Forgot to mention i finally saw The Name of the Rose on Tuesday. I read about half the book on a flight from Oslo to New Jersey a few years ago, and intend to finish it sometime, but had never seen the 1986 Sean Connery/Christian Slater screen version. It was very good, doing justice to the philosophical developments voiced in the novel by Umberto Eco, but now i can't get images of freaky deformed Benedictine monks out of my head.

My 2003 mp3 marathon concluded over the weekend, as i ripped the last of the albums that were missing songs in my digital library (Xymox and Yaz, in case you're curious). As Veronica and i were in Providence dog-sitting Olive for Rob and Roo, i had a look at their CD collection and ripped 15 or 20 albums of theirs as well. All told, my mp3 library is now exactly 9000 songs strong. I'm pretty happy to be liberated from nights spent swapping CDs in and out of my laptop. I'm now poking through other CDs in our collection to see what else i might be interested in, and ripping 6 or so a day at work (takes less than 10 minutes). Today was Ian McCulloch and Alphaville.

Me at work

I turned the big two-nine last Thursday. It was a relatively low key affair, featuring lunch with my coworkers and a relaxing dinner at Panera with Veronica. I've gotten some very nice presents though, some for my birthday and others unrelated but arriving as if on cue. Actual birthday presents included a gift certificate to Amazon from my parents that i'm debating how to spend, and a gift certificate to Newbury Comics from Rob and Roo that went towards a Skatalites compilation, Stereolab's last album Sound-Dust, and the excellent old Sonic Youth album Sister that i used to hear from my roommates in the dorms at Cal. Veronica will be taking me shopping for a suit sometime soon, to improve my wardrobe so it is commensurate with my new job. My non-birthday presents included my new 17" flat panel monitor, bought with the last of my CMIR equipment monies, which arrived on Monday after two months on backorder. Also, Veronica and i both got new cell phones, the Nokia 3650 ... $300 but free after two mail-in rebates from Amazon and T-Mobile. It's the new video/camera phone, and is really nifty. It can take 640x480 pictures, 10 second videos with audio, can access the internet, and many other things that i have yet to master.

Work is coming to a head, with only two and half weeks left for me at the CMIR. I'm in a good state to wrap things up on schedule, but there are so many little odds and ends to take care of. Not to mention the usual stream of interruptions from my coworkers, for which my patience is dwindling dangerously low. "My Stanford office will have a door", i keep telling myself. Uh oh, here comes one now. "A door ... a door ... close the door ..."

First the givens: yes, the NBA finals were hardly a model of the best play in the league, and instead devolved into a series of low-scoring slug fests, and yes, the blame for that lies squarely on the shoulders of the New Jersey Nets and the victorious San Antonio Spurs. But let's get a few things straight. The Spurs are the NBA Champs. To earn this title they defeated the daunted Los Angeles Lakers (thank god for that), as well as two other excellent teams in the Dallas Mavericks and the Nets. I'm getting sick of listening to everyone try to belittle the Spurs' accomplishments. When they won it all in 1999 Phil Jackson proclaimed it the "asterisk title" because the season had been shortened because of labor disputes. This year the Spurs detractors don't have that excuse, but they're pointing to everything from the ugly play, the low television ratings, and now Tim Duncan's lack of high profile ad contracts to discredit San Antonio. I realize i'm not going to dissuade popular opinion, but let me just state that some of us casual basketball fans appreciate the no-frills, hard-nosed work ethic that Tim Duncan brings to the game. A lot more than the pathetic posturing and whining of media darlings like Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal.

Mp3ing continues ... halfway through the P's, 94 albums to go.

As you may (or may not) have noticed from the recent changes to my mp3 library, i've spent a fair to enormous amount of time ripping CDs over the last few days. When i first starting converting my CDs into mp3s, i only ripped the songs that i really liked ... for example, while ripping Automatic by the Jesus & Mary Chain, i only bothered to grab "Blues From A Gun" and "Head On". Whole albums converted to mp3 were the exception rather than the norm. I did that both because of time and storage efficiency. However, now i've got a 120 GB hard drive on my work computer that's only 40% full, and space is no longer an issue. So i've decided to fill in the holes persay, and rerip albums in their entirety. I thought this little endeavor would go quickly, but oh how wrong i was. I'm through the M's now (got all the Manic Street Preachers albums last night), and i've got a tentative list of the CDs remaining to be ripped ... all 135 of them.

Our days in Boston are dwindling rapidly. Veronica and i started cleaning a bit last weekend ... yes, the movers are doing all the packing, but i think it would be a bit tacky to expect them to pack a disorganized, bursting closet and a counter full of unwashed dishes. The gravity of it is beginning to hit me ... i only have a few weeks left at the CMIR! How the hell did that happen? As sad as i am to be leaving my MGH chums, the thought of getting back to California never fails to bring a smile to my face. I wonder if the terrible economy, energy problems, and that ridiculous campaign to recall Gov. Davis will change that. Probably not.

