I've been in a clinical study for 16 days now and I'm finally being released! The study was to determine the recreational potential of a new drug they want to use to treat ADHD. I participated because I was compensated very nicely. The drug was compared to amphetamine and placebo in a double-blind experiment with myself and a few dozen other subjects. They already have determined that the drug is effective, they are now only trying to determine the recreational potential. So they do actually give us recreational-sized doses. We dosed every other day with not much happening in the 'washout days' (days between). They have wifi for the subjects and you can bring your phone, laptop, books, etc. to extertain yourself. You wear scrubs the whole time and are only known to the staff by your initials as to not inadvertently release any medical information. There are no visitors. Your food intake and general behavior is also pretty closely monitored. The typical dosing day consisted of measuring of vitals and taking small blood samples every 30 minutes most of the day and recording any side effects, but most importantly taking tests about how 'fun' the drug is or how 'high' we felt at that specific moment. Typical 'washout days' where we did not dose consisted of one measuring of vitals in the morning and then pretty much free time all day. For me it was lots of video games and reading. I also discovered Hubski and hope to spend more time here! I do like the design and philosophy and thought put into it. I missed my girlfriend and the comfort of my own bed, and the freedom of being able to eat and sleep when I want. I value little freedoms and kind of go crazy in here, I definitely would not do well in any kind of incarceration. But tonight I will be sleeping in my own bed at last.
Update: 2 feet of snow fell last night to this morning. I knew it was going to be a long, wet day. But I'm so happy to be free, the snow can't put a damper on my cheerfulness. I told my girlfriend not to pick me up because the roads are way dangerous. Was reading about a 15 car pileup on the freeway involving an ambulance. Got released around 10am, should be home around 4pm! It's 3pm now and I'm close to my last train stop. Royal pain in the ass carrying all this stuff - all the necessities I needed for the last 2.5 weeks minus clothes because you wear the scrubs they give you. I'm thinking of writing a short article to share my experience as a human lab rat for experimental drugs. Where's a good place to host it?
I have spent approximately eight seasons of available Frontline episodes converting this into an excel spreadsheet for market research purposes. Having seen the price on that page I'm a little taken aback; I bought it for $7. Nonetheless, being able to methodically go through everything (and I have more than a dozen other years on deck) has created insight. It has also led to the purchase of two other books, one of which is incredibly promising and the other of which remains to be seen. I am down to "Harry Winston" "Xemex" and "Zenith", approximately fifteen pages of ingest left of 377. My wife's receptionist knows a gemcutter in Thailand. Now I know a gemcutter in Thailand. I've commissioned a pentagonal faceting job on an Oregon Sunstone. It's going to go in a pendant that will hang on a Viking knit cord, most likely of 28ga sterling wire. I've also probably made 7 feet of viking knit. I'm not exactly good at it, but I'm getting better. I've got a 10-year anniversary coming up. According to Quicken I spent approximately $21k last year in pursuit of horological goals. I have 51 college credits towards this. I guess it's real.
Dang, what do you get out of the book? Model names, prizes, complications? I would totally be interested in the average price and standard deviations per complication, maybe regressed to how expensive the brand is in general. Hmu if you need some data science help!
At the risk of two anecdotes=trend, I met a South African woman in Bali. She said she was impressed with the metalworker she contracts all her jewelry making to in town (for dirt cheap). Is this a southeast Asian thing?
Bangkok is kind of the epicenter of gemcutting. The gem markets there are pretty well off the chain. I'll probably be buying some melee (tiny loose faceted stones) off him because the price in the markets is about 1/100 what it is in the US. Silversmithing, on the other hand, requires minimal tooling and can be self-taught. There tend to be lots of talented silversmiths in places where large jewelry markets don't exist.
