iPhone

So I had been meaning to make this post for a little while now, but I thought I'd hold off until I broke the thing in. As you may have guessed, I bought an iPhone, the 8Gb variety. Chris bought one for herself too. Let me just answer your first question by saying that I love it so much, I want to wear it from a big fat gold chain around my neck (I've told that joke so many times now its eating prunes and threatening the kids on our lawn). There were however, some initial glitches. The biggest glitch was that Chris and I hadn't yet bothered to upgrade any of our Macs since OS 10.3.9 (the iPhone requires at least 10.4). There was also the little issue of not having any USB 2.0 ports on any of our puters. Chris solved the problem for herself by just buying a new laptop (which she really needs anyway for her home web development biz) I however had to do what I do best, which was to yet again upgrade my ancient Sawtooth. This time I plugged in a 20$ PCI card with 4 external USB 2.0 ports. I think that last upgrade makes it official, there is really and truly nothing left to upgrade on that machine. If I find it laking in some piece of hardware or performance need, I may just have to buy a whole new desktop model and start the whole upgrade process anew So anyway, after buying this new PCI card and upgrading to the latest OS, I was ready to activate my iPhone and go. I loaded my phone up with tons of crap, movies, photos, music contacts etc. all of which came in really handy for my recent flights to and from San Fran. For instance, I had bought and loaded the entire season 2 of Robot Chicken and laughed my ass off for a good 3 hours or so.

So far the funniest iPhone event I've had came on the Monday I was in San Fran. The week before I had been showing off my new toy to anyone who cared to see it. At one point, whilst demonstrating the web browser, a co-worker of mine asks, "hey can you surf for porn on that?!" I hadn't yet tried to so I simply answered, "I don't know but I will definitely give it a try and let you know." So now fast forward back to Monday morning. Four of us (including myself, my longtime mentor, another scientist from my lab, and our young business development representative) were scheduled to meet in the hotel restaurant at 7 Am sharp to go over a presentation we were giving later in the day. I was ready to check out of my room at 6:45 and, realizing I had some time to burn, recalled the earlier question about porn surfing. So I sit down and fire the phone up and sure enough, yes, I find that you can surf for porn on the iPhone. At the moment of this happy discovery, I realize it is 7 Am and so I hurry downstairs to meet my colleagues. When I get there I realize that in addition to the group I came with, we have a fifth, unexpected guest at the table. A fairly new, younger employee of my company whom I've only just started to get to know. After some brief inquires I learn that she is at a conference in the area and that the travel agent just happened to book us all in the same hotel without letting either party know about it. Anyway, we're all happy to see her as it gives us all a good opportunity to get to know each other a little better. So, to clarify the scene, it's four guys at the breakfast table and this one woman, who we are all happy and surprised to have with us. For the sake of anonymity, I'll just call her "Jen". At some point one of the guys asks me if I've shown Jen my new iPhone. "Why no, I don't think I have". Jen shows some of the excitement I'd gotten used to at the prospect of playing with this new gadget, and I proceed to take the iPhone out. It is in sleep mode at the moment I place the iPhone in front of her to demonstrate the main page, and am about to hit the little button at the bottom of the phone that will wake it up. As I'm saying, "So here's the main scr..." this (NSFW!!) photo pops up in full-screen mode. I immediately pull my phone away, tapping hurriedly at the controls as Jen gasps and my head suddenly becomes extremely warm. The other three guys at the table immediately ask what the hell just happened as I sheepishly explain that I just showed Jen a photo of a nude woman I had forgotten I was viewing about 15 minutes ago up in my room. A roar of laughter comes up and then the jokes start and continue on for what seems like years to me. Fortunately (after my immediate and repeated apologies) Jen seems to have understood, despite her initial shock, that this situation was a regretted mistake on my part and that the humor in it was entirely at my expense. So embarrassing. I'm just glad that the displayed image was of the more tasteful Playboy-variety, rather than my usual trans-sexual donkey porn (kidding).

