I just spent half a day learning how to handle radio-isotopic material, feed my hypothetical SPF testing mice and properly dispose of dichloromethane (hint: not by flushing it down the drain), all in Japanese.
… Which would all be very useful if, you know, I ever worked with anything else than my computer and a blackboard.
I need to dramatically raise the hang-drying capacity of my balcony…
Or start doing laundry more often than once a month.
Most unfortunate quote of the week, courtesy of some economist quoted by the Guardian:
[…] One should not forget the great depression, and that the way we got out of it was a world war. Germany, Japan and China have to do more. […] Heiner Flassbeck, Guardian.co.uk
Of course, this is taken entirely out-of-context for comic relief. I still did a double-take upon reading that sentence.
Am I the only one absolutely befuddled that a multi-billion dollar company that has had over two decades to iron out the details of its poor excuse for a enterprise-standard word processor, has never managed to come up with one single passable built-in template for business letters?
And I am not talking about their “Fantasy” or even “Elegant” letter templates, which would make my niece’s MySpace page seem sober and sophisticated by comparison. No: I am referring to their most basic, no-frills, “Business modern” template, which still manages to look like the caricature of a “don’t” example in a primer on business etiquette and communication (pro tip: the fact that your monitor has colours, and possibly so does your printer, doesn’t mean you should try to stuff the entire rainbow in your official print documents).
Time to start writing my mail with LaTeX.
Since about age 5, I have come to grasp with the notion that staring at an oven timer doesn’t make it cook a cake faster.
And yet, I still seem to think that staring at the live output of my painstakingly slow linear optimization program is gonna make it spit its final value faster.
Dubai’s economy is free-falling, the NY Times reports…
A city whose entire economy was based on selling land (and financial services) in the middle of a 2,330,000 sq. km desert… Gee, I wonder how that bubble came to pop.
In the original Lost season, the producers had gone the cheap way and cast a rather poor Frenchwoman knock-off who could barely read her lines phonetically.
In the last season, the bunch of French castaways is actually played by real French-speaking actors. Except this time one of them has a very thick Quebecois accent (for a vague English equivalent, try to imagine something like a Californian character played with a strong accent from Ontario).
I just received notification of clearance for login access to the institute’s Super Computer Lab. I have the computing power of a few thousand CPUs laying at my fingertips, waiting for orders…
Can’t wait to see how fast Unreal Tournament runs on a cluster of CRAYs.
Now we’ll see who gets that top score on the SETI@Home project.
“This will greatly help me compute substrate cleavage point predictions for this new set of data in reasonable time, thanks.”
Off to spend some quality time with my good doctor friends, hopefully sampling their large selection of delicious pharmaceutical-grade drugs along the way.
Barring some very unlikely technological leap in European medical facilities regarding internet access, I’ll be offline for a couple days. Use cellphone or carrier pigeon for any matter that cannot wait.