I've been swimming in a bacterial culture

From LA Times: L.A. County Beaches Were State's Most Unhealthful This Summer

J'y crois pas! All this time I've been in the sea, paddling away quite happily, oblivious to the fact that I've been immersing myself in a broth of bacteria more dangerous than the ones I grow!

Perhaps I should do swabs of myself after an hour's session...

World's slowest car chase

Americans may not "do" irony as I understand it, but they certainly do great comedy. For example, I'm currently watching a 10-15mph car chase in San Pedro on abc that has been going on for the last half hour. I can't stop laughing! The newsreaders are commentating on whether the driver is "DUI" (driving under influence), and seriously speculating if the driver is looking for a safe place to ditch the car and run. They're even recommending that viewers stay in their homes in case the driver goes loopy or decides to turn this into a high-speed chase. Come on guys! Do you really have to big-up everything? Is this such a slow news day that you have to devote at least 20 minutes of news time to the world's slowest car chase?

(And as I'm about to post this, there's breaking news that the vehicle concerned has been involved in a pursuit before that lasted 4 hours. Oh my... We're in for the long haul, eh?)

Update: I give up! It's been 30 minutes. The only reason I was on abc was to check out the local news, and there was the promise of some preview of Saddam Hussein's trial. Bloody CBS has the damn car chase instead of real news as well. A flip to NBC gives... a news report on the effectiveness (or rather, lack of) of antibacterial handsoap. These local news stations must love car chases; it gives their newscasters/readers a chance to just blether on and on. Fed up now. Guess it's back to CNN.

Sigh of relief

P is on his way.

After a one-and-a-half week worry, wondering where his passport was while waiting for both the US embassy and their very useless couriers (SMS) to get their act together, he's all set to leave the UK for the very first time. (OK, he's been out of the UK on holiday before, but this will be the first time he's truly away from home.)

And just in time for Halloween too! We've carved pumpkins and set them up on our windowsill in Edinburgh before, but this time, we'll do it properly and even dress up! (There has also been talk of going to have a look-see at a parade in Hollywood.)

I can't even begin to describe what a relief it is that he's finally on his way. Although the last few months have just flown by, I haven't really settled in. Like so many other foreign post-docs, I have no reason to go home on time in the evenings; I don't want to be the kind of person who lives in the lab. I've even forgotten what it's like to talk to someone over breakfast/dinner.

Without anyone to share my food, I don't have any incentive to bake or do anything more elaborate than stick bits of protein, carbohydrate and vegetables together in 2 or fewer pans. It'll also be nice to try out some LA restaurants that aspire to more than the fare I've had so far.

i got wet! yay!

That's three days in a row that the pavements got damp. LA even smells quite clean. The best thing about the walk from the bus stop to work is the fresh, yet sweet, smell of one of the trees. Haven't worked out which one it is, but it's almost natural. ;)

storm? what storm?

Received this via the uni's mass mailing list:

October 17, 2005
Due recent storm activity, we have lost connectivity to the Oat Mountain transmitter. The loss of connectivity to this transmitter has caused for our users to miss their pages in the following areas:

[snip]
[snip], our maintenance support vendor, has been made aware of the situation. Unfortunately, due to the rain, they are unable to reach the mountain top. We will have to wait until the weather clears up and the roads become accessible.

Ha ha ha! Storm?! Noticed that on the news last night too: abc had a "Storm Watch", which made me laugh so hard I nearly chundered up my dinner. OK, there's been some thunder/lightning, but it's been just a bit of rain so far. It used to rain a lot more and a lot more heavily in S'pore (typical tropical weather). I think the weathermen like to "big up" the weather here, to make themselves appear more important.

iTunes UK vs US

iTunes now comes with video capability. Which is super news for people like me who always end up missing episodes of popular TV shows. I missed season one of Lost because I left the UK before it had aired, while here in the US, it's on to season two already. Same thing with The West Wing, for which I've had to use the internet to fill huge plot gaps because I missed all of season five (they're on to season sever here, but Bravo is staging a marathon of season six, thank goodness).

Desperate Housewives is another popular TV series I watch occasionally, and it looks like iTunes (US) is offering 23 episodes for $34.99! And the most recent episodes at $1.99 each! Yes, entire episodes for under two bucks... How on earth are they managing that? After all, to buy an entire season of any TV series on DVD usually costs 30 quid for a pack of two to four episodes in UK shops.

