Gary Brolsma - the legend

Here is a running list of articles about the legendary Numa Numa dance guy, Gary Brolsma.

This blog contains my own movie tribute inspired by Gary (who I think is brilliant), and a couple of postings about this phenomenom, just scroll down or go here and here.

Kalani's Advice Column

Sunday's gem:

"Do the world a favour and pluck your eyebrows."

How smart is your right foot?

Just for kicks give this a try:

1. While sitting at your desk, lift your right foot off the floor and make clockwise circles.
2. Now, while doing this, draw the number "6" in the air with your right hand. Your foot will change direction.

I told you so.......And there's nothing you can do about it!

From my cousin Shells.

Zig-zag Bumper Bowling Record?

I went bowling at a newer bowling ally a couple of nights ago. Little bumper bars raise, if you want them to, before your turn to bowl. This is fab so as to avoid a night in the gutter. On my best try I managed to send the ball zig-zagging with a bumper count of 5. (That is, it hit the bumpers a total of 5 times). Has anybody beaten this? If so, please let me know how.
I'm sure there is some complex relationship between angle, speed and energy absorbtion by the bumpers. I would imagine a talented person could reach a bumper count of 7, but beyond that might be impossible without the ball stalling in the alley. Please let me know otherwise.

The thing about cool hotels

Earlier this month I stayed in Nashville at the Union Station - A Wyndham Historic hotel. It was AWESOME and I got a fantastic deal through Site 59. (Turned out to be cheaper than staying at Best Western or even Days Inn). I get a huge kick out of staying in cool hotels for cheap. With that in mind, check out this UNDERWATER HOTEL that is being built in the Bahamas. Projected nightly cost? ~$1500 US. I doubt it will ever show up on Site 59, but man it's cool somebody is building this!

Water and white chocolate

Today's medical literature tidbit of interest:

...In chocolate, both "milk chocolate" and "dark chocolate" methylxanthine doses improved cognitive function compared with "white chocolate". The effects of white chocolate did not differ significantly from those of water. CONCLUSIONS: A normal portion of chocolate exhibits psychopharmacological activity...

Here for the whole thing.

How can I get signed up for these studies?!

My first major motion picture on the web

So profoundly inspired by this fellow (be sure to watch it first), I wanted to do something artistic and dedicate it to Shawn. Link here to download my 2.6 megabyte creation for Quicktime play. Thanks to my friends for helping me make it.

UPDATE: Gary Brolsma has been identified as the source of the original brilliance. He is a legend in a good way! Long live Gary Brolsma's humour! (And imitation is the highest form of flattery).

Singapore and logic

When it comes to tackeling social problems head on, my favourite country is Singapore. This week's entry:

SINGAPORE'S Government is forcing schools to deal with childhood obesity by rationing food for overweight children and making them exercise during lunchtime.

I've yet to visit Singapore, but I've worked with two students from Singapore and they were brilliant, kind and sensible people. From the people I have met, and the sounds of government policies, maybe I should think about moving there. Sometimes I think we in the USA are too worried about hurting a few and so don't enact policies that would help many.

Pray that I never run for public office!

The Tivo low-down

Are there better devices out there than Tivo? Read here if this question keeps you up at night.

Get ready to die laughing!

I love him!

-link stolen from Cinders

And while we are laughing, I sure am relieved about this. I've been following it for several months now.

UPDATE: Should you have the obsessed need to own the song the wonderful young man is dancing to in the first link, I tracked it down. It is "Dragostea Din Tei (Original Romanian Version)" by O-Zone on the Ma Ya Hi (Dragostea Din Tei) [English Mixes] - EP available for download on iTunes for 99c. You'll be glad you bought it. (Even though I'm still annoyed with Apple, you really can't beat iTunes and I continue to twitch without my iPod).

UPDATE: Looks like I wasn't the only one inspired by this young man to create a motion pic (this post)! This blogger seems to be collecting them. Here, here (I promise this one wasn't me, even though it references both Dar Williams and Australia), here and now my creation, here (to date). This link, which debuted the original clip, has more. (Although I don't support and I don't like any clips that make fun of Gary Brolsma's original).

UPDATE: The New York Times has an article posted today about Gary Brolsma, the young man who lip syncs and dances and who started the fame. Apparently some people think less of him, which is tragic, because I think he is a legend. We think it is funny because it is creative and fearless and shows that a good laugh can come from some clean entertainment. Gary is a legend, and I'll debate anybody who thinks differently! Long live Gary Brolsma and his humour!

The economics and evolution of scientific research

CNN.com has posted today an article titled "Scientists feel stifled by Bush administration." Go here to read it in full. I just don't know what to think about science funding in general. Being a graduate student, I certainly don't like the sounds of:

"Overall the R&D budget is bad news," said Bierbaum.
She said the National Science Foundation funds for graduate students and for kindergarten through high school education has been slashed.

