begin rant

Today, my life feels like an algebra problem. If 2n = my father's age, where n = is equal to my years of life, then where does that leave me? By this point in his life, my father had a PhD, a career, and a pair of lifetime commitments.

But I cannot focus on what accomplishments I have not yet achieved. That way lies madness, and I prefer to recognize my glass as half-full. I do have my health, and I do have my hair. I even have a degree, however useless. For the first time in a long time, I can say with great enthusiasm that I do not hate my job, and more importantly, sometimes I even enjoy it. I get to spend a lot of time out of doors. I currently have to spend it in Florida, and this is a source of many problems - but someday that too shall change.

I'm not sure what the future holds, but whatever it holds, I will document and share here.

Posted by Derksen at 11:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was having a good day.

This is what happens when you are paying more attention to your destination than the road ahead of you. Ironically enough, I was on my way to donate blood. The guy in the lane next to me just wouldn't get out of the way. I let my frustration at possibly missing the impending turn distract me sufficiently, and I failed to notice that traffic had come to one of its frequent and sudden standstills in front of me. It was stupid, and I regret ruining everyones' evening - as well as missing my appointment for a blood donation.

Not one of my finer moments.

And for what it is worth, while the bumper is dented, the Texas plate remained unbent and unbroken. I guess that they just make 'em tough out there.

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The aside to all of this would be that after a month of trying, Comcast has finally got their act together and hooked up my cable access. For those who were curious, Comcast is the devil. I will never recommend them as a digital service provider. Their customer service representatives and technicians mean well, but fail to communicate with one another, and often fail to go that extra mile required to complete a task. It seems to be easier for them to close out an account than to admit that they can't close problem tickets.

I wouldn't even be using them, except that they are literally the only game in town down here in south Florida. You can tell that they are a monopoly, because only a monopoly would refuse to take your money when you offer it to them. I may even yet look forward to having my service cut off, because their billing department appears to have screwed up my account now that the cable is hot.

Or maybe I'll just have free cable for a while. Who knows? There could be certain advantages to their incompetence.

Posted by Derksen at 3:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I swore I'd get around to writing something intelligible in here again, and I guess that time is now. I just never know what I'll finally end up writing when I sit down in front of a keyboard, sometimes. This bit is a perfect example: it began its life as something else, and has only found its way here through a strange metamorphosis that I could not have expected. Still, when you have to write, you write - no matter what it is that you are writing. Structure and organization can always come later, because the desire or inspiration to craft words is not always there. I have to wait until the muse strikes, and then the words just flow. One of those lovely side-effects of ADHD that has shaped my life - when you focus, you're a laser beam counting molecules, but the rest of the time you're running around managing ten different thoughts at once. I tried cleaning my apartment yesterday, and wound up vacuuming the floor until I hit the closet, at which point I remembered that I needed to put laundry away, and while doing that I saw that the sink needed cleaning, and then realized that I had a picture frame I meant to hang up by the sink, and while getting the cleaner for the sink I recognized that the dishes needed washing - and so on. I mean, I eventually got it all done, but stop and start, stop and start. I can ignore it and focus if I want to - but it took years of training, and it is an act of will. You either distract the system with a lot of noise (I still take notes with three different colored pens and two highlighters), or you make slow slow progress. Admittedly, you make slow progress on about ten different things at once, but the rest of the world would rather see single accomplishments than simultaneous progress and a final rain of multiple results.

Mostly, it helps to have a strong source of emotional inspiration. I do not kid when I speak of my need for muses.

Most of what you see published here has actually undergone one or two passes of the editor's pen. I know that it frequently looks rushed, but it is what it is. The above is mostly raw and unstructured. Pure. Call it a thought experiment spilled on the page for the rest of you to read. I have to put it to bed now, because I am starting to read it over - and to edit it. I want to leave this first draft free in the wild unfinished and unrefined.

Posted by Derksen at 1:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have never been a morning person.

Ever.

Perhaps it is because I am habitually a night owl - often only starting projects late in the day when my brain settles, or because I am easily distracted far into the night by a good book that pulls me in and holds me away from sleep, but I have never been a morning person.

This is odd, because I do enjoy breakfast. I like pancakes. Waffles. Bacon. Or maybe I just like brunch, and sharing those things with friends. I also enjoy the silence that mornings can offer, and the first few rays of sunshine creeping between the trees, and burning off the low fog that still lingers on the ground like a blanket. A private time when you are alone with the sun and the birds, and together watch the world waking up. It is a feeling like a secret shared. I treasure these things, but perhaps I hold on to those moments because they are so rare that I do not take their joys for granted.

Mornings have only gotten tougher with age. It isn't just rousing oneself to get up from the enveloping comfort of sheets that have moulded themselves to your person in the night. It isn't about having to leave all that to go somewhere undesirable, such as school, or church, or work. These are all things that can be endured, and must be accepted. Some of them can even be anticipated, and looked forward to.

Waking up hurts.

My body has had eight hours unsupervised to fall apart. Eight hours for allergies to inflame respiratory tissues, and for them to become clogged with mucous. Eight hours for wrecked sinuses to release too much moisture and become desiccated, drying and cracking to weep blood that will run down the back of my throat. Eight hours for the barometric pressure to change suddenly, and for those same sinuses and the fissures in my skull to fail to adapt, straining my cranium like a balloon to burst.

Any one of these things can make entering the waking world an effort of pushing through surgical gauze; the memory of anesthesia that does not quite hide the pain - and does nothing to prevent foreknowledge of pain to come. You bury your head in the pillows, and pray for the absence of clarity, because full awareness will bring a sharp appreciation of the stabbing lances between your eyes, or the dull grinding that rolls around beneath those orbs, or the throbbing inflammation that makes your teeth feel loose in their sockets.

Any one of those things - and they never come alone in the night. They always bring a friend.

But you get up. You fight through it. You have to. Your glassy eyes stare at the world, and you cling desperately to bottles of decongestant and Advil, hoping that the medicine kicks in soon enough to relieve some of your symptoms. Your glasses may be on, but you are still looking at the world through a bleary haze. Your throat and eyeballs are a desert, and you cannot focus. The swelling has thrown off your sense of equilibrium and balance, and you stagger. Every beam of sunlight that once seemed your friend holds a dagger that pierces beyond the eyeball to your brain.

And you have to drive to work.

Now.

You do not hate those for whom waking up is easy, but you do wish that they understood. You wish that every morning you woke up was as peaceful or easy as those few you shared with the rooster, and you envy those for which every morning's awareness is not a fight. Those for whom the peaceful magic of dawn is so commonplace that they can hardly appreciate it for the wonder.

In the meantime, there is coffee. It does nothing for the pain, but it does alleviate some of the symptoms, and its method of action is faster in the system than the ibuprofen or pseudoephedrine. It is enough, and it must be enough, because it is all you have left to try before you must rush out the door pretend to be a human being until the other medications kick in.

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Well, I guess this begins my first day at the new job. We'll see if this is a stand-up fight, or just another bug hunt.

Posted by Derksen at 5:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When I first was doomed to head down to Homestead, way back in May of 2007, I found my path blocked by seasonal wildfires. They raged up and down the interstate, completely closing the Alligator Alley that runs from Florida's Gulf to Atlantic coasts. You would think that omens such as this would have stopped me, but I am ever stubborn.

Now, as I try to drive North to submit my thesis in person, I find myself confronted by a similar wall of flame. I almost made it through the net last night - perhaps, had I started but half an hour earlier, I would have made it. As it was, I had driven to the edge of the Alley only to be turned back by flashing lights... after sitting in a traffic jam for nearly two hours.

I will have to take the long way around, and today I will head up to Gainesville direct, instead of stopping to visit my parents. I will remain just as indomitable at the end as I was in the beginning. If I can force myself into the fire, and hold my hand there for the two years so required, then I can hang on just one more day and be done with it all.

Posted by Derksen at 6:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So today while sitting at my desk and working on corrections for my thesis, I receive a phone call.

And you are now reading the scratchings of Florida's next CAPS agent. Mostly unexpected: I'd interviewed so long ago that I had long since given up hope. Given that one of the other officers attended my thesis and thought that I did a good job, I probably shouldn't be too surprised that they would call me back only a day after I finally finished.

I guess I get to survey for invasive critters and defend Florida agriculture. It is, after all this time, still a bug hunt instead of a stand-up fight. Of course, the position is still in Miami, and still in Florida, and still involved with agriculture. Still: it is a job. Right now, that is a hard thing to find, and I am glad to have it.

We'll see what time brings. I start on May first.

Posted by Derksen at 4:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

First TREC seminar down.

"Host susceptibility and population dynamics of Scirtothrips dorsalis Hood (Thysanoptera: Thripidae) on select ornamental hosts in southern Florida"

Copies are available for the curious in Powerpoint 2008 and PDF formats.

Now for the defense next Wednesday.

Posted by Derksen at 6:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I just finished the final revision on the first draft of my thesis submitted to my committee. Put that way, it sounds a little less final, but it is an important milestone along the end of the road.

I am almost done.

Now I just have to defend it, revise it with their comments until it meets their approval, and then render it down into its component parts for publication, a process I have already begun.

Posted by Derksen at 8:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Texas' cultural domination of the American landscape continues: after years of longing, I can finally find my beloved Blue Bell ice cream in south Florida. While this may seem like a small thing, it is a major improvement in my quality of life. This is the best mass-produced ice cream in America, bar none. Made with real cream in Brenham, Texas. I used to drive right past their factory every time I rode to Austin. It is a shame that I never stopped in for the tour. I hear that they let you sample all of the ice cream currently under production at the end...

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Yegads: I have a new resumé, and now a CV to go with it. Presumably I will start filling in the "publications" subsection in the not-so-distant future, and finally be able to put a graduation date on that Master of Science at the University of Florida.

Perhaps I should add hyperlinks to the PDF files as well? This is a digital document, and I suspect that in the modern era one should be able to find the relevant websites whether that item is in PDF or HTML formats.

Posted by Derksen at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Barely a week in the new housing, and my allergies have already cleared up immensely. I can breathe clearly again for the first time really since I left Gainesville. I'd almost forgotten what it was like. No daily nosebleeds every morning I wake up. No excruciating headaches that leave me foggy and disoriented. Just pure, clean air.

Posted by Derksen at 9:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Do you suppose that it is perhaps past time I went in search of new running shoes? These guys are less than a year old, and I can already see my toes through those holes. I am disappointed - it is either that the high humidity here in south Florida is absolute hell on shoes, or that Nike just isn't making them like they used to, because I sure as heck am not running as hard or as often as I used to.