What's even more unbelievable is the discrepancy in pricing between the US and the UK yet again. When iTunes (UK) first opened, they charged us one quid for a song that only cost one buck in the States. Bearing in mind that the exchange rate fluctuates around the 60 pence to a buck ratio, that's a 30 percent mark-up for iTunes (UK). The greedy arses are doing it again with the videos, charging 1.89 UKP per video, and not releasing episodes of TV shows.

It makes me wonder if the prices in the US are artificially low, and the iTunes in the rest of the world are subsidising these cheap American videos... Put them tin-foil hats on.

Technorati tags: iTunes, rip-off.

adelphia are unbelievably incompetent

I can't believe it! Adelphia have screwed up yet again!

Apparently, they didn't record my details the first time round, and left a message on my answering machine to have me call them back. And when I did, I finally realised what an incompetent lot work for Adelphia. Either they don't get trained when they join the company, or they are a bunch of jobsworths.

Allegedly, they failed to record my full details the first time round. Which kinda sounds like a bunch of nonsense, seeing as I made sure that the promotions guy recorded everything. Now they're telling me that I have to wait a whole week before I can be rescheduled for an installation appointment. "But, no, hang on, Miss... A work order was submitted for an installation for you today! So, please wait until 12 (again) and phone the customer service number if nobody shows up."

What the hell kind of service do you call this? Bunch of incompetent, time-wasting people. And I can't even change companies as, allegedly, Adelphia are the only provider for my area. What rot!

Perhaps this is all part of a conspiracy to prevent me from working Monday mornings in October... Has someone in the building arranged this so they can steal my reagents while I'm stuck at home? Or is some governmental agency trying to stop me from getting into the lab (because I'm the only one who gets there early) so they can bug the place? I should just face the facts and conclude, unequivocally, that Adelphia sucks.

Technorati tags: adelphia, adelphia sucks.

Kings Rule (?)

The LA Kings played their first home match in a year at the Staples Center against the Phoenix Coyotes, and I was there. Oh yes, this was my first experience of an all-American sporting event (even though most ice hockey players are really Canadian; well, they're *North* American too). And what an experience it was!

I'm no stranger to passionate support of a team, be it football, rugby or cricket. But never have I sat in a stadium in utter silence after a goal scored by the away side. If there were any expatriate Phoenix fans in the Staples Center tonight, they sure kept themselves quiet... It was a partisan crowd without equal; little different to your regular fitba fans, who challenge the referee's every decision against the home side and keep mum when their team gets away with a gawd-awful foul. It didn't help that I was sat with the craziest fans (one of whom bought the tickets for us), starting the chants, and generally swearing loudly at all the players throughout the game. Again, perfectly normal behaviour, for nutjobs...

There's something about ice hockey that seems to draw the males with the most testosterone. There were a fair few fights on the ice, and it's a good thing the crowd was 99.99% Kings fans, or there may have been fights on the steep terraces.

Ice hockey is a strange sport. It's not all that easy to skate or control a puck on ice, yet players are allowed to bump into each other, obstruct their opponents, slam their opponents into the plexiglass walls, and generally act like hyperactive boys in a playground. And if you start a fight, you're told off, made to go sit down for a bit, but be back on the ice by the time the next period has started... That's not exactly going to teach the player a lesson. If anything, his teammates have to work harder while he has a wee breather on the bench...

It's also weird how many substitutions there are in a game. It's like a constant flow of traffic here and there. Hope someone keeps track of the number of players on the ice at any one time... Speaking of which, a wee storm in a teacup resulted today when the Coyotes posted the name of an injured guy on their match list, but brought in a different player, who was then ruled as ineligible to play... A controversy enough, but I heard on the radio on the way back that the Kings staff knew about the initial mistake when the player list was submitted, but kept mum about it. Somehow, I'm no longer surprised by behaviour like that. Sportsmanship now has a completely different meaning...

And a one hour game is no longer that either... As I understand it, ice hockey is split into three 20 minute periods, which gives the players a little time to recover from whatever brutal push or whack they received during play. But it's not only two 15 minute intermissions per game. Oh no... There are wee breaks for TV commercials. J'y crois pas! Play stops DURING the 20 minute period for TV scheduling/advertising purposes! So what should have been a 60 minute game plus 30 minutes of intermission took 3 hours to complete... It pissed me off no end when BBC lost TMS, and Channel 4 started to show short ads between overs; or when BBC (again) lost F1, and ITV showed ads during the race. But at least with those, play/action didn't stop... I don't like this. What if they introduce this in football, given Sky's dominance over the Premiership? Speaking of Sky, I've now seen Rupert Murdoch's Fox Sports Channel presenters in the flesh; they broadcast out of a booth at the Staples Center.

