In root canal news, they tried to schedule me for a appointment on June 3 [> 1 month away]. I mentioned that I was actually in pain and that waiting a month wasn't really an option, as far as I was concerned... so they rescheduled me for Tuesday. I don't understand why they didn't put me in that spot in the first place...

In bird nest news, the youngins are leaving the nest! At least one has left, and another seems to have left for a little bit and then come back. This morning when I turned on BirdTV, one of them was outside the nest, sitting on the romex cord next to the nest and directly in front of the camera. It looked huge. Pictures from this morning aren't up yet, but will be soon.

Group management made some good noises regarding the possibility of me being hired once I finish my thesis... yay. And my mentor decided to take an active interest in my progress - he wants to have weekly meetings where we talk about what I've finished in terms of the writing and the actual code development.

Well I went in this morning to kick my cavity in the buttocks. Turns out it had gotten to the nerve. Which means....

ROOT CANAL

Yay! I'm so excited. Possibly as soon as tomorrow. Maybe not until next Tuesday. We'll see. Right now my face is so full of novacaine that I'm drooling like an idiot.

Oh yeah, and speaking of my trip to the dentist yesterday, when I showed up in the parking lot, there were only two open spots. I took one and went in for my checkup. When I came out, a minivan had gone out of control, across all four lanes of Trinity Drive, over the curb, sidewalk, and into the parking lot - totally destroying the car that was in the spot that I didn't choose. It was beyond weird. The cars on either side of the destroyed one were basically fine. If I had parked there, my day would have been... worse.

The fact that I have my first cavity in many years was sort of a bummer, but seeing that my truck was fine and that it could have been totalled made everything OK. I feel like maybe I should have gone out and bought some lottery tickets or something.

So I called yesterday morning to make an appointment with the dentist for a checkup. They said the first opening they had was June 28... so over two months away.

Then they called over lunch and said they had just gotten an opening later this week that I could take. However, by the time I called them back, they had already given it away to someone else.

Then, they called again at about 1:00pm and said that someone hadn't come in and that if I could come over immediately, they could see me right then. So off I went. The delay shrank from 2 months to zero seconds. Not bad.

Turns out I have a cavity and need an crown. Their scheduling person was out yesterday (maybe they should be out more often?) so they had to call me today to make the appointment. As I left, they cautioned me that it could be June before they could get me in and that I should take extra special care of that tooth so that the cavity doesn't progress to the nerve before I can get it fixed (and thus avoid getting a root canal).

This morning they call and offer me an appointment tomorow morning. Either I'm very very lucky or they were just kidding about being busy.

So the lone trumpet snail that appeared in my aquarium last week has been hard at work. Today I noticed some small white specks in the gravel that, upon closer inspection, were oddly... snail-shaped. Now, after a few minutes of examining the tank, I count over 50 small snails crawling around on the gravel. There's no turning back now.

There's really no good way to deal with a snail infestation in an aquarium. The only way to really get rid of them is to boil everything in the tank for awhile. This, of course, kills the fish and the plants as well as the snails. There are loaches and various other fish that will eat small snails, but they are all much too large for a 10 gallon aquarium. The only real option is population control by periodically removing the snails from the tank and giving them a new home in the toilet. So it looks like from now on my weekly tank maintenance is going to be that much more of a pain in the arse.

Addendum: There's also some kind of small white worm, several of them, crawling around on the glass. They're only a few millimeters in length... no idea what they are or where they came from.

Just had another High Guads Restoration Project this weekend. Finished off another cave and collected good inventory and survey data for part of another. The weather down in the Guadalupe Mountains was wonderful, with highs in the 80s. I spent Sunday morning ridgewalking and managed to come across two previously-discovered caves but nothing new.

I came back to discover that the finch chicks have really developed quite a bit over the weekend. Most of their afro hairs are gone and they are mostly-feathery. Another couple of days and they should look like proper finches. Also this morning I saw a roufus-sided towhee in the back yard, but the camera was still packed in the truck and I couldn't get a shot of it. This was the first time I've ever seen this kind of bird.

Needless to say, I've gotten pretty excited about this active house finch nest so close to my house and in such an accessible location. Today after work I continued my routine monitoring photos, and then I took an old $20 black-and-white CCD camera I had sitting around and wired it up to an old TV. I stuck the camera to the ceiling near the nest for an unobtrusive view into the activities of the mother and her brood. (picture here)

It works great! The little TV in the laundry room plays Bird TV constantly. Though mostly the chicks just sleep, every now and then the mother returns with some food and then everyone goes ape. Anyway, this improved view has confirmed that there are, in fact, four babies. I don't currently have it set up to be able to framegrab directly off the camera NTSC signal, so I had to resort to taking photographs of the TV screen... I apologize for the abysmal quality.

Here are the interesting pictures from today that I was around to take pictures of the TV for.

