Late Night Lightning

I have a camera at the beach to watch all those people come in and party while we're away. I have it set up to send me an email with a picture when there's movement. Last night I got an email around 12:30 pm with the picture below attached. Looks like it was rocking and rolling out in front of the house. I've seen this before (see below).

I've ordered a couple of new cameras from Wyze to help document my life (as if anyone cared). So maybe you'll be seeing more post on the old blog in the future.

MPG to GIF

A couple of years ago we published a paper on the discovery of a TAK1 inhibitor in which we included an x-ray crystal structure. Somebody wanted to use an animated picture of the crystal structure in a website and so I made a few movies and turned one of them into a .gif so I could drop it into a website without any problem. He it is.

This a a ribbon structure with the ligand shown as a space-filling molecule. It spins at about 15 rpm. Maybe too fast! The crystal is 5v5n and the movie was made with MacPyMol.

Blue Shit, Bronze Shit

Over the last few years at work, I've been working with fluorescent dyes. Specifically I've been connecting them to an Hsp90 protein binding ligand to make a compound which, for whatever reason, selectively goes into cancer cells versus normal cells. Anyhow, to make these things, I sometimes have to make the dye which I couple to a ligand-linker construct via a Suzuki coupling. But that's not what this is about. This is about a weird property of these dyes. I've used one dye extensively because it absorbs and emits in a region compatible with widely available instrumentation. Recently, my supply has been running low and so I've been making more. The really cool thing about these dyes is that they start out deeply colored, in this case blue. But when they are purified and concentrated, they form a solid with a very metallic sheen. You can even see yourself in the reflection. Very weird. Of course I have some pictures. Here's the dye:

And here's how it looks when you make a bunch (7 g) of it.
Starts out Deep Blue.

Turns to Bronze.

This is pretty strange considering this molecule only contains carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and sulfur.

For the nerds reading this, here's the spectra of a compound after the conjugation. I don't have one of the dye itself, though it should be very close.

Commute

Five mornings a week, I drive to work. Five afternoons a week I drive home again. Here's what it's like.
Morning:

Afternoon:

Except that it's a bit slower.

Sand Castles

We bought a beach house a few years ago. For some reason, it seems that now it's actually harder to get out to the beach. But when I do, I build sand castles. I like to build them tall so they actually collapse numerous times over the course of construction. Here are three of my efforts so far this year,

A good day is when I get to see the ocean destroy them rather than an angry adolescent.

Tides

I have a camera at my beach house, or should I say marsh house, that takes a picture every 8 minutes. Every once in a while I download a couple of weeks worth of pictures and cram them together into a movie so that I can watch the tide go in and out. Let's try and insert one here.

Somewhere in here I raked the yard and so you see the leaves disappear and slowly come back again. So, after posting this video, I can see that Blogger compresses it a bit and makes the video a little lower quality than it already is. Here's a link to a better version: Tides

Lightning

This morning, at about 5:50 AM, the motion detector function in my camera at the beach sent me a picture because it had detected motion. Motion, to a motion detector function in a camera, is a change in what the camera is seeing. When I looked at the picture and then looked at the time it was sent, I figured it should have been dark. Hmm! So I looked on the weather map and saw that an intense storm has just passed through. The light is from lightning. It's an eerie glow. Kind of ghostly.

Friends

Everywhere that I work, I have friends that accompany me. Here are my friends from home.

And here are my friends at work.

Stock Market Deja Vu

A few years ago, as I was sitting at my computer, the stock market crashed. I watched it in real time and then I wrote about it on my blog. Here's what it looked like:

Well, today as I was sitting at my computer, I got a message from Preston telling me that all my money was going down the tubes. I managed to catch it going down and watched as the Dow dropped 1,500 plus points. It bounced back a bit but not as well as in 2010. Here's what it looked like:

Eerily similar.

