some day

Published by Charlene | Filed under halloween, who you gonna call

…I think I would like to be a ghostbuster for Halloween.  Preferably with 4 people.  And a smoking ghost trap.  I think we could figure out the electronics and dry ice…

My new favorite crackers

Published by Charlene | Filed under food

…and they’re super flaky too.

Sooo

Published by Charlene | Filed under Uncategorized

It’s snowing today.  Just thought I’d share.

Also, Jeff likes men in tights

Software list

Published by Charlene | Filed under geeky stuff

Just for grins, I’ve gone through my computer to see what stuff I use is open-source or free…and here’s what I got. You can just google the names as I’m too lazy to link. But I’ll write a bit about the things I like.

Work
OpenOffice - Does word, powerpoint, excel-like things. Also has a better system for page layout and visio-like drawings in my opinion.
Zotero (with OpenOffice/Word extensions for in-document citing) - A firefox addon that lets you download RDF/DOI data (think autofilling of citation fields) from most places, including PubMed, and store the pdf/article in the database, AND you can tag and it’ll do fulltext searches within both citation info and the pdfs on the fly.  The extensions let you cite from it and formats automatically into a lot of typical citation styles with either endnotes or footnotes.
InfraRecorder - Burns CDs, DVD, or makes ISOs painlessly.
Handbrake - Converts video (VOB files) painlessly into various divx formats, including for ipods
VirtualDub - Make simple video edits/effects for AVI files
Audacity - Record or edit sound.
Firefox - You know what this is
Free Download Manager - Very useful here in Mongolia.  Supports download resuming without as far as I know putting crap on your computer.
WAMP - An all-in-one package that runs a local Apache web server with the latest versions of PHP and MySQL.  Can also be set up to run multiple versions of PHP and MySQL or set up as a “live” webserver.  Includes SQLite I believe, but I don’t use it.
OpenEpi - Offline (but browser-based) interface to a lot of common biostatistical/epi/public health calculations, such as sample size or chi stuffs.  Also explains decently what these calculations are for.
WeftQDA - Haven’t used it for real, but it’s a qualitative data analysis tool similar to ATLAS.ti
FreeMind - Used for mind-mapping - multi-branched tree-like structures that are great for group work and discussions or medium-sized planning sessions where you want to focus on gathering all ideas then refining/organizing them
Sumatra PDF - Simple PDF reader that will run off a USB drive - also saves/bookmarks the last page you had open of individual files if you do the ebook thing.
CutePDF - “Prints” files to PDF format
CompareIt - Just that.  Compares line-by-line two files for changes.  Useful if you poorly manage documents or code, as I do.
Fun
VideoLan - Great media player - plays virtually anything and will try to fix corrupted files
Trillian - Multi-platform chat client
QuickPlay with ZSNES, Kega Fusion, Nestopia - Old video games! And Quickplay serves as a management frontend for the various systems and stuff.
StepMania - DDR clone for computers.  Many many many songs are available online, and with a laptop with tv-out and a usb-based pad, you have DDR for real.

Utilities
WinDirStat - Cool utility for looking at your hard drive’s space usage graphically to identify where you have random large amounts of crap.  Also has cool pacman hourglass-equivalent icon while analyzing your drive.
USBVirusScan - Needs some setup, but in the end will execute a program (e.g., a virus scanner) upon insertion of any removable disk.
PuTTY - Blame sourceforge.  Used for SSH and telnet-kinds of things.  Mostly command-line
Spybot - Malware/web-based exploit protection software.  May be becoming obsolete with more virus scanners including this kind of module…
TortoiseCVS, TortoiseSVN - Again, sourceforge.  Used on Windows machines for CVS/SVN code management
WinRAR - Shareware.  Much nicer interface than Winzip
FileZilla - FTP tool
Firebug - Firefox extension for checking code in browsers and examining CSS.
UW proxy tool - Used with Firefox to toggle on or off UW netid authentication when looking for articles and what-not.

Even if that wasn’t interesting to you, now I have it saved somewhere so I can download stuff if I need it later and don’t remember what I have…

a day in UB

Published by Charlene | Filed under birthdays, electricity

Just got in yesterday afternoon from Khovd - the flight to Khovsgul (in the north) is tomorrow afternoon. The conference was, as with all conferences, alternating exhausting, idle, and frantic - and I’m glad it’s over. We’ll see if there are long-term effects from it…

So, right now in Khovd, other than the power, it’s nice right now - probably in the mid to low 50s. Lately it’s been a new moon or cloudy, so it’s pitch black at night and I tend to stumble a bit. FYI it’s hard to pack for a couple months and seasons by candlelight. Outside it’s interesting - the trees are pretty much at the same point of budding they have been for the past 2 months. I’m starting to see a little bit of green in the clumps of scrubby yellowed grass you see around town. Also it seems like hawks or some other similar bird just come out in force about this time - there are always some circling around the town, and you’ll see them perched on the cell phone antennas - they make a kind of whistling sound when they call to one another. The pigeons and smaller dogs seem unconcerned though…

Anyway, off to work-land for me. So many little thingies to do…and a birthday potluck here in Ulaanbaatar tonight.