danielsenhwong.com

I just enabled user registration for this blog.  I don’t know how useful it will be, but it’ll be there.  The default account level is “subscriber”, so there shouldn’t be any noticeable difference reading this blog, though I suppose commenting would be a little more fancy ifone were to create an account and log in.

I might not be yet, but maybe someday soon.  It’s now really easy for me to do this, and I can’t figure out if it’s just having had more experience or whether I did some magic to the slides that is making them cooperate with me.  I’ll post some sample images later.  For now, here’s a cell I took a picture of an could have sworn it was 3D on the screen.

About a year and a half ago, my old 4th gen iPod stopped working.  I woudl try to turn it on, and it would make the pitiful hard drive whining sound, stop, and give me the sad iPod icon.

I didn’t do anything with it for a while, because I assumed tha tonce the hard drive gave me that sound, the whole thing was toast.  I started looking into ways to replace the hard drive, and maybe even replace it with a compact flash card to provide more storage space.  (Easy: http://www.tarkan.info/20080126/tutorials/32gb-compact-flash-ipod Ugly: http://geektechnique.org/projectlab/767/put-flash-memory-into-almost-any-ipod)

At the time, I calculated that it would cost abou $100 to do this, and at that price, I might as well get a new iPod.

One day, I got bored and just took my iPod apart, then put it back together.  Curious as to whether it was still broken, I plugged it into my computer and magically, it worked!  I reset the iPod, but then I needed to plug it into the power adapter in order to finish the process.  Problem: I hadn’t used the power adapter in months because I didn’t have a reason to, and Pam didn’t know where it was either.  We didn’t end up finding it until we moved, but now I have a fully functioning pre-video iPod again!

This is why I’m extremely happy with FiOS:

Fios Speed Test

That, and it pretty much never goes out.

I also just switched router functionality from the Actiontec router that came with FiOS service to my D-Link DIR-655.  Reason?  I wanted gigabit ethernet capability to transfer files across the network, and to use a router that I had already bought.

Previous broadband experiences include Verizon DSL, ClearWire, and Comcast.  Verizon DSL was good, but both of the others I had major issues with.  ClearWire, which my parents still have, was slow and unusable for anything except web browsing the last time I used it a year ago.  Comcast would just stop working every once in a while.

Drawbacks to my current netowrk setup: my router isn’t dual-band 802.11n, so I’m still hindered by interference on the b/g frequency.  Not a big deal, though, because I don’t have any other wireless-n hardware.  Also, FiOS was installed with a coaxial connection to the fiber optic terminal via MoCA, so I still have to use the Actiontec router as a bridge, following the directions here.  Things to note: unlug everything except the computer being used to configure the Actiontec router before starting, re-set the other router you’ll be using instead, and be sure to turn off the DHCP server at step 8.

My PI gave me a pep talk about graduate school this morning, and combined with a couple other recent events, it has brought grad school as a possibility back into my future life plans.  It’s irritating that I keep going back and forth on this.  Sorry for the mental vomit that comes below, but it’s part of the reason why I haven’t been able to make up my mind.

Issues to consider:

• Turns out I’m not half bad at science
• I’ll most likely be on two papers within the next six months, which is good for grad school and med school; ok for industry, but having only a bachelor’s is a limiting factor there.  means nothing outside of science.
• I missed working in the lab when I wasn’t doing so Senior year or college
• I don’t even hide the fact I’m a huge science dork
• Graduate student stipends are ~$21,000/yr
• Lab environment and dynamic are highly variable, and people and personalities are important.  also important in an office, which just as limiting in social interaction.  social aspect totally different than working in medicine
• Could go for dual-degree, but that essentially doubles the time before I actually begin my career post-education.
• I’ll most likely work 10+ hours days and many “occasional” weekends
• I’d probably work 10+ hours a day and many “occasional” weekends anywhere I work
• Graduate school is way less expensive than medical school
• I’d most likely need at least one post-doc position after graduating in order to gain experience, so +2 or more years
• Medical residencies are similar, and could take longer
• If I want to stay in science, the only way to make it a decent career is to get a PhD
• The only ways I’m going to make a decent amount of money in science are to either run a lab or go into industry.
• Running a lab involves always chasing money, but I will be my own boss, sort of.
• Working in industry is more structured, but I surrender more independence.  Pay is higher for the same or less work.
• I have a bit of security in my current position, minimum one year, possibly up to two.
• Science: I get to play with expensive toys and generate images like this:


HCMV-infected HFF

• Outside of science, and maybe in industry: I can buy my own toys.

Conclusions:

1. Medical school is out, unless it’s part of a dual-degree medical scientist training program and I end up with both an MD and PhD.
2. If I stay in science, everything I’ve done for the last four-plus years is still working for me.  Cons: I will be broke for at least four years.  Risky after grad school.  Can lose funding and enter career limbo.  Need to start applying now.
3. If I leave science, my options may be limited?  Alternatives: product design consultancy (e.g. Ideo), management consulting (not familiar with the field).  Cons: my experience is lacking, at least from my perspective.  Can be laid off.  Should start applying now.

I’m headed up to Philadelphia for a family wedding tomorrow, and I’ll be back in DC Sunday evening.  One of my second cousins is getting married, and I’m the representative for my immediate family, since my parents are in Seattle and my sister is at school in Vermont.

It’s always intimidating to go to these family functions, because my extended family on my mom’s side is absolutely huge.  Apparently I have 59 cousins of some flavor, most are second cousins (my mom’s uncle’s children’s children — I think that’s second cousins, but I’m not sure how it translates into English).  I have, I think, only six first cousins on my mom’s side.  Only.  Anyway, Philadelphia in particular is intimidating because a large number of my cousins live there, and every time I’ve gone to visit, I’ve had to re-learn everyone’s names because I can’t keep them straight in my head, and they’re all about my age and therefore change as rapidly as I do in the years between visits.  So this weekend will be fun.

