They are shutting the power down briefly in the building my lab is in early tomorrow morning for work related to the new building construction. In preparation we have shut down and vented all the mass spectrometers. It is so weird for the mass spectrometry lab to be quiet! No vacuum pumps! No fans! No recirculating chillers! Very weird!
Hopefully everything powers back up successfully tomorrow morning!
I had a Facebook “memory” from ten years ago in which I described joking about business casual dress saying I’d wear a skirt, but probably people would have a problem with that, too.
I was really getting like that, around then. It was only a few months later I decided I really was trans enough to try some transition things.
Also, turned out I could just show up at work wearing skirts and dresses and such an everyone was fine with it. I was not expecting it to go like that!
It’s a truism that you can’t solve social problems with technology, but social media has made it just as clear that technology does shape the social dynamics that emerge in the spaces it mediates. This drives me to wonder: as more of my friends and friends-of-friends move to individual websites and blogs, what social dynamics does this give rise to? And what different technical designs could improve those dynamics?
I think it’s most interesting to approach this question from the social direction rather than the technological. Our first priority should be a set of social goals for interacting on the internet, and only with that understanding firmly in hand can we start usefully interrogating the way technology gives rise to or fights against the sort of interactions we want. My ultimate aim is to articulate a clear vision of a way to interact with people’s websites that’s not just a pastime or a research process, but that can meet social needs—to imagine what I’ll call a “sociable web”.
At work the landscape contractor has shown up with one of those towed air compressors to blow the water out of the underground sprinkler system before winter. It’s kinda fun to see bits of the process, air and water mist blowing out of the sprinkler heads. I was out for a walk after lunch in the usually warm afternoon and saw one of the guys working on that, said it’s a sign winter is coming, when they are out doing this job.
Some people have underground sprinkler systems at home for their yards, do you have to hire a landscape contractor in fall to blow them out? I never thought about that when I was a kid! We didn’t have one of those systems but some of the neighbors did. I never saw them being “winterized” though.
This time of year there is a short bit of road on my drive to work where, if the sky is clear, I get the bright rising sun glaring into my peripheral vision from the left and the bright reflected sun off the windows of a building glaring into my peripheral vision from the right! It’s an experience!
I saw the full moon in the dark sky out the window, when I woke up well before sunrise this morning. It was -1°C outside. Just one month ago I saw the previous full moon while out camping, in much, much warmer weather! The daytime was longer back then, a month ago! It was warm enough to see my bare tits in moonlight!
I have to say I feel a low level of enthusiasm for torquing down bolts on a thing made out of graphite while it’s filled with pressurized HCl gas, and I wouldn’t really want to be nearby on a little work platform 70 feet off the ground while someone else does it!
I’m a bit of a train person but no expert, so while I’m not certain, I’m fairly sure that the Shave and a Haircut rhythm is not a Federal Railroad Administration-approved whistle signal, so props to the engineer who uses it anyway, I hear it in Tosa occasionally as they pass by.
I took this photo today, October the 16th, 2024. I don’t know how long this Christmas display has been up in Kohl’s, but even today is possibly a bit early for Christmas, some might say.