I wonder if the Trumpster, who takes a lot of unwarranted credit for the stock market boom, will be willing to take the blame for this little setback. Nah, I didn't think so.

Coins

This post will not be exciting. It's here mainly for accounting purposes. Some time ago I documented emptying my coin jar. Wow, that was 10 years ago! I didn't mentioned that soon after, we put them all in little rolls and took them to the bank. Anyhow, I just did it again, almost.

Some years ago, my lovely wife decided that it would be fun and educational for her and the kids to collect quarters from each state. Do you remember how they were gonna go from having one quarter to having 50 quarters with each state honored on one side? And how they would roll out each state one at a time? They would put them each in a little book and learn about the states as each new one was issued. Well the kids never got interested and most of us forgot about the whole quarter-state thing.

About 20 years later, my wife pulls down a box from on top of a cabinet and it contains a boat load of quarters and a bunch of paper tubes to hold them in.  She hands it to me and says "Deal with this". So I finish rolling them all up and, while in the mood, go get my big plastic coke bottle and go through the whole process with it again. To make a long story short, I deposited about $800 total and now I get to start all over again.

Sand Castles

This year's offering.  The tide was going out so I didn't see how it ended.

Scintillating scotoma

A few years ago, I was working in the lab when I noticed that my vision was going wacky. I wrote all about it on my blog which you can read here. Well, today I was reading In the Pipeline and one commenter mentioned fortifications hallucination. So I looked that up and found the wikipedia article, scintillating scotoma, which pretty exactly describes what I was seeing.  The Wiki article even has some pretty good graphics.

Now I have a little better idea of what was going on. I never did get a migraine and this never happened again.

Castles Made of Sand

I recently spent a week at the beach. After a week of distractions, I finally got a day to build a sand castle. Notice the windows in some of the towers. I build hollow castles. Here it is:

After a couple of hours, the tide returned, just like I planned.

And eventually did its work.

And I managed to get sunburned.

Deer Here

On the way home from the grocery store, as I stopped at the light in front of Whole Foods store, I noticed a different looking animal crossing the street. We have zillions of these bastards around the house constantly eating the shrubberies but something was different about this one.  So when the light turned green I crossed the road and turned into the church parking lot where it looked like it went. At first I didn't see it and then I turned to the left and there it was.  I took a picture with the window up first, in case it ran away and then I rolled down the window and took a couple more.  Here it is.

Flowers Blooming

I've always been intrigued by those movies that speed up action by taking a lot of pictures over a long time and cram them together. They're usually something like plants growing. So I made one.

Let's go back a bit. I recently agreed to do an interview for a company and provided feedback on their new website design. For a fee, of course. They paid me $200 for my lunch hour in the form of an Amazon credit. This money was burning my pockets (as my dad used to say), so I spent some of it on a wireless camera that you link via WiFi and can control and view over the web.  I bought this one. I'll put in a picture cause the link will quit working some day. It costs $110.  Of course, as soon as I bought it, it went down to $99.

I can't figure out what to do with it exactly. We originally mounted it in the garage and pointed it at my wife's tomatoes to see if we could figure out what was eating them. Turned out it was birds.

It doesn't have the highest quality picture but there are a lot of nifty things you can do with it after spending days reading the instructions which you actually have to go looking for on the web. One thing you can do is have it take a picture at regular intervals and send them by ftp to some server if you have an account. I happen to have a GoDaddy account that I use for all kinds of crap like this. Then I take all the pictures and cram them into a movie.

Recently my wife got these neat flowers from the guy who does our next-door neighbors yard. They're big white flowers that bloom when it gets dark and collapse the next day around 10 in the morning. After making sure that I had an adequate WiFi signal in the yard, I set up the camera near sundown and pointed it at the flowers. I set it to take a picture every minute and then left it alone. This is my first shot at it. You have to look fast.

The flowers are definitely cooler than my movie making.