Easy Rider

Sorry for the long gap in posting, I've been busy. Last weekend Chris and I took a motorcycle safety certification course. We both passed and now I have an official "class M" license to drive motorcycles. Unfortunately, the weather over the weekend was really shitty in Columbia, causing delays in the training exercises we had to do on both days (because frankly, riding in the rain on freshly surfaced asphalt is really slippery). I actually almost bought it on on turn I made a little too quickly. My rear tire slid out from under the bike but I managed to get back in control in an instant. Even still, it was quite a thrill. I had promised a friend I'd help him move a couch after class on Saturday, and another friend that I'd attend his house party in the evening. After the rain delays in class, I was late for helping the couch moving, which itself also took longer than I expected, leaving me little choice but to bail on the house party (since I still had another day of class on Sunday which required attendance at 7:30 Am sharp). Sorry Spike!

Anyway, the Monday before this passed weekend was spent in San Fransisco on business, so for any of my friends out there who might be reading, apologies for not getting in touch. I only arrived in town late Sunday and flew back home Monday afternoon. I will say that if you are in the mood for seafood in the bay area, go to Kincaid's in Burlingame. The snapper stuffed with King crab was awesome, as was the sushi sampler.

caturday lolcat!

Some explanation may be required if you aren't quite the internet junkie that I am. In the beginning, there was FARK which hosts many "photoshop contests" from which many of the most famous internet memes have been spawned. Then there was the "lolcats" website which began to archive most of the lolcats photoshop contest pics from FARK, a signal that meme had matured. All this now leads us to today, which has seen not just one but two "caturday" threads on FARK. So I finally decided to break down and make my own contribution (above, and submitted to the second thread, along with another). It seems that lolcats is about to go mainstream (if it hasn't already). I don't even like cats generally.

Now if you are like me and can't get enough of this shit, then you should also check out a recent derivative thread called "lolpresidents" which has also taken on a life of its own and had me laughing off my stool for hours.

Friday Action Figure: Megatron

I saw the new "Transformers" movie at a matinee on July 4. I really liked it. It was the very first summer "blockbuster" for which I can honestly recommend that you go see it. All they had to do to win me over was to not screw it up. Of course, they may have had a lower bar to jump in re-making what was originally a Saturday morning cartoon rather than the rich and well-developed story line of a long-running comic book series, but still, they did a good job. I would even go so far as to say they fixed a thing or two. First they made BumbleBee a Camaro (first very old and then very new) instead of a Volkswagon Beetle which, I have to say was an improvement. Although I think it would have been much cooler if they had introduced Bumblebee as a '71 Dodge Charger Super Bee and then later as the modern Charger. A nicer fit that would have been. The best do-over though goes to Megatron who I always thought was a bizarre transformer in the cartoon. How exactly does the largest of the bad-guy tranformers convert into a pistol that can be held in the palm of any other transformer? I always thought that was stupid. Well they fixed it in the movie and had Megatron transform into a cannon of vaguely pistol shape, but giant, non-hand-holdable size. The movie also did a really great job of explaining how the transformers chose their familiar "incognito" forms of Earth-machines, which the cartoon never did as far as I know. This explanation opened the door for transformers to adopt multiple on-the-fly incognito shapes if the need arose, but they would do this infrequently enough, and under such desperate circumstances that it was easy to interpret this act as one requiring great amounts of precious "Transformer energy". That is, transforming between humanoid robot form and chosen incognito form was a snap, but adopting a new incognito form seemed a pain in the ass.

Biology Rules

There this field of study out there dubbed "evolutionary psychology". It is unfortunately what I would call "soft science" in that there are no real experiments. So they have to do what the modern physicists do which is essentially to make up hypotheses and then go looking for real world support for these hypotheses via direct observation. This isn't much better than what sociologists do so I'd say the veracity of either group's conclusions are about equally untrustworthy. In many cases, both groups start from the same set of observations, but propose wildly different root causes for the observed behavior. In most cases, I think both explanations are true, but most of the time I would have to go with the evolutionary psychologist's conclusions as "feeling" more at the root of things.

Here's a great evolutionary psychology article detailing "Ten politically incorrect truths about human nature". Spike and Jackie, this is for you.

Pop Quiz

1) The Sun revolves around the Earth - True or False?

