All is Quiet on New Year's Day
I’ve never been the type of person who makes New Year’s resolutions. January 1 is only the first day of a month. Perhaps, August is the moment for your resolutions: you’re on holiday and in between two working periods. In a week I’ll be back in business and fully operative in the lab, although, as I’ve already written, I haven’t taken any break whatsoever despite promises and common sense. Because I worked in the lab on Christmas day, I don’t see I shouldn’t do the same on New Year’s day when, traditionally, whatever you do is likely to be done for the rest of the year. So, blogging and working are to continue for the remaining 365 days (as this is a leap year: hence, election year in the USA and Olympics).
For what concerns the blogging, there is a big news: my old computer is about to get a massive boost as I came across a guy from Florence who sold me two 256 MB SDRAM PC133 cards for less than 40€. Therefore, what is now a sluggish 64 MB infuriating non-sense, is to become a decent 512 MB beast, with positive consequences for the blog, of course. If not for its contents, at least for the stuff garnishing it (pictures, layout, etc.).
As I said, I went to visit my cells on Tuesday. In afternoon, of course, because, like any other normal guy in his twenties, my had been to a party to celebrate with noisy fireworks and lots of champagne the new year. Did I enjoy it? Well, it was better than the previous 6 ones, but what I really liked was me solitary walking back home at 2:00 am (arriving 45 minutes later) from the party, through the entire centre of a city in a sort of after-party, hung over condition, with several people going home happy and drunk, wandering through the hospital buildings, trying to avoid noisy people (successfully, as I know my city very, very well), listening to melancholy songs of the Interpol. That was awesome!
In fact, although they are all fibroblast, the two mutant lines, predictably, are as fragile as hand cut Bohemian crystal vases, in the sense that the moment they reach 100% confluence, they begin to quickly detach themselves. CS-A lacking ones (I’ll explain this soon), in particular, should be handled like Hannibal Lecter…
Mind you, I think I couldn’t have chosen two better things to do to start the year. Oh, and there is a third thing: last year, this was an awful period, being busy preparing exams, but I none the less managed to post regularly even staying up late at night. It was a good habit, because this has always been the calmest occasion for recollecting my thoughts as everybody sleeps. That’s why I’m posting when it’s 1:30 am here. I'm on holiday, apparently...
A 32-bit operating system can use up to 4 GB of RAM. A modern desktop box with less than 2 GB low-latency RAM isn't much fun. If you have Microcrap Vista installed, the upgrade/Service Pack is re-installing WincrapXP.
Uncle Al's modestly obsolete Athlon FX-55 (ABS Computers; custom build, fantastic price) calculated pi to 2.1 million decimal places in 5.95 seconds (much faster than downloading). It is now Linux crunching geometric parity divergence of the benzil crystal lattice, 78 atoms/unit cell. I'll have it to 40,000 A radius in 33 days. The box is 100% dedicated to that one calculation. (In WincrapXP it would be 46 days. Ha ha ha.)
A craftsman above all deserves good tools. Don't let your grasp be limited by your reach.
You see, 512 MB from two 256MB SDRAM PC-133 is the highest amount of memory my 10-years-old Asus motherboard supports. I know it doesn't sound like a massive improvement, but it would be like getting a brand new desktop for me, having spent the last 2 years with XP SP1 "powered" by 64MB RAM. At the moment, though, I have added another 64MB card I borrowed from the computer I work with at the university...
Frankly, I look forward to receiving my new cards (most likely on Monday) as badly as I am curious to know the results of your EXPERIMENT.
By the way, I know about Microsoft troubled child, code-named Vista and its much healthier, older bro XP (service pack 3 is already better than Vista expected SP1). Still, Linux is perfect and democratic and very, very cool, but it still is for people who don't mind spending a lot of time in front of a computer. Oh, and Apple laptops are too coochy coo, if you know what I mean.
The parity calorimetry experiment should have been opposite parity single crystal 27 paired runs aligned N-S, then 27 more E-W, then a day of calibration runs on recemic powdered benzil. What I got was one day, six runs, and four calibration runs (3.5% precision vs. OEM 0.1 %). Two of the six parity runs were garbage data.
The calibration powder was finely crushed single crystals, half mass each space groups P3(1)21 and P3(2)21, grown from recrystallized solute. I suspect it was pretty good benzil.
So... I thank the volunteer for efforts expended. I'm looking for a DSC vendor 40-50 degees latitude who would like hardware fresh off the production line to be exquisitely calibrated at 95 C - with a 50% chance of sustained worldwide publicity for having done it. After eight years, what's another year?