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.

174 000 miles

Made it to 174 000 miles on my 1991 Accord today. That means I've owned this car for 40 000 miles and just over 4 years. Car's holding up pretty well, aside from some body problems. Nowadays it doesn't get driven around nearly as much as when I first got it. Having to do a few major repairs every now and then, but that's to be expected as parts wear out. Eventually I'll have to replace it, but hopefully I'll be able to squeeze another 40 000 miles out of the car. I want to see this puppy roll over to 200 000 miles.

Home buying

The wife and I have decided it's time to buy a house. We both agreed that since we're not planning on moving again anytime soon, we're ready to jump into home ownership. So, to educate ourselves on the home buying process, we headed off to Barnes and Noble and picked up Home Buying for Dummies and The Complete Idiot's Guide to Buying and Selling a Home. Looked at a few books in the store, and decided on these ones. I figure in about a year and a half or two, once we've paid down some of our credit card debt and saved up for a down payment, we'll finally have our own home somewhere.

I'm looking forward to it.

New toys

The Exploranium GR-135 we've been waiting for finally arrived. It's a radiation survey meter with brains. The thing I like about it most is that if you find something, you can acquire an energy spectrum and the unit will even tell you what it is, if it's something that's stored in its library. It will even send data to the PC via serial cable too. Pretty slick device. Made by Canadians too!

The guys over at Radiation Safety got one about a year ago, and we couldn't let them trump us with cooler toys, so we got one too. It's going to be a fun tool to play with.

Personality Types

Just for kicks, I took the Jung - Myers - Briggs Personality Type test over at www.humanmetrics.com.

Your Type is INTJ

Strength of the preferences %
Introverted 100
Intuitive 22
Thinking 78
Judging 44

Qualitative analysis of your type formula

You are:

1. very expressed introvert
2. slightly expressed intuitive personality
3. very expressed thinking personality
4. moderately expressed judging personality

INTJ type description by D.Keirsey
INTJ type description by J. Butt and M.M. Heiss

I think the second analysis is pretty accurate about me. Of course, to make these kinds of tests at all meaningful, it's very important to be brutally honest with yourself when answering the questions.

There are even FAQs about people like me.

Fine dining

The wife's parents are visiting us for part of the weekend. Monday was their 30th wedding anniversary, so tonight we took them out to Peninsula Grill for dinner. Next to Charleston Grill, it's one of the best restaurants around. Pricey, but the food is well worth it. Definitely a place to put on your list of places to eat at. But save your pennies beforehand. And make reservations early.

Friday Five

Ok, I'll take a stab at this week's Friday Five.

1. What's the last place you traveled to, outside your own home state/country?

Made a spur of the moment trip to Toronto, Ontario, Canada to party with friends.

2. What's the most bizarre/unusual thing that's ever happened to you while traveling?

February 2003. Sitting on a plane in Chicago just about to take off for the flight back home. The flight attendant announces the flight destination just before the door are about to close. Suddenly, the Arab American sitting behind me jumps up realizing he's on the wrong flight and rushes off the plane.

The flight is of course delayed while things are investigated. The seat where he was sitting is checked over several times by the flight attendant and then the pilot. Several passengers around me are talking about having the plane evacuated so that a thorough search can be done. About an hour later, we take off without incident.

3. If you could take off to anywhere, money and time being no object, where would you go?

I'd spend several months touring Europe.

4. Do you prefer traveling by plane, train or car?

Train. I like to see the scenery going by, but I hate having to drive to see it.

5. What's the next place on your list to visit?

Home, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

Too busy

I have this bad habit of taking on too many projects at the same time. The end result is a to-do list that just keeps on growing.

A sampling of my to-do list

• VB interface between my equipment test spreadsheets and MySQL database
• Dosimetry for monoclonal antibody lymphoma therapy
• Research for a dopamine receptor imaging project
• Website maintenance
• Converting wedding video to VCD/DVD
• Converting graduation video of one of my wife's friends to VCD/DVD
• Converting in-law's vacation video to VCD/DVD
• Documenting various database projects I've started
• Finish the rest of this year's x-ray surveys (about 20 more units left to do)
• Attenuation correction method comparison between two of our gamma cameras (another research project)
• Optimize the acquisition protocol for thyroid scans on another one of our gamma cameras
• Optimize the acquisition protocol for brain scans on one of our new gamma cameras

And this is only the small part of my list that I can remember off the top of my head.

ok, back to work...

Half-life ragdoll physics simulation

This is pretty cool. It's a simulation done in Flash using the rag-doll physics incorporated into Half-Life. You can spin around the skeleton, drag it around and even pepper it with bullets and watch it dance.

Moonrise over the marsh

This is a picture I took back in April from the 3rd floor of the apartment building I live in. The full moon was just rising, and we were having one of those unusually high tides when I took the photo. Olympus C4000Z, 4 second exposure time, f2.8, ISO set to 400.

