Moving around...

So, off to the lab to do, well, not much. Yesterday I started some work (took 1.5 hours, accompanied by a high pitch wail from one of the access verification points stuck in access denied mode, a broken waterbath and nobody to help resolve these issues as it was Sunday) which required another hour of work today, so enough time to go to the accountants and arrange matters. Apparently I'm now chairman of this whole building thingy. Wonderful. My other remaining housemate has the other function.
Some hectic driving and creative interpretation of the instructions later we reached Hilversum (via Doorn, for logic's sake). The less said about that the better.
Tim's house was next up - it's a brilliant place to live, I must say. I could even feel at home there, even though it lacks slanted roofs.

On the other side of things: Nobody is ever interested, I know this is an extreme case, but come on: Parking officer 'distressed' at dead man's fine.

Unix, Linux, etc.

My other machine is a...
Actually, I'm letting it go through a couple of identity crises at the moment. Though it's old(er) and unreliable I can say that testing different OS's and distributions are fun. So far:

• Windows ME. Final verdict: Absolute ****. Probably the worst version of Windows out there. Has something against Internet Explorer and is the main reason that I ditched that and went to Mozilla and later Firefox.
• Windows 2k. Final verdicht: n/a. Installer hangs due to hardware conflict. In general 2k isn't too bad. Really.
• freeBSD. Final verdict: Very decent. Free, stable and fast. As it's less standard, getting things to run can be a bit more of a problem. Flash in firefox is doable, so is getting support for realplayer. Nvidia drivers are available, and it runs freevo. The ports collection is brilliant.
• Ubuntu (based on debian). Final verdict: Nice if you want an instant workstation. Somehow confusing if you want anything else though. Don't have the patience to figure this one out.
• Next up: Gentoo. We'll see.
  

Minor Updates

The list of blogs linked in the sidebar has increased somewhat. If I'm missing anyone, please feel free to tell me.

As my birthday (Uhm, still need to plan the party, this may once again become a UC gig, though), St. Nick, etc. etc. is coming up, I may link to a wishlist as well soon. Though I need to think of things to put on it... Maybe I'll just set up a different blog (not monitored) and let everyone fight things out via comments.

The State of Things

The Lab: Okay, I have inserts in the plasmids. My comment last week was: lets wait for the sequencing - there's still enough that can go wrong. Like a skipped base pair in the beginning of the sequence. So the short of it is - most of the sequences are useless for expression.

The Street: The main shopping street, right round the corner, has seasonal decorative lighting spanning accross the road for the entire length. Awh, how cute!

The House: Groundfloor neighbour is moving out. Anyone need a 41 sqm room in Utrecht and has enough cash to buy it?

The Room: Moving the furniture around a bit, figuring out where the posters will go and how they'll get there. Amazingly enough, I can pack a double bed, a 205x80cm desk, a dining table, a two person couch, A large, medium and small cupboard, a kitchen unit, a bathroom with toilet, shower, washbasin and washing machine, more than 5 metres of shelves, two bedstands and a lot of junk into a 20 sqm. room and still have enough space to move the furniture around. And I also can still walk around without running into things.

The blog: Getting a bit dull. Random links:
Learn to dance with Napoleon Dynamite (well, if even K. is sending me a link...). And, no...
Also ran into TISM's music vid again. The bunny is still brilliant. And also, music out of windows sounds.
For those who have a holiday and are bored: go plant a garden. Though I once planned to hang window sill baskets on the baggage carrier of my bike and grow geraniums, I doubt that anyone else is up for that, so here's the virtual garden (game).
Meanwhile, on the Ad front: A big add (Also large file size, nearly 7Mb).

Back to that rotating view

A short history of the file you can see (two posts ago): As said, I went to the Kröller Muller museum some time ago. They recently opened a work by Krijn Giezen, called 'Kijk uit'. The museum site isn't very helpful, or well designed for that matter, but the sponsor has a bit more information in Dutch here. From the top of the stairs I took a series of 20 pictures that I then sent through automatic processing. The software is in demo and can be found here. There is no commercial end-user license yet, but products can be used as long as the use of the software is acknowledged. After some cropping and resizing I had a base image that I then imported into Flash MX 2004 (yes, I have Studio MX under student license, one of those side effects of taking a multimedia course). Currently the only steps there are setting up a single motion tween (10 minutes of work to tweak it). I'm hoping to find time and inspiration to use it as the base for something new.