So I saw Kill Bill vol. 2 last night. Highly entertaining, though I'm not sure if I like it as much as the first one. One thing I like just as much as the first one is the music. The RZA did another awesome job of producing the soundtrack, and his original works are great too. I especially like the last song in the closing credits, called "Black Mamba." It's a hidden track on the soundtrack (#16) but from what I've been reading online it sounds like the soundtrack version has lyrics, whereas the movie version was an instrumental.

Why do they do that? If I buy the soundtrack to the movie, I want to hear the music as it was in the movie. Also, none of the RZA's other original music is on the soundtrack. Gah! This is exactly the sort of crap that makes me just steal MP3s off the web rather than buying the CDs. Marketers: figure that one out.

[segue]

I've moved the pictures of the house finch nest into their own gallery page. I'm trying to take pictures one or two a day until the new birds leave the nest. It's looking like there are just three of them. They are starting to grow feathers and their eyes are open!

This morning as Nina was leaving for work, she heard baby bird chirping noises coming from the house finch nest in our carport. I came home for lunch and held a digital camera up over the nest to reveal...

Three or four baby finches! They're... well, ugly. But it's still cool. I wish I had taken some photos back when they were just eggs. I'm thinking I'll try to get a series of photos of the nest over the next couple of weeks until the new birds fly away. The internet says that house finch babies stay in the nest for two weeks.

Anyway, the pictures I took today are in the house finch directory of the photogallery.

Zia Spacemodelers had their April launch today. It was a bit too windy so I only launched one small rocket (the Omloid). We held our annual PeepLoft competition, in which you attach a marshmallow Peep to your rocket, launch it, recover it, and then eat it... and whoever has the quickest time from launch to swallow... wins. I got 32 seconds, which put me in third.

Here are some pictures including some great grimace shots as people try to force down the retched peeps.

Forget virgin birth... I have a pet snail that was born out of nothing.

I've had my aquarium set up for months now, and today there was a full-size snail crawling around on the inside. I took this picture of it.

My dad saw me on the webcam staring at my tank, so I got into a discussion with him. I recall our old aquarium at home being overrun with snails at some point. Apparently, they're hermaphroditic and capable of autofertilization... So now that I have one, I'm bound to have a bunch more.

The most likely explaination for the snail miracle birth was that some sort of egg (snails have eggs, right?) was transported in on one of the plants I bought and put in the tank, and that it just took forever for it to grow (and somehow was totally unseen to me or anyone else until today). If that's true, then I suppose this one could be laying eggs that are equally unseeable all over the tank and in a few months I'll be scraping snails off the glass by the dozens and having miniature... whatever the french word is for that snail cuisine... uh I believe its... le yuck.

Nina and I drove down to Socorro yesterday for NMT's annual MudBog event, run by our friend Dan. It's a little hard to describe in a way that doesn't make it sound totally trailer. So here are some photos that I took yesterday which more or less explain what was going on.

Speaking of trailer, check out that kid with the T-hawk in the first picture.

I applied to six graduate schools back in the fall of 1997, all of them for different disciplines. I guess I lacked focus. When April 1998 rolled around, I had gotten accepted into all of them except for MIT, and had decided to enter the astronomy program at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. After telling them I was coming, a mail room error in my favor revealed a month-late acceptance letter from MIT that had been lost somewhere. I had to call Wesleyan and tell them I wasn't coming after all; that I just couldn't say no to MIT. So instead of astrophysics, I went into nuclear engineering. It's only a matter of 30 orders of magnitude in scale, otherwise it's basically the same field... right?

Anyway, after taking a few years off from academia after graduating from college, Nina has recently applied to grad schools and just heard today that she's been accepted into the Earth and environmental sciences program at Wesleyan. So it looks like she'll be studying planetary geology in Connecticut come August. Congratulations!

I'm going to be thinking about these all day now.

This is akin to the day that I spent trying to come up with an analytic formula for the number of points on a regular grid within a circle of arbitrary radius centered on a gridpoint.

The best I could come up with was:

[2*floor(r/sqrt(2))+1]^2 + 4*[sum{n=floor(r/sqrt(2))+1 to n=floor(r) of floor(sqrt(r^2-n^2)) * 2 + 1}]

Prooving this formula is left as an exercise to the reader, as is coming up with a better one.

I've been hounding the pet store here in town to pick up some Otocinclus for some time now. My ten gallon aquarium is too small for an adult plecostomus, so I needed one of these little algae-eaters to keep the green plague at bay. On the way home from work today, just after tossing my tax forms in the mail, I swung by Pete's Pets and there they were. Picked one up and it's already hard at work cleaning my tank for me.

So I've been out caving since Thursday night, down by the Valley of Fires State Park. The weather down there was great. Sunny, warmish, and I got a sunburn [caving? yeah I know it's weird...]. When I came home last night, it was snowing lightly and there was about an inch on the ground. This morning, it had grown to six inches and it is still falling. Here's some pictures, featuring a frozen hummingbird feeder and snow all over the place: http://mouser.org/gallery/easter2004

Isn't it the middle of April? Anyway, these photos are for all those people who, when I tell them that it's cold here, say "In New Mexico?!"

