Refraction

So remember the part where I’m a Gmail fangirl? Gmail has made me even happier with their new options for labels! I used to keep the labels menu closed by default since I had so many (I’d make one for each course I took…), but now I can keep only the active ones visible. Since I’m out of school, there are only three. Makes for a nice clean inbox, anyway, and I’m able to easily see just the messages I want.

I’m so glad I got my Gmail account when I did, so that I’m able to use my real name (sans numbers, etc.) Unfortunately, I seem to get a number of e-mails addressed wrongly to me. Some of these are amusing (booty call), some cause me a bit of concern (receipt for a plasma TV), some are oddly helpful (organic produce newsletter).

I can’t quite say the same for Facebook; I was beaten out to my real name (as a username) by someone else with the same name. Ah well. You win some…

So this is a hidden track on the album Le Coeur dans la tête. I didn’t know it was there when I bought it. I swear. This song made me smile the first time I heard it, and I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to translate it.
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Thinking back, I have definitely had better birthdays.

Ones that don’t involve babysitting reactions which look like chocolate soufflé but smell like concentrated vinegar.

Ones that don’t involve cleaning up said reaction after the oil bath overheated while I was in a meeting.

Ones that don’t involve said reaction mixture splashing onto my pristine lab coat and arms.

As my lab mate kindly pointed out: “Hey, at least you got a story for your birthday.” Thanks, R—.

(My lab mate is really good at chemistry puns, actually…)

Anyway. I’d like to think I totally rocked the conference–my presentation even picked up a prize, and I met some really awesome people (how could they not be awesome? They’re chemists!) Despite my misgivings about the small town of K—, it turned out to be irrelevant: We chemists know how to drink. And enjoy board games. Especially drunken board games.

I think xkcd has been awesome this week.

Reasons:

1. Um, hello, Firefly?
2. Do you really need any others?

I don’t know how healthy it is to admit that a friend and I sat down today to try and list all 150 (original) Pokémon.

We got up to 144.

I didn’t care about this before, but now that I’m on the cusp of leaving my undergraduate degree (last hurdle tomorrow) I realize just how AWESOME the open courseware that MIT offers is.

I can finally get a semi-proper foundation in linguistics! And … all that other stuff I always wanted to learn about. Cryptography. Economics. Anthropology. Maybe I’ll finally understand what political science is all about. Psychology. Cognitive sciences. Classical studies?!

Plus stuff that’s more relevant to my degree: Materials science. Chemical engineering.

This place is a goldmine.

I’ve had this song stuck in my head for the last couple of days:

And everyone’s new and everyone glows
with something I had never seen
It’s like the secret
They are telling me that makes my heart go
Oh oh, oh oh, oh oh, oh….

“Sympathetic Vibrations”, The Paper Raincoat

*kind of wants to make a mix based off this one song alone*
*kind of doesn’t want to do that because she needs to prep a presentation*
*will keep humming this all weekend*

I’m a traditionalist in maybe one sense of the word: I believe in the continued use of Traditional Chinese characters. This is mostly due to the fact that I grew up on Traditional Chinese media as well some some issues I have with the aesthetics of Simplified characters.
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