And I certainly don't like the idea of scientists within government agencies feeling pressure not to release information contrary to the government policies, because that's just not right and needs to stop. But I've been thinking for a while that economic evolution needs to happen in basic science research, and this squeeze might be the exact type of selective pressure that will help us get there.

Here's my concern: academic research, although generally more fundamental than industrial research, and therefore necessary, is so painfully inefficient. The inefficiency comes from two main things. First, most of us are amateur researchers (being graduate students). Second, we don't have the funds to keep up with many of the new technologies. A graduate student may spend a week or more doing a process that an industrial robot does in 10 minutes at a biotech company. So, while the government funds academic research and gives us just enough to move slightly forward, private industry zips past us, (only we don't really hear about it until years later because industry is, by necessity, more silent about their research). Because of this, I believe that the government is getting low returns on the money they invest in academic research. How do we resolve this?

I would like to see industry take more responsibility in training its future employees. Right now I feel that they are getting a hand out. The government funds academic programs, which train (however inefficiently) graduate students, which then mostly go into industry. So the ideal would be for a tighter connection between graduate student training and industrial funding. Such programs exist, but they are limited to the top students who are awarded industrial sponsored fellowships. (Ironically, many of these top students then choose to follow academic careers rather than industry). If universities and industries worked closer, more money and research technologies would be available for the fundamental research done at universities, and then in turn graduate students would be better trained for the industrial positions they would head into. Academia will still get their future professors, because there will still be plenty of people who prefer that lifestyle.

For this to work there would need to be some careful thinking done as far as how to manage the publication of fundamental research done at universities but sponsored by industry. Perhaps a one year lag time would be acceptable, allowing the sponsoring industries to use the fundamental research results however they wish. The publication lag time might strike at the idealistic heart of academic research, but I believe the reality would be that given a few years, publications would start coming out quicker and more frequently as better technologies and more money would be available to the university researcher thus speeding up the overall process.

So, perhaps its time that the biotech industries start stepping up to the plate and start a more broad support of the education process of its future employees. If the government science budget continues to get slashed and if industry does not step up, there simply will not be enough students graduating with the skills that industry needs. This is selective pressure at its best!

UPDATE: Looks like I wasn't the only one to notice this article, (but I may have been the most inexperienced one to comment on it).

"The system is down"

My lab members and I frequently order sandwiches from Jimmy Johns on State Street here in Madison. Their fastest delivery time to our lab is 12 minutes. Their slowest was almost an hour. (We refused to pay them full price that day). Today we called, and power is down on State Street right now. The system is down. (-clever reference from our newest member of the lab).

Madison Polar Plunge

I went to the Polar Plunge to watch a bunch of people from my church plunge into the icy waters of Lake Monona. They were incredibly brave and raised lots of money for the Wisconsin Special Olympics. Well done guys! I'll be posting pictures in a few days!

UPDATE: Our group, the "University Mormons" was split into two jumps. See pictures here and here. More pictures and perhaps a video will be in a later post.

UPDATE: More pics posted. Go to this post.

I used to love Apple....

Murray Park Dental is the best dental office in the Salt Lake City area, located in Murray across from the large IHC hospital. They do general family dentistry. My husband, Dr. Adam McLachlan is an excellent dentist, and I really mean that! So if you live in the Salt Lake City area, and need a good dentist, give him a call at (801) 263-1632. Tell him you got referred by this blog post. http://murrayparkdental.com/McLachlan/

NOTE, (February 2009): This blog post is a big whine about apple's customer support. Since writing this I've decided that all tech companies have less than perfect customer support, so I'm no longer upset about Apple's level of support. In fact, I've had several good experiences since this post. Since this post seems to get the most visability on search engines, I shall use the top part of the post to plug my husband's dental practice, as above.

___________________
This is a copy of a letter that I have sent to Apple concerning my poor customer support experience with them:

Re: Very poor customer support at Apple Store with iPod

To whom it may concern,

I am writing to make you aware that the customer support I have received at an Apple Store is completely unacceptable and that this treatment has made it such that I will not buy another apple product.

I have used a university owned iMac and a Titanium in my laboratory during my PhD program for the last 5 years and have been mostly pleased with the performance of these computers. We have in-house technical support, so any issues I have had are quickly cleared up. Ten weeks ago I was given an iPod which was purchased at Circuit City. I used my iPod for only eight weeks until the screen stopped working for absolutely no reason. I followed the instructions given on the apple.com site for such a problem. I rebooted the iPod, this failed. Frustrated, I then tried the next step which was to re-install the software. This was frustrating since the majority of hard drive space on my work desktop computer is used for work-related storage, so my collection of CDs I had been encoding into aac files could not fit on the desktop hard drive. I had been transferring my music in increments to the iPod, then deleting what was on the desk-top hard drive. In re-installing the software all of this was lost (which I understood would happen upon re-installing). However, the re-installing of the software did not fix the iPod screen, and seeing I was within the 180 days of warranty I knew the next step was to get a replacement from Apple

I had been using the iPod primarily to listen to an audio book for a class I teach, so rather than send the iPod into Apple and wait for the turn around time, I chose instead to take it to the closest Apple Store so I could receive instant assistance. I called Apple Store Mayfair (Wauwatosa, Wisconsin), which is an hour and a half drive away from where I live. I told them my technical problem and they told me to bring it in and they would swap it out right there and that they close at 9pm. Unfortunately I did not get the name of the person at the store who told me this information.

