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Occupational Hazards
Aside from the occasional mishap, my colleagues and I do rather well managing the ever-present hazards of working in a research laboratory. Every so often, though, something happens that’s particularly interesting. We have some neat little stitch scissors for detailed snipping activities that I needed to use today. While I was cleaning them off, they…
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Just Another Day at the Lab
Yesterday, in a turn of events involving chocolate, yogurt, and rat treats, I ended up in the UMD Medical Center cafeteria. While looking through the cooler, I happened to notice a new (released just this year, in fact) soda flavor: Dr. Pepper Cherry. This seemed rather interesting, as Dr. Pepper has been advertised as an…
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The Genre Debacle
Ever since I started digitizing my music library, I’ve struggled with the pronunciation of the word “genre.” I started out saying John Ree, perhaps imagining him as a pioneer in the field of music classification; sort of a spiritual ancestor to the Music Genome Project. Later, I adopted the slurred buzzing intonation that inhabits a…
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Barrier to Entry
A while back (2006, to be exact) Coke started My Coke Rewards, a semi-digital version of those frequent customer reward programs. It’s supposed to be very simple: you buy Coke brand drinks and enter the code under the cap online. Apparently now you can even text the codes in on your cell phone (how delightfully…
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Deadlights
It’s been raining a lot around here lately, which means a lot of driving around with windshield wipers. A while back I replaced my broken wiper blades with new ones by Rain-X, followed quickly by replacing my blue windshield washer fluid with bright orange product also from Rain-X. The combination of the two has created…
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This Unfortunate Holiday
I usually have a grand time on April Fools’ Day, checking out all of the pranks from my favorite sites like Google, Smashing Magazine, and Gizmodo. I can’t remember the last time somebody pulled one on me, but James McCauley just hit me with a great one. Context: James and I have been working over…
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cp_usa
A couple of nights ago I had a crazy dream based around Team Fortress 2. The teams were red and blue, as usual, and I was playing on the red (defending) team. The map was some strange modification of cp_dustbowl translated to real life. The twist was that the blue and red teams represented Democrats…
Matter, Energy, and Life of Michaela A. Castello.