begin rant

So... last night I go ice-skating in G-ville, which was kind of lame for a number of reasons. Things like the skates being too wide for my feet and constantly slipping on my ankles - occasionally making my turns suddenly exciting. Things like the colossal number of little kids. Things like there being no room for distance, and a quarter inch of water on the surface making for really interesting turns. Things like one of my friends being too drunk to stand.

Then again, I am ice-skating in G-ville. It is eighty degrees out, and I am on ice - that is kind of wild. I placed another friend's feet on the ice for the first time, and saw to it that she only wiped out twice all night, and by the end of the evening she had learned passable basic technique and was starting to pick up speed. Stranger still, the folks running the thing turn out to be huge Soul Coughing fans, and I get to flaunt my esoteric-music credentials. Better yet, I only wipe out once myself - and nobody breaks any bones.

Tonight does not promise to be quite as entertaining due to less ambitious planning (read: 'slacking') on my part, but I'll do what I can with what I have. Only boring people are bored.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Posted by Derksen at 4:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Something is rotten in the state of Denmark."
- Marcellus, Hamlet (I, iv, 90)

For all intents and purposes, my laptop is dead. While I may yet go in search of a third opinion, two separate IT-professionals have concluded that some component on the motherboard has gone wrong and leads to an increasing series of internal errors that eventually stack up and result in the unusual freezing behavior approximately five to ten minutes after power-up. As this is a laptop, single components can not be easily removed and replaced, and to repair it would allegedly require replacing the entire motherboard - at the cost of nearly $750.

For twice the price, I can have a brand new laptop with four to six times the power and ability.

This time, I will remember to purchase the extended warrantee that would have covered my issues with motherboard or heat-sink or the boot-sector on the hard-drive or whichever of my components has failed, resulting in this crash. While my family has been universally satisfied with Apple products, and have never had so critical a failure - it appears that laptops are somewhat more fragile, and more prone to damage and destruction. I suppose I should have expected it - given the amount of thumping and bumping the poor beast takes (took?) as I carry it everywhere - and through all kinds of weather.

My laptop is dead. Long live my laptop.

Posted by Derksen at 6:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This afternoon, my computer has spontaneously chosen to turn itself into an expensive brick of white plastic and printed circuits. While I can still access e-mail and this station via campus terminals, the majority of my contact information and professional data remains interred on the now silent hard-drive. The usual ritual incantations and mumblings have failed to resurrect it from the great beyond, and my last external backup was at the beginning of finals week.

I had actually scheduled an additional backup for this afternoon when the machine locked up.

Until such time as I can get my machine up and running again - or at least figure out a trickier way to export some of the more personally important data, please feel free to contact me via the usual alternative methods.

Posted by Derksen at 5:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So...

The semester is over and done with, and I am done for as well - at least for the next two or three days. Then I really need to get back to work to try and define my project proposal for my Master's research. The growth rate for Scirtothrips on common commercial plants in Florida temperatures and humidities appears mostly under-documented, and I figure that this would be a valuable starting place for my research. I'd like to follow it by exploring thrips dispersal patterns. Population densities and local humidity appear to be important in influencing brachyptery and macroptery - whether individuals are winged or not - and this would be critical in determining their ability to fly away and expand their range. Plenty more interesting questions to be researched there - I personally wonder about the environmental triggers and timing that leads to the expression and development of winged individuals.

There are a few other tangents I might like to explore with my research, provided time and available resources. Thrips end up clustering at the bases of leaves, much like aphids - and one might expect that ants would be significant predators of them as such - but many ants appear to avoid or ignore the presence of a thrips infestation. Thrips are known to produce any number of chemicals, and some species carry and distribute droplets of these possibly noxious cocktails from long hairs on their hindquarters around the colony feed-site. None of this behavior has been specifically documented in Scirtothrips, and it will be interesting to determine if something similar is present.

In the meantime, I am 'relaxing' by catching up on the effort to sequence the Neandertal genome - and by blasting a lot of vicious aliens.

Time will tell.

Posted by Derksen at 9:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Finals week again.

This is not a part of my undergraduate education that I missed. I'll be mostly silent on this front for the coming week. Too many critical projects left unattended for far too long, and all of which have required far more time resources than I initially estimated.

Time will tell. I just want to do well by my professorial staff.

Posted by Derksen at 8:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The reason that coffee tastes like battery acid is because you use it to replenish your own depleted internal stores.

Posted by Derksen at 9:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)