A letter from Clemson's Bioengineering department arrived in my email today telling me that I've been accepted to the PhD program.
Woohoo!
This is going to be a pretty major undertaking for me but I'm looking forward to it.
Now to figure out how to pay for it.
Found this guy on the screen inside the back porch. Not quite sure what it is yet. Hopefully BugGuide.net will help me figure it out.
Anybody out there have any ideas?
Update: Looks like the mystery bug is a young wheel bug (Arilus cristatus). Identification thanks to BugGuide.net
There aren't too many things that are more fun than spending a morning watching a bunch of labs frolic around in a pond.
Over the past week, this king sago palm (cycas revoluta) by MUSC's Basic Science Building sprouted an "appendage".
The middle of the plant has lots of these nasty looking poke-y things.
While I was doing the final disposal of junk out of my old office, I found an ancient Dell Latitude XPi with a Pentium 120MHz CPU in it. From it, I harvested the next victimhard drive to be dissected: a 810MB Seagate ST9816AG that probably dates back to the mid 90s.
Underneath the cover. Looks pretty ordinary. Despite the huge advances in HD storage tech, the basics really haven't changed all that much.
Like with most 2.5" form factor drives, the magnets are pretty small and slim. Still pretty strong magnets though.
This particular drive was made up of 4 platters. Note the motor in the center made up of wire coils and magnets.
The read/write heads
Went roadtripping out to Clemson for the first annual Southeast Linuxfest with a few of my fellow CSCLUG-ers. The drive up there was pretty uneventful, and also doubled as a preview of what to expect when I head back up there for orientation.
The conference turned out quite well, with attendance numbers that far exceeded what was expected. Last numbers I saw said 455 registrations with a little over 360 actually showing up. Pretty awesome for a first year conference. Of course now the bar has been set pretty high for next year's conference.
Meeting the people I'd been working with online to plan the conference was pretty cool. In typical fashion, I ended up taking on the task of photographer and spent most of my time wandering around taking photos of everything. I did stop long enough to catch a few very good talks, and bounced around from room to room catching snippets of other talks.
The talk by Richard Weait on the OpenStreetMap project was one of the more interesting talks that I made it to. Completely open mapping data that you can do pretty much anything with. And it's not limited to just street data either. What's really neat is that almost all of the map data comes from user contributions. Browsing around Charleston, SC shows a reasonably complete map, but there are gaps here and there that could probably be filled in with a few mapping parties. At the beginning of the talk, Richard asked the audience what else maps were good for, and I shouted out "finding out when the train is coming". It was a reference to a Flintstones episode ("The Story of Rocky's Raiders"), but I don't think anybody got it.
Another talk by Brian Leonard on developing for platforms beyond just your own computer was pretty interesting. Showed off some pretty simple but interesting things that can be done with Netbeans and VirtualBox.
The performance by DualCore at the after-party was pretty good. Rap/hip-hop usually isn't my thing, but their nerdcore style is something I could possibly get into.
Very soon planning for the 2010 Southeast Linuxfest will begin. I'm expecting it's going to be a lot of work to make it at least as good (preferably better) than this year's event.
As part of the admission requirements at Clemson, I have to provide them with a record of my immunizations. The last time I saw my immunization record I had sent to me from Alberta Health was 10 years and 3 moves ago, when I started working at MUSC and had to provide them to Employee Health.
A trip to Employee Health yielded some questionable results. It shows that I received the immunizations they're interested in, but it's not clear if EH just recorded the date that I provided my records to them, or if I got a whole new set of shots. One of the sheets they provided suggests the former, the other suggests the latter. Aside from the initial TB test, I don't remember getting stuck with any other needles during my pre-employment screening.
Somewhere in the house (I hope) is a box containing a folder with a fax of a photocopy of my shot records from 35+ years ago. Haven't managed to track it down yet but the search continues.
Next step: Contact Alberta Health and see if I can get another copy of my shot records sent to me.
Thanks to Auntie Sandi, the dogs have some new duds to sport around town.
Nala in her new bright yellow no-stink collar
and Simba in his blue and black no-stink collar
Don't they look sharp?
Caught these pictures walking to my car leaving work this afternoon. They've been tweaked a little bit to bring out the streams of sun or converted to B&W.
This blog is 6 years old today!
In the world of the interwebs, that's pretty old.
1990 entries (including 4 drafts I never got around to finishing) and 765 comments.
I think this deserves a blog birthday celebration. Conveniently, the next Lowcountry BBQ meatup is scheduled for Friday at Duke's BBQ up in Ridgeville. Blog birthday, BBQ - perfect!
See you there.
In the meantime, I think I'll walk across the street for dinner at Zia, because their beef barbacoa enchiladas are just awesome.
It was road tripping up to Ridgeville for the latest Lowcountry BBQ meatup at Duke's BBQ this evening.
Word on the street is that Duke's BBQ is pretty good (one of the best most would say), and I'd have to say the street is pretty accurate.
Like many of the really good BBQ places, it's not fancy inside. Walking into the door you're greeted by the large main seating area with 3 large tables (perfect for large groups or communal dining). Off to the side is more table seating. Pony up to the cashier and pay your $8 (plus tax) and dig into the buffet. Buffet items are pretty standard for a SC BBQ place: rice, hash, sweet potatoes, pulled pork, chicken and a few other things.
I think my favourite item was the hash. Almost gravy like, it was good over rice or just straight up. Give me a bowl of the hash and I'll be happy. Mmmm, hash...
A plate of this would make me happy too.
George Pasley was the lucky winner of the Media Mogul Twitter contest between the Carolina Regional Business Journal and The Digitel. George's prize: a couple of boxes of Moon Pies and two cases of RC Cola.
The Ridgeville Duke's is pretty good, and worth the trip. I'm starting to think that I'll have to move because I live too far away from all my favourite BBQ joints.
See the rest of my photos here.
Macho is staying with us for the next couple of weeks. He's become a pretty big boy since the last time I saw him. It's a little hard to tell from the photo, but Macho is about 5-6 cm taller than Nala or Simba and probably has at least 10kg on both of them. He's having a good time playing with the other dogs.
Nala, Macho and Simba
