15 February 1998

8 January 1998

I talked to a sales rep over at Pixera. They make a digital camera which takes a megapixel image for less than $1200 - a remarkable price. So I asked how big the pixel array is, and it certainly did not have a million pixel resolution, only about a third of that. The rep told me that 4 shots are taken, and they are interpolated. I figured out that the pixels weren't being interpolated half as much as they were being intercalated between each other. Kind of like taking 4 quadrat samplings to increase the range. She was a little taken aback, and said that I should be working for them! Real ego booster.

I hope that tomorrow is a good day to play volleyball (and that people can stir themselves out of the holiday lethargy to actually play). Sort of clears the cobwebs in my head.

6 January 1998

This takes the cake. I already knew the gruesomely lazy things that a car culture oriented person will do in Texas: like driving to the gym just around the corner to exercise on the Stairmaster. Today I saw a pizza delivery boy drive across the street (a distance of no more than 40 meters) to deliver a pizza and come back. First of all, I wonder why the person even bothered to order the pizza to be delivered, and then this. Euwww...I don't think I will ever get inured to this.

On a different note, I am in search of an ftp client that will upload whole directories of files, but at the same time, will only process files of a certain criterion. For example, uploading a whole bunch of JPG files, but keeping the directory structure intact, without uploading or affecting other kinds of files. Got any ideas?

5 January 1998

Fun Stuff. I wrote another essay about the upcoming Microsoft Office 98 fo the Mac. Added some new pictures to the Picture Album. I am amazed at the size of this website: it is over 6 megs in size now! I used to think I couldn't fill up 2 megs. I guess I should implement a search feature soon. Going through almost a mg of total genomic DNA from Dicty; nothing like blitzkrieg biochemistry.

4 January 1998

In a conversation with another postdoc the other day, we culled up some interesting thoughts. Mammalian cells will arrest their cell cycle when the cytoskeleton is disrupted with the usual drugs like taxol and colcemid (which overstablize and destabilize the microtubule array respectively). Is there some communication pathway between the nuclear division process and the cytoskeletal processes? Obviously, in the case of mulnucleate cells like megakaryocytes, it is possible to uncouple the two processes. Two possiblities: either there is a component that is activated upon disruption which arrests the cell cycle, or there is an essential component that is not activated if the cytosolic condition isn't just right. Could there be an experiment to test this? Has one already been devised?

ps. this is my first try at using stylesheets to control the appearance of the web pages. if this works, it should be fun to add it to other pages.

3 January 1998

Whew! Another year, another renovation. I'll explain more later, right now, the links are in place, and I encourage you to explore. Check out the photos in the Picture Album or the links in ClickStreams. More to come, I promise.