403: forbidden

It's late and I'm aching too much to sleep (averaging 4-5 on the subjective scale), so I'm going to ramble here while I wait for the prescription painkillers to take effect.

June and July were a long drought for my real-time RPGs, what with one GM having work-schedule chaos, and the other having to so severely cut back on expenses that they had to cancel their internet service (we play online, with a virtual tabletop program).

Paizocon was a bright spot in the first weekend of July, but not exactly enough. So I'm revisiting play-by-post gaming. Historically, I've had trouble remembering to check them and they've withered on the vine. The ones I'm in now are played with people I already interact with often, and simply observing that they're online seems to be a good cue for me to check for new posts.

Whether PbP games can fill a similar sanity maintenance role to real-time gaming remains to be seen.

I have a presentation and poster session a week from today, on the behavior of Arabidopsis thaliana LBD16 mutants under phosphate starvation. This afternoon, I finished the last of the main-inquiry data gathering. Now I have to make it mean something.

Probable radio silence ahead, not that that's any different from usual.

I'm trying out this little thing, and find that I'm much more comfortable with it now that I know how to bring up a BASH shell. I'm not quite rigidly constrained to the unfamiliar UI any more, and that makes all the difference.

Sunday (9/4) was RenFaire day with siderea and tn3270; I'd guess that King Richard's Faire is about half the size of its Phoenix counterpart. Was fun for what it was. Most notable event was that zeightyfiv solved a puzzle ring with no assistance. Took him around 2.5h, and when he'd finished, he suggested that he should try it again to make sure he understood what he'd done, rather than just getting it by accident. All three of the staff who'd watched him puzzling over it shouted "NO!" in perfect unplanned unison. ;)

Monday (9/5), we cleared the last of our belongings out of the basement of the old apartment. There's some garden stuff left outside, but I'm allowed to continue gardening until the season thoroughly finishes around (IIRC) November for the cold-hardy plants. Due to moving and setup for classes, I didn't get to bed until 02:00 or so Tuesday morning.

Tuesday (9/6) was my first day of class. I got up absurdly early for a doctor's appointment that turned out to be nearly useless. Once in class, I learned that I'm now in waitlist position 3/12 for Population Biology, but nothing of significance actually happened. After class, puzzled over administrativa for two hours or so, then met zeightyfiv at his office and fell asleep on a couch for another three. We went out for dinner, had delicious fried vegetables, and didn't get home until about 22:00. I did some more damn paperwork, and all of a sudden it was 02:00 Wednesday... but I needed to pour some recent events out of my head before I could sleep. And here I am.

Wednesday (9/7) is my first violin class. Its location is still listed as "to be determined". I can tell it's going to be a fun day already.

...is running through the common area of the house in a bathrobe, because grabbing Sets, Functions, and Logic off the "textbook" bookcase is more urgent than getting dressed to do so.

Last Monday, 2/14: Up at 06:00. Class, groceries, home. Spent the afternoon figuring out how to make icecream cupcakes for zeightyfiv's birthday. Presented them that evening - the expression on his face was priceless.

This Monday, 2/21: Up until 02:00, reading 600-odd of the 1001 Mournland Horrors, in preparation for sending my D&D players there in a few sessions. Woke up around 06:00 with a pretty good idea of how I'm going to run things in that region of blatant offense against the natural order. Poked zeightyfiv repeatedly until he stopped snoring. Woke up again around noon. In the next 9h, I need to set up all meals for tomorrow, start some plants in pots (thyme, peppers, and early tomatoes), and if there's any time remaining, make some apricot-habanero jelly.

Next Monday, 2/28: Back to the grindstone, including roughly 3h total on the T.

This week I received a new laptop keyboard, and new glasses. Installing the new keyboard, I learned that it was probably a bad idea to hot-glue pieces of the old one's plastic back on. This being a laptop, the keyboard tray occasionally got warm enough to re-melt the hot glue. Made a bit of a mess, but doesn't seem to have damaged anything.

The glasses are taking some getting used to. The only thing that changed is my astigmatism correction for one eye - so while my vision stays sharp, my depth perception has changed.

..Your character was dubbed Michael Jordan, Queen of England.

So, Coca-Cola Co. carefully guards the recipe for its flavor syrup, and exports the product to bottlers all over the world, where the syrup is then mixed with sweetener, diluted with water, and carbonated. In border states like Arizona, one can find imports from the far side, even though Coca-Cola itself frowns on importing from one licensee-bottlers' region to anothers'.

The best-known difference between American coke and the Mexican version is that cane sugar is the sweetener of choice in Mexico, while the cheaper HFCS is used in America. Tasted side-by-side, though, what struck me was how much more acidic the AmeriCoke tasted. Unsure if this was extra phosphoric acid or just extra carbonation, I poured some of each into two identical glasses. The MexiCoke was noted to have a larger, but also more transient, head of foam than the AmeriCoke. The glasses were then swirled until the soda went flat. The decarbonated sodas did not have noticably different degrees of the characteristic cola-flavor (phosphoric acid). However, the AmeriCoke tasted sharper and "less flat", even when it was visibly decarbonated and bubbles did not nucleate on the tongue. I remain unsure what the difference is, and unable to determine whether it's a bottler-originating change, or one of syrup composition.

...And is otherwise completely gratuitous.

Yay in-flight wifi!