ever wondered what it's like to ride on the back of my scooter ?
Saturday, February 24, 2007
The Decembrists, La Maroquineire, Paris, Feb 22
Voila a photo of the decembrists show taken with my phone ! can't see much I'll admit, but maybe you get an idea of how cosy it was. The maroquineire (nice jukebox on web site) is a great small venue, 500 people tops, up in Menilmontant, in the 20th arrondissement, many nice funky little bars near. But back to the show, most of the time I was mesmerized, the lead singer's voice sounded so much like the one on the album ! Of course, but he does have a very particular voice. fell in love with the drummer (as wilco says) who looked like one of the guys from the little house on the prarie with the vest and the beard. In the end I even decided I might check out their last album, especially for the Shankill Butchers song. Of course they played the legionnaire song, since it talks about Paris, getting a few cheers from the audience (a good fraction american college students). They finished up the show (the last of the european leg) by inviting the opening band (with their ~1 yr baby with baby headphones on!) and singing a perfect rocking cover of "feel like making love" by Bad Company, with accordeon too.
This is the venue where I saw one of the concerts that is in my top ten list of best concerts ever: Wilco at the maroquinerie....
early Spring in Paris, little flowers with a grey sky
it was unseasonably warm for a few days, the flowers started to bloom. now it's cold again. the flowers might freeze and we wont have fresh fruit, what will april in paris by like this year ? OK, go out and get some of those fluorescent lightbulbs, to begin (you know australia is phasing out all old lightbulbs ?).
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
squids ! (and octopi)
check out these videos:
this one is of a huge squid filmed by japanese researchers, like many deep ocean fish it glows in the dark.... news @ nature.com - Squid vid shows swimming surprise - Pictures from the depths reveal luminous and speedy animal..
the national geographic has a cool video of an octopus meeting a shark... and one passing through a very small hole, there are some advantages to having no bones !
Video: Giant Octopus Battles Shark
Video: Octopus Escapes Through One-Inch Hole
more about squids and octopus :
wildlife museum of sidney
of course there is a whole page only about octopus:
www.tonmo.com
and an octopus cartoon cooking show that looks pretty funny...
www.8legged.com
this one is of a huge squid filmed by japanese researchers, like many deep ocean fish it glows in the dark.... news @ nature.com - Squid vid shows swimming surprise - Pictures from the depths reveal luminous and speedy animal..
the national geographic has a cool video of an octopus meeting a shark... and one passing through a very small hole, there are some advantages to having no bones !
Video: Giant Octopus Battles Shark
Video: Octopus Escapes Through One-Inch Hole
more about squids and octopus :
wildlife museum of sidney
of course there is a whole page only about octopus:
www.tonmo.com
and an octopus cartoon cooking show that looks pretty funny...
www.8legged.com
Sunday, February 18, 2007
fun french music
a new song every week by the guys of beaubourg: la chanson du dimanche .
Beaubourg are actually a french/italian band. They use both traditional, tarantella-like italian music and french folk music, a lot of fun to dance to... and as long as I'm talking about fun fench music check out the page for Les Princes Chameaux. There's only three of them, but they make more noise than the legendary negresses vertes, (or last.fm link) and it's impossible not to dance and sing along. Ils sont ouf ! et sympa aussi. I guess the negresses vertes are a bit like what the Pogues are to ireland...
Beaubourg are actually a french/italian band. They use both traditional, tarantella-like italian music and french folk music, a lot of fun to dance to... and as long as I'm talking about fun fench music check out the page for Les Princes Chameaux. There's only three of them, but they make more noise than the legendary negresses vertes, (or last.fm link) and it's impossible not to dance and sing along. Ils sont ouf ! et sympa aussi. I guess the negresses vertes are a bit like what the Pogues are to ireland...
Friday, February 16, 2007
I put an egg in the microwave. that's cool dude !
