The family (including me!) went out to Seaworld and Disneyworld for our winter break. I’m trying to encourage Rebecca and Jeff to post some highlights but I’ll try to do my best here.
- Feeding the rays and sharks at Seaworld by tossing dead fish into the water with them.
- Soaring at Epcot–best ride. You are looking at an IMAX-style screen while you sit in ferris-wheel-style seats. On the IMAX, you see where you are flying to
- Behind the Seeds tour. You see how Disney grows a lot of its own plants and fish. There are tons of pictures under the Disney album for that. By the way, Rupal, if you are reading this, I got some Disney instructions on how to grow their kind of hydroponic plants. I think it’d be a great biology honors project!
- Getting hot chocolate and chocolate bars from the Ghirradeli store. Yum!
- Food in general. My dad made awesome breakfasts and sandwiches for us to eat casually so that we could eat on the go and not worry about getting food at the park. Also, we ate at the park.
- Finding “Mickeys.” There are at least 700 hidden Mickeys hidden throughout the park, and my family found one that wasn’t listed in their official book. No one really knows where the architects put all the Mickeys throughout the park.
- Walking everywhere. I really got sore feet but I love walking everywhere. Is this good or bad? I don’t know… I think I’ll take a walk to think about it.
Published by Lee on 12/17/2007
in Lee.
I’ve been playing a joke on someone in my lab named Karthik for the last month, and the joke is based on a joke that someone played on me in seventh grade.
In the joke, an anonymous person was printing out documents in wingdings… only, I didn’t know what wingdings was back then and so I didn’t know what it was right away. Eventually, I got enough of the messages to start translating it by hand. Months later, the person admitted to me who he was.
Flash forward to last month. Madhu (also in the lab) wanted to play a joke on Karthik and so we teamed up. I told her about the wingdings prank. However–instead of emailing an easily-translated version of the document to him, we were going to email it to the biology department’s printer (a.k.a. the biohub printer). Emailing it essentially scans it into a picture format and allows the printer to email it as a picture to whoever. Thus, anything coming from the biohub printer would be untranslatable by a computer and also would be anonymously sent to him because everyone has access to the biohub printer. After we got the details worked out, we occassionally found a few jokes on the Internet, wingdinged them, and emailed them to him from the biohub printer.
I know, I know, this is the dorkiest practical joke ever.
On Saturday we finally told Karthik that it was we who were sending him wingding emails. He just shrugged and told us that he just thought that they were junk mail and ignored them. The nerve of him! We wasted a perfectly awesome joke on him.
Just for fun, I’ll show you guys one such email we sent him.
Published by Lee on 12/12/2007
in Lee.
Somehow I have received enough awesome gifts that have the same color blue. Pearl’s Aunt Fanny gave me the neat pen that opens and closes by stretching it apart or pushing it back together; the USB stick was a Channukah present from Rebecca; and the phone was a nice thing my dad for me a couple of years ago.
I need a new phone though. I’m sure that if I find a blue phone then it will be a sign that it is the one I should buy.
…maybe my new favorite color is blue?
Picasa wins and Flickr sucks. After my premium account ended, Flickr artificially hid all of my photos except my latest 200. Also there is the upload limit of so many megabytes. Flickr, what the hell?
I’m switching to Picasa because I trust Google more and more, and also there is no real limit to anything I do. There is a gigabyte limit but that is probably going to be expanded just like gmail.
Published by Lee on 12/4/2007
in Lee.
After four glorious semesters, it’s time to move on. I’m going to stop teaching intro to biology and concentrate on research. Sorry kids, but it’s time for Daddy to make you proud. It’s tough love.
I think that I really accomplished something during my teaching days though. This last semester, only my students made As on the lab final exam. All my students consistently scored higher on each quiz, and most of them understand all the topics even if they are not interested in biology. A few of them have even moved onto real biology research.
Anyway, I am leaving behind my Graduate Teaching Assistantship and starting off on a Graduate Research Assistantship.
