, could be 50th. The number is a little fuzzy because I've forgotten how many donations I made while I was back home in Canada. I'm pretty sure it was 34. I remember being pretty close to getting the pin for 35 donations.
I've been a regular blood donor since about 1989 or so, with the exception of the three years I lived in Detroit. That was just because there wasn't a conveniently located donor center that I could find.
I go every 8 weeks (6x a year) and donate a pint of my AB+ blood. The people at the donor clinic love me because I'm AB+ and I have large veins. It gives me a good feeling to know that I'm helping someone out. And I get pop and cookies in return. Doesn't get much better than that if you ask me.
Have you donated blood recently? at all? If not, why not? you really should. What have you got to lose except a pint of blood that can be used by someone else?
Back from my trip to Jackson, AL for my wife's family reunion. It was an interesting time. Got to meet lots of her relatives, and collected a lot of information for building the family tree. It's pretty extensive, and some of the information I got led to some surprising connections. I've got enough to keep me researching for at least several months now. Added a couple hundred more names to the family tree database.
Jackson, AL was bigger than my wife and in-laws led me to think, although it was still pretty small. It's a nice area, lots of woods and green things that contrast sharply with the reddish brown soil in the area. I'll have to ask my geologist brother about that.
One thing that I would have liked to do was get a little bit of oral history recorded on videotape. Didn't really get the opportunity to do much of that, since I was so busy getting stuff for the family tree database. Might have to wait for another time, although I don't think I can wait too long before some of the older generations with the more interesting stories pass along.
It's summer, which means hot humid weather, lazy days trying to stay cool and plenty of sunshine. Summer also means it's hurricane season. So, while I'm out enjoying the summer weather and hanging out at the beach, I'm also keeping an eye on the weather (along with everyone else). Fortunately with hurricanes you always get a lot of advance notice, so there's plenty of time to prepare.
I've been pretty lucky so far in the 4 years I've been here. The closest I've come to encuontering a hurricane was Hurricane Floyd in 1999. That one caused some major traffic snarls when the decision was made to call for an evacuation. Luckily I was already headed out of town anyway, so I was already on the road and missed all the traffic jams.
I've been watching the Tour de France on OLN lately, and I must say, it's been a pretty exciting race so far. There are a lot more riders dropping out early this year than I remember from the last few years. Crashes and the heat are playing pretty big roles in that this year. And this year, crashes have taken out some pretty big name riders.
Looking forward to more exciting stages coming up, especially the individual time trial.
Go Posties!
I've been around the Net for almost 15 years now, and I've seen some really strange things posted online. Then I ran across this site about an exploding whale and just had to check it out. Not the wierdest thing I've seen online, but it ranks up there with the good ones.
According to the Urban Legends Reference Pages, the incident actually happened.
Download the video and watch. Particularly amusing is the newscaster's description of the aftermath. I can't believe nobody thought about that before they started...
Just saw these two articles over at Slashdot.
These kinds of things really bug me. Big corporations and special interest groups abusing the legal system in what amounts to extortion. Buying politicians to get stupid legislation introduced. Makes me want to smack them all upside the head for being idiots.
I hate moving. I've made 3 moves so far in my life, and i'm starting to get ready for my 4th. And each time, there's more and more Stuff to move. That's the nature of Stuff I suppose. It grows to expand your available space. Some Stuff is useful. Other Stuff just becomes Junk. And since I'm a bit of a packrat, some of my Stuff that should be Junk just ends up sticking around.
So now I'm in the middle of collecting boxes to put my Stuff into. Some of the Stuff will become Junk, and end up getting tossed. The rest will remain Stuff and will get packed away. Someone's supposed to be stopping by to look at my Stuff and give me an estimate on how much it will cost to move it. Sometimes, I think I should just get rid of all my Stuff and start over.
Then I have to see about making all the address changes. There are a good deal of them, and inevitably, I'll forget one or two of them. Thank goodness for mail forwarding.
Also have to get my car checked out and make sure it will survive the trip to my new home. Been having some cooling issues with it lately, and don't want it dying on the road in the middle of my trip.
State inspectors are going to be cruising through the department the rest of the week on one of their bi-annual surveys. This means there are a lot of people scurrying about (myself included) making sure that everything is where it needs to be, and stuff that needs to be posted is posted. And then later on this year, I think there's supposed to be a JCAHO survey going on. Luckily for me, I think I'll be gone by the time that happens.
Found something new (to me) on the web. GeoURL is a place that lets you do location/URL lookups. Adding your blog or site is pretty easy. Just look up your location (latitude/longitude) on a site like the US Census Tiger Map Service, add a couple of meta tags to your index page and submit it to the GeoURL site. They'll add it to their index in a litte bit, and give you a link showing other URLs in your geographic vicinity. Clicking on the map at GeoURL gives you a big long list of websites in the vicinity of where you clicked.
There's another site, GeoTags that does something similar also.
Kinda neat I think. Then again, simple things amuse me.
Friday we were up at South Carolina State University for the annual SCAMP conference. It's a conference for undergrads doing research under the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation program. The get the opportunity to gain some experience presenting the results of their summer research projects.
This year, my wife won the first place award for best oral presentation in the Biological Sciences category. She did a good job giving the talk for her project. She was a little disappointed that she didn't also win a prize for the best poster competition too (she won both last year), but she's still pleased.
LS-AMP is a neat program designed to encourage minority participation in the sciences. They help fix undergrad students up with research labs, provide a stipend, and give them a forum to present the results of their work. Along with the stipend for the summer work, scholarship awards are given to the best oral and poster presentations in several different categories. There a number of LS-AMP chapters in a bunch of different states that are definitely worth checking out.
Well, turns out we won't be moving after all, and I won't be working at Duke this fall. The wife has been having such a good experience in the research lab she's in and seems to be clicking well with her mentor, so she's decided she wants to stick around. I suppose it's just as well. She's already established some connections with people here, and she thinks getting into med school here will be a little easier than in NC, even though there's more of a choice there.
So now I have to come up with a way of breaking the unfortunate news to my would-have-been colleagues up at Duke. My friend Ehsan will be disappointed. I'm a little disappointed. I was looking forward to taking on some new challenges at Duke, but it's not like I had my heart set on it. I'd have been happy in either place. The important thing is seeing that the wife gets to pursue her goals. I'm sure everything will work out nicely in the end.
Added a couple of CDs to my collection today. As a Canadian, I'm naturally a fan of The Tragically Hip. I happened to be browsing around the local Cat's Music waiting for the barber shop to open, and found Road Apples and Fully Completely in their 'Dog Pound' (used CDs) section. The price was right, ($6.50/CD), so i just had to grab them.
Ahhh, decent music for a change...
The CT scanner below my office was removed a couple of weeks ago, and now they're doing renovations on the room getting it ready for a new CT scanner. A few days ago they were doing some drilling through cement or something. Now it's some kind of repetitive hammering noise. Floor work or something perhaps. I don't know what they're doing down there, but it's loud and rattling my brain.
I think I shall be leaving work early today so I can escape this racket.