I spent a lot of time this weekend thinking about the aquarium... of the Future! Well maybe not that dramatic, but it's been something I've been tossing around for awhile. Currently I have a little 10 gallon planted aquarium that I set up last September.

The current aquarium is nice, but it is just too small. I can't put very many fish in there, or any big fish, and even some plants are too big to grow in there.

So I was looking around on the web for ideas for an upgrade to something bigger when I came across the concept of a paludarium. A paludarium is a combination aquarium/terrarium with live plants in both environments. I found some excellent examples. This one is probably the most impressive, though it has the least written about it. Other good examples with better writeups are here and here.

The thing that really appeals to me about a paludarium is that I can grow some relatively exotic plants (both on the land portion and in the water), have everything my current aquarium has, and keep some interesting small land pets, like anoles or salamanders or frogs or something. With luck, I could find something that will spend time both on the land and swimming around in the water portion of the tank.

The first link, above, really has it set up right. Below the paludarium, inside the cabinet it rests on, is a small 15 gallon sump tank that receives all the water from an overflow pipe hidden in the main pond. The water in the sump is continuously filtered by a great external canister filter and heated by a submerged heating element. Then, a pump takes the water from the sump and sends it back up to the paludarium where it enters the pond either through one of the two waterfalls or through a perforated feed pipe under the gravel. There is also a valve he can turn to divert some of the feed water into a spray tube that mimicks rain for the land plants.

The great part about that setup is that all of the maintenance equipment is in a separate tank that is out of sight. You don't have to look at a big filter lift tube or heater in your display case, like I do now with my aquarium.

I want to set something like that up. I could even use my current tank as the sump. In fact, everything you need to set that up is relatively cheap except for the big tank itself. For some reason aquariums (and their canopies and cabinets) are crazy expensive. It's not like they're all that complicated. But if I wanted to get a 75 gallon acrylic tank (I'd need to drill a couple holes in the bottom under the dry side) I'd be looking at the better side of $1000 just for the tank, canopy, and cabinet.

I'm looking into the options for building my own tank out of lexan or something. More on this later.

And now for two very quick and depressing PS2 game reviews:

First up is Prince of Persia, recommended as a good game for people who like Ico. I gotta tell ya, it looks great. But the playability rapidly went to zero when I discovered that every time a cinematic comes on, my controller stops working and has to be unplugged and replugged. This, combined with the fact that there is a cinematic about every 10 seconds during the first part of the game, made it basically unplayable.

I think there may actually be a problem with my controllers (I tried both of them and got the same results). Once upon a time, my PS2 controller delivered a giant shock to me out of nowhere. Ever since that time, the DVD remote control would not work as long as the controller was plugged in. Unplugging the controller allowed the remote to work again. I tried switching to my backup controller and everything was fine again... until a few months later when it too delivered me a giant shock and then stopped working in tandem with the remote receiver.

Up until now, this has been the only problem - and the fact that I rarely use the PS2 for games meant that I could just leave the remote receiver plugged in all the time and only swap it out for the game controller when I was actually playing a game. Basically the controller worked fine for all the games, so no worries.

The Prince of Persia thing is pretty weird. I'll have to borrow someone else's controller and test my hypothesis. Until then: unplayable.

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Next is Jak II, recommended as a "Sci-Fi GTA3." And that description is spot-on. You walk around a city and are free to carjack people's hovercraft and punch out random people that walk by. There are cops who get pissed off and chase you, etc. It is mission based, just like GTA3, and the difficulty early-on seems to be about the same.

Where Jak II diverges from GTA3 is in the fact that you are constantly paired up with the single most irritating videogame character of all time - Daxter. The game is aimed at a somewhat younger audience than GTA3, and the dialogue suffers greatly as a result. In fact, after about five missions, Daxter's slapstick humor and annoying attitude caused me to put the controller down and step away, lest I grab his scrawny orange neck and do something horrible. The gameplay outside of the cinematics and Daxter's "helpful" spoken clues is great, but every time he speaks up, all enjoyment I had previously disappears. Daxter is a turd in my drink. There should be a Daxter MUTE function.

Alas, unplayable.

After reading Brent's recent posts about his bowling scores, I decided to go throw a series and see what I could do.

Well, 354 isn't so bad for me. I got over 100 on every game, though each game I got a lower score than the last. I had an over-the-line foul on a strike in the second game which would have given me a ton of extra points. Oh well. I use a 15 pound ball, Nina uses an 8.

Nina and I nursed our sore hands and played a game of Maximum Force after bowling. I need to get some lightguns for my arcade setup; MF is way more fun with the real arcade guns compared with the trackball at home.