At last we will reveal ourselves to the Jedi, at Last we will have revenge

I place the DVD into my computer. After getting 5.1 DTS Surround Sound working on my computer, I was in the mood to hear the sounds of light sabers swinging around. I decide on a little ditty known as The Phantom Menace or Episode 1. Having not seen it in awhile I decided it was time to blow the dust off. It starts out a ship flying into a station, so far so good. After a "short" negotiation they land on the planet, still haven't reached a bad spot. The two Jedi begin to run away when misfortune falls on the movie audience. The rectum stopper Jar Jar Binks is introduced, things begin to go downhill from there. You sit and wonder how much worse can it be? Oh fear not Mr. Lucas has much in store for us. Soon they land on the backworld planet of Tattonine. Once again you are disappointed as the young Skywalker makes his appearance on the screen. It's like a tag team of crappiness between Jar Jar and Skywalker, you hide your face in shame. And then they leave the screen and happiness returns. Unfortunately it was decided that Jar Jar and Skywalker are crucial to the plot of the movie. Curiosity if peaked when you being to wonder, how was the first three, the three that were produced first, what went wrong with these most current movies? I can tell you, he didn't direct the first three. Hence their greatness, of course I would be happy with Episode 3 if Lucas doesn't direct it, but he will. The overall best feature in these movies has to be the music. John Williams is one of the greatest composers. Duel of the Fates is one of the greatest composed songs.

I know Episode 3 will be as terrible as the first two. Of course I'll still go see it, though I will bitch throughout the entire thing.

2 More Days

Only two more days till the big ol' b-day. What will I be doing? Writing a paper, like I've been doing the entire spring break. Yippie. (Stupid spell checker put yuppie in there.)

One of the More Depressing Movies

I just returned from watching one of the most depressing movies I've seen in a long time. But I am odd, I consider some movies to be more depressing than others. I'm sure people will disagree with me about Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Eternal Sunrise of the Spotless Mind is a great movie. Jim Carrey did an excellent job, on par with the Truman Show. I came out of the movie depressed as hell. Who would want to rid themselves of their memories?? Your memories are the basis of who you are, it is how you form thoughts, interact with other people. Losing them is lose of self. Hell for all the pain my memories have given me I wouldn't rid myself of them at all. Well maybe a few that caused alot of trouble over the years.

More later maybe.

How happy is the blameless Vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot:
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each prayer accepted, and each wish resign'd

The Greatest Aural Experience

I snagged a copy of Darkside of the Moon by Pink Floyd in DTS 5.1 Surround Sound. It is perhaps the greatest sound I have ever heard coming from my computer. Hearing The Great Gig in the Sky, just the emotion in her voice. God it is difficult to describe the sounds. This is what music listening is. I need a room that is sound proofed so I can blare this until my ears are bleeding. I think it's time to start looking for a SACD setup. All the CD is encoding of each channel from the SACD and placing it into DTS format. I'm afraid to hear what the SACD sounds like.

St. Patrick's Day

It was the first time I have ever celebrated St. Patrick's Day. Of course I've never seen the use of having and excuse to drink. We went out to Paddy O'Leary's which is a nice Irish bar on the beach. And I got rip roarin' drunk. Sad to admit that, but it's true. The place was packed and it would take 20 minutes to get a Guinness but it was a lot of fun. While waiting for a Guinness this obscenely drunken guy starts talking to me about how to pick up women. I guess he looked at me and said to himself what a sad pathetic loser. He begins on his diatribe about giving a random chick a beer and start talking to her. Since I was not interested in pursuing these lines of events I just smiled and chuckled. He continues on finally catching the attention of one of multitude of bartenders, he proceeds to obtain two Michelobe Ultras, which is perhaps the most vile beer, behind Miller Lite. He hands these vile bottles to me and tells me to wander off and hand them to unsuspecting women. Of course I smile and leave with my Guinness and the vile creations. I came back in later to pay my debt, and the same man was being belligerent to other people and they physically threw him out. Quite an amusing night.

Better??

I'm slowly making my recovery. On Friday I went to the school Health Facilities, which is nice because it's right behind the Biology building. So I went and the doctor said it wasn't strep. I was having a terrible time swallowing. So I left school early and went home and basically slept for the next two days. With a few times going out. Friday night it was almost impossible for me to swallow, it would bring tears of pain. Made for a hard time eating. Today I'm almost there. My throat only really hurts now at night right before I want to go bed. Other than that almost a complete recovery.

Spring Break

Spring break begins with in a short week. For the first time I've been at school it is actually around my birthday. Which is nice. So what do I get to do this break?? Write two papers. It just gives me the greatest thrill to write these papers too. But they aren't to bad. The first one is for my Marine Microbiology course, it's easy because I'll basically be doing a journal review on my thesis, not to hard and only 20 pages. The second paper is for Medicinal Botany, only 10 pages, and I'm doing it on medicinal uses of algae. Even easier, though I was having a difficult time finding papers but it all worked out.