Posted by Derksen at 8:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Finally! After first promising that we would move in by November of 2006, the graduate student housing at TREC is open for inhabitation. These buildings are a far cry from the trailers (referred to by staff as "our little legal liabilities") that I have lived in for the last year and a half. While the houses are intended for eight students to share, there are currently but four of us living here - and we have more than enough space between us.

Better still, this is a place that all of us can be proud to live in. They're brand new houses with all of the latest amenities, and I finally have my own amazing kitchen with a truly awesome ceramic-surface oven and a giant refrigerator. My mattress is brand new, and is not rotting with mildew - and neither are the walls! Above and beyond the trailers, I cannot emphasize how nice these places really are. When I leave here, I really do not expect to live in a place this nice again for years to come.

In the meantime, I really don't know what to do with myself - except to graduate and get out of here. While I will never be a fan of south Florida, I finally feel that I have someplace I could call home.

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There is so much that I want to say at this, but I think that he is his own best advocate, and so I will let the man speak for himself.

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"We are young despite the years, we are concern.
We are hope despite the times.
All of a sudden, these days
Happy throngs: take this joy wherever, wherever you go..."

R.E.M., These Days

Posted by Derksen at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With a new year, new deadlines. My life for the next four months, summarized (all apologies to Bungie):

• Deadline for degree application
  January 30, 2009
  Begin processing the paperwork on ISIS.
  Status: Complete!
• Submit thesis to committee
  scheduled for February 10, 2009
  Submit thesis to committee in whole.
  Status: three quarters written, pending first approval and edits.
• Defense
  scheduled for March 5, 2009
  Sit down and be electrocuted by committee for five hours.
  Status: rebuild graphs and display files, practice discussion of data and results.
• Entomology department deadline
  scheduled for March 16, 2009
  Thesis first submission (defended, signed, formatted, on paper) to Department for review.
• Thesis first submission
  scheduled for March 30, 2009
  Thesis first submission (defended, signed, formatted, on paper) to Editorial (160 Grinter) for review.
• Final exam form deadline
  scheduled for April 20, 2009
  
  • Final exam form deadline (Editorial, 160 Grinter) for dissertation or thesis degree award.
  • Final submission of thesis or dissertation.
  • Deadline for “Final Clearance” status in the Editorial Document Management (EDM) system, to qualify for degree award this term.

Posted by Derksen at 10:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I spent the latter part of this afternoon converting excerpts from my thesis' literature review into the Wikipedia entry for Scirtothrips dorsalis, so now the truly bored can learn more about this critter than they ever possibly wanted to know. I am probably going to continue to expand the article, adding sections on management of the thrips - but converting all of those citations makes my eyes want to bleed, and I keep finding things that should be linked into other things. I mean, I can't leave a section on putative Tospovirus transmission in S. dorsalis without first improving the page for Tospoviruses, now can I?

Please feel free to contribute to or to vandalize these articles as necessary. This information needs to be shared, and right or wrong, Wikipedia has gradually become one of the most prominent references for common knowledge. It is amazing what ten minutes of expert opinion can do to improve an article, and conversely, what ten seconds of vandalism can do to ruin it.

Posted by Derksen at 4:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last night was also the NCAA college championship between UF and OU under the politically fraught and controversial bowl system. While I am not a fan of the lavish attention that college football receives at the expense of academic programs and other sports, it is interesting to see the madness up close and personal.

Since the championship game was being held in Miami, and I receive no other benefits for attending the University of Florida so far from Gainesville, I sort of felt obligated to attend. Of course, getting tickets was near impossible. As a student of the University of Florida, I can enter a lottery to win permission to buy tickets to the game. Had I won one of these tickets, I could have paid $175, and would have had to pick them up at the ticket office in Gainesville - after presenting two forms of picture ID and a valid credit card. I later learned that OU students paid only $110 for their tickets. These were tickets discounted for students in the nosebleed seats. I'd hate to think how much seats in the front or middle tier might have been worth.

Still, lacking for entertainment in Homestead, I figured it was worthwhile to attempt to crash the game, or to go tailgating in the parking lot. Parking was supposed to have cost my small party an additional forty dollars, but we were fortunate to arrive a little late to the opening ceremonies. I say fortunate because the person responsible for collecting money for parking had run off to watch the game, and his staff told us to just park and to enjoy the game.

While we never got inside the stadium, there were more big screen televisions in the parking lot than there usually are at a sports bar. There was considerable food about as well. While we did not so engage ourselves, had we wanted to, we probably could have stepped into one of many drunken lines and taken some barbecue and booze from someone watching the game. We ended up circling the stadium most of the night, just watching the people watch the game - until we found an ideal spot outside of the VIP lounge where there were three giant screen televisions.

I was not entirely surprised to find that local fans were not as enthusiastic as Texas football fans, but few people are. You can usually hear a Aggie or Longhorn game long before you see it. Still, whatever their level of enthusiasm, these were still southern football fans. Some folks were friendly, and enjoyed the game. Others were more bellicose. We watched a drunken skinhead pick a fight in front of four police officers. We watched a man in MSU green (and not much else) bicycle by. Our celebrity sightings outside the VIP lounge included the Miami chief of police, former President Bill Clinton's heavily armed security detail, and the wrestler Mankind. We saw a lot more people in Oklahoma red than I normally expect to see in Miami on any given Wednesday. I got to try and explain the "Sooner" nickname to South Americans.

After a tense first half, Florida won it in the third quarter.

Then we all went back to our trailers.

Posted by Derksen at 9:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The day just keeps getting better. Here we are in December, but I have finally received a not-insignificant check from the "Dade County AgriCouncil". I was glad to receive the reward, and I will be glad to send them a copy of my thesis and any associated publications as I finish them.

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Why not help someone else have a red Christmas this year? Donate blood for the holidays! Cheesy as it sounds, you can give the best gift of all this holiday season: life.

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You know, there are very few moments in cinematic history that actually pull a truly emotional reaction from me. Stephen Spielberg's Jurassic Park is one of them. You know the moment. It's the one where you meet your first live dinosaur for the first time. John Williams' score begins to swell, and the brachiosaur comes over the rise, trumpeting mournfully.

I've probably been waiting for that particular moment my whole life.

I really am in the wrong field.

Posted by Derksen at 8:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The man was filled with shadow,
the land was bathed in sun.

The afternoon was waning,
the man was on the run.

He had to get to Reno,
his future there to find.

He had to get to Reno,
before he changed his mind.

If life is but a gamble,
and each is dealt one hand,
he had to get to Reno
to play his one-man band.

Truth may prove elusive,
old beer may lose its fizz,
but a man who leaves his shadow
can change his was
to is.

My father, ever the poet.

Posted by Derksen at 2:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A special thanks to Fred Wightman for his thoughtful gift. Now I just have to learn how to tie it!

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A cranium of Protoceratops andrewsi, collected by the infamous Roy Chapman Andrews during his Mongolian adventure. He went seeking human origins, and instead came back with some of the first evidence of dinosaur nesting behavior.

You might notice something familiar in his name, but look to something even more familiar in his hat. This notorious adventurer, explorer, scientist, soldier, spy, and some would say grave-robber and thief of rare antiquities was one of the inspirations for another adventurer in a beaten fedora hat. You can either read of his excellent adventures in his own hand above, or try Charles Gallenkamp and Mike Novacek's biography of the man, Dragon Hunter.

Posted by Derksen at 2:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Of course, I ended up at the gallery of paleontology and anatomy. I suppose it says something about my person when I have but a day to explore all of Paris, and the two major sites that I visit are a library and a museum of natural history.

The museum itself is something of a wonder. It has over four hundred years of collections, brought together and studied by some of the best scientists that the world has to offer. These are amazing and historic samples in a sturdy building designed to last for the ages. They are also poorly labeled and displayed behind scratched plexiglass. The roof leaks, and samples and displays all suffer from water damage. This approach pales when compared to the educational presentation of even a modest American museum of natural history.

I suppose my father puts it best:

" As I often preach in my geology lectures, a rock is no more exciting than a page in a book. It's the story that matters, and the challenge for a museum is to tell the story (as well as warehouse data).

We've probably told you this before, but in 1976 we visited the Cairo Museum of Antiquities. It was like the government warehouse scene at the end of the original Indiana Jones -- an immensity of stuff, dimly lit, dust-covered, few labels (fewer in English). There was much of the King Tut material, what you could see of it, and endless mummies and caskets. Years later we saw a a traveling exhibit of Egyptian material including a fraction of the King Tut stuff from Cairo - but viv're la differance! It was a very well-displayed collection that really made an impression. So, there is probably a moral here somewhere, but I will settle for the thought that one good idea - well communicated - is worth more than any old box of rocks."

Emphasis and links are mine.

Posted by Derksen at 2:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

And now I am lost in Paris proper.

Charles De Gaulle International Airport connects directly to the local metro rail. It was here that I first experienced a difficulty that I would advise all future travelers to Paris to be aware of: many of the metro rail stations accept only coins at the ticket-vending machines, and if you have only paper currency, your life may be made difficult and entertaining.

It was also here that I experienced a small bit of cognitive dissonance as I walked into the station. The first music to come on the radio was "Eye of the Tiger", and it was rapidly followed by Madonna's "Material Girl". I was uncertain whether perhaps when I had travelled in space, if I had not also perhaps travelled in time. Fortunately the train arrived in time to prevent a complete flashback to a prior era.

It was there on the train that Paris began to present its face as a major cosmopolitan city, and showed itself to be culturally diverse as well as relatively friendly. As I sat reviewing my maps, a nice old Algerian lady asked me if I was American (is it really that obvious?), and offered to help me find my way to my destination. I thanked her for her help, and immediately realized how terrible my French was. My obvious spanish ("you speak like an Italian!") accent and linguistic reference frame would throw me mentally off course and bedevil me throughout my journey. As we travelled from the airport into the city proper, the city woke up and the morning commuters on their way to work and school filled the train. I marveled as all the nations of the world began to board and babble in their native tongues. France was once an imperial power, with colonies scattered the world over - and it is still an important player in matters of world policy and finance. That broad international reach was well reflected as color and diversity filled the train and my soul.

In an odd way, I find being alone in a sea of foreigners vaguely comforting. Not only does it remind me of my youth, but I suspect that we are all islands wandering alone together. I like to believe that it is only through an appreciation for the polyglot that we will find successful answers in a globalizing world. Everyone has their strengths and their weaknesses, and all of them have a different approach and outlook on the way we process life.

I find such novel and different approaches refreshing and exciting, even when I disagree with them. If nothing else, it certainly provides many opportunities for feasting well at a number of different ethnic restaurants. I have also always believed in world peace through superior dining.

Posted by Derksen at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By the time you read this, I should be well underway in my voyage to Paris. At this point, I am probably winging my way over the Northeastern seaboard. In the meantime, I present: my gate at Miami International.