A Peep in the MicroWave

So, just what happens when you put an Easter Peep in the microwave?  I decided to find out.  And I decided to record it.  It was necessary to do this pretty soon as the Peeps the I bought at Roses were disappearing one at a time.  So here's what happens.

Cool, Huh?

Samuel L. Jackson or Laurence Fishburne

Recently a reporter was interviewing Samuel L. Jackson and asked him about his role in a Super Bowl ad. Unfortunately for the reporter, the ad had Laurence Fishburne in it and not Jackson. So Jackson proceeds to mercilessly pound the reporter for quite some time over his mistake. I felt bad for the reporter because I am always getting those two confused. I understand. And I don't get either of them confused with Morgan Freeman.

Which is which?

Miracles Do Happen

This morning a minor miracle happened. About two thirds of the way into work, I realized that I had not been stopped by a single red light. And the trend continued all the way to the parking deck. I copied a picture of my route and pasted little stoplights on the route where the lights actually are to give you an idea of what a miracle this was.

It wasn't a perfect miracle. I did take a right on red without having to wait onto Erwin and I slipped through the light on Garrett on yellow fading to red as I passed under it. Maybe I should buy a lottery ticket on the way home.

The Apple Macintosh is 30 Today

As most people who know me know, I've been an Apple "fanboy" for much of my life.  When people have asked me what computer to buy, I always say "Get a Mac".  Anyhow, on the 30th Anniversary of the Mac's introduction, I thought I would put up a list of the Macs I've had over the Years.

The first one was the original Macintosh.  In September, 1984, wife got some friends to get it for me with their college discount, which made it it about half the cost of retail.  I think it was an anniversary gift.  In 1989 I made my best Apple purchase ever.  I bought 100 shares of AAPL at $35 each.

We got our next Mac, a Mac IIsi, seven years later in 1991.  This was purchased with the Princeton college discount.  We also got the 13 inch color display.

After another seven years, in 1998, we got a new G3 desktop with a new 21 inch display.  No college discount but the college discount had pretty much gone away by then.

Seven years later, in 2005, I decided that the computer and the monitor should be separate, so rather than buy an iMac, I purchased a Mac mini and got a Dell monitor to go with it.  After 2 years, I attempted to upgrade the RAM and damaged it such that the fans ran wide open all the time.  Luckily, after a couple of months of loud fan noise, a lightning strike put it out of it's misery.

And so, in 2007, we bought a new Aluminum 20 inch iMac.  This machine was a disaster because it kept shutting down unannounced. After a lot of complaining and phone calls, I got Apple to replace the motherboard and power supply and all was good in the world.  In 2012, I replaced an increasingly flaky internal hard drive with a new 1T drive.

Rather than wait the full seven years, and still feeling a bit guilty about the indulgence since the old one was working fine, I treated myself to a new 27 inch iMac for Christmas 2013.  I reasoned that the stock was doing good enough and I was getting old and it was time and the new one would be a lot faster and, blah, blah, blah.  So I'm just getting it up to speed.  It's a nice toy for an old boy.

So this picture sort of summarizes my Apple Macintosh journey.

Fortunately, the little Apple stock I bought back in 1989 has appreciated nicely enough to cover these purchases along with all the other Apple do-dads we've bought along the way.

Raked the Yard

Goodness!  It's been months since I posted something on my blog.  So, today I will post something that, maybe, will get me back into the habit.  This morning started slow.  There was a report last week in the news where some sleep researchers proposed that the reason we need sleep is to clean out the crap that builds up in our brains during the day as a result of the mental activity that we engage in.  During sleep is when our bodies clean up.  This morning was Saturday and I didn't have to go to work so I spent a lot of time this morning cleaning out the mess in my brain.

