Posted in Miscellaneous babble

Well, this is my first public blog entry. I've decided to hop on the blog bandwagon and see what the view is like. I'm normally not a very public person, and try to keep most of the things I do pretty low key, so this will be a bit of a departure for me.

Occasionally I'll post significant happenings on my web page, which I guess could be considered a rarely updated blog. Maybe once I get more into this blogging thing, I'll get around to updating my website more often. I don't expect there will be a great deal of activity here at first, so be patient. Plus I'm still learning how this software works.

Stay tuned...

An Associated Press article in today's Post and Courier grabbed my interested today. It's about a new airport passenger screening device that uses scattered x-rays to detect weapons and explosives.

Happy Birthday to Canada! Living in the US for the past 7 years, I've missed the Canada Day celebrations. Canadians aren't really known for being overly expressive in their patriotism and we're not big flag wavers like Americans are. But on July 1st of each year, everybody who admits to being Canadian does so proudly and loudly. And usually with much beer and partying.

Well, we've finally decided to take the plunge and make the move to Raleigh, NC. It meant turning down a very tempting offer to stay, but I think in the long run everything will work out. Moving is always a pain in the butt, but I'm looking forward to being up there once we get settled in.

Today I made my 46th blood donation. Maybe 48th, could be 50th. The number is a little fuzzy because I've forgotten how many donations I made while I was back home in Canada. I'm pretty sure it was 34. I remember being pretty close to getting the pin for 35 donations.

I've been a regular blood donor since about 1989 or so, with the exception of the three years I lived in Detroit. That was just because there wasn't a conveniently located donor center that I could find.

I go every 8 weeks (6x a year) and donate a pint of my AB+ blood. The people at the donor clinic love me because I'm AB+ and I have large veins. It gives me a good feeling to know that I'm helping someone out. And I get pop and cookies in return. Doesn't get much better than that if you ask me.

Have you donated blood recently? at all? If not, why not? you really should. What have you got to lose except a pint of blood that can be used by someone else?

It's summer, which means hot humid weather, lazy days trying to stay cool and plenty of sunshine. Summer also means it's hurricane season. So, while I'm out enjoying the summer weather and hanging out at the beach, I'm also keeping an eye on the weather (along with everyone else). Fortunately with hurricanes you always get a lot of advance notice, so there's plenty of time to prepare.

I hate moving. I've made 3 moves so far in my life, and i'm starting to get ready for my 4th. And each time, there's more and more Stuff to move. That's the nature of Stuff I suppose. It grows to expand your available space. Some Stuff is useful. Other Stuff just becomes Junk. And since I'm a bit of a packrat, some of my Stuff that should be Junk just ends up sticking around.

Well, turns out we won't be moving after all, and I won't be working at Duke this fall. The wife has been having such a good experience in the research lab she's in and seems to be clicking well with her mentor, so she's decided she wants to stick around. I suppose it's just as well. She's already established some connections with people here, and she thinks getting into med school here will be a little easier than in NC, even though there's more of a choice there.

Added a couple of CDs to my collection today. As a Canadian, I'm naturally a fan of The Tragically Hip. I happened to be browsing around the local Cat's Music waiting for the barber shop to open, and found Road Apples and Fully Completely in their 'Dog Pound' (used CDs) section. The price was right, ($6.50/CD), so i just had to grab them.

Ahhh, decent music for a change...

The CT scanner below my office was removed a couple of weeks ago, and now they're doing renovations on the room getting it ready for a new CT scanner. A few days ago they were doing some drilling through cement or something. Now it's some kind of repetitive hammering noise. Floor work or something perhaps. I don't know what they're doing down there, but it's loud and rattling my brain.

I think I shall be leaving work early today so I can escape this racket.

Made it to 174 000 miles on my 1991 Accord today. That means I've owned this car for 40 000 miles and just over 4 years. Car's holding up pretty well, aside from some body problems. Nowadays it doesn't get driven around nearly as much as when I first got it. Having to do a few major repairs every now and then, but that's to be expected as parts wear out. Eventually I'll have to replace it, but hopefully I'll be able to squeeze another 40 000 miles out of the car. I want to see this puppy roll over to 200 000 miles.

Last night on TCM, the wife and I were watching Grand Hotel. Apparently it was Greta Garbo day on TCM, but the wife just wanted to see who John Barrymore was.

It was an interesting movie about the lives of people living in a posh Berlin hotel. We both enjoyed the movie, but Casablanca still remains my all time favourite. Anything with Audrey Hepburn comes in a close second.

MCAT's over, and now the wife is relaxing before school starts on the 26th. Taking the rest of the week off and heading off to her parents' place to relax and veg out. They have a nice relatively secluded compound where we usually go at least once a month or so, depending on her schedule. The downside is that we usually end up doing all the cooking for everyone while we're there. But it's all right. We use them as guinea pigs for recipes we want to try out :)

The chicken wasn't the only thing that got smoked last week. After 4 days and as many hair washings, my hair still smells like BBQ smoke. When the wind blows from behind me, I smell BBQ and get hungry.

It was one of those days where you're trying to get something done that people are asking for yesterday, but you keep getting interrupted by people doing things that should have been done weeks ago. So, a task that probably should have taken 4 hours or so gets started late, and ends up taking about 6 hours to finish. Ugh.

A few weeks ago, the people that run the blood donor room at work held a little party to celebrate and thank people that donated blood over the past year. I got a small award for having 6 donations, which I thought was the most anyone could donate in a year.

So, much to my surprise, they were also honouring a small group who managed to squeeze in a 7th donation. Kudos to them, but I'm still trying to figure out how they got in a 7th donation. Donating every 8 weeks, the math says that 6 is as many as you can squeeze into a calendar year. Maybe their 'year' is longer than everyone elses...

Anyway, go donate blood and help someone out after you finish reading this.

Well, after a little bit of Google searching, I managed to figure out what that spider was.

First I started at the International Society for Arachnology page. The web was kind of orb-ish, so I clicked on the Orb web spiders page. Lo and behold, there was a picture of the spider, Argiope aurantia. This spider apparently goes by several aliases: Yellow Garden Spider, Black-And-Yellow Argiope, Golden Orb Weaver, Yellow Argiope, Writing Spider, Golden Garden Spider. According to this page, the spider should be mostly harmless. Sure doesn't look it.

So there you are. Yet another illustration of the power of the Internet :).

Just bought the new Terry Goodkind book, Naked Empire. Book 8 of the Sword of Truth series. Looking forward to giving this one a read.

Spent a lazy sunday afternoon watching another one of my favourite Audrey Hepburn movies, Roman Holiday. I like these lazy afternoons. I've got an Excel programming project I really should be working on, but nothing beats a good Audrey Hepburn movie.

It's been a pretty rainy weekend, because of Tropical Depression Henri. But at least it's been nice and relatively cool. In a few more days, we'll see what Hurricane Irene has in store for the area.

September 11, 2001. It's one of those infamous days in human history where just about everyone can tell you exactly what they were doing when it happened or when they heard the news. Just like the Challenger disaster (January 28, 1986), or Columbia (February 1, 2003), or JFK (November 22, 1963). I wasn't around for JFK though.

I remember vividly what I was doing that day. It started off as a normal routine day, as it probably would have for anyone else. I had a couple of bone density units to survey that morning. I recall walking around the department, making my daily rounds. As I was finishing up, I happened to walk by one of the waiting rooms where for some reason everyone was clustered around the TV. It was a news report about how a plane had crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers. My first thoughts were "Holy crap. Bad bad accident".