Life

[dibs]

You damn biologists and your babysitting. My buddy told me about him sleeping all weekend on the benches caus his bloody experiments were ... doing biology.

[osmosisch]

a 48 hour shift

What the actual fuck. Whoever's responsible for that is your real culprit.

[dibs]

They have to do it to look after their experiments apparently. I used to fight with my bio friends about it, but they were all more interested in their cells/reactions than working normal hours (in fairness, it wasn't the normal thing, but when they had a delicate experiment running they didn't leave the lab).

[Griddlelol]

What the actual fuck. Whoever's responsible for that is your real culprit.

 

I work in circadian biology - so body clocks and how they affect illness. 24/48 hour shifts are common place for many of us. Although they tend to be like - take a sample once every 2 - 6 hours, not 48 hours of constant work. So I know how incredibly easy it is to mess up or be absent minded, especially if you're doing it alone (I tend to rope someone else in with me so I don't go crazy).

 

Ironically a lot of our findings are applicable to how shift work and disrupted sleep promote diseases or lead to drug resistance. 

[osmosisch]

You're not your own test subjects surely? Use shifts! That's how my circadian colleagues did it anyway.

[marblize]

I had an interview with Barnes and Noble today because I'm tired of relying totally on freelance gigs. I think they liked me.

[Gerretic]

About 25% of my department got fired today for reasons that seem completely arbitrary. These folks weren't necessarily the super stars but for the most part they were quite good and they'd all been putting in twelve+ hour days for weeks trying to meet deadlines. This is hugely demotivating although I have good reason to believe I'm secure for now. I don't love my job anyway and it happens that my favorite coworkers are all gone now. Shitty times all around.

[Griddlelol]

You're not your own test subjects surely? Use shifts! That's how my circadian colleagues did it anyway.

 

There's an odd culture where I work. No one is willing to let other people handle their stuff without being supervised. I don't know whether it's stemmed from mistrust, or trying to cut down the number of people on publications. 

There also seems to be little skill overlap, with different people specialising in different areas, so even if I wanted to, the only person who was qualified to handle animals has now left. 

[osmosisch]

Man. What a situation. And the end result is shit getting fucked up anwyay

My sympathies. Hope there's a workable recovery option of some kind.

[tberton]

I just read a thread on a random forum from 2009 speculating about my granny's health. Gotta be one of the most surreal things I've ever read.

[tegan]

I forgot how much I like sewing. I made this little bag I posted in the 3DS thread today.

 

 

 

 

Already I've had people reach out to me about buying one for themselves, but I have no idea how I would do that. I have a tendency to be very bad at evaluating the value of my own work. This took something like five hours to make and the materials are expensive, but I also wouldn't personally buy one from me even if I were only paying the equivalent of minimum wage, because that'd be really expensive.

[Mawd]

A library fine I had half forgotten about now has the spectre of council debt collection hovering over it. I haven't had a regular income since November so for the past 4 months I've been living off $154 ($15 of that is left), my partner's understanding and my mother's goodwill. Money's been tight all round so rather than ask for $34 for a library fine I had previously figured that I could pay for it by the time my student loan was once again in effect.

 

How wrong of me.

[JonCole]

I forgot how much I like sewing. I made this little bag I posted in the 3DS thread today.

 

[...]

 

Already I've had people reach out to me about buying one for themselves, but I have no idea how I would do that. I have a tendency to be very bad at evaluating the value of my own work. This took something like five hours to make and the materials are expensive, but I also wouldn't personally buy one from me even if I were only paying the equivalent of minimum wage, because that'd be really expensive.

 

Why not calculate it and offer anyways, even if it is expensive? Worst thing someone could say is no, and if you actually want to do it and they say yes then you can make some money.

[Apelsin]

There was an terrorist attack in Denmark today. One civilian dead, two wounded police officers.

Apparently a lone gunman who seemed to target a Swedish artist who published some rather bad caricatures a couple of years back.

 

Update: Two more people dead, including the gunman and a Jewish guard outside of a synagogue that became the second target. Several more wounded police officers. 

[Henroid]

So today my local police department decided to demonstrate how incompetent they are.

 

This past week, a drifter that swings by our store often was caught using our restroom as a bathing facility, which is grounds for having him removed from the store. One of my coworkers told him he had to go. He argued about it all the way to the entrance, where one of my bosses had joined in asked him to leave. It escalated. Yelling, cursing, then the guy got physical with my coworker, shoving him around and trying to gouge his eye out, then yelling out death threats before running for it (I only personally saw this last part, though I came running).

 

The guy has drifted in and out of my job a couple times since, but today we finally had an honest shot to get him. One of my coworkers allowed him access to the restroom, fully aware of this guy being on our "call the cops ASAP" list. It bought the cops enough time to get to the building, and minutes later I saw them leading the guy out in handcuffs while getting the statement from my coworker (the one that was assaulted by said drifter; my coworker was pressing charges).