My life feels so good right now that to try to talk about it seems sickening -- and that's with having broken up with the latest boyfriend in the past week. Part of the reason it feels so good -- I value myself enough not to put up with bullshit! There's many vectors in which I'm still improving - still trying to improve - that will never end. But things are already so, so really great that the improvement is just exciting, interesting; a challenge I can't wait to meet. Life is great. :)
Yogurt I put yogurt in pancakes/waffles, muffins, granola, smoothies etc. Plain, no fat yogurt. The kind I like can be $6 or more for a 750 ml tub, so I recently started making my own again. Two things brought this on: 1) we bought an electric blanket to warm up the bed before crashing for the night. 2) after bone density scan last summer, docs recommended 1000 IU of Vitamin D daily and more dietary calcium. I used to use powdered skim milk very cheaply, but in my town now powdered milk costs about the same as bags of ready-to-use skim milk (about $1/litre). I just made three large jars of yogurt for about $2.50 in milk and a little time (mostly waiting for the milk to cool): Simple instructions: Buy a candy thermomenter. Heat milk up to "scalding" - 150F on my thermometer. Let it cool to 110F. Poor the milk into jars. Add 2 tablespoons of plain yogurt into each jar and stir well. Wrap the jars in the electric blanket. Set the blanket on high. Leave for 7 or 8 hours. Ta Da My electric blanket shuts itself off after three hours, so I had to check it a few times and make sure it was on. Aside from saving $15-$20, it's nice to have lots of yogurt available to put in the dishes mentioned above, it's delicious, and I made it. I'd love to do a photo-essay of the process, but I still can't seem to easily turn my phone pics into jpegs (tried imgur) that come up on hubski as pics instead of just links. Help welcome.
I'm exhausted. Mentally, physically, emotionally. Completely lost my appetite because of stress, so I'm back below the normal BMI which doesn't mean anything to anyone, but I'll keep being annoyed because of it. Fortunately, I'll get about a week of free time between my last exam and the start of next semester, so there's some hope for rest and getting some peace. At least that's the plan. I learned that one of the guys who made my life in high school a living hell died on Saturday. Not gonna lie, I have some very confusing, incongruent feelings. Obviously, I hated and resented him. Part of me still does. But I, hope just as obviously, didn't want him dead, only to leave me alone. I'm not sure if it's appropriate for me to attend the funeral, but I think that I should put everything aside and go. Exams are at full swing, solved most of the 'take home' problems already. Physical Chemistry problems were surprisingly hard (doubly so when compared to homework), but I'm relatively confident of getting 4.5 (which I assume is like strong B/B+). By my adviser's estimate, my maths thesis is very close to being complete, which is perhaps the best news I brought in in about three weeks or so. So far the chess tournament score is 4 out of 5, I posted my last game in this thread if you are interested and missed it: Because when you blunder, blunder hard.
Phase 3 of Operation Graduation Celebration is underway. Arrived in Israel yesterday on Taglit (10-day trip with peers to travel the country). Extending the stay for a month - 9 more days with the group, then family for a few, settling in with a small farm for the duration. I think the only Israeli 'skian to possibly connect with IRL is Cumol? Are you out of the country still?
Did I miss last call? I'm still in love. It sucks. We broke up when she moved back to the US. I'm in Australia. We still speak regularly. I miss her a lot and wonder if she misses me. But I don't want to ask her because I feel like that time has passed.
The boardgame club is the light of my life. We have a discord now, and it has grown from a single channel, to an incredibly excessive 20. There's the playlist channel where everyone who joins the club can add one song, another one for poetry and haiku, one for each of the RPG campaigns. There are 5 bots, two for greeting newcomers, one for playing zork, and two for my new Cryptocurrency eSpencoin (here's the whitepaper) which is possibly the first currency to handle numbers symbolically as well as extend to complex numbers. Most weekends now, somebody hosts a houseparty and we chill and chat and loosely contemplate playing games. It's honestly been the greatest thing, so much so that I've forgotten to do my homework and really must get back to my lab due tonight.
I know I can trust eSpencoin because the whitepaper has that LaTeX/cmr font goin on. Anyone writing with LaTeX had bigger fish to fry than scamming me out of my money!
It's such a fun little coin. Unlike real crypto which is deflationary, infinite spoin can by minted or destroyed basically whenever. You can give somebody 'pi' coins, and it stays as pi without rounding. Anyone can give anyone else negative imaginary spoin. You can give somebody a formula eg: limit( (x+2) / (x+1), x, oo), so long as it can be solved.