MIA has always seemed a strange and magical place. As Miami is the capital of South America, it was inevitable that all of the expatriates and transnational elites would end up passing through on their way to their final destination in the southern hemisphere. We would always run into someone from somewhen else in our extended expatriate experience, sometimes years after we had seen or spoken to them last. Such communications always ended with a chuckle and the suggestion that we "meet here again next summer".

Posted by Derksen at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A Wordle of my literature review for Scirtothrips dorsalis. I am amused to note that et al displays with as high a frequency as it does.

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This weekend proved more exciting than initially expected.

What should have been a simple walk to the Seventh Annual Hollywood Clambake on Hollywood Beach turned instead into a battle for survival against nature and the elements. Perhaps I exaggerate, but decide for yourselves.

Continue reading "exchange of fate" »

Posted by Derksen at 8:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have collected and counted 31,785 thrips on 472 3x5" sticky card traps since July 19th of last year. My research thrips of interest, Scirtothrips dorsalis, accounts for 84.04% of all captures. The next two species that account for the largest proportion of thrips collected during the year are Frankliniella schultzei, at 3.59% of all captures, and Gynaikothrips uzeli, who account for another 3.05% of all thrips trapped. I would suggest that this implies that S. dorsalis represents the predominant thrips species on my two host plots throughout the year.

Next week I will collect my final traps for this project, and with sixty weekly sampling periods, this experiment will be complete.

Obviously this project would have been improved if I had access to larger and more field plots from which to sample. This project could have been further improved if these additional sample plots had been from a broader geographic distribution both in south Florida and across the state. It might also have been more informative had it included samples taken from around additional host plants, and had it included an additional variable - measuring captures on traps at an increasing distance from certain host plots.

Officially, this was my "back-burner" project. I did not receive support or encouragement to continue or expand this project during its first three months, and once officially endorsed, it was suggested that I direct my enthusiasm for improving this experiment elsewhere. I was discouraged from modifying the experiment in order to achieve the improvements I have mentioned above.

This experiment is now one of the fundamental planks of my thesis.

Graduate school is all about realizing that you are in charge, and perhaps more fundamentally, that you probably do know what you are doing and where you should be going. Cast off self-doubt, and pursue reasonable research goals that are endorsed by your peers. Follow your heart. Most important of all?

Graduate.

Posted by Derksen at 11:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Time alone - oh, time will tell: ya think you're in heaven, but ya living in hell."
- Bob Marley, Time will Tell

So the news is this: I will not be graduating in December.

Members of my committee feel that I could stand to repeat two of my experiments by expanding the number of treatments, and by increasing the number of repetitions within those experiments. I will collect data on these experiments for another two months, which will put me two weeks from the departmental deadline for thesis defense, and it is extremely unlikely that I would be able to complete my analysis and writing while dealing with the obstacles of bureaucracy at the University of Florida. As such, I will most probably defend in January, and graduate in May of next year.

I am of mixed feelings on this subject.

While I rather wish that they had reached these conclusions before approving and endorsing the experiments in the first place so that I would do it right the first time, this is also the first time in two years that I have had clear objectives and a deadline. I know exactly what I need to do in order to finish.

Posted by Derksen at 11:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Coffee is the common man's gold, and like gold it brings to every man the feeling of luxury and nobility.... Where coffee is served there is grace and splendour and friendship and happiness."
- attributed to Abd al-Qadir

It is amazing how as little as a quarter cup of coffee can turn your whole morning around. I may someday dedicate an entire sub-category of tag on this website to it, given how frequently the magic drug appears in my musings.

That, and in my old age I am finding that perhaps there is something to this whole "go to bed before midnight" thing. I've been collapsing at around eleven in the evening these days, which makes rising at seven much less of a battle. I still don't think I'll ever be the sort to get up and go running at six - as I suspect that neither coffee nor an early slumber will ever make me a morning person.

After all, phenotype can be limited by genotypic potential, no matter what the environment.

Posted by Derksen at 11:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I had thirty minutes to spare before our movie started tonight, and instead of reading colorful but dull lobby cards for films I'll never see, I donated blood. Given the sheer number of times that I've been involved in a life-mangling accident, I figure it is only fair (and about time) I gave a little back. There are plenty of injured people in the world who need blood, and you've got more than enough...

Posted by Derksen at 11:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sometimes I wonder if I am just not working hard enough.

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Certain parties have suggested that my head resembles certain varieties of tropical fruit. I disagree, but leave it to my public to decide such things for themselves:

Posted by Derksen at 8:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Since it seems to be a theme, I might as well introduce my latest pair of shoes:

After slightly more than a year here, I can suggest that the constant moisture and humidity of South Florida really does a number on footwear. My previous pair lasted considerably less than a year before rotting away until my toes started to poke out the distal end, and the tread of the soles had worn down to an almost unrecognizable veneer of rubber. It was desperately past time to replace them, and I decided to go back to my roots.

For those who are not in the know, my roots are mired in the thick soil of high-quality hiking boots. Of course, I have been told that it was "not very fashionable to stomp around polite society in such things", and I eventually made certain concessions to style, comfort, and my fencing coach by surrendering to running shoes.

Running shoes can be a great joy, as a good pair feels like putting on a fresh set of socks in the morning - but they do not appear durable enough to survive the heady subtropical jungle of Southern Florida. I decided to compromise, and turned instead to the North Face and their waterproof line of trailrunners. Trailrunners are an odd hybrid of both running shoe and hiking boot, with a stiffer sole, slightly more ankle support, and built of a tougher fabric. I used to have a pair of Nikes that I was exceptionally fond of, but these new guys are growing increasingly comfortable.

We'll see if I still wear them on my feet in another year.

Posted by Derksen at 8:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My encounter with the invasive Cuban Knight anole earlier this morning.

Posted by Derksen at 8:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nothing stitches a brain back together like two cups of coffee.

Posted by Derksen at 2:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There aren't nearly enough hours in the day to get the things I would like to get done accomplished. Perhaps another reminder to be learned from graduate school: nearly everything takes far longer than you expected. The same could be said for many of the important events of life; if you don't budget for accidents or interruptions, you'll never arrive on time. Of course, it never seems to matter when I plan anything. Reality is resistant to this. On the other hand, having occasionally tried to fly by the seat of my pants, I find that having some form of plan is better than no plan at all. At least then you have something to complain about when everything falls apart.

Posted by Derksen at 11:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Until a few minutes ago, I had only heard excerpts and soundbites from Mr. Obama's speech on race. The chattering classes had provided summaries and commentaries on the event, all of which completely failed to capture the power and intelligence behind the text of his announcement:

Whoever wrote this piece was brilliant, placing Mr. Obama's words within a compelling historical context. One way or another, I would like to believe that this man will change America - and for the better.

Posted by Derksen at 9:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For what little it is worth, I am much better with a sword.

Posted by Derksen at 8:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Some time within the next two to three weeks, my car will turn one hundred thousand. So begins the end of the journey. My "new" 2002 racing stallion was purchased towards the end of 2001, which makes it almost seven years old. That is a little less than 15000 miles per year, which is a respectable bit of driving. We have come a long way together, and I would love to see it get another hundred thousand miles going forward. I have confidence in the engineers of Toyota, and some of my friends' old models lasted well over a hundred and fifty thousand miles before finally giving up their much beloved ghosts.

We shall see.

Posted by Derksen at 5:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"This is the excellent foppery of the world, that,
when we are sick in fortune, - often the surfeit
of our own behavior, - we make guilty of our
disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as
if we were villains by necessity; fools by
heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and
treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards,
liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of
planetary influence; and all that we are evil in,
by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion
of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish
disposition to the charge of a star!"

- King Lear: Act I, Scene II

Posted by Derksen at 8:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So... I remembered a few things about myself this weekend. I have been housesitting for one of the folks related to the research station, and it reminded me of what I liked about living and working around a real home.

The first is that I really like stereo sound, and I have missed it terribly. I plugged my host's speakers to my laptop, and the improvement in my movie-watching capability was dramatic. Headphones are okay, but nothing beats the freedom a pair of cheap speakers and a small subwoofer can provide. I can only imagine how much better my surround sound system will appear to me when I finally return to civilization and a television that provides more than monaural output.

The second thing I have rediscovered is that I focus better with less white noise. I am okay with music blazing clear, or random nature rustling in the background, but the steady whine of machinery like the incubator beside my desk can be incredibly distracting. It gets inside my head and it grinds against my brain - and it drives me crazy. It makes me want to plug my ears up and go to sleep.

So I just need to find good clear sound for my brain to function right.

Muses, are you listening?

Posted by Derksen at 8:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Being a Derksen means never having to say that you are lost - you're just on another adventure.

Posted by Derksen at 9:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Without imagination we are nothing, and without bold ventures and risks nothing great of permanence is attainable."
- from the introduction to Jack Chalker's Lords of the Middle Dark

Posted by Derksen at 11:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Derksen at 3:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Folks who have known me entirely too long for their own good might be amused to take note of the following lab vehicle:

It is almost as old as my old yeep, and has just as many problems with the air conditioning, power steering, brakes, windows, engine, and oil - but it is also just as responsive as my old warhorse once was. In fact, when I first made its acquaintance, I was not completely certain that it was not my old beast. It would have been fitting and appropriate for us to have found one another thousands of miles from where we last parted ways.

For such a lunker of a car, it handles pretty well - and could probably manage any exit that the highway might provide.

Posted by Derksen at 4:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You know, there is something to be said for striking while the iron is hot. Lately, I've been entirely too distracted for my own good. This leaves me full of ideas and potential... that are sadly often left incomplete. I am trying to put the pieces back together into the semblance of a human being, but there are fits and false starts. It is going to take a lot of personal effort to finish this degree while simultaneously trying to figure out where I am going next, and why I will be going there - all while trying to retain or manage the ghost of a personal life that might give greater meaning or purpose to the whole process of human existence.

There is also something to be said for productive slacking. Yesterday evening, my roommate and I tore out of here to see a concert. I did not get anything degree-related accomplished last night, but I have been remarkably productive thus far this morning. I may be easily distracted, but if I am at peace, I can focus on completing even a distasteful and uninteresting task.

I obviously need more slack in my life. As always, I am open to suggestion.

Posted by Derksen at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Derksen at 8:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last night, I had a little trouble picking my roommate up from the airport.

To be perfectly honest, it wasn't that bad a collision. Traffic stopped on 826N, and so did I... but the truck behind me carried too much inertia into my rear bumper - where it did its job admirably. I didn't even get knocked into the green Saturn that had stopped in front of me.

No one was injured, and I suppose that is all that matters - but it does irritate the heck out of me that the other driver chose not to stop and share their insurance information, and that my passenger and I were too jazzed and too surprised to get their license plate number as they barreled past on their way to wherever they were going.

