Author: Eugene

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Winning awards

Friday we were up at South Carolina State University for the annual SCAMP conference. It’s a conference for undergrads doing research under the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation program. The get the opportunity to gain some experience presenting the results of their summer research projects.

This year, my wife won the first place award for best oral presentation in the Biological Sciences category. She did a good job giving the talk for her project. She was a little disappointed that she didn’t also win a prize for the best poster competition too (she won both last year), but she’s still pleased.

LS-AMP is a neat program designed to encourage minority participation in the sciences. They help fix undergrad students up with research labs, provide a stipend, and give them a forum to present the results of their work. Along with the stipend for the summer work, scholarship awards are given to the best oral and poster presentations in several different categories. There a number of LS-AMP chapters in a bunch of different states that are definitely worth checking out.

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Geoblogging?

Found something new (to me) on the web. GeoURL is a place that lets you do location/URL lookups. Adding your blog or site is pretty easy. Just look up your location (latitude/longitude) on a site like the US Census Tiger Map Service, add a couple of meta tags to your index page and submit it to the GeoURL site. They’ll add it to their index in a litte bit, and give you a link showing other URLs in your geographic vicinity. Clicking on the map at GeoURL gives you a big long list of websites in the vicinity of where you clicked.

There’s another site, GeoTags that does something similar also.

Kinda neat I think. Then again, simple things amuse me.

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DHEC survey

State inspectors are going to be cruising through the department the rest of the week on one of their bi-annual surveys. This means there are a lot of people scurrying about (myself included) making sure that everything is where it needs to be, and stuff that needs to be posted is posted. And then later on this year, I think there’s supposed to be a JCAHO survey going on. Luckily for me, I think I’ll be gone by the time that happens.

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Moving

I hate moving. I’ve made 3 moves so far in my life, and i’m starting to get ready for my 4th. And each time, there’s more and more Stuff to move. That’s the nature of Stuff I suppose. It grows to expand your available space. Some Stuff is useful. Other Stuff just becomes Junk. And since I’m a bit of a packrat, some of my Stuff that should be Junk just ends up sticking around.

So now I’m in the middle of collecting boxes to put my Stuff into. Some of the Stuff will become Junk, and end up getting tossed. The rest will remain Stuff and will get packed away. Someone’s supposed to be stopping by to look at my Stuff and give me an estimate on how much it will cost to move it. Sometimes, I think I should just get rid of all my Stuff and start over.

Then I have to see about making all the address changes. There are a good deal of them, and inevitably, I’ll forget one or two of them. Thank goodness for mail forwarding.

Also have to get my car checked out and make sure it will survive the trip to my new home. Been having some cooling issues with it lately, and don’t want it dying on the road in the middle of my trip.

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Abusing the system

Just saw these two articles over at Slashdot.

These kinds of things really bug me. Big corporations and special interest groups abusing the legal system in what amounts to extortion. Buying politicians to get stupid legislation introduced. Makes me want to smack them all upside the head for being idiots.