I put an egg in the mocrowave this morning. I woke up late (the week at the synchrotron messed up my sleeping patterns, I go into the deep dreams phase btw 7-9 am! at which point the alarm clock just becomes part of the dream and thus useless) anyway, so I had to prepare a quick lunch. No, I did not put a whole egg in the microwave, I know you are not supposed to do that (there are quite a few movies of that on utube, the best is probably the slo mo exploding egg). I cracked it open and put it in a bowl. You can watch the white part gradually cook, as an expanding deep freeze in a movie, and then... the egg yolk blows up ! So next time either put some sarand wrap on top or pierce to egg yolk... but that was way cool dude !
It's faster than making a hard boiled egg, it's "low fat" (lowre than a fried egg that is) it's easier than making a poached egg... this egg didn't come out poached bc by the time the white part was cooked the yolk had as well... there must be a way though... found it ! there is a whole web site on egg recipes, only in the UK !
It's faster than making a hard boiled egg, it's "low fat" (lowre than a fried egg that is) it's easier than making a poached egg... this egg didn't come out poached bc by the time the white part was cooked the yolk had as well... there must be a way though... found it ! there is a whole web site on egg recipes, only in the UK !
Friday, February 02, 2007
the new internet part two
I'm back in the belly of the beast, the synchrotron. and so continues my reporting from the exploration of the new internet:
another thing you can do with the new internet is use it to store bookmarks, quickly store and organize your bibliography, and share these things with other people, either everyone on the web or only the ones you want.
If your job includes working with bibliographic references you have been as amazed as me to have witnessed the amount of help the internet has contributed to making this part of our job easier. I'm old enough to have had to use the citation index in the library during my undergrad thesis, then to have to manually type in each entry in a reference sofware during my PhD and more recently to use this software to search references on the web and include them automatically in my documents (and format the bibliography according to each publisher's specifications !). Now it's all on line (and sometimes free, yei !), you can store and share your database on the web. One of the advantages is that you have immediate links to all the papers citing or cited by that article, the 'related papers' features, supplemetary materials and so on.
The information is out there, you just have to know how to take advantage of it: organize it, keep track of it and make sense of it. There is so much !
So for bibliography I have found endnoteweb (sometimes free, depends on your affiliation), connotea (always free, you could theoretically link in an article from any page, while endnoteweb works through web of knowledge, but it doesn't always get all the citation data), reference manager (never free as far as I can tell, have not tested it online).
For storing bookmarks there are loads out there, they can be helpful in finding some interesting sites you were not necessarily looking for. The most popular seems to be del.ico.us, you can tag your bookmarks and see what other people are bookmarking. Digg appears similar, it's like you can vote for the sites you find interesting, and add comments, if you have time to kill you can start there. The google toolbar lets you store bookmarks that you can access from any computer, but that only works in IE (blah).
So what would happen if one day all the internet connections went down thanks to a massive power outage (or something similar?). You better back things up... especially your bibliography.
my turn again in the hutch, I just love the smell of ozone in the morning !
another thing you can do with the new internet is use it to store bookmarks, quickly store and organize your bibliography, and share these things with other people, either everyone on the web or only the ones you want.
If your job includes working with bibliographic references you have been as amazed as me to have witnessed the amount of help the internet has contributed to making this part of our job easier. I'm old enough to have had to use the citation index in the library during my undergrad thesis, then to have to manually type in each entry in a reference sofware during my PhD and more recently to use this software to search references on the web and include them automatically in my documents (and format the bibliography according to each publisher's specifications !). Now it's all on line (and sometimes free, yei !), you can store and share your database on the web. One of the advantages is that you have immediate links to all the papers citing or cited by that article, the 'related papers' features, supplemetary materials and so on.
The information is out there, you just have to know how to take advantage of it: organize it, keep track of it and make sense of it. There is so much !
So for bibliography I have found endnoteweb (sometimes free, depends on your affiliation), connotea (always free, you could theoretically link in an article from any page, while endnoteweb works through web of knowledge, but it doesn't always get all the citation data), reference manager (never free as far as I can tell, have not tested it online).