Of course, the trunk doesn't really open or close that well anymore, and the left rear brake light is no longer functioning, and I have no idea what else may be stressed in the general frame of the car. I know that I am stressed, because I live in Miami, a city in a state that requires all persons to be insured to carry a valid driver's license, and where half of the people in the county are uninsured. As a result, my insurance has a thousand dollar deductible for uninsured or hit-and-run motorists, and I am not a happy camper.

But no one is injured.

Maybe. My neck feels a little stiff, but sorting signal from noise is difficult: I am not sure if this is from staring into a microscope all of yesterday afternoon, or from the sudden bump at the end.

Posted by Derksen at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I often find that knowing the answer to a question is not nearly as important as knowing how to find that answer.

Posted by Derksen at 9:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, for whatever reason, last night I only woke up at six in the morning. I missed my three AM appointment with insomnia. Lucky me. Let us hope that tonight is better.

Posted by Derksen at 9:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For the last four days, I have found myself rising spontaneously from sleep at approximately three and six in the morning. This is unsettling, and it is not dependent on the time at which I went to bed. Given its regularity, I suspect that there may be a mechanical inspiration; perhaps there is some machinery lurking within the bowels of the trailer that upsets my rest at regular and three hour intervals?

Whatever the source, it is driving me crazy.

Posted by Derksen at 9:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yeah, a prolonged silence from my person is generally not a good sign. On the other hand, it has recently occurred to me that it is no joke when I say that I want the title "evolutionary biologist" on my nameplate, and that anything which stands between that goal and my person had best stand aside or expect to be trampled.

Something about how the brigade will draw sabre, and prepare to advance.

Sometimes an obsessively single-minded focus can be a good thing, right?

Posted by Derksen at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"You don't work hard because you're competing against some identical operation down the street. You work harder because everything is on the line. Your name, your honor, your family, your life."
- Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash

Posted by Derksen at 8:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As you can see, I am making as much of Time as I can. The thrips seem to be making better use of such time, as their populations are recently rebounding on my rosebuds.

Posted by Derksen at 12:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So... tonight I had a halting discussion in Spanish with a Brazilian who only spoke Português and some Spanish and English with the aid of a Colombian who spoke fluent English and Spanish about group selection and whether certain models of sexual selection are appropriate to apply to human social models. With a background in anthropology and evolutionary biology, these are two topics that really interest me and will get me excited, no matter what the language. I can only hope that we were all on the same page and talking about the same thing, and not arguing past one another like ships in the night.

Posted by Derksen at 8:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This weekend, I needed to run to WalMart to buy a lamp so that my humble room would have light to read by. As I approached their establishment, I found myself incapable of stopping, and instead kept driving. I just kept going until I hit a beach and its accompanying mangrove swamp. Walking amidst the wind-swept mangroves, I found peace for a little while. That, and I chased these poor things all over the park trying to get one or two good shots.

Posted by Derksen at 3:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So lately there has been a minor technical difficulty with the server that hosts this mindless page you read before you, and all of it might have been wiped out. While it might have been interesting to start again with a completely blank slate, I would have missed this. I am a man who likes to carry a sense of personal history, and for what it is worth, this site does provide that context to me; helping me to remember who and where I was - or what I wanted to be.

This site contributes to seven or more years of my personal extended memory, and occasionally provides a sense of outreach to those who need to keep track of me.

Soooo...

I'm back, and for most of you, I suppose it is as if I had never left.

Posted by Derksen at 11:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If the eyes are the windows to the soul, then a new pair of glasses must be a bit like remodeling the front of the house with nice new victorian picture-windows. I can see clearly again and live without glare while driving.

Rah!

Posted by Derksen at 2:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have officially moved into new digs.

In some ways, they aren't much of an improvement. The walls are still choked with mildew and mold, and my allergies are just as outrageous every morning.

In other ways, there has been a vast improvement in my quality of living. I now have twice as much floorspace in my room, taller ceilings, and carpets. I also have one less roommate to share the main living space with. Not altogether unreasonable. I mean, aside from the purple carpets and the pink curtains.

Photos forthcoming.

Posted by Derksen at 11:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've learned a few things this weekend.

The first of which is that I need to plan ahead for whirlwind tours of places where I have too many friends if I ever wish to see any of them for a good and reasonable amount of time. I was irresponsible and easily distracted, and as such I failed to make good a few promises and a few meetings. I sorrow for having missed faces that I've not seen in a year who were important to me, but console myself with the fact that some day, I will be back.

Family curses aside, I must inevitably return if only because it seems that in spite of it all, I might just be a Texan. Sort of like Kinky Friedman, but without the musical or writing talent - or Chuck Norris without the asskicking. Or maybe more like Ann Richards without the political savvy and the snark.

What can I say? While I didn't miss the traffic on the interstate, I really did miss the food and the people. I plan on heading back to Austin in September for ACL, and we'll see what happens when next I am in my favorite town I never lived in. I've got such a strange history in my love-affair with Austin that it practically deserves and entry unto itself. Maybe some day soon it will finally get one.

Posted by Derksen at 6:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Friends are people with whom you fall back into familiar patterns even after ten years gone. They are good people, and they might as well be family... and you never realize just how much you missed them until they walk right back into your life - even if it is as if they never left.

Posted by Derksen at 3:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Returning to Houston after almost two weeks shy of a year gone is... unusual. It isn't quite home that I am returning to, but it all still feels terribly familiar. A bit like déjà vu: it is almost as if I have been here before.

The most unusual part of being back is the way I sort of know where I am going when I am driving around. I almost remember where I will have to turn if I want to get where I am trying to go to. It is an unusual sensation, as most of the time I lived in Houston - and certainly during this last year's upheaval and constant shifting - I had no idea where I was going most of the time, and had to rely upon a map to navigate my new environment. Perhaps this is because I have always been a visual sort of learner, and direct myself by landmarks as much as anything else. Little things, like knowing to turn right when you see the "handicapped persons ahead" road sign on Woodlands Parkway.

So now I run around like a madman, trying to overcome my limited planning and sleep, revisiting old haunts, and tracking down as many of my old friends as I can. Another thing that amazes me at being back is the sheer number of people who missed me, and how many I had left behind. I had a pretty reasonable social support network behind me when I was here... but I failed to properly appreciate or utilize them as I should have.

Too stubborn, too independent, and after a few years of disappointment at failing to live up to my own goals and standards... probably too frustrated and angry at myself.

Posted by Derksen at 1:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Perhaps it is the miserably wet and tropical weather of Southern Florida, but it the shoes I have owned for less than a year are already falling apart under the strain of belonging to my feet. While they have not yet given way, they are well on their way to collapse - and once again, I find myself without appropriate time to search for a new pair. Interestingly enough, they are falling apart in exactly the same fashion as before, with the outsole peeling away laterally from the ball of my foot.

Posted by Derksen at 6:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I am not sure that my roommates and I have the same understanding of the word "hygiene".

Posted by Derksen at 4:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Derksen at 7:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space."
- Hamlet: Act II, Scene 2

Thank heavens my sense of humor is still intact.

The locals remember when these trailers really were a place to crash at night after a long day of hauling discarded palm fronds out of the wreckage that used to be your living room. Now I complain that the distribution for the air-conditioning is irregular, and that the temperature can be freezing at one end of the building while tropical at the other. I guess what one really needs is a sense of perspective. I have the fishtank up and running, and I am putting in additional shelving. Rent is cheap, and I get free laundry, power, and water.

This does not change the fact that someday I would like to own a house with a kitchen large enough for two.

Posted by Derksen at 5:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It is a good thing I like scope-work, because lately - I've been doing a whole hell of a lot of it.

Posted by Derksen at 4:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It seems that on my way back from the grocery store, I blew out a tire. This is quite a blowout. I must have run over a piece of metal from the numerous construction projects out here. I am only thankful that it happened as I drove back into the complex, and not somewhere considerably farther up the road. I've had to empty the trunk of the carload of things I plan on taking back into storage just to get the spare tire and jack out. It'll be fixed soon enough, and then I'll go buy me a new tire.

Posted by Derksen at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the advantages to my new home is that the sun peeks in through my window as it rises, and very little will keep its persistant determination from lifting the lids of my eyes for very long. As a result, I was up at what might normally be considered an unnaturally early hour of the morning for myself - especially on the weekend. Lacking anything better to do with my time, or failing to want to do anything more than get some breakfast and go back to sleep, I watched my version of Saturday morning cartoons on Google Video.

I put a bagel in the toaster, spread some peanut butter on it, and sat down to watch Craig Mello give a talk at Google corporate headquarters on his Nobel-winning research on RNAi as part of their continuing seminar series on emerging technologies. The tech talks are interesting because they give you a look into what the almighty Google is thinking about buying and turning into their next cash-cow. Dr. Mello's talk is interesting because he is a good speaker and does an excellent job of translating highly technical jargon into plain english that the layperson might understand and appreciate without feeling condescended to. That, and he is talking about RNA interference, one of the single most interesting and important topics to hop along through molecular biology in the last ten years. To say that I am excited by its potential application in various subfields of biology and chemistry would be something of an understatement.

If you have an hour and ten minutes to kill, I highly recommend that you check it out...

Posted by Derksen at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, I guess it is official: I am now trailer trash living at the University of Florida's Tropical Research and Education Center.

Ironically enough, the University has these trailers as FEMA leftovers from the last time an Andrew visited town. They maintain them because Homestead is an hour south of Miami, and even renting property in the ghetto is prohibitively expensive for graduate students. Of course, "maintained" is a term subject to qualitative observations, and it has been more than fifteen years and a few more hurricanes since these trailers were new. That, and apparently many graduate students do not take very good care of their living space. My share of the trailer is a 7x7x7 cube that I can almost turn around in. Thank god it holds the fishtank in a corner on top of a dilapidated dresser - but I miss my old kitchen (and my dishwasher!) already.

Posted by Derksen at 8:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Have I mentioned lately how much I hate moving?

For the last several days, my life has been compartmentalized into a series of boxes - some of which I will take with me, and some of which will go into storage. It is difficult to let go of things to which you have become attached, particularly when those things are comforable furniture, or the bookshelves that you would like to put your recreational reading material or DVD library upon. That said, there have been a few bright moments.

My friend Sheri had her brother in town on vacation, and he was kind enough to volunteer the back of his rented convertible Mitsubishi Eclipse to carry some of my shelves off to storage. It really does not look normal to see something that big crammed into something that small.

My fish are now living in a bucket. I made them a promise once: stay alive, and I'll take you with me wherever I go in life. Three of them have made a voyage of greater distance in this fashion before, and the prognosis for their survival is good. I hope they make it. While I may laugh and call them a primitive form of ultra-realistic and high-resolution HDTV, I have become quite attached to them. Like some of my furniture, they have always been there with me - reliable through turmoil and joy. I only hope that I can return the favor.