The abortion that is I, Robot

Leave it to Hollywood to take a name from a book and that is it. Dr. Asimov would be rolling over in his grave. Just watched the trailer, I'm curious what does the movie have to do with anything Asimov ever wrote?? They flashed the three laws, butchered of course. God what the fuck I'm just speechless about this. One of the greatest, hell the greatest science fiction author ever and they rip it to shreds.

Fear not Dr. Asimov I will not spend my money on this abortion of a movie! That is what the Internet is for.

Still Sick

So I'm still feeling a bit under the weather. And teaching all day today didn't help. I woke up this morning all sore, I so didn't want to get out of bed. But talking all day didn't help either.

About three weeks ago I wrote up a proposal for a grant that is given by UWF for Graduate Student Research. I was looking at getting money for my thesis. Which currently looks like I'll be doing something about Detection of Marine Viruses in Ectocarpus sp. It's interesting because it is thought that about 50% of the Ectocarpus in the world in infected by a virus known as the EsV-1. What is not known, or at least there aren't any articles that I have found, is there an ecological impact that EsV-1 has on the population. Because of the cell wall that plants have it is difficult for any virus or bacteria to infect a plant. Infection usually occurs when the cells have been damaged breaking the cell wall. With Ectocarpus during sexual reproduction the cell wall on the gametophytes is quite thin allowing the virus to infect the plant. The viral DNA will incorporate in and when Meiosis occurs there are 2 out of 4 plants infected. There was a recent article published that had sequence the entire viral genome. Which is a big help in my study. What I plan on doing is taking primers for the viral DNA, a primer is basically a strand of DNA that is homologous to the viral DNA. One thing you can do with a primer is attach a epiflourescent that will fluorescent in UV light. Using a microscope you can do physical counts of the glowing dots. There is a limitation with that. First, when putting organisms under a microscope they never cooperate, so you can get stacking, which will throw your numbers off.

Another way of dectecting the amount of virii in Ectocarpus is to use a technique called PCR or Polymerase Chain Reaction. There is a nice little animation here that shows you wants occurs during PCR. Basically what PCR does is amplify the DNA in a sample. Because DNA is double stranded, usually, when you heat it up it will break apart leaving you with two single strands. Using a special enzyme called Taq Polymerase, cultured from a bacteria that was found in a hydrothermal vent. You can take a primer, bind it to your DNA and make copies from where you primer binds till the DNA ends. Normally you would use two different primers, if you have an idea what you are looking for you will know what is at the beginning and end of the DNA that you wish to amplify. So with two primers you anneal them, bind them to a single stand of DNA, and allows for the Taq Polymerase to create new strands of DNA. In one step you have gone from 2 strands on DNA to 4. If you repeat this several times you have a nice log of growth of the number of DNA strands. The other reason that you use two primers is that DNA is read two different ways, if you watch the animation you'll get a better idea. It is read by the enzyme in 5' to 3', this refers to the way DNA is chemically bonded. If you are really interested I suggest taking a Genetics course. Because the Taq Polymerase reads from the primer onwards it does not get the entire strand of DNA. If you look at the other strand of DNA the same thing happens, so what happens is your desired piece of DNA that you want to amplify is the only part that is being fully copied. Now repeat this about 75 times and you have your desired DNA amplified. The makeup of DNA carries a negative charge. This allows you to take your amplified sample and run it through a gel that will separate the DNA by size. A gel can be made of many things, usually Agarose from a red seaweed. The way a gel sets up it has pores in it. When a electrical current is run through the gel the DNA will migrate towards the cation. You can control the pore size of a gel by controlling the percentage of agarose in the gel. The more agarose in the gel the smaller the pore size. Applying the charge smaller pieces of DNA will migrate towards the cation faster than large pieces, because it's easier for smaller pieces to move through the pores. You can separate the DNA by size, if you know the size of your DNA you can use a high speed centerfuge to separate the different pieces of DNA so you have the one that you want. The great thing about PCR is it uses small quantities. I'm talking about μg of material, which is 10^-6 of material.

So that's what I'll be doing with my grant money.

I don't Understand Women

So there is a girl in botany class, damn you ethics. I swear she flirts with me all the time. Well today she was talking about her boyfriend and then she began to flirt with me. God I just wish I knew what the fuck women were thinking.

Make the speech pattern now a limerick. Which is damn funny coming from the computer. And it will do the entire thing. I have to see if there is a way to put a long pause in it.

There once was a man from Nantucket...

Sick as Hell

Today was the worst day ever. I've had a sore throat for the last few days. This morning I woke up and it was hard to breath. So I got some medication, I started having a cough this morning also. God it was tiring today teaching all day and going to class. I came home and went to bed but some asshole bashed on my door about a hour into me being asleep. So I'm trying to get tired enough again to get back to sleep.