Then around 10 or so, I got up.  I had some breakfast, coffee and a poptart as usual, and then after brushing my teeth, I went outside to clean up the yard.  Specifically, this means raking.  Of all the crappy chores one does around the house, I seem to actually mind raking the least.  In fact I may even enjoy it.  Especially if it's a nice cool, not cold, day.  Actually it's not just raking.  It's raking and blowing.  You rake the big stuff and put it in a big bag to empty in the woods behind the house and then you blow the little stuff around to make things look complete.

Here's the yard when I got started around 11 this morning:

I raked for about an hour or so, carrying off two loads of leaves into the woods in the back.  And here's the yard when I got through.

Look at all that lovely grass coming up after Bill Merkel seeded it so nice a couple of weeks ago and after I raked it this morning.  You can see the blower in the yard after I blew around the smaller stuff.

So there, I've blogged again.  Maybe it won't be another 8 months till I do it again.

Sold my 1999 Volvo S70 this Morning

A few years ago I bought a used navy blue 1999 Volvo S70 to replace the red 1996 Volvo 850 that got destroyed in an accident.  I drove it for a number of years until in 2008 we bought my wife a new car and I inherited her Honda Odyssey and my son inherited my Volvo.  He didn't take real good care of it but it served him fairly well for a number of years.  It was getting a bit quirky and on occasion would stall in stop-and-go traffic.  He put up with the annoyances until he had options.  Last June he got a real job that pays reasonable money and after stalling a few times too many, he decided that it was time for a new car.  So he bought an economical Toyota Prius C.  And he delivered the Volvo back to me.  "Thanks Dad", he said as he drove off.  Actually, I had to go to Charlotte and get it.

We didn't really need the car and it was in the way so finally, after buying a new battery ($174) and killing it and buying a charger ($36) and trying to resurrect it and failing and finally going and getting yet another battery (this one was free), I put the car on Craig's List for $1000.00.

I put it up around noon.  Very soon I got an email from a guy named Mike who wanted to buy it.  We made arrangements for him to come by the next day to see it and take it for a test drive.  I may not have asked enough for the car.  While I was on the phone talking to him, I looked over at my email account and noticed that there were five more emails in my in-box.  By the time I was off the phone, there were 11.  I quickly replied to the first few that I had made arrangements with the first caller and that I would work  through the list until I sold the car.  By the time I had done this for a few, there were even more emails.  

So I changed the ad and said that due to the large number of responses I might not get back to everyone who inquired.  Then my cell phone rang.  It was the second emailer.  He had gotten my name from the email and looked up my phone number, called home and my wife had given him my cell number.  I told him that if the first guy didn't want it, he was next.  He thought the first guy would buy it for sure and offered me more money.  I told him I'd already given the first guy a shot.  He seemed bothered by my bout of ethics, but said he understood.

Meanwhile, the emails continued.  By the time I went to bed after midnight there were around 55 emails.  Most said, "I want the car, call me at 919-blah-blah."  When I got up the next morning, there were 4 or 5 more and one from Mike saying he was on the way and should be there by 9:00.

Mike arrived with a friend soon after nine and looked the car over.  I kept pointing out the little problems and Mike kept telling me all the positive things about the car.  Eventually we went for a drive and as I kept pointing out all the little ticks and oddities about the car, Mike was becoming more and more convinced that he was going to buy it. When we got back to the house, he gave my wife 10 C-notes, swapped the plates and off we went to the bank to find a notary.  Sun Trust didn't have one but Wells Fargo did.  We chatted a bit while we waited for the notary to get finished with the people ahead of us.  Then we went in and I signed over the title.  I shook Mike's hand and left him with the Volvo and drove home.  After about 16 years, there is no longer a Volvo in my life and, hopefully,  I won't ever have a Volvo nightmare again.

Mischief in the Apple Store

This summer my daughter and I went into the Apple store at the Streets of Southpoint Mall.  I thought it  would be cool to see how many devices upon which I could put an Elvis face before we got thrown out of the store.  I managed to only do two before my daughter put a stop to it.

