A General Sense of Direction

...or maybe not. I'm still debating whether I should be worried about that exam that's coming up. For some reason my brain keeps on planning around it. Planning: Before: workdiscussion, final lab work for the week. After: (immediately) host borrel, (immediately) department Christmas dinner. Friday: Lab cleaning. Saturday and Sunday: getting health insurance - as my current insurance ends January 1st, my current insurance company will close it's doors and the company they're transfering their members to isn't going to make me an offer. That makes me one of the 'lucky' few in this country who now has two weeks to figure out what all this mess is about. Everybody gets an offer from their current insurer... yeah right.
There's a blog that I read sometimes lately. It's very calming and is entitled 'Dagboek van een gek' (guess what, it's in Dutch). Basically that's all it is, or, as he describes in the about section: "Dit zijn de belevenissen van Hans, geboren in 1942. Eerst even voorstellen ik ben Hans en woon al jaren in een psychiatrische woonvorm. Verder ben ik invalide en beweeg ik mij voort in een rolstoel."
By the way: Always wanted your own fake office, but too lazy to photshop the sign on an existing office? This site does it for you: Atomsmasher's Office Sign Generator. [Advert] This came with an advert for T-Shirt Hell: also nice to look around for evil t-shirts. Current tagline: "All orders placed this week will arive after December 25th. But a late present from us, still beats a crappy present on time". [/Advert] Sorry, don't know what came over me there. Atomsmasher also has generators for other signs and error messages ('windows has detected that you have moved your mouse. Please reboot now.'), scroll down on the office generator page for the links.
And for more joy: what used to be the best image archive for 19th century (and also a little late - mainly symbolist and pre-Raphaelite artists) until it closed, is slowly re-opening it's doors. I should add the site, ArtMagick to the links section soon...

And direction in general (magnetic) North is wherever it chooses to be today, or so it seems: BBC news.

Another day

And we're off to a flying start. Articles to read, protein names to dread (erm... X-box associated protein? I choose to believe that that has nothing to do with certain electronic devices), powerpoints to study, etc. etc.
Well, with the added 'fun' of having two girls of about my own age at the door asking how much thought I gave the future and more importantly, god's role in it. Scary stuff: I don't handle people with very strong beliefs that well. Especially not the ones that come to spread the faith in a fairly multicultural neighbourhood. I wonder if they'll run into that psychic...
Though, maybe divine inspiration did come, as I figured out why I can't send any mail from outlook: my ISP is blocking access to port 25, which is used for SMTP transactions. Solution: figuring out that one of my outbound servers accepts connections at a different port, and route all accounts through that server. Yay quick response e-mailing again. That took a my while of not thinking about the problem to figure it out.
No I just wait for all the bio knowledge that I need to appear in my head, along with a repaired sense of languages and a stable memory for people and things, for I'm mixing up all the names that I should know again.

Back to that chemistry again.

Bio Exam!

Yes, one week to go and already trying (not succeding) to remember stuff. Though I have to say that Depeche Mode, the remixes 81-04 is working brilliantly (or was, it did increase my attention span). The other conclusion: learning this stuff is bad for your health (or maybe that was because I was already a little under the weather). Also, your language skills don't improve too much. Then again, some of the tact (lack thereof) and skill in writing English letters (ditto) displayed by an (associate) professor at the department is very inspiring. In the sense that it shows you that you can still get far if you don't fully grasp your grammar, keyboard and social skills. In other words: I could lock myself up in the lab for 16 hours a day and devote my life to science and still have the impression that I'm damn important and that I'm the only one who has any sense at all. Though I would need to shrink my own little private world quite a bit more to achieve the latter - shouldn't be too difficult if you don't see real sunshine or non lab-people for a couple of years. Nope, I think I'll skip - My own little universe is already sufficient - it's small enough to overcome agoraphobia and I don't want to take things further.

As there's no point to this post at all, I'll just paste the last list I got over MSN. Antilian proverbs. Have fun, take care, remember that there's a whole world out there.

P.S: Firefox really blocks that pop-up...

Climate Change

There's nothing so depressing as a climate conference. A few of the very good reasons why are outlined in a blog by Amanda Haag over at Nature.com. Also, in another article, another look at the US is taken. Of course, it would be surprising if something positive would be said - but that isn't likely to happen. Instead, when talking about methyl bromide (insecticide, but also one of the large major ozone-damaging chemicals out there, the last to be phased out) the following pops up:

• North America uses more of the substance than any other part of the world
• Exemptions for the US of the cut-backs imposed are more than the exemptions of all other countries combined for 2005
• "But representatives of the farming industry counter that the huge value of the crops, and the efficiency of methyl bromide as a pesticide, means that its continued use is reasonable." Okay, the fact that if we don't act now, we won't have a climate to grow strawberries (main use of the chemical) in in a few decades, doesn't seem important. We'll cross that bridge... when we all live underground wondering what wrong?!
• Under the exemptions, which would lead to less reduction of the usage, the US has requested to use more methyl bromide than it actually used in 2003. What part of reduction don't they get?
• Europe requested to use 4400 tonnes in 2005. Reports indicate that the actual figure will be 3000 tonnes. The US request for 2007 is 6500 tonnes. Funny that, as even in 2000, Europe had 730 million inhabitants, and the US 282 million. More is less, I guess.
  

Quick sources: Nature.com article and GeoHive.

In short, as the Nature blog mentions:

"At one point, the chairman even said, "Saudi Arabia is on the phone, so let me go to the UK."
So much for saving the world."

100th post

So that's 100 posts in about 11 months. Could be worse I guess.

I'll spare you the rants, I'll try and link to a few things, I'm brining up the wishlist that I promised a while back, even though it'll be January by the time I get round to celebrating my birthday.
Anyway: there's yet another breakout clone available in flash - to waste your precious time in exam week. So is this game, once you get the hang of it: N-Game.
Once again - back to the female drivers aspect. Just ignoring the fact that there is a perhaps greater amount of male stupidity videos out there. This one is how not to exit the garage. With apologies for the adverts on the page. I'm using IE now to search for media, as I'm running a firefox beta and not all plugs are functional. Turns out that one of the pages that I monitor for content is now more of a porn gallery than anything else. Well - at least it proves that Firefox with Adblock works miracles...