Last and not least, I remain amazed by the volume of stuff that one can comfortably cram into the 2002 Toyota Camry, and still be able to see out your rear-view windows. That said, I did manage to come uncomfortably close to obscuring all of my blind-spots. When planning out my packing strategy, I had forgotten to include the fishtank for the aforementioned fish, and found it occupying a surprising and irregular volume in the backseat of my car.

I had not realized just how much stuff I really do own. Given that I've tried to shake the load lighter on at least two occasions now, and that I will be moving into much smaller accomodations, I wonder if the next packing trip is going to be as bad?

Posted by Derksen at 3:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sun, iced and spiced coffee, David Bowie on the radio, and another four hours of hammering at my proposal. I've managed to refine it to three major topic areas, but defining specific questions to answer and hypotheses to test has proved somewhat difficult. I am a creature prone to wandering from one idea to another as part of an interconnected whole, but science is better written when it is focused and addresses particular details instead of drifting aimlessly across the map. It does not help that at least two of my major topic areas experience some significant overlap, and extracting the effects of particular variables is either going to require a lot of little experiments or one massive multivariate mess that may not be able to extract the significance of any particular element. In this light, writing my proposal has been a bit like biking uphill: you'd best switch major gears before you get there, because changing topics in the road is likely to slip your chain and find you going nowhere.

Posted by Derksen at 2:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There is a certain truism that I have been loathe to admit: for all my frivolity, I am not an impulsive man. I often achieve a realization about six months before I react to it. These range in nature from matters of the human heart to the purchase of significant household electronics, but I stand off and do not act until my certainty builds to a critical mass. I do not know whether it is reluctance or caution that holds me from direct action in response to such a decision, but I will prevaricate and avoid committing myself to a decision already made. Perhaps this has saved me from making a few too many impetuous advances, but it has also been used as an excuse allowing me to avoid certain unpleasant facts. Refusing to face them does not make me immune to their consequences, just incapable of dealing with them.

Posted by Derksen at 6:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You know, after considerable thought on the subject and some reflection on the desires of my past, I have arrived at a conclusion of sorts: if I could say something about the future trajectory of my life based on where I have been and what I would like to be doing, I would like to be responsible for developing and releasing genetically modified organisms into the environment for specialized functional purposes.

Posted by Derksen at 10:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yep:

That is an armadillo. At night. I am ever so glad that I had my camera ready this time.

Posted by Derksen at 12:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

1. Florida isn't supposed to get this cold. There was ice on my windshield when I went out to my car this morning.
2. I have a steak waiting for me in the freezer. It has been marinading for the past two days, and it wants to be turned into fajitas.

Posted by Derksen at 1:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"My dear, descended from the apes! Let us hope it is not true, but if it is, let us pray it will not become generally known."
- attributed to the wife of the Bishop of Worcester, in reaction to the infamous debate between TH Huxley and the Bishop Wilberforce

While I do not subscribe to the "great man" theory of history, there is no question that Charles Darwin happened to be the right scientist in the right place at the right time. Spurred on to publication by Alfred Russel Wallace, the "father of biogeography", his observations from years of collected research led him to conclusions that shook the foundations of biology and the society built atop that platform. His work brought forth a mechanism by which the whole of diversity might be explained within the context of geological history. When linked to the evidence of heredity first explored by Mendel, and then confirmed at the molecular level by Watson and Crick (and Franklin!), it provided the unifying synthesis of modern biology.

As I am dedicating my life to following the science that he helped to establish, it is with some interest that I note that my own life has from time to time, accidentally fallen into Darwin's footsteps. I have touched the same armoured glyptodontids that he helped to unearth in Southern Argentina at the Museo de la Plata. I have stood in the home he kept, and looked through the study to the desk at which he wrote much of his work. Lately, I have seen the villainous vinchuca that was to bring him low in his later years with Chagas disease in a new light, and finally, I have stood atop his grave at Westminster Abbey in London.

Everyone has their heroes.

Happy Darwin Day, everybody.

Posted by Derksen at 1:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It appears that my apartment complex has realized what a relative deal living here offers. They have raised the monthly rental rates by nearly a hundred dollars. Should I care to renew my lease now, only six months in, they will shave fifty dollars off of that final rate. I guess it is time to start looking for a new home, which is kind of a shame because I have come to like it here. Possibly more important to consider is the thought that my master's funding will last at most one more year - by which point I should be done and ready to move on to a doctoral program - and probably somewhere far far away from here.

Posted by Derksen at 2:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I don't believe that I am entirely over this head cold I've been fighting with for the last week. I fell asleep on the floor beneath my desk for about two hours. It was oddly comfortable, as there is a considerable pile of paperwork hiding underneath there to nest in, and I had my gym bag as a pillow. Still, I need to get up and moving and more work done.

Posted by Derksen at 7:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well then.

This morning at around nine AM, my old company elected to fire off eighteen percent of the workforce as part of a massive reorganization strategy. It claimed large portions of my old department, and a few of my friends are out of a job. My heart goes out to them, and I wish them only the best - many of them were good and capable people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

There but for the grace of graduate school go I.

God bless - and good luck, guys.

Posted by Derksen at 3:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Derksen at 8:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hoy la tierra y los cielos me sonríen,
hoy llego al fondo de mi alma el sol,
hoy la he visto... la he visto y me ha mirado...
¡Hoy creo en dios!

- Gustavo Adolfo Béquer, "Rima XVII"

Posted by Derksen at 11:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Someone asked me if I had a recent headshot. Turns out the MacBook has a pretty decent video camera as part of the frame.

Posted by Derksen at 5:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Cooking for large numbers of people is a challenge that I have recently enjoyed again. It is at once easier - and yet more difficult than cooking for the self alone. You no longer concern yourself with producing too many leftovers or leaving ingredients out to spoil, but instead begin to worry that you have insufficient kitchen space to maintain and process several dishes. An interesting complication has been the necessity of simultaneously providing for the vegetarian members of my association with the same ingredients available for my normal meal-plan. Do you simply substitute and shift the relative quantities of components, or do you make a unique and separate dish that acknowledges the 'special' dietary requirements of some of your guests which can also be appreciated by 'normal' appetites? Execution requires far more planning, and far more attention to diverse burners and the suddenly smoking oven... but a good time will be had by all.

Posted by Derksen at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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)

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)

It is amazing how much of a difference three hours can make.

Three hours to the South of Gainesville, there is still sun, and the leaves are still green. Gainesville may never quite experience winter, but it unquestionably sees fall as the leaves here turn to yellow and gold and sail and swirl away on the wind.

Visiting family for Turkey Day was good. Family is good. They have helped to fill the empty space that my surrogate family made up of my extended network of friends used to fill... or maybe I have that backwards. Whichever it is, I know that it makes a difference to sit down and break bread with people, and to see the same faces every day. There is more than a sense of community - there is a sense of 'belongingness' that I did not find outside of Austin. Besides, few things in the world beat watching your aged and respectable parents laugh and chase after dragonflies with an enormous butterfly net.

Finally got a new battery for my laptop, and it is rather like falling in love all over again: I have no strings, and I may wander. No longer do I need to worry about squandering power frivolously on such things as a monitor with gamma bright enough to read. No longer must I race from outlet to outlet, hoping that I will have enough charge to last all the way through class.

So life is good.

Then again, I am about to re-enter hell-week. You should either expect extended silence from this station, or lengthy tales of procrastination. One of the things I do not miss about the whole educational program is the sheer number of things that must fall together at the last possible minute. I am moving forward, and with far more diligence than in my undergraduate years - but... Yeesh. Corporate life retrained me to accept lower standards, but I am starting over and I refuse to hand in anything less than a solid effort.

Time will tell.

Posted by Derksen at 9:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So...

Thursday night last week was one of the better days I have had in a long time. Not only was I looking at a three-day weekend due to the observance of Veteran's Day, but the seminar speaker for the afternoon was Dr. Jim Marden - a guy I think of as famous for his work on the evolution of flight in early insects. He has done a lot more work on a lot more integrative biology since then - pushing the science at the level of the gene into its effects on behavior and population structure. One of the projects he is exploring looks at the frequencies of certain genes in a metapopulation of butterflies. These genes are responsible for the butterflies' ability to convert sugar to energy and stay aloft for long periods of time, and inadvertently represent the butterflies' ability to migrate from one area to another. Butterflies who express one form of this gene tend to be very good at staying in their natal patch and reproducing there. Butterflies who express another form of this gene tend to disperse and migrate out onto new patches.

Continue reading "grad school rocks! grad school is going to make my brain explode!" »

Posted by Derksen at 11:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Behold!

New shoes, and for what it is worth, I actually managed to find two pairs that would have potentially fit my feet. The other pair were true running shoes instead of the allegedly more durable trail-runners that I purchased, and not only were they bright tomatoe-red, but they were also little more than a sock atop a rugged rubber sole. Amazingly comfortable, but they also screamed "broken toe!" louder than I would have the first time I tripped over a log.

Posted by Derksen at 6:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So late last night, the sole of my right shoe finally wears through and starts to peel off. This is really irritating. I still haven't found the time or a pair of shoes to replace them, and I am getting pretty desperate - so I have turned to more traditional means of shoe repair: Elmer's school glue and a pair of tacks. While I don't plan on doing any heavy-duty footwork in the next couple of days, this kind of short term fix is going to have to be replaced, and fast.

Before	After

Posted by Derksen at 5:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just for the record, I hate shopping for footwear. The recent move to Florida and its rainy weather have gone a long way towards gradually destroying my last pair of trail-runners, and I have an unusually difficult time replacing them. Something about finding clown-shoes in my size. Two hours in a shoe store this afternoon, and nothing to show for my efforts. Either the heel was too tight, the tongue was displaced, or the lower sole fit - but the uppers were constricted. I even found a pair that would have been almost okay - except it was designed for heel-runners and I am unquestionably a toe-striker who would have received less traction than I'd like. I've suffered through bad footwear before, and I need something that fits like a glove, and runs like a shark.

Posted by Derksen at 6:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A sphecid wasp:

I suspect that this may be the "steel-blue cricket hawk", Chlorion aerarium. Another parasitoid - this one specializing in crickets. I'd love to give more details about family relationships, but suborders for both predator and prey organisms are undergoing recent drastic revision.

Posted by Derksen at 11:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Monday, I found out that I am but four points shy of being the second person in over ten years of biochemistry to pull off an "A" without having first taken organic chemistry - and the class average is rumored to be at least ten points below me. All I have to do is really crack down and blow away the next two tests and the final - and I can end this semester feeling that I have accomplished something worthwhile. The prof is even recommending another series of advanced genetics courses, and is encouraging me to apply for the medicinal genetics lab course taught at the hospital over the summer session. They only take five folks, so I'll have to be stellar - but the amusing thing is that it mostly sounds like playing through all of the roles laid out across the pharmbio labs back at Lexicon... which is all I really wanted to do in the first place, so I will have come full circle...

