Independence Day

Happy 4th of July!! Unfortunately, our original plans for the holiday have fallen by the wayside. We had planned on going down to Richmond, VA to spend the weekend with my cousin and his family but, alas, my wife was suffering with illness so we ended up staying in Cleveland. The weather today is great so that's at least a plus.

Yesterday was the first day in many, many weeks that I've taken a full day off from work. Even when I've traveled over the last few weeks it has been FOR work. So yesterday was very refreshing. We slept in ('til 8am—I can't sleep in longer than that any more without feeling horrible for the rest of the day) and I got up and made us breakfast, we puttered around the house, did some reading, my wife worked in the garden while I tinkered with Boxee (which really rocks!) and then we went out shopping for grocs and house/guitar repair supplies before settling in to watch a movie and have a late dinner. I managed to link my Netflix account to my Boxee account and now can watch (some, as I didn't realize that I had to actually ADD the streamable movie to my Instant queue until this morning) streamed flicks on our 22" HD TV by connecting the MacBook Pro to it.

Some of the streamed flicks look like crap and others look pretty good. I've been waiting for truly individually-selectable downloadable content for a LONG time. Ken Thompson was working on this at Bell Labs before he retired and WIRED magazine interviewed him about downloadable music about 15 years ago—long before mp3/mp4 ripping and the iPod changed the world of digital media. I know that this has been available for a while since my brother had a TiVO early on and another friend here in Cleve had a Windows Media Center BUT I was never very impressed by those options; particularly since they weren't very Mac-friendly.

I take a lot of ribbing for being a "mac guy" but, this past week, I discovered that, by using VirtualBox, I can use Oberon, a comp-language/operating system that I used to tinker with back in the early 90's. Sweet! Unfortunately, I don't have the time to play with it much but the fact that I can run native Mac apps, Windoze (currently running the 7RC), whichever Linux distros I want to try at the time, and now Oberon really impresses people. Of course it certainly helps that I'm pretty computer savvy and don't have much trouble getting the virtual environments up and running on my Mac and don't have much trouble learning new environments well enough to get productive quickly.

The MacBook Pro is quite speedy with just about everything that I've thrown at it and seems almost as fast as my MacPro tower that I use at my desk at work. With the speed of the core-duo cpu and the ready availability of tools like VirtualBox, I can play with just about any piece of software I would like to. I don't have time for computer gaming any more so that's not a limiting factor for me (we bought a PS2 a few years ago and that satisfies all of our gaming needs at the moment though I'm tempted by the PS3 for the bluray capabilities) and I use a pretty limited set of software for most of my work. I write my papers in emacs using LaTeX (which handles layout AND bibliography generation with BibTeX), draw vector things in Illustrator or Inkscape, do bitmap editing in GIMP, data analysis in Python, and—if forced to—can access Mickeysoft Word/Excel/PPT stuff in OpenOffice. As you can see, most of these are FREELY available multi-platform tools (Illustrator is the exception but you can get that for Mac or Win). I'll freely admit that I do use lots of Mac-specific apps like Pages (which is SO much better than Word!), iPhoto, iMovie, iTunes, Papers, and some LaTeX/BibTex "helper" tools that are written for MacOS but only for convenience sake and I actually know of (mostly) equivalent tools in the Win and Linux worlds so I could pretty easily switch and still be productive. But why bother when the Mac allows me to do EVERYTHING I need to do and I don't have to sweat as many viral/security issues as the poor Windoze users deal with.

In other news, last Monday was our 8th year wedding anniversary and we had a nice dinner out at a great local Indian restaurant and my wife bought me a new money clip (believe me, this is a good thing) and a 22" Samsung monitor that is gorgeous. So I'm one step closer to having a nice media jukebox and digital audio workstation in my study upstairs. The key component of that DAW/jukebox system is currently my old PowerMac G5.

The G5 was originally my desk machine at work from 2004 through 2009. I bought the MacPro to replace it and then moved the G5 to one of my students' rigs. Unfortunately, the poor G5 couldn't run our electrophysiology software, the camera controller/acquisition software, and our digital chart recording software all at the same time without completely choking. We replaced the G5 at the students' rig with a nice quad-core Windoze box because that's what the student was most comfortable with and that level of hardware was required to do everything in near real-time under windoze. Then the G5 was moved under the desk of one of the post-docs in the lab to serve as his main machine since he was tired of lugging his laptop in to work every day. That didn't work either—too slow for the immunoimaging work that he was doing, he said. Sooo, the poor rejected G5 is back in my hands. Hooked up to the new monitor, the G5 seems to run just fine for most web-browsing, Python coding, and LaTeX stuff so I'll use it for the things I typically do and my MacBook Pro can handle all the heavy lifting that I need to do for fancy graphics and data analysis.