Several days after calling to confirm that I could have my iPod taken care of at the Apple Store, I made the time to travel into Wauwatosa. (This was Friday Feb 11th). I drove to the Apple Store with the broken iPod. I got there at 8:35 pm. The store had at least 6 or 7 salespeople on the floor helping only a few customers. I approached the sales counter and told the worker what I was there for. He told me “I’m sorry, the Genius Bar is closed.” I asked him what the Genius Bar was, and he condescendingly explained that it is the tech support area. I told him I had been told that I could come in by 9pm and my problem would be taken care of. He insisted the Genius Bar was closed and that no one could help me. He pointed out that the man at the Genius Bar was swamped with helping other customers “who had made appointments.” After some discussion I learned that a customer is supposed to make an appointment at the “Genius Bar” and that there was nothing he could do. I had not been told when I called the store about the limited tech support or that I had to make an appointment, the worker had just told me to come in by 9pm.

I went to the Genius Bar and spoke to the man working there whose name was Scott. He was polite (unlike the first man I had spoken to) but insisted that he could not help me because the computers closed down at 8:30pm and that he would be staying late anyway to help the people who were still waiting to have their lap tops fixed. I told him that this was unacceptable, that I had driven in from Madison, and that nobody had told me when I called the store that I needed to make an appointment. All that needed to happen was to swap the iPod. I had my receipt with me to show that I was within 180 days of warranty, which Scott did take a look at. (Ironically even this was a problem because apparently my iPod had been returned to Circuit City prior to my friend purchasing it. The serial number of my iPod, which must have been entered in by the customer that had that unit before returning it, came up as being beyond the 180 days of warranty service. Scott was helpful in that he made a note online that he had seen the receipt and that the unit was with 180 days of purchase). Scott said he was sorry and that that was all he could do to help me. He called over a salesperson to help me on the computer to get a box sent to my apartment so I could send in the iPod, the exact same thing I could have done from home (save faxing in a copy of the receipt). Scott called over a sales person to help me fill out the online form. The sales person’s “help” consisted of him bringing up the web page and then walking away. I had to go and find him twice when I had questions about the online form. I left the store shortly before 9pm and had to drive the hour and a half back home having had one of the worst customer experiences of my life.

As a contrast to this experience, that same evening, on the way into the Apple Store, I had stopped at the Sprint PCS store in Madison with my sister since her cell phone battery (purchased 8 months ago) had begun leaking. She showed the sales assistant the battery, and with no questions asked he took the phone and installed not just a new battery (since they did not have any identical batteries in stock), but a more expensive extended life battery. We were out of the store within 4 minutes. (And cell phone companies are meant to be notoriously bad for their customer support)! The contrast between the two customer support experiences of that night made my Apple Store experience even more frustrating.

I am about to start writing my PhD dissertation and had decided to buy an Apple laptop so as to be easily compatible with the computers in my laboratory. This experience has soured me on Apple and I am now looking into buying a PC rather than an Apple. Apple may have cornered the market with iPods, but if the customer support doesn’t improve, I think, in the long run, Apple will lose customers of their other, more expensive, products.

I will be posting this letter on my blog.


Julie Eggington
Case Number ********

UPDATE: It's been 13 days, and the return packaging box that Apple Store told me would be overnighted has yet to arrive. - IT WAS DHL EXPRESS AND MY FRONT OFFICE THAT MESSED THIS UP. THE BOX WAS OVERNIGHTED, BUT WAS DELIVERED TO MY APARTMENT FRONT OFFICE WITH NO NOTIFICATION TO ME. I must have bad digital music karma. Maybe this is pay back for all of my Napster free downloading days.

UPDATE: Michelle has made a very valid comment (see comments) that I shall have to weigh in my apple anger...

UPDATE: March 3rd and new iPod arrives. Very happy. All in working order.

UPDATE: November 2005. 1 year after original purchase of original iPod. Battery test proves that battery on replacement iPod (now 8 months old) is less than 50% of that of it's garaunteed level. Still within warrenty, sent in for replacement. New iPod arrives. Paid additonal $20 for extended warrenty. Had to make three more phone calls to fix the clerical error Apple made in the extended warranty. Brilliant customer service model.

