Two sides of a ripe bell pepper, pan-fried in olive oil until it begins to char.
A boneless chicken thigh, also pan-fried in same oil until browned.
Two slices of regular bread with layers of pepper and chicken.

yum.

I wanted a more stable photo archive than the collection of DVDs (at least two copies of each) I'd been building. I got two 1/2 Tb drives and placed them in a shared external case ( Read more... )

I just performed a surgery to save the life of a small tropical oyster.

This involved dissecting apart three linked sessile critters so that the oyster could be placed away from a bullying hermit crab.

http://images.google.com/images?q=ceropegia fusca

A succulent species in an interesting genus.

( Read more... )

power tools are fun. I got myself a router and have actually used it for the purpose the tool was designed for.

1st BLAST search on this project, 87316 sequences, resulted in a 1.7 Gb text file.
2nd BLAST search, 28563 sequences, resulting in a 592.3 Mb text file.

oh boy am I glad I have a program to parse the useful information out of those reports.

Over the weekend I wrote an Octave script to parse a 1.7 GB report file.

It would have taken 3 days of runtime to finish. Today I converted it to MatLab script for running on my lab computer and shaved the time down to 10 hours. Maybe I can do better...

1.5 lbs littleneck clams ( Read more... )

I just finished my flow cytometry file format (versions 2.0/3.0/3.1, somewhat) data importer. In doing so I found the previous textmode importer was discarding half of the data. I haven't figured out why it is doing so, which is disconcerting, but the fix is to use the newer code.