And speaking of TV, just like I've seen on TV during the Lakers games in the early 90s, the roving TV camera picks up people waving their flags/towels/t-shirt manically. And the cameraman had a good eye for spotting the lookers in the crowd. There were lingering shots on celavatories like some guy from SugarRay (was told his name, which I promptyly forgot), the gardener from Desperate Housewives, and Cindy Crawford with two pretty wee girls (at least I recognised her straight away). There may have been more, but stick a famous face under a baseball cap and I'd fail to recognise them. Then again, stick a famous face right in front of me and I'd still fail to recognise it.

While I'll probably never be a die-hard Kings fan, the experience was fun enough to make me wanna go again. But give me a few weeks to recover from the earache of piercing whistles and shouting men...

And I almost forgot to mention that I had my first all-American hotdog, with mechanically-processed-meat-sausage-inna-stodgy-bun, relish, ketchup and mustard. And a my first pretzel in America (having had German pretzels before). No beer at the game though. My wallet rebelled at the thought of losing $8 for less than a pint of very crap draught beer.

Technorati tags: ice hockey, la kings.

Some Baylor students have no sense of humour (via doctorvee).

And let's not get started on why Americans just do not understand the concept of irony...

adelphia are crap

Well, I can't comment on the quality of programming or reception, but I can say for sure that their customer service leaves a lot to be desired.

I've just wasted a whole morning waiting to get cable installed. On phoning them to check when the installation guy would turn up, I found out that they had me scheduled for the 5th of October, even though I had been told the appointment was for the 3rd. Wankers.

Add to that the fact that I had to phone twice because the first operator was either blatantly ignoring me or she genuinely couldn't hear me, and so put the phone down even though I'd been through their entire crappy recorded message crap just to speak to someone.

That's not the end of it. I was told that a work order would be submitted to the technical team, who would call me within 30 min and let me know if they could arrive today. After that 30 min period, I called back to find out from a different operator that would have been impossible anyway (probably because they're all a bunch of incompetent whatevers). So, we're now rescheduled for the 10th, between 0800 and 1000h. (And why is it that some operators are dead nice though incompetent, and others are just downright nasty? You know, the ones who use the words "sorry" like it's an insult... It's a crap job, I know. But if they got it right in the first place, they wouldn't have to keep covering their bloody big backsides.)

So, chalk that up to yet another crappy day in America. Adelphia sucks. If they miss the new appointment, I'm going elsewhere. And I didn't even want cable in the first bloody place.

Edit: Looking back a few hours later, I'm still annoyed, but am slightly sorry for using so many swear words. No, actually, I'm not. Bloody Adelphia. Tossers, the lot of them.

Technorati tags: adelphia sucks.

Neil Gaiman is a one-cell amoeboid blogger

But in a nice way...

Wandered over to WeHo (West Hollywood) this afternoon for the West Hollywood Book Fair. It wasn't quite what I was expecting, having only been to huge book fairs in the WTC in S'pore, and the genteel, but overcrowded and over-priced yearly affair in Edinburgh. This felt more like a local event, which just happened to invite one of my favourite authors to a Q & A session.

It so happens that Neil Gaiman has his own blog, and has had some kind of online journal for the last decade (and more... even back to Compuserve days). Which prompted Heidi MacDonald to call him a proto-blogger, which led him to coin the above title...

Sadly, although I had lugged my brand new copy of Anansi Boys along, I wasn't lucky enough to get a ticket in the lottery for the book signing session. Ah well. Next time, eh? One wee thing NG let slip was that he's about the embark on resurrecting Jack Kirby's The Eternals. Talk about the perfect person for the project... I like the way NG has been updated mythology, bringing it into a 20th/21st C context. Funnily enough, another favourite author, TP, does the same, although he mixes it with pseudo, surreal and real science in an alternate universe. NG writes about a world that, on the surface, is no different from ours, but where weird and wonderful things can happen. TP writes in a fantasy environment, but read enough of his books and you realise how real world-based his characters and scenarios are (and scarily, he often write about zeitgeist events BEFORE they happen...).

Other things mentioned: he's No.1 on the NY Times list, is convinced his blog led to Anansi Boys being such a good seller, and has over a million blog readers. Now that's some online audience.

So, sorry to have missed out on getting my book signed. But should Neil Gaiman ever come across this post, I make a decent cuppa (definitely not the American way), so feel free to drop in the next time you're in LA...