In the meantime, I am still trying to work out whether I want paleontology as a hobby or to potentially take it more seriously as a profession. It would be deeply personally satisfying, and there are few things in the world that would probably make me happier, but... I don't know that I am not just imagining things - and entomology is unquestionably still far more employable. More importantly, I've found a few things in entomology that really grab my attention and are starting to pull me in. Of course, the problem is that they have very little to do with my alleged thesis project working with thrips.

Continue reading "phoenix smoulders" »

Posted by Derksen at 8:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Marshall Nirenberg was the recipient of the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which he shared with Har Gobind Khorana and Robert Holley for their research exploring the translation of nucleotide-triplets on mature messenger RNA into specific amino acids linked along a polypeptide chain. Of further note, and of personal significance, Dr. Nirenberg recieved his master's degree in zoology at the University of Florida. His master's thesis focused on the classification and taxonomy of caddisflies.

He began his career as an entomologist.

There is hope for me yet.

Posted by Derksen at 8:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"You just seem like the kind of person who would own a bike."
- Ben Ketcherside

And indeed, Ben - I am the kind of person who would own a bike. I would have owned it sooner, but I lived in Houston, a city that is particularly unfriendly to pedestrian traffic in a state already in love with the heavy truck. As of the afternoon of August 23rd, I was the kind of person who did own a bike. I would have owned it a whole day sooner, but a mixup at the shop sent it home with an individual who had purchased a similar model for his son. His eleven year-old son. Who realized his mistake the minute his son's legs had trouble reaching the ground. Turns out that tall people ride on taller rims.

My noble steed is a 2006 Trek Bikes' model 3900, and it has served me well for the past two months. I am in love with the flexibility and facility that it provides me as I travel from one side of town to another. Gainesville is a city designed for pedestrian and bicycle traffic, and I have gradually begun to explore this town in a slowly expanding radius that spokes outward from my apartment - with a few side-journeys down safe or potentially interesting thoroughfares. It carries me the three miles to biochemistry every morning by 8:30 in the AM, and takes me to the museum and entomology lab buildings in minutes. I haved used my car perhaps once a week since its purchase, and did not refill on gas for the entire month of September. I only wish I had purchased a bicycle sooner.

More importantly, I hope that no one steals my bike. While bicycle theft is not terribly rampant on campus, it is a problem. I even witnessed as one of my colleagues had his bike stolen one afternoon. The thief was so brazen in his disassembly - and even waved hello as I walked by - that I had to assume that he belonged here and it must have been his bike... I figured the only reason I did not know him was because I was still new here. The thief gradually disassembled my colleague's bike over a period of about an hour, and no one else in the department suspected anything was amiss until the true owner returned and found the remains of his frame still chained to the bike rack.

I have taken to fastening my bike as securely as possible, or should I plan to stay in one place for a long while, stashing it in a corner of my locked office. Let us hope that plan works - I have become remarkably attached to the vehicle.

Posted by Derksen at 7:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Today was another good day. I spent most of it on a desolate and barren hillside in the middle of a gravel quarry, hunched over a mountain of clay - and armed with only a screwdriver to sift through it - but today was still a good day. I may have burned out my brain in the hot hot sun, but I was searching for buried treasure, and I found it.

We were digging in a two million year-old sinkhole that once lay at the bottom of a Florida lake. The lake acted as a funnel to the sinkhole's drain, and the depth of that hole promoted an anoxic environment, deterring further scavenging and predation. This created conditions favorable to the preservation of a large number of whole and partially articulated skeletons. You might be surprised by the diversity of life represented in this unusual watery grave - any number of things can fall in a lake and drown over a few thousand years.

Continue reading "rock of ages" »

Posted by Derksen at 7:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wow.

Florida is an incredibly long and densely populated state. The eight hours between my coursework in Gainesville and my research lab in Homestead is a long way to drive, and while I have stopped to visit my parents in Palmetto at the half-way point... I am still wiped out by this evening's adventure. The trip down was not nearly so exhausting as the trip to return - it rained something terrible this afternoon, and I was no longer as driven to arrive - or as caffeinated.

I am still trying to decide whether it is better to stop and visit my folks (and get some laundry done!) and trek through the Everglades each time, or whether it might be better to head straight through Orlando and then down along the Atlantic coast on that leg of the Sunpass turnpike. One path puts me in my parents' good graces and nets me a free meal and possibly some free laundry. The other road probably saves me the few hours I would otherwise spend visiting with family. I must master each route, as there will probably come a day when I will need to arrive in Homestead as early as possible in order to spend as much time and get as much work accomplished as is humanly possible while I am down there.

In the meantime, it is nice getting the opportunity to know my folks better. As much as I joke about what a chore it is to visit them more often than once or twice a year because I am now only three hours down the road, I am glad that they are there. It is kind of odd: I lived with them almost continuously for well over eighteen years, but I still don't think that we know each other very well. I believe that it is only recently that we have begun to take notice of one another, and to respect each other as adults. They are good and interesting people, and I remain more than just fond of them.

We will see what time brings us.

Posted by Derksen at 8:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As I am striving to live without home-internet access in order to cut personal costs, I find myself camped outside of the entomology building to borrow their wireless signal from the campus network in a mild misting of rain. This is probably not good for my laptop, and can not be good for my health either - but doing so is entertaining to me. I may be eaten alive by mosquitoes, but I am living an adventure.

After all, I was snuffled by an armadillo in a very dog-like manner not less than five minutes ago. At first, it startled me: something unknown was suddenly crashing through the undergrowth behind me - but when I turned to see what approached, nothing was there. Then the ferns shook and parted, and my armadillo revealed itself. I guess that it wasn't used to having humans outside on its patio at this time of night, as it seemed to take a minute to figure out what I was - and what to do about me. It snuffled the air before me, and looked to see if I had anything interesting to eat. As I did not (some entomology student I turned out to be!), It snorted loudly and then turned its back on me to wander away into its ferns, continuing its search for grubs.

I rather wish I had my camera at that moment - its nonchalance was endearing.

Posted by Derksen at 12:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So here I am at home in my new home.

Thus far, I am rather pleased with the place.

I kind of like this place - I may be paying a hundred dollars more than I paid back in Conroe, but I am definitely getting what I paid for. I get about a hundred extra square feet of space, newer appliances, and a heck of a lot more counter-space in the kitchen. I also get to live in a duplex so that I am the only neighbor on the first and second floor, which makes me less self-conscious about being so darned clumsy and dropping things on the floor.

Better still, I am merely a ten minute walk from the entomology building!

Of course, the rest of my classes are held on the opposite end of campus - but I am not really complaining. My only real complaints would be with the plumbing, which seem to have been partially clogged by the previous resident's long black hair.

I would also note that my apartment backs up onto the edge of a nature preserve, which is full of living and thriving things - all of which are being eaten by a large chorus of frogs that sing me to sleep at night. Except the ones that are being eaten by alligators. Or armadillos. I lived in Texas for well over eight years discontinuously, and I could count the number of times I encountered a living armadillo in the flesh on one hand - but last night while walking home from a local coffee shop, I nearly tripped over two! The goofy things didn't move until I was almost right on top of them, and as I had mistaken them for rocks in the dim lighting... when they jumped - I jumped.

Kind of exciting in a freaky sort of way.

Once the adrenaline died down, it made me laugh.

I still wish I had someone to share it with, you know?

Posted by Derksen at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This evening, I have done a terrible thing. I have killed one of my most valued and beloved possessions - and it was in an act of futility whose worthlessness frustrates me even now. For while I am not usually attached to my belongings, this one was special, and it had been in the family for far longer and carried far more merit within its wooden frame and woolen heart than I ever have provided to the family through my flesh and blood and bone.

That old leather chair was more than thirty years old. It was purchased soon after my parents were married, and was at one time one of my father's prize possessions. I grew up in that chair: my long arms gradually reaching down its smooth skin to play with the design laid out in brass tacks at the ends of its arms, my legs stretching out and eventually touching the floor while I was seated, and my head falling back and finally resting dead center of the cushion, its pillows carefully supporting my neck. I spent many happy hours reading in dark of the family library in that chair with only a matching brass lamp for light, and many hours more sleeping in that chair afterwards. It was once the only thing I desired of my parents in their final will and testament.

It was fortunate that I did not have to wait for that unhappy passage to receive it as a gift; when my parents moved from Texas to Florida, my mother forced my father to abandon that old chair in favor of newer furniture that she preferred. I happily inherited it, for while the springs had long since collapsed, it perfectly fit the curvature of my spine, as it had curved to fit the spine of my father before me.

It was the only thing I wanted in the world, and when I had it - I knew only contentment and peace - and I threw it away.

Continue reading "Rest in Peace, Big Red Leather Chair" »

Posted by Derksen at 2:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 28th, 2001 to August 3rd, 2006.

Five years, five months, and five days.

I'm not really certain that I have worked out all my feelings towards this place, and I am not sure I ever will. Let it be said that it is a good company that would probably be an excellent long-term investment, and that it very well may someday have a significant impact on the pharmaceutical industry as a whole. If nothing else, it will be bought up by one of the big pharma who will mine Lexicon for its vast and rich pools of intellectual property - and then turn the remainder into a fast-moving research arm. I did not find the kind of personal growth and development that I was looking for, or even a career - but along the way I met some really excellent people who I will miss terribly.

Anyhow, what is over is finally over.

Cue Beethoven's "Ninth Symphony", and begin the celebration.

Mind you, that would be a 29.6MB file linked there, but you know what?

Totally worth it.

Posted by Derksen at 12:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Sometimes it seems that it pays to be a little paranoid. You never have any idea when your day is going to turn from perfect - to perfectly frustrating. For example, your friends might tell you that you are crazy for wanting to leave for your four PM flight with more than two hours of spare time, but you know you need it - just in case of 'emergencies'. Little things. Like your car's battery suddenly, spontaneously, and mysteriously failing to start some two hours and twenty minutes before your flight. While you are in downtown Houston, instead of at home, and can therefore not afford to abandon your car all on its own for half a week. So you have to call your insurance to get the numbers for a towing service to have your car hauled home - all while you are trying to board a plane.

So you call on your friends.

