Hey, it’s always nice to find out that someone at my home university is recognised for something. This time it’s one of the profs from the deapartment where I did my undergrad – Dr. David Schindler, who just was awarded a very prestigious environmental prize. Way to go, Dr. S!
Here’s another article from the CBC.
Image from here.
Alright – check this story out. And this work (here’s the online fulltext) is even published in Ang. Chem, the funkiest journal I’ve ever read! I love how they have pictures of the authors and put little cartoon ads in the whitespace after the references in the print version.
Its been a busy week so far. This past weekend I did a lot of errands and made my first trip to Marché Jean-Talon for vegetables and fruit. Its mostly still indoors but nice to get good produce at good prices. Yum.
I took a half-day off work today so I worked late Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday and have just about made up all the time. There’s about twenty things I’m doing right now which makes me incredibly busy. I’m supposed to be spending 1 day a week doing computer analysis but so far since I’ve returned from TO I’ve spent about a day and a half doing so. Must try to make time!
Today my new assistant (who is really great) commented that I type really fast. I guess I do … after all, my first computer was a 286 with WordPerfect 5.1 and I didn’t even use a computer with a mouse until 1995. I’ve always been a fan of the keyboard and it’s so much faster than clicking. For example, making things in Flash has always seemed to be really slow to me and back when I was doing my internships there was a lot of clicking and very little keyboard use. I see newer versions have more keyboard shortcuts, but more please!! And it seems that most bioinformatics software is either hard-core unix text-only or completely point & click – it would be nice to use some software that does a bit of both and in a way that makes working with the astounding amount of data I handle reasonable.
Our friend David Backhouse played at a café on Sherbrooke last night. It was really good – he is an excellent song-writer, guitar-player and singer. Nice café too, but Dan wasn’t happy with the coffee. And at the café last night I found out another one of our friends who lives in the Plateau started biking to work … in Laval!! I’m seriously impressed.
So I just found out our friend Tyler has a girl-friend!
Today Dan went to get bombarded by x-rays at the hospital so I went along and it was all over really soon. He had taken time off school but it was so quick that after we went out for lunch/supper, he went back to school for his last class! We ate at Jolee restaurant, a southern Indian restaurant in CDN that Lisa has been telling us about for a year. I had a nice Lassi (yogurt drink) and we had thalis and pakoras. Yum again.
On the way home I waited about 20 minutes for the bus. This would have been ok if was 11 at night or something, but it was at 4:30 PM in the middle of rush hour. I was the first in line and the line was so long that it went almost half-way around the metro station! Finally two busses came and we were off. And then we passed one of the streets in my hood and there were 4 police cars there and a whole bunch of people standing out in the street. I’m wondering if that affected the traffic or not. I don’t know what happened yet – nothing on the news. But this week there was a potential homicide in my hood! Um, july can’t come soon enough.
My cousin Anik recently posted part of a letter written to my Great Aunt during WWII. Take a look – it’s quite a story! More will come…
This is an event that has come up on multiple occasions in my life. I’ve met many people who have experienced it too, and I wanted to test you readers to see if you have also been affected by the scourge of the green pennies. Have you ever ended up with a Canadian penny that is green and crusty on one side, maybe something whitish or blackish seems to be stuck to it?
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Ok, want to know something? It’s my fault. Ok not really but it is my junior high school’s fault! Back in about 1993 my junior high school had a great idea. They wanted to raise money for Unicef so they asked all the students to bring in their extra pennies. Surprisingly, there was a good response and each classroom collected around over 200-800 pennies. Admittedly this isn’t a lot of money, but with all the classrooms pooled their pennies we had quite a bit of cash to donate. Great, huh? Well unfortunately someone at the school had another good idea – we drew haloween shapes (it was October) and glued the pennies to the outline of the ghosts and ghouls. We used that white glue you have in school as a kid. All those coppery, shiny haloween characters looked great in the gym and everyone was so proud of the money we raised. Hooray!
But then, someone had to shuck all these pennies off the paper and roll them. That someone was me and about three other people who happened to be in one of the school clubs. So, we shucked and we rolled. I don’t know how many times I had to go to the bank across the street and ask for more penny rolls. The shucking wasn’t always so successful, though, and sometimes the paper tore off with the pennies. The ones that didn’t have paper stuck to them had turned green from oxidation caused by the glue. So we sent about $30 of half-oxized, gummy pennies into circulation and I’ve been finding them or meeting people who have found them ever since! So, have you found any of my pennies? I think the mint is probably pulling them out of circulation since I see them less often these days. Hmm, I wonder if it is considered a defacement of the national currency!
A cool meme: anagram names of the metro/subway stations!
http://community.livejournal.com/montreal/1259849.html
http://www.evade.ca/images/newMtl-metro-map.JPG
Hey-diddle-de-ho there neighbour-inos! What’s new in Karen-land, you ask?
I finished reading my two Unix books and am now a guru superuser somewhat competent user and know how to get around, telnet, ftp, search/grep, copy, remove and move things and such. I learned two neat tricks this week: in OSX, typing “ls -G” gives a colourized list for files, directories and symbolic links (according to one of my Unix books, “ls –color” does the same thing in other Unix-ish versions. And from Dan: “open -a application.app” opens an application in Finder from the terminal. neat-o.
So I’m now into the Perl book and doing ok, but its a bit of a crash course since I have never programmed before and I still don’t quite understand the whole strings, operators and scalar valuables thing yet, but I’m sure I will with time.
I’m still not feeling well. Some days I am fine and other days I can’t stand the thought of food and have to force myself to eat. Not much fun. I went to the clinic and begged for some antibiotics, but (probably sensibly) they turned me down since we really don’t know what’s wrong yet. BTW Quebec definately has a two-tier health care system and although I’m too tired and fed up to blog on it now, I might later just to show how messed up it is here. It’s bad enough that I am seriously considering moving elsewherre in a few years. I hate to think that it has come to that, but I can’t seem to get competent health care in Montreal (or I haven’t learned how to use the system yet) and frankly, I need it given my immune system appears to be made up of tape, string, and a hamster running in a wheel.
Speaking of rodents, the mice are dong well, although Keiko had a sore on her head last week. I put some cream on it and it’s mostly healed now. They are struggling over who is the dominant mouse, and Keiko seems too tired or lazy to stand up for herself so I think Miette is now in charge. Also today there was a pathetic (but very chubby, as you can see) squirrel sitting on the tree outside our apartment making this lamentful barking sound. He was just kind of sitting there on our tree looking extremely depressed/confused and occasionally barking. I think he must have woken up from his hibernation early (just for the record, its Jan 14th and 0C) and didn’t know what to do since there was no food. I put some bread on the balcony, but he didn’t take it. Well its supposed to get down to -14 tonight so hopefully he will go back to bed and wake up in April.
Dan is re-installing the OS & software on his computer, as per his demiannual tradition.
Grapefruit was on sale at the grocery store so we bought a bag. They are so nice to have with breakfast!
Three weeks ago Dan had a wardrobe malfunction. While this one was not caught on video, he has retold the story here for your entertainment.
Make sure you tune in to CBC radio one at 8:05 Christmas morning or CBC radio two at 6:05 PM on Christmas night to hear the “Christmas Sing-in” that we participated in two weeks ago!
http://www.cbc.ca/montreal/features/singin/
I am beginning to suspect I didn’t buy a mouse a month ago, but some sort of mutant cat/mouse/lizard hybrid. Don’t believe me? See the photos below…when I put food just out of Miette’s reach she tries to paw at it like a cat and then catch it with her creepy extra-long toungue. eww. I did get a nice picture of Keiko with the new camera, though.
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