2) What is a molecule?
A) A very small living thing
B) Two or more atoms bonded together
C) A wave
D) Silicon
E) All of the above

3) Which of these is a form of radiation?
A) Radio waves
B) Micro waves
C) Light waves
D) Gamma waves
E) All of the Above

4) Which of the following molecules stores hereditary information?
A) Silicon
B) Water
C) DNA
D) Sperm
E) All of the Above

5) What is a stem cell?
A) A cell which can grow into many different cell types
B) A cell from a cloned mammal
C) A cell which grows into a stem shape
D) A cell from an aborted fetus
E) All of the Above

Not to be all professorial, but I just read this article and it freaked me out. So I want to be sure all of my readers are up to snuff. Write your answers down before clicking the comments link to see which were right. No cheating.

Friday Action Figure: Silver Surfer

I saw "Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer" last weekend and as I expected, I was disappointed. This did not come as a surprise of course, it has practically become a tradition with Marvel comics to allow Hollywood to pervert and stupid-ize the story lines of their best heroes. Honestly though, the movie story line remained vastly more faithful to the original comic-book story than did the most recent Spiderman flick. The main thing I didn't like about the Silver Surfer movie was the ease with which the Fantastic Four came up with a way to negate the Silver Surfer's power. The Silver Surfer is a near-god-like being, and while his powers have been neutralized on occasion, it has always taken much more extreme effort. With such power, the conflicts that were usually faced by the Silver Surfer were almost never physical but usually moral or philosophical, which is what made the Silver Surfer series so fucking rad. Of course, Hollywood just knows that America is too stupid to appreciate the subtleties of a good morality play, so instead they screw around with the story line so that it fits the same-old vapid action movie formula. I would have really rather they focused the movie on the moral lessons learned by the noble yet amoral Silver Surfer character. Instead it was mostly a slap-stick superhero movie with awkward moments of seriousness shoe-horned in.

That said though, the movie was leagues better than the committee-written story sleazed on to us in the form of Spiderman 3. Ugh, what a piece of trash.

Next up: Transformers.

The newest twist...

...in the saga of my myriad diseases is that I'm not allowed to go to work. I hadn't mentioned it before because it was so minor, but the short fever I had developed from the Lyme disease as well as the minor sunburn from the antibiotic-induced photosensitivity resulted in my first-ever outbreak of shingles. For those who don't know, shingles are caused by the same virus that caused your outbreak of chickenpox when you were a kid (side note: chickenpox is not caused by a pox virus at all, but by a herpes virus called Herpes zoster, as opposed to Herpes simplex which causes genital herpes and facial cold sores). Chickenpox works essentially the same way as any herpes virus, that is, once you get it, it stays with you for the rest of your life, occasionally manifesting as outbreaks of pustules. With chickenpox, the outbreaks are called "shingles" and they usually only occur when your immune system is being challenged (like from an acute case of Lyme disease) or when it is being compromised (like from old age or chemotherapy). What many people don't realize though, is that you cannot catch shingles from someone else. You can only catch shingles from yourself, and even then, only if you had already had chickenpox (again, shingles is literally the re-emergence of the exact same virus that caused your childhood chickenpox - not just the same species of virus, but the exact same virus, laying dormant all those years, waiting for an opportunity). Having said that however, someone who has shingles can give a case of chickenpox to a chickenpox-naive person, but only if the chickenpox-naive person rubbed up against the skin sores of someone with shingles. Someone with shingles can't just cough on a chickenpox-naive person and give them chickenpox (in the way someone with chickenpox can). Is that all clear?

Anyway, my shingles sores are restricted to a 3x3 sq. inch section of my lower back. Despite my limited ability to infect people however, there is still that small risk that my lower back might be accidentally rubbed by the mucous membranes of some adult who has never had chickenpox or who has such a severely damaged immune system that they are vulnerable to chickenpox re-infection. With that in mind, my company apparently has a policy of not letting people with shingles come to work, so I was sent home yesterday (after I casually mentioned my spot of shingles to our HR director). I can't come back until I can produce a doctor's note saying that I am no longer contagious. I made a call to my doc yesterday and today, so hopefully this will all be resolved soon. Staying home is nice and all, but I've already taken most of the vacation time I need this year.

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