UPDATE: January, 2009. I extended the warranty of my original iPod and ended up replacing a total of three times. Once for the screen, and twice for the battery life. Then the warranty ran out and the battery was slowly decaying. Then several months ago I lost it, or it got stolen, or something. Whatever the case, it is gone. I weighed my options, and decided that I still like apple and iPod enough to stick with them so I bought a second hand iPod 30GB classic that's 18 months old. The battery life if fantastic!

Toads turning dogs into junkies

I knew I've always hated cane toads. Read about it here.

Dr. Phil must have sold out on the Amazing Race abuse case

On my blog of the first episode of Amazing Race 6 I said:

Jonathan of the Jonathan/Victoria team is an absolute abusive pig. Is it possible to have TV show cross-overs from talk-shows into reality shows? Please Dr. Phil, please oh please help Victoria see that Jonathan is more caustic than concentrated nitric acid.

Last night Jonathan and Victoria were on Dr. Phil for about 5 minutes in a Prime Time Special. Dr. Phil hedged around the obvious fact that Jonathan is abusive and never came out and said "my professional analysis is that you have a problem and Victoria would be better off getting out of this relationship." Honesty is the only reason we watch Dr. Phil! Victoria was text-book abused-wife-syndrome and it's obvious the two came on the show with the agreement to tell their side and not to be helped or judged by Dr. Phil. Sadly, the quest for ratings was apparently the overwhelming drive behind this segment of the show. I guess that shows that Dr. Phil and his producers are not super human. What a shame.

Abba reunite for only a night

The joy. My life is complete. I can now die a happy woman.

Hot, hot, hot

Apparently 2005 is going to be a hot year for planet earth. Considering I live in Wisconsin, all I can say is, oh thank goodness.

Forget today's politics, yesteryears was so much more explosive!

But if you find yourself from time to time bemoaning the state of partisanship in America, cheer up. It could have been worse. And indeed, once upon a time, it was.

-From an article by Pejman Yousefzadeh about the Founding Fathers of the USA.

Amazing Race 6 - Finale

Freddy and Kendra won, am I happy? No. I don't like them. I really don't like her. Kris and Jon came second, and I love them. Rebecca and Adam, with how late they started the last leg, really had no chance of catching up, but I'm happy they made it to the finale three. Hayden and Aaron thankfully were eliminated before the final three headed out. It was kind of cool because they gave up! Apparently you can take a four hour penalty if you skip a roadblock and still go to the ending mat. Who knew?! Kris and Jon had their good Karma come back to them in the lock and key roadblock, while Hayden and Aaron just couldn't do it. Although Hayden did get proposed to by Aaron. I guess that's the thing to do on reality shows. The big question I have is, if they had taken the four hour penalty when they first got to the roadblock, would they have beaten Rebecca and Adam? I'd like to know the exact timing of things to figure that out. It was a good finale, I'm just sad Kris and Jon didn't win.

The big shocker of the night though was the preview for next season which starts in three weeks. Rob and Amber (of Survivor infamy) will be a team. Oh I really, really can't stand them! Sad thing is, I think they might have the mental and physical ability to do well and that makes me sooooo mad! We will see how they do.

I win!!!

I was flying back from Nashville last night and we hit a bit of turbelence. I very rarely have problems with turbelence, but last night, not only was it bumpy, but it was like rolling up and down over waves at times, and well, that was enough to do it. Out of a plane of 25 people I was the one to lose it. Thankfully I managed to get to the little tiny bathroom with a barf-bag and did my puking in private. I won!!

Photoblogging Madison

I have an older digital camera but it works okay, so, I'm going to start photoblogging scenes from Madison. Today's scene is from a friend's apartment viewing the Wisconsin-style swimming pool (notice the snow).

Amazing Race 6 - Episode XI

A mild "you suck" from Kris (of Kris and Jon) to a TERRIBLE cab driver was as angry as Kris and Jon got in this episode of bad luck for their team. Even under pressure they remained calm and lovely people. I want to grow up to be like them! (Yesterday I refused to pay full price for a sandwhich order because the delivery guy got lost and I spent 25 minutes running around campus looking for him. Perhaps I should learn from Kris and Jon, peace and love forever guys!) However, with Adam and Rebecca being vindictively yielded by the model alliance, Kris and Jon came in third and Adam and Rebecca came in fourth and last. However, being a non-elimation round, Mamma's little Hell-boy and his baby-sitter are still in the game. Only they've got to start off in China with no money. Speaking of China, I know the country has a policy to try to show its best foot to the rest of the world, so somebody needs to free up the cab drivers to work under a capitalist mindset without repurcussion, although Shanghai was beautiful, the devil is in the details and the cab incidents proved to turn off the viewer from visiting.

Only the season finalle left!