Welcome to Karl's Cheap Web Cam Page
This is a page to encapsulate my web cam and a growing list of interesting things that are in some way linked to me.
There may be a live webcam available, click here to see it.
Click here for information about the camera, and why it may not be updating.
News
01/26/10 (2026)
All these crazy rumors about this new apple pad thing remind me of something.
You know what? This happened before. I remember it like it was 8 years ago...
Go hammer in "Apple iWalk" into your favorite search engine and relive it.
Just because I am feeling extremely angry and cynical right now: I hope tomorrows apple event is another run-of-the-mill pedestrian upgrade of cpu specs and a new version of iLife.
Just because you people need to unplug and get some sun and learn how to hold a conversation.
01/23/10 (1817)
My experience in graduate school has done a wonderful job of revealing my strengths and weaknesses. I'd put my ability to find creative solutions, my mechanical and electronic technical skills, and (sadly) my ability to multitask myself into oblivion as strengths.
Writing is definitely a member of the list of weaknesses. The dry style that you are (by now) so familiar with is much closer to reality than eloquent invention made by an overly intelligent mind to cast a weaker version of itself. That's right! Spelling errors are real spelling errors.
I am by fits and starts trying to improve this quality. Certainly I have already ascended to altitudes far above the poor/newly-outsourced janitors who's resumes were amazing demonstrations showing that through application of Zapf Dingbats, one can give an otherwise bland piece of paper deep and verdant meaning. That said, there are parts of my soul that believes this is a lost cause. Where one can easily sit an hammer out reams in the lowly common vernacular, creating a document in correct scientific style requires a level of detail, discipline, and understanding, that quite frankly, hurts my brain.
I'd rather be writing code or calculating something or building something. I am really good at that and it feels good to do. Sitting around for days/months/weeks at a time writing papers is incredibly dull.
I had hoped that any scientific career would involve a minimal of writing papers. Technical manuals I can handle. Simple reports and analysis, sure... I'd hope to keep the papers to something like one per year.
At least Jesus died to give us word processors and reference managers. I'd be useless and doomed without them. I was stupid and didn't pick up as much LaTeX as I should have. So now I'm stuck with the rather nasty combination of Microsoft Word and EndNote. As soon as I am done, I'm going to force myself to proficiency with LateX and BibTeX. That would give me a portable, free, powerful, and importantly, reliable solution.
I hope one of the interesting jobs I have applied for pans out. I was unsure about going to grad school, almost dropped out numerous times over the first 3 years, had fun for almost a year until it was revealed that the grant the funds me is running dry, and then nearly immediately turned miserable again and now I want to quit as much as ever, except for the small fact that I'm theoretically ABD.
A side effect of the economy and politics is that positions in my field are in short supply and highly contested. Fortunately, aside from wanting to avoid a tenure-track position, I had no specific career ideas in mind before grad school or now (which, in my view, means I shouldn't have gone). The Girly is un-employed, and we have no reason to be living as far as possible from our friends and families. So, I'm applying to an amazingly broad range of positions. I'm a little worried that, because I didn't pick up the skills I wanted, I'm now not a strong candidate for the positions I want.
Nothing would validate my feelings that this has all be an idealism driven chinese fire drill like being unemployable after umpteen years in the educational system.
I have mixed feelings about my Canon A570IS. I've actually had to replace it once, and it's flimsy-ness is a major short fall compared to my old Sony, which, while having a lower megapixel count, was also smaller, equally easy to use, and generally generated pictures that I thought were superior in quality.
I spend a lot of time thinking the A570 is a piece of junk. It turns on too easily and it's lens mechanism is fragile. As a result it's stripped gears in my pocket, so now it has trouble focusing, so the image quality is hit-or-miss. Also, when the lens is working right, it has trouble focusing... the sony never had that much trouble.
Sometimes, I'm genuinely surprised when i generate nice work with it.
Snow:
I gave up on anyone responding to my request to have my workspace back. Between the constant inaction, apathy, and language barriers I might as well be complaining on my webpage. I decided I had to be proactive, especially since the equipment at the bottom of the pile is now non-functional and I need to get into it.
