danny’s space

Sitting on my backside all day trying to read reviews and papers to get an idea of what I’m meant to be writing in my introduction/literature review for the thesis.

One book open to my left about imaging intercellular transport, flicking to and from the references to track down a few cited papers in conjunction with Firefox and databases and the library website. A review in front of me, with other references being chased up on a completely different topic. Another book to my right with yet another topic and more references to look up. Find a reference, give it a quick skim, and find a few more references to look up from that paper.

For each 1 paper I read, I find another 10 to read. It’s fun chasing all these papers but if you never get to the end of the chase, the reading gets a bit tough. Very tough.

Snowballing comes to mind.

Why do they call it science a collaborative exercise if all people ever publish is successes? Very rarely in the literature do you find articles on artefacts or, *gasp*, failures. Unless of course you study the artefact/failure to bits and then maybe some obscure journal somewhere may publish it.

Even many of the successes that get published probably have some degree of artefactuality in them anyway. The big names can publish without much fear of reprisal because they’re so revered in the field. So many people worship these researchers and go with the flow that the O’ revered ones can probably get away with saying ludicrous things like plants actually dance around at night when no-one is watching.

I think general scientific collaboration would be greatly improved if people talked about failures. Since 90% of molecular biology experiments are failures, there will be plenty to publish. This way, not only can honours students actually publish stuff, but scientists can learn from others’ mistakes so that the same bleeding mistake doesn’t have to be repeated in hundreds of labs across the world, wasting everyone’s time and money.

I say set up the Journal of Failures and Artefacts (abbreviated to J. F. Art. for obvious toilet humour reasons) and let the papers roll in. Let’s learn from the mistakes of others - who knows, perhaps we’d have a cure for cancer and AIDS already if people actually published failures.

For the past week the Optusnet cable connection has been intermittently dropping out at the most inopportune times, like when I’m submitting a database search or an article request.

Finally had enough and called Optus tech support (twice, mind you), only to be told (twice) that the problem was on my computers and that I may have spyware. Pfft. They nonetheless detected “anomalies” on the network, but there was no problem with my nearest neighbour who was also using Optus cable, so they figured the problem must be on my end. They told me to “monitor” the situation and to call if it got “really bad”, and were “sorry [they] couldn’t do anything more”. Right.

But then a dig through the cable modem log file (192.168.100.1) came up with many entries marked Critical, Warning, Error, and even one Emergency.

************ 5-Warning D520.2 DHCP Attempt# 9 BkOff: 5s Tot DSC:9 OFF:3 REQ:3 ACK:1
************ 3-Critical D1.0 DHCP FAILED - Discover sent, no offer received
************ 5-Warning D520.2 DHCP Attempt# 7 BkOff:11s Tot DSC:7 OFF:2 REQ:2 ACK:0
************ 3-Critical D2.0 DHCP FAILED - Request sent, No response

My problem? Yeah, right.

So anyway, it’s working now obviously since I’m posting. No problems so far tonight. I changed the MTU setting on the Linksys WRT54G v5.0 router to manual 1450 instead of the automatic 1500 after Googling the problem. Some users found 1450 works better; the recommended range is between 1200 and 1500 for cable. Don’t know if it’s because of the new MTU setting or because Optus finally fixed itself up.

Internet speed, of course. If you’re one of those geeks who like nothing better than to prove your manhood by your internet connection speed (not saying I’m one of them…), www.ozspeedtest.com provides a few benchmarking tools to test your Australian and international internet access speeds.

But of course, if you were one of the geeks, you probably knew this already.

My speed is an emasculated 640KB/s.

Even the SMH has taken on this topic that seems to be plaguing every man and his dog in today’s society.

Check out the Frankenstein replies on time-saving tactics. Everything from changing your pants while driving (as in moving, not stopped at a red light), weeing on your feet in the shower to avoid tinia (is this true?), eating while umm egesting, and of course moving away from Sydney. No doubt more interesting replies to come.

Public transport (as expected) is posted as a major time waster. I probably spend 2-3 hours a day dealing with Cityrail and State buses - dealing with and not ‘on’ because most of the time is spent waiting for the damn thing to arrive. Why must buses come in packs of 6? Are they beers? Why must trains terminate at Lindfield? Why must the air conditioning be switched off on trains during the summer but work perfectly well in the winter? (Okay the last one wasn’t about time, but it sure makes a train trip feel longer.)

Was making a mini-seminar Powerpoint on my whole honours project, and what did that annoying paperclip say to me? The gall of Microsoft…

Thanks for rubbing it in.

It sounds even better when an HP tech support dude from India says it.

So the HP Photosmart 3110 multifunction printer we got at the end of last year has been screwing up on and off, especially with the paper feed. You need to entice the printer to take up paper by patting it gently and saying kind words to it. So I gave HP support a call a few months ago, and they recommended physically cleaning the paper rollers from the back of the printer with a cloth, and then doing this media sense calibration thing. That fixed the problem, for about 1 print. Then I couldn’t be bothered calling them up again until this week.

Gave them a call, quoted the reference number from before, and they sent me this ‘paper pick pit’, also known as an ‘HP Paper Feed Cleaning Kit’. It’s basically a plastic tray with a rough patch at the end which you slot into the paper tray and it grinds the paper rollers thanks to the attached software. 24 minutes, loud grinding and a burning rubber smell later, the printer now picks up paper properly, hooray! No more error beeps when trying to print or copy. The photo shows the grinding area and the sanded-off bits of paper roller. Funky. Who would have thought they’d make these things. I guess it’s cheaper than replacing the whole printer, which by the way HP was willing to do if this paper pick kit didn’t do anything. HP support rocks. Too bad the calls are rerouted to India.

That basically means what does your personality have to do with your blood type. I’ve always held the theory that your blood type is correlated with your personality, albeit loosely. Maybe it’s like one of those horoscope things - like when you read a description and think, “Hey yeah, I’m like that!”

So anyway my theory, from looking at family and friends whose blood types I actually know, is this (generalisations and hyperboles here!):

A - angry and stressed
B - more relaxed, easygoing
AB - narky, wound up
O - the miscellaneous group

Turns out, thanks to Angela’s web hunting, that other people, especially the Japanese, have looked into this as well. Check out this site and also this one.

Basically, their descriptions are:

A - stressed, conscientious, perfectionists
B - relaxed, unconventional, strong minded
AB - unpredictable, set own conditions, trustworthy, Anime villains
O - average, sociable

So, what does your blood type say about you?

In the interest of wasting time while writing up my thesis… here are some more Flash games I like.

Unreal Flash - yes, it’s like UT but Flash and 2D. Fun but sometimes laggy.
Chaos Faction - like Super Smash Bros on Nintendo consoles, too bad it’s only single player vs CPU.
Champion Archer - shoot arrows at stick figures.
Weapon Fire - not as corny as it sounds; a side-scrolling shooting game.
Territory War - turn based side-scrolling combat game.
Flash Craft - tower defence based loosely on Warcraft 3.
Clash n Slash - arcade game where you shoot alien spaceships. Yes, fun!
Thing Thing 3 - fast-paced side-scrolling shooter. Also check out 1 and 2, they were easier to beat.