Sympathy for Lady Vengeance

I just finished watching a great movie called Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. It's a Korean film by Chan-Wook Park. I'd seen Oldboy a few months back, and enjoyed the plot but hated the style of the movie. But for Lady Vengeance, I guess I was ready for the surreal elements of the film, although I do think they were less over-the-top and more integral than in Oldboy. But the thing that hooked me came about an 1:15 in when the plot takes a U-turn and becomes completely intense. I mean, the entire movie kinda punches you in the gut, but at that point my jaw dropped for almost ten minutes as I was trying to process what was happening. Highly recommended.

Draft Numero Uno

I am super pumped right now! I finished the first draft of my Apex paper this afternoon and I just sent it off to my Ph.D. advisor to review. This is the beginning of the end, and for me the hard part is over. I really hope Science goes for it, because it would be so awesome to get my Ph.D. work published in Science. I hope it's still cutting edge, since I did defend over 17 months ago! But I am making a bold claim about early life on Earth, so maybe they'll like it. I would really like to see this article published sometime this year.

I really want to celebrate. Maybe I'll go home a bit early and have a beer. Goodness knows I have a fridge full of them now!

New TV

Since the movers took away the old TV yesterday morning, I went to Best Buy after work to buy a new one. I had gone window shopping a few weeks back, and the Toshiba HDTVs looked the best to my untrained eyes. When I went back yesterday, they had one on sale, so I bought it. It was only a little bit more expensive than when I bought the last one. Plus, Best Buy is having some tax-free event this weekend, so I didn't have to pay any sales tax! Maybe this is some kind of DC-area thing, because I never remember not having to pay sales tax back in AZ. So it was a great time for me to buy a TV. The screen looks good, and it has no dead pixels, and the sound quality of the speakers ain't that bad either. And the TV remote has a screen size button, so it's really easy to switch between normal 4:3 and widescreen viewing modes.

So now I just have the problem of dealing with viewing a low quality video source on a high quality screen. It's like looking at all your digital photographs at 2X zoom. You can see some pixelation and blurring, especially in animated shows like the Simpsons. And because the cable all goes through the TiVo, it makes no sense to get HD service, since they would just be reduced to standard definition by the TiVo anyway. I bumped up the recording quality on the TiVo, and that made the picture a little better. I also turned on MPEG smoothing on the new TV, since the TiVo uses MPEG compression for its video encoding and playback. That also made a difference.

But the best part was when I booted up my PC. The new TV has a standard VGA input, and the screen looks outstanding. Even with Ubuntu I can use the maximum PC resolution of the TV (1366 x 768). I can actually read icon text now, and the desktop is huge!

Unfortunately, the Playstation 2 looks like crap now, and nothing really can be done about that.

Writing

I just wrote a kick ass (IMHO) paragraph for my Science paper summarizing Fischer-Tropsch-type synthesis, it's potential application to Apex microfossils, and why my data suggests it's not applicable. For those keeping score, that's about 10 pages of dissertation into 1/2 of a page. And I think it turned out pretty readable too. Actually, the only reason I'm posting this is because I'm surprised how well it turned out...and how "strong" it turned out, since I'm basically arguing that the obvious answer doesn't apply. I guess we'll see how the reviewers tear it apart, though!

Now I need to write a summary/conclusion paragraph, but I need to take a break and step back for a little bit to think about what I really need to put down in it.

Getting Paid to Stay in Bed

I think I've found the perfect job for a lazy person, or people who play World of Warcraft all day. Actually, it sounds like something that could fuck you up for the rest of your life.

Vegan Onion Dip

Because a few people were interested, here's the recipe for a quick and dirty vegan onion dip that I worked out:

12 oz. tub Tofutti vegan sour cream
1 1/2 tblsp parsley (either dried or fresh)
2 tblsp chopped green onion chives or 1 1/2 tblsp chopped fresh chives
1/4 tsp salt
1/8 tsp curry powder
1/8 tsp paprika
1/4 cup dried onion flakes

mix everything in a small bowl and chill to let the dried herbs and onion become soft.