Who thankfully have not left Houston yet, and who curtail their afternoon plans to try and help jump your car. You don't care if it starts again after you stop it next - right now you just need to get to the airport. Of course, the car proved unjumpable. The battery has either had its charge boiled off by the hot and humid Houston afternoon, or it is completely and spontaneously dead. Or maybe the starter is having issues. Or the alternator, or the distributor, or any of a dozen other things that could go wrong. The problem is that one of those things has gone wrong, and now you only have two hours to resolve it and drive half an hour down the road to the airport.

And now it is raining.

So your friends not only take your sorry backside to the airport - but some of them also sit around and try to deal with whatever minion the towing company sends their way. Having learned that it will be frighteningly expensive to have your car towed all the way back up to Conroe, they elect to hunt down a new battery in a city that is not their own, and replace yours and then drive your car home for you where it will be waiting for you in the parking lot.

Which is more than amazingly cool of them, and you are now eternally in their debt.

I still don't know how this story ends (and probably won't until Wednesday when I return), but Kate, Lowell, Karmin, Rick?
Thanks, guys.

You ever need anything?

You have but to call.

Thanks.

Posted by Derksen at 11:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Director of Human Resources:

In order to continue my education, I have decided to volunarily terminate my employment with Lexicon Genetics on August second, 2006.

Thank you for your time;
Andrew Derksen
July 19th, 2006

Posted by Derksen at 8:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Okay... as of today, it appears that I have a new major advisor for graduate studies in entomology, and a new project focus for my education. I will now complete a lifelong goal by defending America from an alien invasion. Admittedly, this will be an invasion of small biting arthropods known as thrips, but they're strange enough to be from beyond this world.

They are tiny parasitic insects of about a milimeter in length whose wings can only be described as feather dusters. They are incredibly prolific, and once a colony is established, it can be extremely difficult to eradicate. Worse still, they are promiscuous parasites, readily leaping from a preferred host to an alternate host when environmental conditions demand. Most important of all, they can also act as vector to several commercially important plant viruses, and to top matters off, they will bite human beings when they run out of plants.

It appears that Florida stands poised on the brink of invasion by a creature that could only be described as an enemy to all I hold dear - the Chilithrips, Scirtothrips dorsalis. It will be my duty to develop a management strategy to control and identify their advance across the nation. Millions stand to perish if I fail.

I am actually looking forward to the challenge. I mean, it isn't mosquitoes, but it still will be ecological control of a potentially harmful species, and it presents all sorts of interesting opportunities to explore the evolution and adaptation of an invasive species: resistance, founder's effect, structured competition, host-shifting and sympatric speciation. As in all such things, only time will tell.

Posted by Derksen at 11:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Will someone kindly remind me to go out and purchase a new set of hiking boots at some point during this weekend? I've quite worn the rubber soles of my old pair of Wolverines down to their leather lining, and the steel toe-gaurds are starting to shine through. It is wonderful to note that the wear patterns of a shoe can reveal much about their user's health and habits. Mine reveal that I have high arches, and that I like to sprint on my toes, rolling across the ball of my foot instead of my heel. They also imply that I usually fence with my right foot forward, dragging my left leg on deep lunges - and that I walk with my toes pointing slightly outwards: a sure sign of lateral chondromalacia...

Posted by Derksen at 7:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The other week, one of the guys I fence with was trying to convince me that I had too much tension in my poise while on strip, and that I should loosen up my form and relax. I tried taking his advice because he really is a more experienced fencer, and I know that he was trying to help - but after following his lead, he and three other guys mopped the floor with me. Then I told them to get back on strip and to let me do things my way. I still didn't win, but my performance improved so drastically and I narrowed the gap between our scores so rapidly that I frightened them.

They didn't realize all that coiled tension could explode outward so suddenly, or jump that far down the lane, or outpace them, or dance unflaggingly on the strip for fifteen minutes. They called it an unnecessary expenditure of energy and told me that I would tire - but after three hours, they were ready to go home, and I was just getting started.

Swordplay can tell you a lot about a person, and that barely constrained energy is part of who and what I am. Some people find their moment through serenity and calm. I find mine through action and passion. For me, it is better to be slightly wound up about enjoying life than placidly accepting circumstances. Yin and yang, my friends. That knot in my neck really is the only thing keeping the puppet on its strings held upright. I will relax the day I die, thanks.

I get more done this way.

Posted by Derksen at 11:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

You know?

More than anything else in the world, I dislike being alone.

Even a book is company enough, but without it?

I stop feeling real after a while.

I do not exist as an individual as much as I exist as an extension of a cultural process known as 'conversation'.

Posted by Derksen at 2:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Tonight, the infamous "Curse of Braveheart" almost struck again. For those afflicted by The Curse, screening the 1995 Mel Gibson film or listening to the James Horner soundtrack can be courting disaster. It is fortunate for me that my iPod had only offered up track eleven, "For The Love Of A Princess" when the deer leapt into my headlights as I drove home tonight on SH 242 - and not the near-fatal track twelve, "Falkirk". Had track twelve been playing, the ghost of Sir William Wallace would have risen from the grave and claimed his vengeance in the name of Scottish dead... and I never would have swerved into the other lane in time.

Posted by Derksen at 10:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Congratulations. The Entomology & Nematology Department's Graduate Committee has approved your admittance into our M.S. program to work under the direction of Dr. Chelsea Smartt."

Posted by Derksen at 12:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Okay -

So maybe it isn't the kind of accomplishment I would really like to be crowing about, but by Nyarlathotep and Levi's jeans, I have finally beaten every last level of the original "Halo" on Legendary, including that gawdawful infernal hangar-bay just inside the Truth and Reconciliation. I do not suppose it makes me some sort of gaming god, but through persistence and the slick resurrection of my thumb, I have vanquished and conquered - thereby earning my geek spurs.

I may now purchase the no-longer available "Legendary" t-shirt from bungie with its crossed swords and skull in good faith, and you may refer to me as "Sir" Andrew.

Heh.

I'm going running now so I can do the happy dance on the move.

Posted by Derksen at 8:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"With the world saved and the secrets of Da Vinci protected, Eddie finally got his coffee."
- Narrator, Hudson Hawk

Today, I think I finally got my coffee.

I don't understand why. I haven't won any victories, or achieved any great results - but I feel shockingly good right now. I also had my literal cup of coffee this morning, and I think I am finally at peace with life and myself again. I feel centered, and balanced at the tipping point where I might launch out in any direction into a future of my choosing. The spring has returned to my step, just as it has returned to the land, water flowing into the veins of the warming earth so that it bursts again into green green life.

I am alive again.

Rah.

Rahrahrahrah!

Now let's go win some battles that make a difference with this newfound enthusiasm and confidence.

Posted by Derksen at 10:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So today at work one of the girls really didn't agree with the tomato soup that she had for lunch, and afterwards she needed an unused toothbrush and toothpaste to remove the taste from her mouth. She half-jokingly asked me for such a thing, as I have in the past been known to produce rare and obscure toys and tools in a boy scout-like fashion from my desk. And of course I had both toothpaste and brush, second drawer on the left towards the back behind the burlap sack and underneath the bubble-wrap.

It was an old American Airlines travel kit from one of the long hauls between Buenos Aires and Miami.

Probably from 1992 or '93.

The brush was fine - hermetically sealed and all, but the toothpaste apparently had an expiration date on the back - for January of 1995. Jules took the brush, and went in search of someone with 'good' toothpaste to use. Lacking anything more important to do... well... maybe just lacking anything else with such high entertainment value, I called the 1-800 number on the back of the tube. Not only was I surprised to find that the line was still active, I was doubly surprised to find a human being on the other end of only four or five short robot-based menu decisions. I then learned that Colgate-Palmolive only gaurantees their products eighteen months beyond the expiration date, at which point the "consistancy or flavor" of the toothpaste may be subject to change - but the active ingredients should remain effective, although my 'brushing experience' may be subject to change.

So later tonight I will be faced with a dilemma: use this "collector's edition Classic Colgate travel toothpaste" for entertainment value and the hope of possible fluoride poisoning - or save it for posterity and possibly later sale on eBay?

Posted by Derksen at 1:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Talking on the phone this morning with Elizabeth Twieg, and she complained (maybe complain isn't the right word - maybe 'celebrated' is, but since when have I been the kind of person to let little technicalities like that get in the way of my fun?) that she had not seen Derksen wandering the halls with his boxers on his head in a good many years.

Thank god for the revolution in digital image processsing.

Posted by Derksen at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I am not entirely certain where this is going, or what I should say. I find myself starting to write something, and then pausing to consider - and to then delete it all only to begin again. This is the written equivalent of lurching through conversation, except that unlike speech, I can take back what I have said or consider it more fully before I finally commit it to permanence and receivership. The ideas bidden are not born as they are conceived and so they are allowed to develop and grow - and I can sometimes see what kind of monstrosity they might become and abort them before they begin. So perhaps I should remain silent, and say nothing? It might cause less agida for all parties involved.

Except that I have never been a voice for silence. Keeping things pent up inside - whether by choice or because there hasn't been anyone there to share them with tears me apart from the inside. It is well and good to hold on to your ideas until you have a feeling for them and are prepared to express them with the rest of the world... but you can't hold everything in forever: as you take of this world, you must return to it.

I don't know, and I don't understand - which is why I share.
I am not making a statement, I am asking a flock of questions.

I suppose that someday I might eventually learn to keep my mouth shut, but thus far, doing so has hurt me far more than anything I have ever said.

Posted by Derksen at 8:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So things are like this -

It has been a great long while since I last ranted and raved in so public a forum, and I suspect that I may have lost something in not doing so more often. It has not been a sign of disrespect to you, my friends (and some of you my family) - merely a sign that things have not always been well on the home front, or that I've finally decided to take some of your advice and keep my opinions to myself. Anyhow - after much agonized consideration, I have decided that I may have been a little premature in choosing to terminate my career at Lexicon as of December 15th. It is true: I hate my job, and I am wasting my time here. I am not learning or growing - or being challenged to achieve anything of significance by my environment. I have not been permitted to advance within the hierarchy of my organization, and yet I have also not been allowed to change departments to try and find a new home elsewhere within the corporate structure. All of this in spite of being one of the senior-most members and incredibly competent and good-looking to boot!

I would like to leave Lexicon tomorrow - and I am willing to accept that I have built myself a sufficient safety cushion that I probably could do so tomorrow should I choose to do so. I would eventually have to get some sort of dead-end job of menial labour that paid an hourly wage much reduced from my current circumstances - but it could and would be done in order to pay for rent and food and car insurance and gas - and heaven forbid: entertainment costs and medical insurance. That said, I'll be honest: for the first time in my life, I find myself truly afraid of the future.

Which is not to say that I will not eventually be leaving Lexicon - I know that I can stay there no longer, but I wonder at my motivations.

I am being driven away from a thing, and probably by rage and frustration and disappointment. I am not being drawn towards anything, and would be left with emptiness: even more alone than before, and unemployed in what might as well amount to Greenland.