I asked my adivsor for a rack to put my hardware in. Several years ago I had floated an idea to rack all the equipment that was on desks and counters, freeing work space for actual work. This was sort of ho-humed, but no one really cared because there was lots of free benches, and finding racks was certainly going to be hard and expensive because no one had ever done it before. I let it slide. Since then I had noticed many racks that various IT/CS groups had abandoned laying around the building as they crawled their way to salvage or the dumpster. Asking around showed that those were actually overflow abandoned racks and that they were, in fact, quite common and being stored in all kinds of exciting places like labs, semi-trailers, elevator shafts, and (wouldn'tchaknowit?) in the closet at the field site.
I grabbed the closest one, scavanged the others for shelves, and then spent $15 at the hardware store for pinch nuts for the holes. I discovered that I could use my quick-grip bar clamps to hold parts at the perfect level while I screwed them in.
A major drawback is that some of the hardware doesn't fit in 19" wide spaces, so there are catalytic converters protruding at crouch level. Catalytic converters are wrapped in fiberglass cloth because they are 873K on the inside. I expect this will make working in the field more exciting.
Other things of note:
Dog:
I like blood and Moro oranges:
Broken glass duwar:
Boat in Snow:
Sunset:
Alex has posted one of the best photos of me I have seen yet:
Me at Thanksgiving.
01/18/10 (1252)
Death of a fire hose:
It made it 6 months. I should be happy.
01/10/10 (1141)
The Girl reminded me that people might accidentally read my web page, so I fixed the grammar in the previous post, but no the one before it.
It's not that I mean to create typos. It's just how I am. I also type things like:
% meacs foo.txt
% yse "I am a stooge"
% lsd-
(LSD not found....)
01/09/10 (2231)
I almost destructively non-repaired my Apple-Pro mouse. The plastic glider has been falling off for years, and over the past month, it has gotten so loose that the mouse was nearly impossible to use. Every time it was lifted, the glider would come off. I thought I was a smart stooge, so I applied little globs of glue to the bottom of the glider to attach it to the mouse. Unfortunately, the glue got into the flex mechanism (the entire mouse body moves to click) and gummed up the works... it felt like squeazing a tennis ball to click. Fortunately, by carefully applying a pen-knife to the joints, it seems normal again. My hand hurts from using it, so I'm not sure I know what normal is anymore.
I am surprised it has lasted as long as it has. I had wondered how long an optical mouse would last between cleanings... this one has never had the optics (or much else) cleaned. I am beginning to suspect that material fatigue will kill optical mice faster than the accretion of dirt on the optics. That's a pretty amazing feat. In comparison, my microsoft p/s 2 ball intellimouse needs the rollers cleaned every few months, and I rarely use it.
We let the dogs play for about 40 minutes today. I'm sort of amazed the tan one didn't freeze to death. Not that I should worry to much. They are both used dogs. The used dog market is very good right now for buyers, so I suppose if they freeze up, they can be easily replaced. Our model features fur and a pink tongue, which in theory prevents it from freezing. In practice he's a wuss and constantly tries to lick the snow off his paws. He's also got it bad for the other dog, although we don't know why: We've disabled his genitals.
Speaking of which, schlake has an old picture of Stubberella up today on his daily page. I had to work very hard to remember her name. I almost told you it was Bob or Tim, but it's not. It's Lisa Eskra/Stubbs. When I knew her in person I hated her because she wrote that I was stupid on my Organic Labs. She also waited weeks at a time to show me how stupid she thought I was so I would get angry. I would then say stupid things to her. Flainn was my lab partner. I think she thought he was stupid too. It maybe because we managed to blow a cork off a reaction vessel spraying half the room with purple foam. Our yield in that reaction wasn't great.
My experience in undergraduate organic chemistry laboratory was not positive.
She went on to defend her masters thesis using nothing but the chalk board (they don't let you do that now) and then she married a sailor and doesn't seem to need to work.
I thought it ironic that schlake posted it. I was telling the Girly about Lisas kidney stones and how they related to novel writing and special needs children. Lisa looks very young in this photo.
I don't think her genitals are disabled.
Old News
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