Alright, off to clean the house, practice guitar, maybe get a nice motorcycle ride in, and then off to friends' for social bonding and blowing stuff up! :-)

Tech as ubiquity...

I now have an iPod touch (first generation bought used from a coworker), my CrackBerry, a netbook (little aluminum HP--very nice!) and a MacBook Pro (I should have purchased the MacBook). Most of the time I have most of those items along with me when I go to work, when I travel, etc. Actually, I don't USUALLY carry BOTH the netbook and the MacBook but I do carry around a fair amount of tech with me on a daily basis.

I'm pretty sure that most people don't need this much tech with them and, in fact, I would probably be fine with just the CrackBerry and the netbook 90% of the time. I have a surprising amount of available local connectivity in spite of the fact that I live in Cleveland. When I travel, it's amazing how easy it is to find open wireless connectivity at coffee shops, restaurants, hotels, etc. The tech I carry is pretty cheap (the netbook was $299 and the CrackBerry was $100 with a two year plan). This tech allows me to check my email, listen to music, do a little programming or data analysis, and catch up with my friends just about anywhere I go whenever I like. Having Google maps on the CrackBerry allows me to even figure out where I am and what's close at hand with amazing precision.

My point? None in particular. I'm just stunned by the ready availability and minimal expense of tech that I would have KILLED for 20 years ago. :-)

Weird 18 months

We have seen a number of friends and family pass away in the last 18 months. This has been very surreal for us as I can't recall a time in my life in which more people dear to me have died. So my mortality has been very much on my mind. While I am still grieving for my friends who have passed on, in general I feel numb. Most of these people have been far too young to pass away. One of my mentors at work (68), a colleague in the department (54), a good friend from church (47), a classmate from high school (43), and a little baby (9 months). All have had some impact on my wife and me.

I have been making efforts to live more in the moment: to "be here now" for the last 5 years and just be thankful for everything I have (both the material and immaterial) and everyone I value. I am not very good at telling people that I care about them or that I miss them but I DO care and miss them very much. Facebook has become a little lifeline to our family and friends for both my wife and me. It is definitely NOT the same as talking on the phone with our loved ones but neither of us is good at the "phone thing" unfortunately. What can I say? :-(

Python is GOOD!

I'm becoming a devotee of the programming language Python (www.python.org). I first heard about Python in the early 90's and wasn't too impressed because I was using awk and Perl for most of the script stuff that I needed to do to munge my data. Recently I was talking with a colleague whom I respect a lot and he kept pushing me to check it out again. So I started working through the tutorial that comes packaged with the code on a long road trip and was truly impressed with how easy it was to get usable programs up and running quickly. Then, last week, I was sent a link to a brand new issue of a major informatics journal that was entirely devoted to the use of Python in neuroscience. Okay, okay, I'm sold. So I'm diving into that when I'm not frantically busy with EVERYTHING else I need to do.

Heat wave!

Today it is supposed to be close to 60 degrees F here in Cleveland, Ohio. It feels very good and is a welcome change from the last two months of cold and snow.

In other news, my work continues to pile up and I'm having a difficult time with life-work balance. I will continue to work on this and get back to you. Sorry for the paucity of my updates of late.

Christmas? Already??

Wow, how time flies! I finished up with some major deadline crunches throughout November and, now, it's already the middle of December! I need to get my Xmas shopping done and get ready for some deadlines that I have in January. Also, I'm swamped by meetings or extracurricular activities almost every night of the week EXCEPT Friday! But so is my wife. :-( Crazy busy lives seem to be the norm these days. Ironically, I'm not feeling much stress related to the economic downturn. Go figure.

Ah the beginning of the cold time

Fall has fallen and winter is only a month away. Time for me to put away the motorcycle and drop back into the slow world of riding the train. :-( How I loathe the winter in Ohio.

I've been spending much more time thinking about and working on my guitar playing when I'm not dealing with the all-consuming mental focus of work. This is a busy time of the year for me as I'm working on grants for a Nov 1 deadline and getting ready for a big annual conference (though I'm not presenting much this year, admittedly). Not much exciting going on at home as we're both working far too much and have little time or energy when we get back to the little house.

I'll see if I can be more diligent about updating this blog.