good luck charm city

kie: between neb 141 and 137
kiel: good. real good.
kio: secret agent from somafm- summer samba (a good song to leave on repeat)

what the hell is up? that damn crossword contest took up so much of my time that i haven't updated the ol' weblog in quiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiite a while.

in case you didn't know, i'll be going to cornell in august to get my phd. hopefully i'll be working with matt delisa, who did his post-doc in the georgiou lab (george georgiou = marc's advisor and a very big name in molecular biology/engineering). exciting stuff up ahead.

but FIRST i have to finish my masters thesis. yeah. i outlined it the other day and it looks like it should be easy to fill in the outline. lots of people hear THESIS and think "something that takes a very long time to write". WHAT?! YOU HAVEN'T STARTED YET?! actually it's the research that takes a long time, and i've been working on this stuff for quite a while. looks as if i'll finish sometime in july, and maybe do some supplementary work here in the lab that might get me in a paper or two, then off to cornell.

luckily, sam phillips is in ithaca and happens to be moving into a 3-bedroom house with one other person. he asked me if i needed a place and i gladly agreed. neither i nor he has seen the house yet but jonathan, the third roommate, says it's pretty nice. guy i don't know, that's good enough for me.

i don't have much to soapbox about at this juncture ("at this juncture" makes me think of miss helen. she used to say that all the time. god i hate her. once in a while i'll still have dreams about confronting her and telling her off. serious.)

i have been eating at silk road a lot lately. before i graduate (by hook or by crook) i will obtain the secret recipe for peanut lime dressing. it will be mine. oh yes, it will be mine. the other day i saw a folder sitting out containing what appeared to be recipes. all i have to do is somehow snag that folder and i'm golden. then again i can't read chinese. maybe jing can. i dunno. somehow...

jesus christ pissing in a muffin tin i lost the rest of this post when microsoft ass-spyware ass-detector closed internet ass-explorer. luckily blogger has this nifty "recover post" feature that saved about halfway through.

speaking of silk road, ever try coca cola zero? good stuff. tastes a lot like coca-cola classic. it's t3h yum. did you know that coke has a pH of 3.0? THREE! that's like the same pH as 1 millimolar hydrochloric acid!*

i got a new computer from lukas. it's a laptop. the specs:

• 1.7 GHz Pentium M
• 40 GB HD
• 13" monitor (1400x1050)
• DVD-RW (nice)
• 32MB Radeon video card
• Gigabit NIC
• Wireless G NIC (also nice)

it's amazing how many people have unsecured wireless. especially sarah's neighbors. no, not amazing, just cool.

it's gonna be weird leaving baltimore in a few weeks. in case i don't update before then, here's a list (in no particular order) of the things i'm gonna miss about the "greatest city in america".

• Natty Boh**
• Silk Road Express
• Crab-flavored EVERYTHING
• The Wine Source
• Holy Frijoles
• Backfin Pale Ale
• The Canton Safeway (aka the Gucci Safeway)
• The classic Baltimore yuppies and locals dichotomy
• Inside Maryland Politics on WYPR (8:30 am)
• El Zol 99.1 FM Siempre de Fiesta!
• Ostrowski's Sausage (both varieties)
• Tenpachi
• Camden Yards (what a great park)
• The Senator Theatre
• The JHU Campus at night
• Making fun of Dundalk
• Festivals in Patterson Park
• CityPaper***
• But most of all... City Limits Trivia Night: where the fun doesn't stop til 11:19 and fantastic prizes abound. Above all, respect the sanctity.

And now briefly, some things i will not miss about baltimore:

• 2 stolen car stereos
• 1 broken car window
• finding bottles of keystone ice in the street
• steel plates
• various items stolen from my car, including a keyboard, discman, tape adapter, and some cds
• about $200 worth of parking tickets
• paying $400 for getting towed TWICE
• parked car lanes that suddenly appear
• the intersections from fayette to eastern and president street
• 276 homicides in 2004
• muggings (that didn't happen to me, but it happened to sarah AND ben)

notice that most of the things i won't miss involve cars, while many of the things i will miss require a car to enjoy. it's a baltimore paradox.

well that was a nice break from experiments and reading papers, i guess i'll get back to work. later hon.

*or the same pH as a grapefruit
**damn, pabst makes some shitty beer. just look at that list!
***my parents drove to baltimore on their way home from myrtle beach last week and as usual they got lost when i gave them perfectly good directions and ended up right smack in the middle of baltimore's PRIDE festival. then my dad, later, goes "now i know we're in a city and all, but were all of those people really gay?" *gives that a moment to sink in* i mean i don't blame him for being incredulous, since he's probably never met ONE gay person let alone thousands clogging the streets dressed in drag and otherwise. i just had to laugh.

ed: i never did find the secret recipe, but now that i think about it it's probably not that complicated. also, i didn't pay a few parking tickets until after i left baltimore and got a letter in the mail saying i owed like twice as much. i paid down the principal and haven't gotten any mail since. - 9/5/06