Danielle Blog

Gadget Friday *UPDATED*

As promised, pics of my new iPod Nano.

Look how little it is inside the packaging box!

Yes, I just had to get that turquoisey blue color.

And it is so slim!

I’m really quite fond of it.

Maybe in the future I’ll get a pic or two of it in my new armband. Yes, that is right, HB bought me a Nike armband to hold my nano. And by the way, doesn’t nano remind you of the old children’s teasing thing that you did with your tongue? neeener neeener neeener

Enjoy your weekend. I’m hoping for good weather to go on a biking trip with HB that got postponed due to inclement weather last weekend.

*UPDATED to add pics of the armband*

Note: This is the start of the playlist of the songs that I downloaded on Sunday. I’m using it for my walks.
Can you read the titles of the songs?

Hint: you need to look on Flickr at the larger sizes

I’ll post the list later if no one gets it.

Green glass

I was reminded of this photo by Amber’s picture of the light shining through the blue plastic half of a piggy bank.

Part of what I liked about this image was that we’d only recently received our new furniture, and HB had cozied up on one of the chairs with a bottle of Tennents. When I turned to say something to him, I realized how the light was shining through the bottle and creating a really crisp shadow of a bottle on the arm of the chair, but that it was curved, and that part of the shadow was green. I guess it is still a shadow… although maybe the part where the light created horizontal cross beams of lighter green light would be considered a refraction of light or something scientific-sounding like that. Physics was never my strong suit, but that wikipedia description looks right for refraction.

I guess my point to this post is that I’ve always really loved stained glass and colored glass in general. There is this really amazing set of stained glass windows in a chapel in a city north of Chicago. I have film photos of some of the windows, but the next time I am in the area, I’m going to make a point of photographing those windows with Dee-Dee’s assistance.

HA! I just realized today is ground-hog’s day! How fitting that I have a post about a shadow.

HB strikes again – Christmas surprise!

HB and I usually try to surprise each other with gifts that the other one wouldn’t expect. Some times this works out better than others, as you might imagine, or perhaps you have first-hand knowledge and can completely relate. There was the year that I found him an unusual bar set, where each tool had eyes cut out of it so that each one looks like an animal of some sort. You know, the ice tongs look like a shark, the martini strainer looks like a lion, that sort of thing. I think that was one of the cooler gifts that I’ve found for him. Well, at least I always thought so, but maybe it because I liked it a lot too. And now that I think about it, he really did seem more thrilled about that scotch I got him a couple years ago too…

Also, we usually do the traditional wrapping of the presents placed under the tree, that sort of thing.

But this year, HB went a different route and led me down to our living room with my eyes closed.

And look what he got me!

Isn’t it cooooooooooooooool?!

At first, I was surprised to see a Really Red teaset. But MAN, just look at that teapot!

It can blast out at you like a neon fire-engine.

Or look like Alladin’s lamp.

How could I resist something with such great curves?!

It really is striking. Get it, striking, HB strikes again?!

tee-hee! Don’t mind me, I’m just happy and tired, all at the same time.

I took all pictures with Dee-Dee, my Nikon D-70. For some I used the combination of a tripod and self-timer (for the first time) in order to avoid the whole blurry/shaking/too much caffeine issue.

More snow

As I was heating up my soup and applesauce for lunch today, I looked out the kitchen window and saw this.

Cool huh? With the nice rounded shape, and the twigs and the trees in the background.

It is still fascinating to me the way snow piles up on top of things in the oddest shapes.

It can look so graceful.

Or in this next case, symmetrical.

I just took these pics with Dee-Dee while it was still snowing.

Contrast

There was something about the way the snow on the deck railing looked as I viewed it from my kitchen window. It seemed like a neat Z-shape. However, I couldn’t quite get the same angle outside. But I did find a bird’s-eye-view that I liked.

Then when I turned to go back inside, I couldn’t resist another shot of the snow as it melted on the deck and the afternoon shadows that were cast by the railing.

I took this next one, because it reminded me of Squirl saying how much she likes the way the snow looks on the evergreens.

Those trees have been looking really nice the last few days as the sun shone on them. (no pictures of that yet, because I was thinking that to really get the right shot, I need to go outside…)

The table on the downstairs deck reminded me of a mushroom.

And again, as I turned, I liked the way the snow looked as it accumulated on the dark wood of the stairs connecting the two decks.

Anyone up for a snowball fight?

Shimmering ribbons

Snow and sunlight can be almost hypnotic, if you let your eyes follow a curve from left to right… right to left… left to right….

I call this one undulating.

I took all pictures with Dee-Dee the Saturday after Thanksgiving, in the afternoon, as the snow was melting on our deck.

Still Life, part 2

I took these pics when I was at school on Saturday. I’ve always thought that when the water is boiling, the water columns for the distilled water system are really pretty.

In case you are puzzled by it, I turned the second pic 90 degrees counterclockwise and put the columns on their side. I like the image better that way.

Taken with my (our) Sony Cyber-shot DSC-P71.

Still Life, part 1

I have the camera with me this week (yay!), so I brought it into work with me on Monday. As I was doing my experiment, I realized that I’m in a bit of a unique situation, in that there are tools and equipment that I use in my daily life that I pretty much take for granted. However, I’ve decided to take pics of them for two reasons.

1. Certain views of them can be pretty &/or semi-artistic.

2. With the way technology advances, these things may or may not be the tools that we use to do molecular biology in 5, 10, or 20 years.

Even within the 15 years that I’ve been doing research, I have seen techniques, that used to be considered standard, get phased out as the technique has become more automated. For example, I am one of the few people my age who have done DNA sequencing by hand (because I did it in my undergrad research project and for my work-study job). Right after that time period in 1996, a different kind of DNA sequencing became more affordable and individual labs quit spending time and energy doing it themselves. At this point, I don’t know of anyone who regularly does sequencing in their own lab anymore. Nowadays, you pretty much just send a sample of DNA to a sequencing facility (in house) and get the results back. tah-dah! No effort involved, except to trek the sample upstairs.

So, with this idea in mind that the kinds of techniques and tools I use today are likely to change in the future, I have decided to document some aspects of my experiments.

Here are some close-up views of my experiment on Monday.

First an overview shot of my protein gel. I don’t really want to get into a lot of detail about what each thing is or how it works… I just put this pic here so that the close-up shots can be put into a wee bit of context.

Next, a close-up of the swirling bubbles…

I also really like how a dye that intially appears purple in a tube, begins to separate into green and purple (and at one step pink).

If you look really, really closely, you might notice that there are two sets of 4, 5, 6, and 7, in the pic above.

I like this last image for the soft/fuzzy watery gel part of the image contrasted with the hard/solid very electronic part of the image.

AND you can see that the dye has now separated into a red/orange line and the blue lines.

AND, from a “good job on your experiment” standpoint, it ran really, really straight.

FINALLY, from This Gel, I got some of the BEST data that I’ve collected in a while (yesterday).