Busy Weekend

I've been doing a lot this weekend. First on Thursday I went to the Lord of the Rings performance at Wolftrap with Kirsten. The orchestra, choir, and soloists were all really good. But since it's a three hour movie, that was a very late night. So Friday I didn't do anything but watch some Wire and go to bed early. Then last night I had a bunch of friends over to the house for a Guitar Hero party. I think people had a lot of fun, plus I got to chat with some friends that I don't see that often. But, as with any party, I stayed up late and drank too much beer, so today is a very lazy day.

Helio Sequence

Eulynn and I went to the Helio Sequence show at the Black Cat last night. They put on a pretty good show, but it was super loud because the drummer was fucking insane (in a good way)! It was basically just two guys (one on drums and one on guitar) and a laptop for backup. The crowd was really into it, even though they're pretty much a no-name band, so they came out for an encore and played an incredible cover of the Beatles' Tomorrow Never Knows. The opening band was Pattern is Movement, who played this crazy math rock. Not really my kind of music, but they really put a lot of intensity into their performance and they interacted well with the crowd. That drummer was even crazier! Plus they played a cool cover of Radiohead's Everything in It's Right Place with everybody clapping along.

Writer's Unblock

Wow! It looks like I wrote 3/4 of a page today on my Apex paper. Looks like I'm on a roll. I hope I can keep this momentum going. I've got about another page to go before I'm done with this rough draft.

Yesterday was one of those dreary lazy days when you just want to stay in bed all day. I ran a few errands and cleaned house a bit. Actually I spent a lot of time talking on the phone with various people, which is a bit rare for me.

Bunny Buddy

Since it was warm and sunny for the first weekend in a while, I took the opportunity to mow the lawns. I noticed I had a bunny buddy chomping away in the backyard. He just kept eating away as I was mowing until I got closer to his end of the yard. Then he just scurried to the other side! He was pretty big too.

Also, I'm also having an awesome time lately with a certain someone. That's all I'll say about that for now.

New Figures

I've been working on my paper summarizing my dissertation over the last couple of weeks. It's slow going, but it's getting done. I created new figures for the paper, and I thought I'd post one (top) compared with the equivalent figure in my dissertation (bottom). Science doesn't like a lot of annotation in their figures, so I explain in the caption that diamonds represent Apex chert and circles represent Gunflint chert. When I would show the bottom version of this figure to people, I would always get questions about what the boxes and error bars represent, and I hope that just showing the actual data will make things a bit clearer. What do you guys think?

Moving Day

Kelly and her brother just left not to long ago to drive back to Arizona. I wish her the best. I really do. We're still friends. But the really difficult part of all of this is that Gunner went with them. I miss him already. I don't know what I'm going to do now that I don't have him waking me up in the morning with his big floppy mouth in my face, without his morning and afternoon walks, without him excitedly greeting me when I get home from work. He is such an important part of my life right now. I'm so proud of how well behaved he is and how loving he is to other people and dogs. He just wants to meet and play with everybody! I know he'll be fine in AZ where there's plenty of other people and dogs. I love him so much. Check out his blog and you'll know what I mean.

Friday

Let me just state for the record that Friday night was fucking awesome!

Jobby Job Jobs

I had a phone interview for an electron microscopist position in Houston today. I was fine until they started asking the HR questions at the end. How am I supposed to explain my work ethic? What does teamwork mean to me? That's when I got nervous.

Roller Derby

I got a bunch of DC friends together to go to the roller derby championships today. It was alot of fun. The girls were very competitive, but not nearly as rough as the AZ derby chicks.

I also went to the farmers market again this morning. Even though pears are everywhere in the supermarkets, there was almost no fruit to be found at the farmers market except for some strawberries. But there was alot of plants and flowers. Since I'm tired of buying basil and cilantro at the store and having it go bad, I decided to try planting my own. I'm not a gardener in the least, but we'll see how it turns out!