DISQUS

I'm going to be replacing my Macbook Pro soon, probably with another one. I've had this one for almost three years, it has served me well, and has taken quite a bit of abuse. I even dropped it in a swimming pool once, and i had my old power adaptor catch fire right on my desk because of that design flaw where the low voltage side of the magsafe plug frays where it goes into the brick. Electrical tape is holding it together now.

Great video, Gary, and an excellent musical selection. I very much liked the effort you went through to sync the shots of the animals to the lyrics right around the 1:45 mark.

Did you get to see any of the cool termite mounds in the southern part of the park?

Inconceivable!

You're planning a trip to Sumatra? I know you're not a coffee drinker, but I believe that in this case, you need to indulge. Go for freshly roasted right off the tree!

Matt,

I dug through Gary's archives to find a post that answers your question. Hopefully this covers everything you want to know.

http://everything-everywhere.com/2008/03/03/tra...

Wow, a blast from the past!

One other thing I noticed when I did the UK by myself last summer was the amount of crap that I got from Customs officers. Single white guy travelling by himself meant a lot of questions like 'do you travel by yourself often, sir?' 'did you meet anyone on your trip, sir?' I was always the guy holding up the customs line while the officer thumbed through my passport looking for suspicious country stamps.

Actually, the California Roll is not American, it's Canadian. Chef Tojo, of Tojo's Restaurant in Vancouver, is its creator. I ate there last year. Blew my mind.

http://www.tojos.com/

how as the movie?

I figured you'd be cold. When you mentioned seeing snow in old episodes of M.A.S.H., I immediately thought "What you mean was, you remember Radar and Hawkeye huddled around a wood stove, and entire episodes revolving around the theft of mittens."

If it makes you feel any better, it's -14 C outside right now, and we got 45 cm of snow yesterday.

Gary, I can think of worse things to do than sit around in Hawaii and eat junk food. Enjoy your vacation from your vacation.

Gary,

I don't think lighting was your biggest issue with SPS corals. You had flow issues, and I don't think you were dosing a calcium or a carbonate additive, or running a calcium reactor. SPS corals are huge consumers of those two things. With your lighting, you should have at least been able to keep SPS corals near the top of your reef.

I keep some species of SPS corals (montipora and pocillopora) under regular normal output fluorescent lights, and they do fine. They aren't all that colourful because they aren't creating great gobs of UV inhibiting pigments, but they grow.

Bah. Here comes the obligatory "when I took labs" statement. When I did my degree, I had SIX courses per week. They ALL had THREE hour labs, plus three hours of course work. Some of them even had mandatory tutorials.

This of course all changed in my last year, when I did my thesis. Cleverly, I had taken all of my lab courses in the previous years, so I "only" had 18 hours of class time a week, mostly graduate seminar classes (because I was doing an honours degree). I forgot about the fact that I'd be in a lab every other waking minute working on projects for the thesis. It even got to the point where I was missing class to work in the lab. That was crazy.

Oh, and once the second year chem labs start, every lab requires a 10 page or so write up. Every week.