Ben Folds Five is bad for you

or maybe just for me. I like to listen to iTunes at work, since I can tap into other people's music collections and listen to the radio as well. However, I absolutely have to stop listening to Ben Folds Five. I love it, but I end up crying hysterically at this one particular song (okay, and not so hysterically to many, many other songs), Smoke. It's a beautiful melody but something about it just gets me. So work went well today, as you all can probably tell. At least no-one was there to see me a teary, mucusy mess.

I'm back home now, watching the first episode of Heroes, 2nd season. There's this weird channel that we get called G4 tv, that is definitely geared to adolescent boys that play lots of video games. They actually have shows where they review video games, but they also re-run StarTrek episodes, so we actually record a lot off of this channel. And they run this thing called the Spock Market on their website, where you buy stocks (with play money, not real) like Dilithium Mining, and Red Shirt. The value of the stock is determined by the demand for it, and by events that occur in Star Trek re-runs that they link up with. So, if you own James T. Kirk stock, and he does something to save the day, your portfolio increases in value, but if he gets court-martialed, the value tanks. D & I used to play at night when we were going to bed (the show aired around 11 p.m., so it coincided well with bed-time), and I got pretty good at it. I'm not very risk-tolerant though, so I'd often sell before a stock peaked. I'm not sure if they still run this, I'll have to check, but it's been a few years since I've played, so it might now be defunct.

I'm waiting for water to boil, so that I can scald tomatoes, and make more sauce for the freezer. I also have to roll out cookies & get to use my cookie cutter collection :)

I did get a good amount of work done tonight. It's never as much as I hope I will get done, but it was a fair amount & I'm glad that I went. I have about 1/2 of my last VTA case to re-analyze, and 1 full SNc case, and then I'll just have to go back and re-analyze a 3rd time on a few sections , and I might be done with this project. Unfortunately, I think I'm losing my effect from this re-analysis, and so the paper will probably not be re-submitted, and about 3 years of work will really be down the drain. But better that than re-submitting several times and wasting any more time.

To make up for the depressing results of this work, I also analyzed some of my images for my thesis project. This is slow going, because I have to capture serial images off of 5 consecutive ultrathin (~65 nm) sections in order to determine if any particular terminal is labeled enough to be included in my dataset. So far, I'm not losing the effect that I got preliminarily, so that looks promising. (Sorry, I'm boring everybody with science data. I'll try to keep some of that off this blog).

I think I'm also going to take a webcourse in Statistics. I can never really find the class that I want at Pitt, but this directly addresses Mixed Linear Models, which is usually what ends up being applied to my stuff. Anyway, there's a $400 course over the internet that I think I will take even if I can't the credits to apply to my degree requirements. I actually like statistics a lot, and can do pretty well with the SAS programming if I keep up with it, so I'd like to develop these skills a little bit, and make myself a little more desirable to a wider range of employers.