I seem to be in another of my bi-monthly musical renaissances. In addition to the run-of-the-mill culling of my CD collection ... picking up the wonderful live Two Tone compilation Dance Craze that had eluded me for some reason, and reacquainting myself with Slowdive and the Catherine Wheel, i've also been downloading some unfamiliar music as advised by music lists and Allmusic.com. I really like the new Pernice Brothers album, it's a great collection of twangy pop songs. Also, i checked out a split album between Sianspheric, a shoegazing outfit that i had previously given little attention to, and Toshack Highway, featuring former members of Swervedriver who apparently are enamored of 1970's Liverpool great John Toshack. It's a departure from distortion-laden soundscapes to somber twelve string pieces, but with no loss in quality. The Longwave album is great, much better than i expected given my lukewarm reaction to "Everywhere You Turn". The volume of music coming into my computer is so great that i've barely gotten a chance to listen to the new Cat Power album (not soooooo new, but i didn't pick up on it until seeing the video for "He War"), the Dubstar stuff i got from Veronica, or the debut record from British Sea Power. My dearth of concerts has continued however. Veronica and i missed what was probably our last chance to see Frank Black in his hometown two weekends ago, as he played at the Middle East We toyed with the idea of going to the Field Day Festival on Long Island, featuring Radiohead and others, but my take was that as i'm reluctant to go see three bands at a show, going to see twenty bands at a festival was out of the question. Luckily our hesitance paid off, as complications surrounding the festival swirled and it was shortened from two days to one and moved to Giants Stadium in New Jersey at the last minute.

Some people think Björk is the chanteuse to trump all others, but my money's on Tracey Thorn.

In reference to my previous post, Genius + Love really does equal Yo La Tengo.

we'll take our hearts outside, leave our lives behind and watch the stars go out

ATTENTION: Because of a glitch in the ID3 tags of my mp3s, THE ADD AND DROP LISTS TO MY MP3 LIBRARY ARE INCORRECTLY EMPTY. They will be correct beginning next week. Please return to your normal activities.

Hee hee. Seriously though, i was using an ID3 editor i downloaded from the web to add the year of release to all my mp3 files, and after doing about 2000 of them i noticed that the editor was saving the ID3 text in unicode format. Simply put, it was butchering any special characters in the tags, like the ö in Björk. So i had to throw out my newly created mp3 database file and go back and correct all the errors. All better now.

Just in case you can't live without knowing what i picked up last week, let's do it the old-fashioned way: ummm ... i copied Veronica's Dubstar collection (don't you just love my arse?), downloaded the new Inspiral Carpets collection (this is how it feels when your word means nothing at all), and finally got off my butt and downloaded Longwave's The Strangest Things (err ... no clever quotes just yet).

V and i waited for the rain to abate last weekend before heading to Fenway to see Finding Nemo. Very cute. And some gorgeous animation too. Ellen Degeneres' forgetful Dory was hilarious. It's strange being surrounded by excited ten year olds in a theater, as opposed to being surrounded by cynical thirtysomethings when seeing The Matrix.

T-minus 33 days to California. Tick ... tick ... tick ...

I had a phone interview with the first candidate for my postdoctoral opening at Stanford this morning. What a bizarre experience that was. I'm looking for someone to synthesize targeted imaging agents for positron emission tomography (PET) imaging, something that involves a lot of chemistry of radioactive isotopes. The candidate was more than qualified for the job, no doubt. The unqualified elements in this conversation were me and my interviewing skills. I kept hearing myself and thinking, "when the hell did you become an authority figure?" When Stanford hired me i guess, like it or not. Despite my negative portrayal, the interview actually went quite well. My awkward ascent to professor continues.

I had no idea i listened to The Jam so much. Perl kicks ass.

June 19. Hmm? Oh, no reason.

Veronica and i watched a couple of movies on cable over the last week or so ... The Family Man sucked balls, but then i'm not really a Nick Cage fan and i think Tea Leoni is the antichrist. We both got a good laugh out of the sheer idiocy of Rock Star. I listened to metal in high school, and still recall it fondly as evidenced by a metal nostalgia session with Rob, Roo, and Bill two weeks ago (full of Slaughter, Skid Row, Winger, and Guns 'N' Roses). But this movie was so flat out dumb it was laughable. Perhaps the most entertaining part came during the closing credits when they surprised Marky Mark during the filming of one of the concert scenes by piping in "Good Vibration". The lone star of our recent viewing was Legally Blonde. Veronica coerced me into watching it. I'm not so keen on Reese Witherspoon and really wasn't expecting to enjoy it, but the movie was totally likeable. We'll be dropping into Legally Blonde 2: Red White and Blonde soon, i'm sure.

I gave my last lab meeting presentation for the CMIR today, despite having contracted a cold this weekend that's made my voice sound like James Earl Jones doing Woody Allen. I set myself up with a bottle of water and a cup of hot tea at the beginning of the hour, but they only delayed my inevitable descent into froggy-voiced coughing. The talk went well by all accounts, except mine. I didn't practice the talk at all, except for preparing the slides, so while presenting it i found the order of some slides wasn't in line with how i wanted to talk about them. Also, i stumbled on a few points and was reduced to a stuttering mess of "uhhhh ... well ... you see ...". But everyone tells me it was a nice talk, with Anna even praising my ability to explain things in terms everyone can understand. So i suppose as usual i'm being too hard on myself. Everyone got a kick out of my "going away" slide shown here.