 

Then, after the cops leave, my coworker comes to me looking upset as hell. They let the guy free in the parking lot, no intent to hold him, claiming there's no grounds to. What? Except that the assault is on fucking film and we have that queued and ready for the cops at any time. But they still declined to hold the guy in jail even for one night while we got all our papers in order.

 

So now we face to big problems. First is the immediate one; this dude is not afraid to get physical and now he has a revenge angle to take in escalating it.

 

The second one is more damaging. My coworkers, all present, were freaked out that the guy is free on the streets. I had a really hard time, being the eldest person present (by a long shot) trying to keep morale up and dispelling their fears. But I was really goddamn mad and I know it was showing.

 

The only thing the cops offered us is having our boss arrange for this guy to be considered 'trespassing' for being on our property, but it's like... they let a guy who committed a violent crime go! What the actual fuck! So the best I could do is leave a note to my boss about how we need to have a security meeting (our head security guy is out due to an injury). I've gotta figure out our legal recourse in defending ourselves and each other, and what the company allows for. Given that my boss is a putz, though, my hopes aren't high.

 

Given that I just turned 30 a month ago I have been freaking out about my mortality and this isn't helping. Our neighborhood isn't exactly of high moral fiber.

[tegan]

There was an terrorist attack in Denmark today. One civilian dead, two wounded police officers.

Apparently a lone gunman who seemed to target a Swedish artist who published some rather bad caricatures a couple of years back.

 

Update: Two more people dead, including the gunman and a Jewish guard outside of a synagogue that became the second target. Several more wounded police officers. 

 

In happier news, they caught a group of people in Halifax yesterday who were planning to go on a shooting spree before they could do it

 

 

 

So I heard is was supposed to snow today, but kind of felt like it wouldn't. I looked out the window this morning to check and...

 

 

404 outdoors not found.

[Apelsin]

In happier news, they caught a group of people in Halifax yesterday who were planning to go on a shooting spree before they could do it

 

That is great news. 

Most likely a lot of lives saved by that.

 

In other, even more happy (or at least lighter), news Iceland is building the first Norse temple to be constructed in over 1000 years.

Apparently Asatro is the fastest growing religion on the island.

 

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-31437973 

[syntheticgerbil]

Henroid, that's so messed up! What is the police's reasoning for ignoring the assault on video and refusing to press charges?

[Henroid]

Henroid, that's so messed up! What is the police's reasoning for ignoring the assault on video and refusing to press charges?

I wasn't there to hear their logic. The guy who got assaulted gets timid around authority figures so I'm figuring he didn't press the issue at least hard enough to get answers.

 

Neither of my bosses were at work today (WEIRD) but given that tomorrow is Monday they should be in, so I'll know more then.

[syntheticgerbil]

His eye is okay though right? Ouch.

[SuperBiasedMan]

My laptop overheats easily, is terribly slow with playing video or any relatively taxing effort and has a gammy hinge on it.

Or, had a gammy hinge. Said hinge has now just broken entirely, so one side of the laptop is just hanging, supported by the other hinge. Which I assume won't last long when it's supporting the whole monitor on its own. I'm rethinking whether it's worth actually getting a new computer given the above listed problems.... and also right when the hinge snapped I saw that the corner of the screen is just dark, like there's a shadow over it. Which I assume has to do with the monitor cable now being exposed from the area with the broken hinge.

 

Now would be a good time to know if I have a job at the end of next month.

[Bjorn]

What model of laptop do you have? Depending on what it is, I might have a hinge that would work for it if it's from a major manufacturer.

[SuperBiasedMan]

I appreciate the offer Bjorn! But it would require proper repairs even with a hinge provided, it's a weird internal hinge and the plastic cover has entirely come off.

 

 

I would absolutely not trust myself to do a repair job on that.

[Bjorn]

Actually that looks like a pretty standard laptop hinge. It takes me about 15 minutes to replace one, but I've done it hundreds, if not a thousand, times (the bezel on the screen is easy to remove, and the palmrest usually only has 6-10 screws holding it in). I'd say it takes a typical person between 30 minutes and an hour to do the job the first time. This has been my business for most of the last decade, repairing laptops and selling laptop parts and other hard to find computer parts. The worst case scenario is that when it broke, it broke the little nuts the hinge screws into in the LCD housing, which is probably one of the more common problems I see.

At any rate, if you decide you can't or don't want to buy a new one now, drop me a PM on here and I'll see what I can do.

[Gormongous]

I have had the flu since Saturday. The fever's only begun to break, so that should explain any shit posting I've done around the forum, but the deadline for my big article was last night at midnight, so I submitted it then.

 

In the past twenty-four hours, I have become obsessed with worry that the last-minute revisions I made at the behest of a professorial colleague are actually terrible because they were made while my temperature was over a hundred. I have checked again and again and I am unable to find any fault with my changes, save for them being slightly less polished than I'd like in a perfect world, but it's still been the cause of a couple fever dreams since then. This is not the relief I was expecting from submitting an article to be published in a Variorum by Ashgate.