.the gpb kids.

PMB Halloween Party

Posted by Jules - October 31, 2008 at 11:10:46 pm

So we had our dept Halloween Party today, and there was a costume contest. 3 of us decided to be a “Ferrous Wheel” because we though it would be very punny (ehehe) with our Fe2+ (ferrous iron). So half an hour before the party, we made big cardboard raindrops with Fe2+ written in glitter glue, and when our turn came about, we linked arms and spun round and round to be the “wheel”. People seemed to enjoy our joke, and we almost won. The group that beat us out was a production put on by this entire lab. They were all parts of a gigantic magnetotactic bacteria. They obviously put in way more effort than us. So I was surprised by how much applause we got. I think they liked that we danced around in a circle. But next year… we shall totally own them.

CNR Nostalgia

Posted by Mike - October 29, 2008 at 12:10:17 pm

This short video made me really nostalgic for Berkeley and the College of Natural Resources. This girl looks like she followed a similar routine as me. Class, work at the Botanical Garden, study, hang out. I even recognize the bus driver.

Ah memories.

Cloning an array in JavaScript

Posted by Mike - August 15, 2008 at 02:08:12 pm

This frustrated me for like an hour today. The problem is that in JavaScript, arrays are treated like objects and are referenced when you really want to clone them. See embed.

Iphone blogging

Posted by Mike - August 8, 2008 at 11:08:07 am

Trying out the wordpress app.

I took it! And so should you

Posted by Mike - July 29, 2008 at 08:07:16 am

That is all.

An apple a day…

Posted by Mike - May 25, 2008 at 02:05:43 pm

Recently I’ve been purchasing all kinds of Apple products. I used to be a PC guy. I had nothing against Macs, I just wanted to play games, something Macs still don’t do very well straight out the box. My newest Apple product is the AppleTV. I like it well enough but there are some things that bug me.

It has Flickr integrated into it, but I can’t sign in to my account. I’d like to be able to stream all of my friends’ most recent photos. I’d also like to be able to see my contacts’ private photos that I would normally have access to.

Also, it would be cool if you could use it as a second monitor.

Oh well, I guess it works fine to rent and stream tv shows and movies. Pfft.

Burgers, Darts, and What Have Yous

Posted by Jules - May 21, 2008 at 11:05:39 am

Yay, I’m back after cave status for awhile. Yesterday, my class finished a written test for our last required class ever. To celebrate, we all headed over to Devin’s apt, had a barbecue, chilled out, and played some Bang! One game took quite awhile, but it was fun. His place is so amazing~ I want a lemon tree!

Afterwards, we all headed out to Albany Bowl, but the wait was 30 min to an hour because of all the league bowlers! We decided to head out to Albatross instead to play darts. I was pretty horrible at first~ the darts didn’t even make it to the board! Though they did make it everywhere else- bouncing back to my feet, sticking in the carpet, the posters underneath the dart board, the wall… BUT I got way better as we played more games. Candice and I kicked butt in the end! We got 3 bulls eyes pretty early on! And consistently hit the high numbers. That was awesome. It probably helped that we were the two completely sober DDs in the group. But hey~ Playing darts also demonstrated yet again how truly nerdy we were. We changed our team names every round on the scorekeeping chalkboards. Matt, Devin and Emily called themselves MeSA (hormone that instigates plant defense, among other things). We (Candice, Josh and I) combated by calling ourselves SABP2, the esterase that cleaves MeSA. They counteracted with MeSA +SA, which we countered with SABP2 + JA (jasmonic acid antagonizes SA plant defense). And so the cycle goes.. We are nerdy… yeah…

So all in all, I spent around 12 hours straight with these guys. And I have to say that I love hanging out with my class~ you couldn’t find a better group of people who get along so well. We’re all so different, but we all mesh really well together. How lucky am I?

Yip Yips at Wondercon 2008

Posted by Mike - February 25, 2008 at 08:02:00 am

Stan invited me to go to Wondercon with him this year in one of his Yip Yip costumes. The first thing we did was go the costume contest Saturday night where we did a short skit similar to the telephone one seen on Sesame Street. We didn’t have anyone filming for us, but maybe I can find us on Youtube later. It was pretty simple, we didn’t have any audio clip to give to the coordinators so we just yipped loudly. But we got a pretty amazing reaction from the audience. I couldn’t really see because I took my glasses off and the lights are shining toward you on stage, but they sounded pretty happy. I’m surprised they could even hear us actually. After our skit, we stumbled off stage (I almost missed the stairs). At the end of the night, the awards were announced and wouldn’t you know it, Stan and I got “Best Humorous.” He has the trophy on his desk at work. Maybe I can get him to take a picture of it.

On Sunday we went back for a couple of hours and walked the floor in costume for a short period. I have to say that the reaction people have toward the costumes is addictive. Everybody at least smiles when they see us and a lot of people want to take pictures with us. At sound points we would have a little group surrounding us with cameras. A few people has us pose in their booths and one website “interviewed” us. Most of the people knew who we were. I was surprised that both adults and children recognized us. Some, however, thought Stan (in blue) was the cookie monster.

The whole thing was very fun and addicting. If Jules and I didn’t have to make it back for a Joshua Bell concert I’m sure we would have walked the floor for a couple more hours. Yip yip yip.

Update: Stan posted the pictures at flickr. And here’s a video someone took of us backstage.

Weekend Fun

Posted by Mike - February 11, 2008 at 07:02:37 am

The weather was beautiful over the weekend. I’ve been spending a lot of my free time programming side projects but yesterday was so nice I had to take advantage. So I went on my first bike ride in a few weeks. My plan was to do the usual route: up Park to Snake and then take Skyline to Grizzly Peak and come down Centennial by the Lawrence Hall of Science and the Botanical garden. Then I usually either go around the UC Berkeley campus to see what’s new or go down Claremont straight home.

Yesterday, however, Skyline toward Grizzly was closed so I had to go the other way toward the Chabot science center, then come down from the hills and take 13 to Berkeley before going up to Grizzly. I didn’t mind though cause it was so nice out.

The new front tire I put on a few weeks ago feels really nice. My turns are much smoother now and the bike feels more in control. But I think I’m leaking oil. I noticed it dripping out the bottom whenever I came to a stop light.

I devoted most of the rest of the weekend to trying to get Imagemagick to work on OS X. After having no luck from the binary install I checked out this guy’s post on how to Install ImageMagick from Source on OS X Tiger and got it sorted out. I think problem I had was not having the OS X Developer Tools installed. I still got an error when installing the jpeg library but it seems to work anyway.

I also got SVN sorted out last night. Now everything is on Google Code. It wasn’t until after I put everything there that I found out Mediatemple provides SVN hosting as well. Poop.

Secrets of Movement

Posted by Mike - January 7, 2008 at 10:01:30 am

Jules and I thought this talk by Robert Full of UC Berkeley was pretty interesting. He’s doing research on feet.

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