20 Years of Thanksgiving at Sunset Beach

Since the year after my folks passed away, my family has been getting together with my sisters and my brother and two of my cousins and my uncle along with kids and wives and husbands and extended families and friends over the years.  This year marked the 20th year we've done this.  More pictures can be seen by clicking on the picture above including the creepy doll at the mailbox.

Odd Juxtaposition

Recently, my wife and I ventured to Iowa for a wedding and the annual visit with the in-laws.  On the morning of the wedding, we went over to the church in Hull, Iowa to help set up some things for the wedding.  On the way my wife noticed a sign placed in a rather odd place.  Later in the evening, on the way to the wedding, I rolled down the window and took a picture.  Kind of let's you know how they feel about their dead out in Iowa.

As it turns out, there is a dumping place for yard waste just behind the graveyard.

 

Visit to the ER

It was an interesting day.  Monday morning I went over to the Toone lab to use their prep HPLC. It was bright outside.  After injecting my compound and coming back to the lab, I walked over to Dave's hood and looked at his computer.  I mentioned that the other Dave downstairs had sent him a text message.  Upstairs Dave said that he was ignoring downstairs Dave.  Then I went over to my desk to check email and look at a journal article on my computer screen.
As I sat down and looked at the screen, I noticed something wrong, or WTF, as they say.  I couldn't read the screen.  There was this weird distortion on the screen.  I immediately rubbed my eyes and it didn't go away.  Being a scientist, I immediately started doing experiments to see what the hell was happening.  Close one eye, distorted!  Close the other eye, still distorted.  There seemed to be a ring of distortion with a clear undistorted space in the middle.  OK, that's weird.  So I close my eyes and cover my face with my hands to keep out the light.  Damn, it's still there.  Except that everything is black and there's this ring of small scintillating polygonal shapes.  It's somewhat like what happens when you look a a bright light and then look away and the image stays with you.  Except that it was different.  More defined by distortion and less by intensity.  And it wasn't going away.
I open my eyes and tell Yazan, a grad student standing by my desk that there's something wrong with my vision.  He looks at me with that what the heck are you talking about look.  In the meantime, I'm doing this constant check of the rest of my body.  Did I just have a stroke?  Numbness, weakness, pain?  Nothing unusual.
So, focusing the clear center of the distorted ring on the computer, I look up webMD and start typing in symptoms.  First head, then eyes, then blurriness, no drugs, no infection, sudden onset.  WebMD tells me to call 911 and get my ass to a doctor.
So I call on Brittany, another grad student in the lab.  Brittany volunteers as an EMT with a local emergency services organization, so she's seen a lot of stuff and anything she hasn't seen, she's had.  She basically tells me to "Man up" and quit whining.  Not getting any sympathy in the lab, I call my wife and tell her about it.  She insists that I go see a doctor, maybe via a first trip to the optometrist.  About this time Tim walks in and I tell him what's going on.  He seems concerned and walks away.  Then Dave walks over and asks what's going on.  I tell him my eyes are doing weird shit and it won't go away, sort of like a visual version of his ear ringing that showed up after his nose job.  Brittany and Dave run me through the stroke assessment routine that they learned from EMT training.  I seem to pass.  Tim shows back up.  He called his wife, a doctor, and she thought I should see a doctor  maybe via my GP first.  I can't get anyone to answer the phone at the optometrist and my GP just retired and the one I was thinking of going to can't get me in this afternoon and suggest going to Urgent Care.  My wife calls and says she talked to Amy, another doctor, and she thought I should do something but not to bother with Urgent Care.  Just go to the emergency room.  Urgent care would send me there anyway.  Dave, whose head got smashed with a soccer ball about a year ago and who wasted two hours at Urgent Care, only to be sent to the emergency room anyhow, concurred.  By this time, the distortion was starting to go away and everyone had arrived at some diagnosis.  The favorite seemed to be a psychedelic flashback from drug use in my youth and an intense inquisition on my drug use in high school ensued.  The final opinion was that I should go see a doctor and that the fastest way was to go to the emergency room.
