20.05.07
    Dude! So this bioscience blogger (http://pimm.wordpress.com) posed the question "What does a good laboratory webpage look like?" with examples. Two of mine are on there. One, admittedly, was nominated by the client, but the other one's from someone I don't know. Both sites were notable for having the greatest degree of client participation, so maybe that says the less I'm involved, the better. Anyway, 'tis nice. http://pimm.wordpress.com/2007/04/16/how-does-a-good-laboratory-homepage-look-like-show-me-at-least-one/

19.05.07
    One of the main differences between looking at objects in a display and working with them directly is the smell. Sure, walking in the doors from outside you get that hit of old wood and memory, but that’s more of a collective smell. We’re up close and personal, and not a lot of it smells good.
    Whalebone, a favoured medium of Inuit sculpture, is very porous and can hang onto scents. One complex piece gave off an overwhelmingly cloying soapy sweetness like some expired cheap air freshener was coating the inside of your throat.
    Then there were the shoes, racks and racks of shoes. Well-worn shoes made of animal hides. Boots, even. Very warm boots from northern climates made for maximum insulation, not breathability. Also very high goatskin boots from hot climates which seemed to have held onto every drop of sweat ever exuded into them. And then the boots were packed into plastic boxes and no one opened them for years. Thankfully, no one quit.
    On the bright side, sometimes you get an old cedar chest, and we take the lid off, and a sniff of the air inside reminds you of saunas, and warmth, and fires. You have shared something about that object that only a few people have experienced, a personal understanding, a secret sense, a smell of history.

15.05.07
    You know, if I had to envision a concrete anthropomorphic manifestation for God, today I’d pick a Black Baha’i lesbian woman… for no reason, really.

12.05.07
    One of my new clients described some of my older design work as "punk". This doth amuseth me muchly.

10.05.07
    The lawn is dead. I’ve told you about our experience with beetle larvae and crows and the subsequent damage to the yard. Some enterprising employee of a lawn care company dropped off a brochure in the mailbox. My Dad asked for a quote on work, and they submitted a ridiculously expensive proposal to do a large amount of unnecessary things. We all found it absurd. Then my Dad went ahead and told them to do it.
    And now the lawn is dead; black and rotting.
    I should back up a bit. A while ago I was home sick on a Friday, tired and coughing, thinking of heading back to bed, when a noise starts like the mother of all lawnmowers right outside the house. They were aerating the lawn unannounced, pushing around what looked like a galloping mini zamboni back and forth across the grass, leaving little core samples of packed earth strewn about.
    More recently I’ve been going to the back yard to gather grass for the rabbit to eat. The back is North-facing and has a healthy population of moss, Rhytidiadelphus loreus near the house, and Eurhynchium praelongum near the fence, a soft spongy mat, and a fine green feather, respectively. Coming home one day, I found all the moss had been fried, burned by another unannounced treatment, this time of moss killer. Not knowing the extent of the toxic application, I reached into the furthest point of a disused flower bed for some grass, and washed it well before giving it to the rabbit.
    My Father has decided to sow grass seed directly on the dead moss, and is faithfully watering it; acting on some unfathomable resolve based on no apparent research.
    My parents want some suburban utopian lawn composed of perfectly uniform blades of grass. I think this is a harmful, unnatural, and arbitrary ideal. If you want a well-cropped grassland, move to the prairies and adopt a herd of bison. Maintaining a monoculture of a non-native species in a habitat not even remotely suited to it requires a ridiculous amount of effort and not-nice chemicals. Local biodiversity and anything that has to live in our runoff will not be happy. Who even said that your house had to be surrounded by grass?
    Of course this is an intermediate stage, I don’t doubt that the blackened expanse of land surrounding the house will become a sparkling lawn at some point in the future, for however brief a period of time before nature reasserts itself. Whatever the outcome, the entire exercise will have been utterly useless, and a complete waste of time and money.

07.05.07

    Some of you may know I’m bunny-sitting at the moment. Very much at the moment in fact, I’ve brought the laptop down to the bunny and let him out to run around the room. Right now he’s nosing around the corners and stretching up to his full height to examine things I thought would be out of his reach. We’ve bunny-sat before, but I’ve never really been solely responsible for the well-being of these charges. It’s with the worried attitude of a new parent that I’m constantly monitoring his position, general mood (as best I can tell), and taking note of what’s going into and coming out of him. He’s perfectly capable of getting out of his cage on his own when I open the lid, and he rather objects to being picked up, so I’ve taken to opening the top hatch when I’m around and letting him come out whenever he feels like it. I was worried that he wouldn’t be able to get back in if he needed food, water, or his litterbox (he’s well trained), so I set up a box outside the cage to act as a stair. The previous time I took him out, he never quite made it onto the box, so I had to haul him back in manually. He just figured it out now for the first time, hopping onto the box, then on top of the cage, then down and inside. I’m immensely proud.

06.05.07
    Do not hit the gong.
   You know how those fairy tales rest on the triumph of curiosity over reason? We’ve gotten a few nice metal gongs through our department, and it seems like a normal part of exploring the object to hear its voice. We should actually record the sound and attach it as a .wav file or something, so everyone can hear it without it having to be struck more than once. Even worse was the day an entire rack of thumb pianos came in; a complete orchestra of different sizes. You know the type, little metal keys of varying length you twang so that they resonate over an amplifying chamber. If we all got going at the same time on those, what a sound it would be. I’ll guess I’ll have to content myself with wailing on those ketongan, or hanging Indonesian wooden drums, just like everybody else.

05.05.07
    My father, in one of his more overt acts of anglophilia, tunes into the BBC online for news. That venerable institution was broadcasting a story on how a significant portion of school-age kids in Britain do not speak English as a first language, and how this is a challenge to teaching effectively (print article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6597273.stm). A trace of irony exists in that my father is a perfect colonial subject, an Asian man born and raised in Asia who speaks no Asian languages, and is ready to whistle “God Save the Queen” at the drop of a hat. Gee England, if you’re going to go off taking other people’s land and telling them how great Britain is, don’t be surprised when some of those people decide to go there.

    A crow has built a nest in my supervisor's window box. Jessica, our head of imaging, and her husband Cameron have hooked up a streaming webcam in their apartment. At work on Friday we had the webcam displayed on our monitors and we were distracted whenever the crow stood up and you could see the eggs (four so far, a light blue, looking just like robin's eggs). There was a fair amount of distress in the afternoon when the camera (or the hosting site) went on an extended "intermission". It seems to be working now (it's off and on), go keep an eye on urban wildlife, the weather in downtown Vancouver, and people below going for coffee: www.cajecreative.com

    And Pho pictures from last week are up.

June 2007

April 2007 >