Additionally, I finally opened and used the iron and ironing board I bought when I first moved to DC, thinking that I’d need them because I’d likely be looking for work for quite some time.  Turns out I got the first job I interviewed for, and lab work being what it is — a hazardous environment for nice clothes — I haven’t needed to use an iron in a year.  Well, I take that back.  I’ve needed to use it; I just haven’t because I didn’t need to wear ironed clothes.  A wedding kind of changes that.

It's a cute little iron, but rather useless.

The last iron I owned was this tiny little Rowenta travel iron I bought for college, since my first-year dorm room was 96 sq. ft., along with a tiny tabletop ironing board.  I bought it not only because it was cheap and I had no money, but because I felt that I couldn’t justify a more expensive iron.  I could not have been more wrong.

I didn’t realize that the weight of an iron made that big of a difference in the amount of effort it would take to actually take the wrinkles out of a shirt.  That, and I had no idea when this thing was up to the right temperature.  All of these things made me severely dislike not only the iron, but the act of ironing itself, just because it took so much of my time just to look presentable.

Anyway, it took me only 15 minutes to iron the shirts I just did with my new iron.  These exact same shirts took nearly an hour with the dinky little thing I used to have.  The lesson: don’t cheap out on things that are supposed to help you do things faster and more efficiently.

Admittedly, it has been a while since I last really truly developed a website.

Funding at Columbia University page screenshot, 27Aug2009

The FaCU site wasn’t so much of a site as it was a page, and really, I feel I could have done a better job if I weren’t so ridiculously busy Senior year, and if I were more up to speed on using CSS to lay out websites.

Every time I’ve done this, beginning seven years ago, I’ve hit this block around how to manage the layout of a site.  The old way, working with browsers that didn’t correctly render CSS styling code, a lot of people dealt with the problem by using <table> hacks, using these tags to generate a website layout composed of “invisible boxes”.  All fine and good, except that it made changing even the smallest design element on the site was a huge undertaking, because every box was made to align and fit together like intricate pieces of a puzzle, and adjusting the thickness of one border or the geometry of one cell within the table, even by one pixel, required tweaking of every element around it, sometimes even going back and re-generating images or other graphics.

Current Garfield Messenger website screenshot, 27Aug2009

My first effort at using CSS to lay out a website was in high school, when it became my project to design and build a website for the high school newspaper.  I used it to learn not only PHP and how to interact with a MySQL database, but really everything that would be involved in developing a website.  It never became as full-featured as I wanted it to be, and it was eventually wiped out in favor of something less complex, and then again more recently for a WordPress-backed system.

Long story short, I tried to learn CSS in high school, found it supported by the various browsers available at the time in a very inconsistent manner (between browsers), and ditched it because it was too confusing to figure out how do exactly what I wanted with it.

Capstone Industries - iQueue Dispenser System

I came back to CSS during my Senior year at Columbia while I was working on not only the FaCU website, but also the website for my Senior Design Project.  I tried to adhere to only the most widely available fonts, and the lowest common resolution for both sites.  The result: fairly ugly sites, but they get the job done.

Fast forward to today, when I’m now working on moving all of the lab’s most commonly used inventory books into a user-friendly digital form.  CSS has better support across every browser, and everything just makes more sense now.  No idea why.

Still, CSS is still rendered with quite a few annoying quirks.  Take, for instance, the following page layout:

Lab inventory site

Renders just fine in Chrome, Firefox, and IE8.  The left navigation panel and the main content to the left are spaced and positioned properly.  In IE7, the main content title renders where it should, but the table appears at the bottom, under the navigation block.  In Opera, the positioning offset I used to place the content area to the right of the navigation pane doesn’t appear to be necessary, so there’s a giant gap where there shouln’t be one.

A better situation than I was working with seven years ago, but still irritating.

I signed in to the admin section of my blog today, and the following message was waiting for me:

Akismet has protected your site from 208 spam comments already, and there are 103 comments in your spam queue right now.

What. The. Hell.

Well, on the plus side, Akismet is working beautifully!

Analyze this for me:

1. Hush Sound – As You Cry
2. Ok Go – You’re So Damn Hot
3. Travis – Indefinitely
4. O.A.R. – Black Rock
5. Ok Go – 1000 Miles Per Hour
6. Blues Traveler – Girl Inside my Head
7. Death Cab For Cutie – A Movie Script Ending
8. Guster – Amsterdam
9. The Zutons – Valerie
10. Death Cab for Cutie – Why’d You Want to Live Here
11. Ok Go – C-C-C-Cinnamon Lips
12. O.A.R – Ladanay
13. Yellowcard – Lights and Sounds
14. Maroon 5 – “Back at Your Door”
15. The Zutons – Tired of Hanging Around
16. The Magnetic Fields – Fido, Your Leash is Too Long
17. O.A.R. – Conquering Fools
18. Radiohead – Vegetable
19. Ok Go – There’s a Fire
20. The Submarines – You, Me, and the Bourgeoisie
21. Dandy Warhols – Minnesoter

I came across a post on DCist today; the post was published a little over a week ago, but I think th news is still pretty awesome. Apparently, cell phone service will be available in the 20 busiest stations in the DC Metro system. Beginning in mid-October for customers of the four largest cell phone service providers (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-mobile), with service in te other 26 stations within a year.

Better than New York, but the system doesn’t run 24/7.