Wednesday, January 20, 2010

currently we have wonderful thunderstorms in davis and I didn't know about it. Sure it was raining, but that was not unheard of before and I live in a little area which is quite wind sheltered.

So I drove to work this morning and as soon as I hit the open road I had to battle crosswinds of up to 50mph. Needless to say I was happy that nothing happens and check now the weather report before I leave the house in the morning, and if it's gusty/windy I'm going to work from home.

It also turns out that my leather gloves are not waterproof and the new jacket is not as waterproof as the old on. Basically the sleeves are soaked and the bike is parked in the delivery area, since I'm affraid the wind topples it over during the day, while I'm waiting for a moment when the storm settles to run home.

Sunday, January 17, 2010



after we spend this weekend In yosomete I learned a couple of things.
  • snow camping didn't work, since my sleeping bag was to cold and also ashley's spare sleeping bag. So we rented a cabin
  • snowshoeing didn't work out, since there was not enough snow at our altitude. Guess we have to go to higher altitude. Instead we did a nice hike
  • we had a wounderful time together and celebrated our return to davis with a tasty dinner and a bottle of cabernet. Once in a while I actually like dry cabernet.
  • sleeping bag liner don't work for me
  • my food planning worked well and I love my little camp stove
So what do we have to change for the next time?
  • buy a new backpack, mine is more or less gone now and rips everywhere. After all it lasted 6 years and traveled over 100k miles on airplanes
  • buy a -5 celsius rated sleeping bag for the next winter. It's gonna be pricey and will take a year to acquire

 
 
 

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

the last couple of days I was spending with writing parsers for chemical databases. Like

  • Kegg
  • BinBase
  • Pubchem
  • LipidMaps
  • Chebi
  • HMDB
to integrate them all together to a single database of compounds. During this process I decided to use the inchi key as main identifier over all these databases and just ignore the compounds which don't have an inchi key.

This inolved some rewriting of a couple of open source projects to include the newest inchi specifications and to make some work under osx 64bit snow leopard.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

well my Logitech Triple FI arrived around the 22 of December and I put them away to sell them on craigslist. Well this was my honest attention I swear!
But this morning they just kept shouting my name, try us, try us, TRY US. You got us for 100$ instead of 400$. You can always sell us used, once the people sold all there triple fi's and the market recovers.

Well I caved in and listened to them. No pun intended... And have to say, they sound awesome, right out of the box. It's amazing for in ear headphones. They literally blow my RE0 away.

So now I got:

In Ear Headphones:

  • Logitech Triple FI for listening to music on the go/at work
  • Head Fi RE-0 + Foam Tips for riding the motorcycle, they are small enough to fit under the helmet and block the wind noise quite nicely. Still optimizing
  • Sennheiser CX-400 for listening to audio books (I found them in the back of my closet!)
Full Size:
  • AH-D5000 Denons
  • Shure SRH-840 (for sale, can't justify keeping them and wanting grados. So they have togo)

Saturday, January 09, 2010

after we arrived back from germany I started to research my christmas gift a big more and it turned out to be a combination of:

  • tankbag for the bike
  • saddle bags for the bike
and I also did exchange my black tourmaster jacket, against a hideous neon yellow Tourmaster jacket. Advantage you can see me much better, disadvantage the cool bike image is gone...

Well I don't have to see myself in the mirror. But the color is damn hideous...

before:

after:
 

now the color I really wanted was sadly not available