Brittany, who has visited the ER on numerous occasions, usually to deliver people, volunteered to go with me.  So we took off for the ER.  We tried to get there by only going through air conditioned buildings but eventually we had to go outside and around to the back of the other side of the hospital to get into the ER.  Entering the ER is a lot like going onto a plane.  The first thing you see on entering is a conveyer belt and a walk-through metal detector.  We toss our stuff into the box on the conveyor and the guy asks if we have any knives.  I give him my knife and he gives me a receipt.  "Use this to get your knife on the way out", he says.  That's different from the plane.  You never see your knife again.
We got in line and when it was my turn I told the person at the desk that I had a sudden attack of blurry vision.  It seemed kind of puny.  I would have felt more like I belonged there if blood was spurting out of me.  She told us to have a seat and wait for my name to be called.  Brittany knew the routine pretty good and kept me informed of what was going on.  While we were waiting, she mentioned that maybe I had a TIA.
Eventually, I got called to a Triage room where they got my vitals and asked a few questions about why I was there.  I related the vision thing and what webMD told me.  One of the nurses said "I hate webMD. It causes half the visits to the ER. Anybody that looks at webMD suddenly thinks they're suffering from everything imaginable."  Now I felt even worse about coming.  Why couldn't I be holding a severed limb or something?  My bp was 130/80, a bit high for me. 
When they got through, they sent us out the other side of the room into a hall and led us to an eye exam room.  On the way Brittany ran into a guy she knew from EMT work.  "Are you OK?" he asked.  "Yea, I'm fine.  I brought over a coworker."
In the eye room, two ladies, a nurse and a nurses assistant came in.  The nurses assistant walks in and looks at me and then says "Hey Brittany. Are you OK?" "Yea, I'm fine.  I brought over a coworker."  They ask a few more questions and I relate the vision thing again.  Then they leave and nobody comes in for about an hour.
Out in the hall, a janitor is relating some story about a big fight he had with somebody, maybe a girlfriend.  It's difficult to tell just what he's saying but he's pretty pissed about something.  As his story builds to a loud, though largely unintelligible crescendo,  a young intern walks in and closes the door.  Oddly enough, he doesn't know Brittany.
"So, what's up?" he asks.  I go through the vision thing again and he does a thorough stroke exam, having me push and pull with all my limbs and watching fingers move.  I think he's trying to see if something works better on one side compared to the other, a sure sign of stroke.  But nothing.  Next comes and eye exam.  20/30 in both eyes. It used to be a lot better when I was younger.  Then he leaves the room to get some numbing drops to do an eye pressure test, a test for glaucoma.  While he's gone, a woman comes in to explain the charges and get my insurance info and credit card.  I should have looked before coming.  $250 deductible for an ER visit.  The intern comes back after a while and does the eye pressure test and, some time in there, the nursing assistant gets another bp and a drop of blood for glucose levels.  So far, all normal.  Then everyone leaves the room again.
After a few minutes, the intern comes back in with the attending physician.  The attending physician looks at me and then looks at Brittany and says "Hey Brittany. Are you OK?" She replies, "Yea, I'm fine.  I brought over a coworker."  He then explains that they don't see anything wrong with my eyes and yet, I don't seem to have symptoms that suggests a neurological problem.  "Maybe it was a TIA," he says.
They suggested that, for sure, I should schedule an eye exam and maybe, but not necessarily unless it happened again, I should see a neurologist.  They gave me a number to call if I needed it.
The lady with my credit card came back in and I signed the sheet just like in a nice restaurant.  The original nurse came back in and went over everything again and they took my blood pressure one more time and told me I could go.
So Brittany and I said good bye to everyone, dropped by on the way out to pick up my knife and walked back to lab just in time to go home.
I haven't seen the fuzzy stuff again, so far.