And that is the kicker: I need to be drawn towards something - I need to have somewhere to go. It is not enough to be a wandering tramp, and even I don't really have the money for that sort of strange adventure - nor do I feel that sort of extended vacation would develop me as a person. I'd always want to be doing something more with my idle hands. So I am looking for alternatives - or rather, I have been inspired to look for alternatives for the past two months, but have found it just as frustrating as when I first graduated from college. I have more experience, but in many ways, it is not of the sort that matters to alternative employers in the fields which interest me.

I am no longer going to ignore offers of aid or employment merely because they were brought to my attention by a friend or a family member. I recognize that familiar relationships such as those are often more important to a prospective employer as they bespeak a great deal of trust or confidence by the recommending member: your reputation is on the line. I thank the lot of you who have offered me sanctuary on the offhand chance I am invited to interview at a job - or more importantly, a graduate program - in your area.

There is the heart of the solution: I do need to head off to graduate school.

If any goal stands out like an outcropping in the river of my future, it is furthering my education. This is not because I have run out of other ideas for things to do, or because I feel that retreating into academia will save me from poor management. This isn't even because having some form of graduate education will make me more attractive to future employers: this is because there are honestly questions of science whose answers are as of yet unknown, and I would like to help develop the plan to understand them. I really do care about nocturnal pterodactyls and theropod evolution and dinosaur metabolism and the arrival of bats in the early Quaternary and the disappearance of primates in North America and the Old/New World monkey disjunction and lumping Australopithecines and early members of Homo instead of constantly splitting them and mosquitoes and malaria and dengue and West Nile and whatever else will crawl out of the jungle next and how to control or prevent the spread of that misery to come...

So I have some ideas about how to solve those problems, and I'd like someone with more professional experience to give me a little bit more of the training and direction and resources to attack those problems.

So I need to get into graduate school.

Which means that I will be touring more programs in the near future and taking more care in submitting my applications to a broad diversity of departments, and asking a lot more questions.

First, I need to retake the GRE - and this time around, I need to beat the math section into submission. I don't know how or why I managed to so terribly underperform on that portion of the exam the last two times I took it, but I need to sell myself as competitive and intelligent as possible. If this means I must take one of those awful GRE-coaching courses guaranteed to improve my score - then so be it. I am a better and brighter and more dedicated individual now than ever - I just need to prove it to the rest of the world.

And maybe, just maybe...

prove it to myself.

Time will tell.

Posted by Derksen at 10:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Still a little more than forty-six hours before Luv-lee Rita, Hurr-i-cane (nothing can come be-tween us!) makes landfall in Houston, and the place is already a madhouse. While not quite running on fumes, my gas tank was very nearly empty this morning. There was no way that I could make it in to work - and then return home! - especially if traffic kept up the way that it has been.

So I drove the thirteen miles Eastwards down 105 to Cut-n-Shoot, Texas, in search of a pump rumored to be full of gas. Cut-n-Shoot has more claims to fame than merely a full tank of gasoline, mind you. It is also the 'wild-animal' capital of Texas. There is a larger population of tigers there than anyplace else in the world except India, and while India has a greater total tiger population, the population density of tigers is much greater here in Montgomery County. Which leads to some interesting stories in the news every now and again, because as Sigfreid and Roy found out the hard way: tigers don't make great pets.

It is bad enough when the SPCA has to send in Animal Rescue for malnourished, abused or abandoned house cats, right?

On the road to Cut-n-Shoot, I stopped at three gas stations. All three of them were closed, but there were no signs over the pumps to indicate whether they were full or empty. No matter - they were also all the old-style pump which could only be paid for in cash at the counter of the locked and barricaded gas-station. At the fourth station, I hit jackpot. This gas station was also closed, but it accepted credit cards. Given the sheer volume of people at this place nearly sixteen miles off the main evacuation route, I suspect that the only reason this station still had gasoline available was because it was only accepting credit cards.

Cut-n-Shoot really isn't a credit card kind of town, dig?

So when I pulled up and produced a credit card with which to pay for my gas, I was confronted by an older hispanic gentleman of limited english speaking ability and the wide eyes of his children, peering through the windows of their ancient brown Civic. You could see the strain in the wrinkled edges of his face, and the dust on his car spoke of one that was far from home, and not sure when he would be back.

He had cash, and I had access.

An exchange was made, and you could see the relief seep into the man like water in the desert.

After this, I turned and headed back towards my apartment, Interstate-45, and work. Then the announcement came out over the radio: I-45 S had been closed, and was now being opened to Northbound traffic to ease the evacuation. I-45 is the only road directly linking the Woodlands where I work to my home in Conroe. All other options would involve driving at least an hour East or West to then turn back in and head through yet another road for which there was no gaurantee that it would not also have been closed to City-bound traffic.

To spend a day cutting mouse tails at a job I hate, after which I could then look forward to another two-hour drive home?

Unlikely.

Posted by Derksen at 9:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So... Is there hope for the future?

A moment to think. A pause before battle. I've learned a few more things about myself on this trip. You can't be afraid to jump, and you can't be afraid to love, or to live. You aren't trapped in the position you are standing in so long as you have legs to carry you forward, and arms to pull you higher. And when the time comes that you can reach no higher, and your legs fail and you can't crawl that extra mile? Maybe you'll be lucky enough to have a friend willing to pull you along at their side.

I lean back and boot up the iPod one last time while I wait for my flight to board. It offers up "Learning to Fly" by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers in response.

Maybe there is time for tomorrow.

Posted by Derksen at 4:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Amusing to watch you kids suffer and squirm as you apply to graduate school.

Am I the only one who applied to an odd dozen schools and programs, and then got rejected from every single one except the one that accepted me - and then had my future advisor call me back in a panic because the department had just lost funding and SHE was now out looking for a job...?

It doesn't matter how well prepared you are, kids. It doesn't matter what your recommendations folder looks like (since mine contains refs from all current bosses and several old ones, both of my old advisors, and one or two people of whom I am fond and I suspect respect me from a scientific perspective). It probably doesn't really matter how well you do on the GRE. I mean, if you did okay on the SATs, you'll do okay on the GREs. Unless of course you just can't do math fast on the infernal (and more expensive) 'computer aided test', in which case you will suddenly hose out that portion much like I did. Time to adapt new test-taking strategies.

Hell.

I was amused to hear from one school that rejected me that I needed 'research experience', too. This amused me, because I had been doing 'research' for both the government at mosquito control and the private sector for over a year and half by that point. Not only was this a considerably longer period of time than most undergrads can claim, but I am performing identical studies to those that we provide to undergrads as stupid summer internships so that they can claim to have 'research experience' on their transcripts and resumes. Jeez. Next time I go undergrad, I'll remember to apply for more internships over the summer instead of actually working for a living.

Anyways... What seems to matter to the people I discussed my future with was a solid four-year undergraduate plan of work, and a solid indication of where you would like to take your studies in the future. It can't hurt to have your Master's thesis already written out and a government grant to boot, too...

But what would I know?

I was a part-time screw-up in College, and I got rejected. My bad first year of overconfident slackitude came back to bite me in the backside. Forget that I pulled my act together by my senior year! If you were a graduate committee, would you choose the candidate who never made any mistakes, or the one who made some but had hopefully learned from them?

Yeah.

Is eternal mouse-work my (lucrative) punishment in purgatory?

Maybe I am just bitter because I can't make up my mind about where and what to do with myself. I would be eternally happy to dedicate myself to the study of transitional communities in the fossil record, watching the geologically sudden explosion of diversity after calamity... specifically by looking at the radiation of root primates or the odd adaptations of the disappointingly extinct pterosaurs... but I suspect (and trade magazines and discussions with professionals in the field seem to indicate) that there isn't a lot in the way of paying work out there for people who know and care about these things.

So I am forced to consider alternatives that seem more applied but are tangentially related. Like maybe forensic science. It is just that I don't really want to do forensic science: interesting, but I am not in love with it, and I fear I might not be able to fully dedicate the next four to eight years to it... followed by the rest of my life.

On the other hand... I sure as hell can't stay here.

Posted by Derksen at 12:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last night, my grocery list included the following items:

1. milk
   
2. butter
   
3. superglue
   

Posted by Derksen at 10:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today, I am twenty-five years old.
Thanks, Mom!

While thus far I have met several personal goals, I have yet to achieve some sense of something lasting or permanent that will change this world. I figure that I spent most of this quarter-century learning how to go about achieving such accomplishments, and so my time was not wasted. I suspect I will spend the next quarter leveraging my position, and the third quarter finishing my life's work.

I plan on spending the fourth quarter in blissful retirement, resting on my laurels.

Posted by Derksen at 11:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I am tired of doing everything by myself. While there are incredible freedoms to be won by living alone, there are also many hours spent in silence. You can only play so many games of solitaire or read so many books or write so many lines of code or prose before finally realizing that you need another living and changing mind to react to. Someone or something to distract you, and to pull you out of the spiraling well of introspection - a journey into the center of the earth that can have no end. You need another mind to reflect upon my words and deeds, and to act in reaction to you, to show you further pathways yet unconsidered, and to give you another well to sip from.

I want to take a logical leap, and an exercise in faith. I want to believe in and accept more as real than the self. The self-examined life and Descartes' First Principle will take you only so far - a truly satisfying existence demands peer review!

So I wish I had someone to share this thing called life with - to help me make sense of it, and to remind me that I am more than a mere observer in this drama. My input alone is not enough - I want more to learn, and more to understand - and I want someone to understand it with me. Solitary experience is no experience at all.

Sometimes all a lonely man needs is love.

Posted by Derksen at 5:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I feel obligated to share my good deed for the day.

While driving home from work, I pass alongside George Bush Senior Park (formerly the US Army Engineer Wetlands Preservation Floodplain Site and Resevoir). Today, my usual routine was interrupted by an odd thing in the middle of the road. I thought that perhaps it was a log, or maybe an unfortunate and dead turtle - when suddenly, it moved.

It was a very much alive turtle in the middle of the road.
Half way to his destination, and still so far to go.

Knowing the monsters that many of my fellow state residents are, I was amazed that the beast had made it as far as it had. I immediately pulled over to the side of the road, set the emergency blinkers, disembarked... and then ran out into the road and 'rescued' the terrapin. I lifted the hefty reptile - about the size and shape of a punctured football, but much denser - and carried it quickly to the far side of the road in the direction he had been travelling.

It has been a beautiful and sunny day, and that critter had to be well over sixty years old to grow as large as it did. Pulling that creature off the road? That has been about the best I've felt about myself and the happiest I've been since I graduated. Life has been difficult this past year, but I can't but hope that perhaps I am halfway there.

I laughed all the way home.

Posted by Derksen at 6:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)