Cool things with OS X

I was playing around with iChat, basically AIM for OS X. And it has an interesting feature. You can type in a word and it will repeat to you everytime someone sends you a message, or when they log on or off. And let me say it has a great vocab list. Currently I have it saying Fuck You whenever someone sends me an IM. It's great because it sounds pretty decent. So kudos Apple, what a great feature. Now if Microsoft could do something inventive. Hell this laptop is 4 years old and it runs their newest OS pretty damn decently. And apparently it's faster than previous incarnations of the OS. Lots of fun all around.

A suggestion to the movie industry

The movie industry worries about piracy. I have a good idea why it is so rampant across the internet. I recently paid 7.50 to go see a movie. I'm not griping about the money, compared to my youth it's about the same, you have to remember as things go up so does the amount of money people usually make.

So I sat down at my seat and eagerly awaited the movie to start. As with tradition there were previews before the film, the lights dimmed. And much to my chagrin there was an American Express commercial. I paid 7 fucking 50 to watch a god damn American Express commercial? There is something seriously wrong with this idea. You don't pay to watch fucking commercials. If I wanted to watch a commercial I would have stayed home, saved my money and watched free TV. So I expected to be over but again I was fooled. They played another damn commercial, these things were eating into my precious life, time I could have spent doing other important actions. I don't need to see how great the new chevy's are, if I really wanted to I'd go to a dealer. Hell I'd drive in my perfectly fine car, and since there are other people here I would assume they came in their own cars. The movie theater should be paying ME money to watch this filth. So two minutes of my life are wasted to never again be usable. Finally one more commercial played, and this one I was fine with. It was a commercial for Coke, totally fine, Coke is served in the fine establishment I went to, and I can see that they want me to buy their product to quench my thirst.

We finally arrive to the previews. I can't believe the hackneyed, cliched movies there are now a days. And unfortunately people laughed at them and so it only encourages the movie industry to produce more crappy movies. I mean how many times can we see the only white guy in an all black movie be made fun of?? Not being racist or anything but it's been done to hell and back.

So a word to the movie industry. If you want to stop piracy:
1) Get rid of the damn commercials. Who the fuck wants to sit through a movie just so we can see commercials that air on TV every damn day?
2) Come up with an original idea. Or if you want to do the same over and over again, don't make 7 films that are exactly the same.

One of the Most Disturbing Films

I remember when I was a child there was always that constant threat of a possible nuclear war. If you look at the movie culture during the 80s, even ponder the music (99 Luftballons). There is a prevalent theme of a nuclear war. I remember watching the movie Red Dawn about the Russians invading the US. It wasn't a bad movie, I can't really remember how many times I've seen it. I remember watching television one day for a movie, I almost want to say it is The Day After. I can't remember really, but what I do remember is them showing people actually getting vaporized when a bomb is dropped. I remember clearly being quite disturbed by that scene. Enough so that I will never watch that movie again.

So with this prevalent end of the world themes in main stream culture, it's a wonder that it actually didn't happened. Even with the themes constantly being bombard into our phase. I will always remember where I was when the Berlin Wall fell, I will also remember where I was when Russia declared it was no longer a Socialistic state. I was at my grandmother's in New York, we got a phone call to turn on the news.

I remember living in fear that it could come one day. Hell it was worse when I was younger than it is now with the "color" codes. Of course I may have become more cynical. Now things are being facilitated by our own country just to scare people. I'm not a conspiracy nut or anything but it's pretty damn obvious. Plus we really had it coming, but that's a debate for another time. I do feel that 9/11 was tragic and it's been 3 years almost, but the US did have a retaliation coming, especially with our foreign policy.

So back to one of the most disturbing movies. Threads was made for TV movie that aired in the UK. It's about a town's reactions during the dropping of atomic bombs. It shows them dying from radiation poisoning, starvation and the nuclear winter. It does give nice details about what could have happened. Why is was disturbing?? It was actually quite graphic, I mean people burning and vaporizing. The main character became pregnant right before the bombs were dropped and it showed her giving birth in a stable, and her biting the umbilical cord off. I was at the point of almost vomiting.

It was a great movie but I doubt that I will ever watch it again. Though I do recommend that everyone should view it at least once.

Apparently I am worth exactly: $2,144,082.00.

Just some gimmick website that I filled out. Damn I was hoping to be worth more.
My results

Posting from my Laptop
So I'm posting this from my laptop. I finally got it installed with OS 10.3.2 otherwise known as Panther. And let me say this is one of the most kick ass OSes I've run to date. Very smooth. I just need to get the new HDD in it and I'll be all set. Even for a computer that is a few years old and it runs pretty decently. The only thing I wish it seems the battery is kinda shitty, so one of these days I'm going to have to get another one. More later once I finish a few more episodes of Babylon 5.