I like the travelling part, but I don’t like the alone part so much.

bodyworlds

Last week, I escorted two of my young cousins to see the Body Worlds exhibit at the California Science Center in Los Angeles. If you are anywhere near LA, you have to go see it. There are plasticized bodies and organs from some 200 donated cadavers in the exhibit, and they’re just standing around with body parts splayed out in various configurations that show off the different systems in the body. Particularly amazing were exhibits that showed only plasticized blood vessels (the rest of the body had been removed)! Everything was very well arranged, and the exhibit makes it easy to see how everything fits together inside of us.

I watched a young woman walk right up to one of the cadavers, stick her face three inches from its mouth, and study it closely for a few minutes. It was strangely sexy, and I couldn’t help staring. :)

See you in awhile. I’m leaving the country again!

the lone cyprus

I spent the day down south at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and Carmel with Clara on Saturday. Although I’ve been to Monterey many times, it was my first time driving 17-mile drive! The views were pretty spectacular even though it was overcast and a bit foggy. Sometimes I couldn’t decide whether to look at the nice houses to the left or at the coastal trees on the right. :) Also impressive were the super-luscious kelp forests, which from the surface were the nicest I had ever seen. I wish I could have seen them from below the surface.

The aquarium was fun, as usual. The new shark exhibit has a big tank with juvenile scalloped hammerheads in it. I hope they are successful at keeping them alive; the ones in the big tuna tank look skinny and unhealthy. But it was nice to see that the aquarium has a section addressing shark myths — namely, that they are incorrectly viewed as mindless eating machines.

I also liked Carmel’s state beach. It was sort of dream-like: a large area with waves crashing hard against a steep sandy shore, with fog thick enough that it was easy to become lost in your own little slice o’ beach. Lots o’ fog, but no wind nor chill. Pretty neat. [see some photos]

at the studio

For some reason Vienna Teng and I seem to be back “home” during the same periods of time after being gone for upwards of a month at a time. That’s great for me, because otherwise I’d probably never get to see her.

We bummed around West Portal and eventually ended up downtown to visit Jim Batcho at his workplace, before kidnapping Elliot and going to Marco Polo to have gelato.

Anyway, here are some photos. I love these guys because they are great about being strange in front of the camera. :) [see some photos]

Verizon has a new feature from Intellisync called Wireless Sync that allows wireless synchronization of various PDA devices to a Microsoft Outlook and (optionally) a bunch of external POP or IMAP e-mail accounts. This sounds really great, but what is simply RIDICULOUS is that it only works with Outlook if you are running on Exchange (which i am not). So for exchange users, you get wireless, automated synchronization of contacts, calendar, notes, tasks, and external POP/IMAP accounts.

But for those of us who use Outlook and are not on Exchange, simply installing the wireless sync product can potentially wipe out all of your organizational data, so BE CAREFUL! (read more »)

wendy and me

I’ve been here in San Diego for a couple of days now, and it’s been wonderful so far: I feel pretty healthy — my grandmother and mother have been producing good food, and I’ve been swimming every day with my sister and my cousin, Li-Chia.

It’s been family time for the most part, but I went out for dinner tonight at Fidel’s with my sister, Bill and Carri Scuba, Andy Manson, Jeff Padilla, Gaspard DeLibran, Syndromes, Matt Lockhart, Drew Stabile, Eryn Roston, and Teri and Norm Hamson. It had been some time since I had seen all of the Rancho Boys (plus a few others) together in one place, and it was really nice to catch up with them. Good guys, they are. [see some photos]

My cousin Li-Chia is one precocious little 11-year old. Last year, he directed and starred in a play at his school in Taiwan, which he named, “The Adventures of Da-Bien.” For those of you who don’t know Mandarin, “da bien” is “poo.” I can’t believe he convinced anybody to do a played called the Adventures of Poo. :) Anyway, I’ve been enjoying his company. I only get to see him every few years. Everyone is saying that he is like I was when I was his age, which is to say that he never stops moving and loves to torture insects. :)

Now that I’ve switched to Exhibition Engine, my journal workflow for images has become (more) complicated. Read on if you are excited by image organization. :) (read more »)

I’m on hold with Verizon Wireless right now; today has reminded me of both why I love their service and why I hate mobile phones and their carriers in general. Every time I call in, a VZW service person picks up the phone after only a few seconds of being on hold. This alone is almost reason enough to stick with their service, especially compared to what I’ve experience first-hand from carriers like Cingular.

But since I started using the TREO 600, my reported minute usage has gone through the roof. I’ve used the phone as usual, with the addition of perhaps 10-15 minutes a day of data — which I was assured would be billed as minutes because I don’t have an explicit data plan. Image my surprise when I checked minute usage at 5:15pm and saw: Pk:2417 OffPk/Night:1892 Wknd:1801 (!). Obviously, this is crap. (read more »)

wendy and me

I’m testing out a new feature here on my journal site: all of the photographs I will be posting from now on will live in Exhibition Engine, a fantastic online gallery system. I’ve figured out how to use the built-in snippet feature to shoe-horn images into my pages, although I did have to modify the script for the grid of thumbnails to include captions below them. I hope to use this feature soon.

Until then, check out the images here in this entry and let me know what you think. In the long run I will be able to do keyword searches on specific people, locations, subjects, etc. I’m very excited about that prospect. :) Note: if you want to see inlined captions, change the listing type to info cards. [see some photos]

The photos in the list include:

- Jim/Anna Abernethy, Todd Essick, Douglas Seifert and I dining at the Reef Grill in Juno Beach
- a meeting in the Bay Area with Dan Heller and Sammy, who is one of the cutest dogs I’ve ever met
- Wendy and Rachel’s return from a 5 week trip to India

Not long ago, one of my doctor friends invited me to sit in on an open-heart bypass and aortic valve replacement surgery, and on a brain tumor removal surgery. It was my first time seeing any sort of surgery first hand, and it was PRETTY DAMN COOL. I now know that I would have aspired to be a surgeon had I gone into medicine.

The heart surgery was straightforward, and looked like it required a lot of coordination to pull off. The heart had to have some threads woven into it, an incision made, and a tube thrust into it while it was beating all over the place. I also saw blood squirt out of arteries — I had heard that it was pretty high pressure, but I was surprised at how far it could squirt!

I had no idea what was going on in the brain surgery. There was a hole in a head, and the surgeon was cutting stuff out of it. It all looked like mush. I’m told that it’s easier to tell what’s what before everything gets smeared with blood.