I hurt. Pain managed is not the same thing as pain controlled. Time flows strangely for me. Days where weeks happen, weeks where days happen, that sort of thing. Made some progress on Durant Vol 2 which is only 28 hours. Had a few good days on the bike consecutively. With some effort and no unplanned hospitalizations, in a week or two I might be approaching where I was as of October/November as far as mileage. My baby brother has graduated from heavy equipment school and received orders to report to Camp LeJeune for his duty posting. I'm supposed to travel to see his graduation ceremony at the end of the month, health willing. Ten days from now I perform Benjamin Britten's War Requiem with the Ann Arbor Symphony. Audio Link. It's a really powerful piece of music, made moreso by the poetry interspersed throughout and the theological conflict taking place within the composer. My director has made a point to give mini-lectures throughout our rehearsals about how this is unhappy music, composed about conflict by a person who spent most of their life in both internal and external conflict while simultaneously believing fiercely in pacifism. It's officially dedicated to and was commissioned for the rebuilding of the Coventry Cathedral, but Britten himself said that it was dedicated to the dead of World Wars I & II. To those who are around, it's going to be quite a night at Hill, hope you all can make it.
Off to New Orleans tomorrow for a couple of days. My first time! My wife and I are going to see a Seattle Seawolves rugby game (against the NOLA Gold), with a group of Seawolves fans. Should be a lot of fun. I know a couple of people there (circus performers) and others who have lived there or loved the place when they have visited. We may do those things. We may just see what happens. My wife and I are kinda spontaneous travelers. We set up travel and hotel plans ahead of time, make a list of interesting stuff, and then just go and see what happens. Maybe we will go check out the interesting stuff. Maybe we won't. We are making a couple of these trips this year (NYC and Toronto, as well), and are excited for traveling around the US for once! (I've been to WAY more countries than US States.)
Working on books is kind of on hold at the moment. It's too cold in the crafts room to work with glue, even when the space heater is on, so experimenting with double fan binding and even just casing in text blocks aren't really a possibility right now. I've also sewn together so many text blocks I pretty much have more than I need at the moment. I guess this just gives me a few more reasons to look forward to warmer weather. Russian Doll was a fun, short series. It's not perfect, and the third act felt a little messy, but it was enjoyable. Been watching a few videos about forestry on YouTube recently. No real reason why, just because I guess.
Hey Pubs. Wednesday eve, Thursday is only four minutes away. Just came back from a fun DnD sesh. Ski lessons are going pretty well, although it's been occupying the 'swim' place in my list of priorities, so I haven't gone swimming in a while. Gonna fix that tomorrow. Work's at a good pace right now. I've been automating and programming a bunch, and there's new interesting things on the horizon. I'm not too busy and am pretty good at keeping it that way. Tomorrow we're going with fifteen colleagues to a pétanque bar, which like the name suggests is a hip new bar where you can also play pétanque like you're on a French campsite or something. The invitation had tactically placed Comic Sans and there's bound to be some wine so I think it's gonna be fun. I'm hoping it's every bit as cheesy and hip as I imagine it'll be.
We had few shenanigans this time around! We’re a very RP-heavy party, and most of this session was about one of us revealing their Tragic Backstory(TM). Someone did carve the head of a statue off, and tried to distract a gigantic spider with a mirage though.
Low-motivation week, but that's far from unusual. I've been watching pro-level Starcraft II a lot in the last week or so, and it's surprisingly interesting. I'd recently started re-playing the campaign, and I may actually try playing some vs. stuff online one of these days. Virginia politics is a bit of a shitshow right now, but I've done a separate post for that. Since everyone's talking about traveling, I'm going to NYC next weekend (don't recall if I mentioned this) to do some kung fu stuff in Chinatown. I'll miss the weekend family time, but it should be a lot of fun nonetheless. It'll be a small group from RVA, just myself, my student, and my sigung (teacher's teacher). I also have a "cousin" (same generation but different teacher) coming from TX, who may or may not bring some folks. We have folks in our direct organization up there, and then some more distant relatives (like grandteacher's brethren and their students, grand-students, etc.), but hopefully it'll still be plenty of new hands, and better still more new hands that are better than me. And with that, I have to go take my car to the dealership for a software upgrade and hope they don't try to upsell me on a bunch of bullshit.
Working a construction site way before their ready for us. So the whole week has been 12 hour days of mostly waiting on other contractors to finish their side of the project. Some people enjoy sitting around on the clock. It drives me insane. Would rather be productive in my personal life then sit and watch the clock. Otherwise its been a solid week, got a chance to wander and take some photos and eat some good food last night.