View larger image

Classic movies

Last night on TCM, the wife and I were watching Grand Hotel. Apparently it was Greta Garbo day on TCM, but the wife just wanted to see who John Barrymore was.

It was an interesting movie about the lives of people living in a posh Berlin hotel. We both enjoyed the movie, but Casablanca still remains my all time favourite. Anything with Audrey Hepburn comes in a close second.

New photo gallery

I decided to put up my own photo gallery using the most excellent Gallery software. Look out for more albums in the coming days...

Another Friday Five

1. How much time do you spend online each day?

My computer at work is always online. I'd say anywhere from 4-6 hours, split between home and work.

2. What is your browser homepage set to?

http://stats.distributed.net/participant/psummary.php?project_id=25&id=87925

3. Do you use any instant messaging programs? If so, which one(s)?

ICQ

4. Where was your first webpage located?

http://raddi.uah.ualberta.ca/~eugene/

5. How long have you had your current website?

Current website is http://home.netcom.com/. I've had it for about 7 years now I think.

MCAT

At this very moment, my wife, along with several dozen other prospective med students are taking the MCAT. This will be her second attempt at the test. She's nervous about it, but hopefully she'll do well this time around.

On another note, I've been watching Shark Week on the Discovery Channel. It's been very interesting watching and learning about the different sharks. What I find most entertaining though are the short Shark Week promo clips they play before going on commercial break. They show assorted people standing nervously around various bodies of water (swimming pools, inflatable kiddie pools, etc). I think they're hilarious.

MCAT status

First half of the MCAT is over, and my wife says she feels better about the verbal section this time than she did last time. So if she can pull off the same scores for the rest of the test that she got last time, I think she'll be a shoe-in for med school.

Here are a couple of neat NOAA satellite photos. Before the big blackout a couple of days ago, and after. It's neat to see just how much of that area went dark.

Time off

MCAT's over, and now the wife is relaxing before school starts on the 26th. Taking the rest of the week off and heading off to her parents' place to relax and veg out. They have a nice relatively secluded compound where we usually go at least once a month or so, depending on her schedule. The downside is that we usually end up doing all the cooking for everyone while we're there. But it's all right. We use them as guinea pigs for recipes we want to try out :)

Friday Five

Time for another Friday Five.

1. When was the last time you laughed?
This morning

2. Who was the last person you had an argument with?
It was probably my wife.

3. Who was the last person you emailed?
My brother, earlier this morning.

4. When was the last time you bathed?
Had a shower yesterday. Bath? I think it's been a while.

5. What was the last thing you ate?
A slice of raspberry chocolate cake. It was the top of my wedding cake from a couple of years ago.

Identify this spider

Ok, there's this big nasty looking spider hanging out by the sliding door to our room at my wife's parents' house. Somebody tell me what it is.

Getting Smoked

My wife's mom bought a smoker/grill a while ago, and this weekend finally got to use it. What it really means is that my wife and I ended up smoking and grilling just about everything in sight. The last couple of days we've been grilling fiends. Grilling/smoking/BBQ'ing is something we're relatively new at, so each time was a bit of a learning experience. According to our test subjects, all the food turned out very tasty. Once we get a house, we're looking forward to doing a lot more outdoor cooking.

Still Smoked

The chicken wasn't the only thing that got smoked last week. After 4 days and as many hair washings, my hair still smells like BBQ smoke. When the wind blows from behind me, I smell BBQ and get hungry.

One of those days

It was one of those days where you're trying to get something done that people are asking for yesterday, but you keep getting interrupted by people doing things that should have been done weeks ago. So, a task that probably should have taken 4 hours or so gets started late, and ends up taking about 6 hours to finish. Ugh.

Tropical Storms

The 6th tropical storm of the season, Fabian, is brewing out in the mid Atlantic now, according to the National Hurricane Center. That means time to start getting the hurricane kit prepared. Only a few more months left in hurricane season, but unfortunately, those are the busy months. Hopefully this one doesn't cause too much trouble. We'll see in a few days...

Friday Five

Time for another Friday Five

1. Are you going to school this year?
No

2. If yes, where are you going (high school, college, etc.)? If no, when did you graduate?
Graduated in 1996 with my Master's

3. What are/were your favorite school subjects?
Math and Physics

4. What are/were your least favorite school subjects?
English

5. Have you ever had a favorite teacher? Why was he/she a favorite?
Mr. Gosman, high school social studies teacher. He was funny, and made current events interesting.

On my desktop

Last week, while I was walking around the yard at my wife's parents' place, I ran across this largish dragonfly. It seemed like it would make a neat picture, so I took a photo. I thought it turned out pretty good, so I made it my current desktop photo.