For storing bookmarks there are loads out there, they can be helpful in finding some interesting sites you were not necessarily looking for. The most popular seems to be del.ico.us, you can tag your bookmarks and see what other people are bookmarking. Digg appears similar, it's like you can vote for the sites you find interesting, and add comments, if you have time to kill you can start there. The google toolbar lets you store bookmarks that you can access from any computer, but that only works in IE (blah).
So what would happen if one day all the internet connections went down thanks to a massive power outage (or something similar?). You better back things up... especially your bibliography.
my turn again in the hutch, I just love the smell of ozone in the morning !
The new internet
I've been exploring the possibilities of the new internet. Yahoo for example has upgraded its email and calendar to look and act more like your own desktop applications, it also has widgets that you can install on your own desktop, it's mainly for PC user's mac-envy, they are cute, but they might slow down your computer I'm told.
Same goes for Google. Google desktop is like one big widget holder. What is more interesting is the google documents and spreadsheets. You can keep documents on a web site and invite people in to collaborate. For example, I will put up a document for song lyrics (soon), I write the first part, and you get to add on to it a second, and someone else a third, an old game that we can play across the globe. Same goes for spreadsheets. I have been using the google spreadsheet to keep track of my diet.
I recently lost about 50 lbs. Now I have to stabilize, so I still have to keep an eye on things. So I decided to test the google spreadsheet by making a calendar (you can find templates on the microsoft web site). Each meal is color coded, green if very good for you, red if it's deep fried pizza and chocolate mousse (more on the diet in future posts). This way I can follow the patterns, you know, every time you have a deep fried pizza (also called panzerotto) you should not have another one for at least a couple of days, and so a red case should be followed by a couple of green ones. If there are e few green days in a row then it means that if I have lasagna one night then it will not be the end of the world. Anyway, to come back to the point, this spreadsheet is online, so I can access it whether I'm at work, at home or on the road.
Another example of the new internet is the thingy I put there on the right. It's a link to an excel template I made to keep track of eating patterns. It's stored on a site called box.net, I can keep 1GB of stuff there for free. They are not the only ones I guess, but it works pretty well so far. So you can just go there and download the template, then upload it into google documents. I could have done it directly on Google documents by sharing or publishing the template on there, but I just wanted to try this other thing.
Finally you can make a personalized google home page where you keep track of all these different things you have set up.
All this raises lots of questions about internet dependency and security, but lunch time is over, more soon.
Same goes for Google. Google desktop is like one big widget holder. What is more interesting is the google documents and spreadsheets. You can keep documents on a web site and invite people in to collaborate. For example, I will put up a document for song lyrics (soon), I write the first part, and you get to add on to it a second, and someone else a third, an old game that we can play across the globe. Same goes for spreadsheets. I have been using the google spreadsheet to keep track of my diet.
I recently lost about 50 lbs. Now I have to stabilize, so I still have to keep an eye on things. So I decided to test the google spreadsheet by making a calendar (you can find templates on the microsoft web site). Each meal is color coded, green if very good for you, red if it's deep fried pizza and chocolate mousse (more on the diet in future posts). This way I can follow the patterns, you know, every time you have a deep fried pizza (also called panzerotto) you should not have another one for at least a couple of days, and so a red case should be followed by a couple of green ones. If there are e few green days in a row then it means that if I have lasagna one night then it will not be the end of the world. Anyway, to come back to the point, this spreadsheet is online, so I can access it whether I'm at work, at home or on the road.
Another example of the new internet is the thingy I put there on the right. It's a link to an excel template I made to keep track of eating patterns. It's stored on a site called box.net, I can keep 1GB of stuff there for free. They are not the only ones I guess, but it works pretty well so far. So you can just go there and download the template, then upload it into google documents. I could have done it directly on Google documents by sharing or publishing the template on there, but I just wanted to try this other thing.
Finally you can make a personalized google home page where you keep track of all these different things you have set up.
All this raises lots of questions about internet dependency and security, but lunch time is over, more soon.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
