…::: NJ Brideau :::…

Congrats Sammy and David!!!!!!

Just a quick post to say a big congratulations to our friends Sam and David Infanger on the birth of their son Dale.  You can check out pictures, videos, and basically a live blog of everything over at their website.

I used to razz David when he made a point to take pictures of everything, but especially when he got stuck on telling me to make sure to record everything to video.  Well David, being so far away, it was really nice to see a video of Dale, and to hear your voices (very clearly too), so you may have convinced me to start doing the same.

I’ll do some more posting soon, but not likely until we get internet at home.  The process is something I have made a mental note to tell everyone about, but long story short, we have been promised internet by 17 Feb.

We made it

Well folks – we made it.  We’ve been here in England for about 5 days now, and will have much more to report on once everything gets sorted out.  Lots to do in the next week or so, but more to come.  I’ve been promised an internet connection at home next week, as well as one at work, so we can skip the Starbucks-only wifi (not free).

Down to 3 discs

One of the major challenges of our move to England is me figuring out what to do with all of our technology-related stuff.  I’m pretty sure we’ll ship our DVD player and projector, as well as some accompanying cables.  And I figured I’d pick up a surround sound system on the cheap off the Craigslist equivalent over there once we got settled a little bit.  But the question remained, what do we do with all of our optical media?

What do I mean by optical media?  CD’s, DVD’s, mp3 discs, etc.  Anything on a physical disc that takes up space.  Hopefully you can see in the picture above we have plenty of optical media.  We have stacks and books of music on CD and mp3 discs, as well as lots of movies on DVD or even DivX.  The entire pile together takes up quite a bit of space, and really ends up being heavy.  Too  heavy perhaps to ship in a giant box.  So what was my solution?  Rip them all to hard drives.

In addition to our previous external 1 terabyte hard drive, I picked up another for dirt cheap a day or so after Christmas by telling Best Buy the guys down the street had it cheaper.  They didn’t even care to check the price.  Anyway, now armed with 3.7 terabytes of storage capacity, I figured I could move all the digital content from the optical media onto our hard drives.  Above you can see that I employed four laptops simultaneously to do so.  The entire task took a few days of constant shuttling new discs into computers, but it went fairly smoothly.

So now instead of moving the large pile of discs with us, I can store the box at my parents, and take just our 3 external hard drives.  Believe it or not, this isn’t the best solution for us.  I eventually want to move to network attached storage (NAS) with a RAID array set up for the case of drive failure.  Maybe once we get settled and stop bleeding money so badly.

best deal of 2010 (so far)

As many of you know, in our preparation to move overseas we have been purging our lives of almost all of our belongings.  Save for a few sentimental and useful items stored with our parents, we have managed to get rid of almost everything.  The idea being, that we won’t need it too much in Oxford, and that when we come back we can start again with all nice new stuff.

There are a few exceptions to that rule – one of them being new clothes.  With reports that clothing is MUCH cheaper here in the States than England, we decided to get rid of some of our poor-fitting and out of style clothes, in favor of some flashy new ones.  One new shirt takes up less space in a suitcase than 3 old shirts anyway.  Or at least that is what I tell myself.

I picked up a new shirt this week from The Men’s Wearhouse.

I’m not normally one to show off fancy clothing, or brag about my nice stuff.  And I certainly am not the kind of guy that would spend 70 dollars on a simple button down shirt.  That makes no sense for a guy in my line of work.  BUT, I put this picture in to prove a point.

All of the men in our wedding were outfitted with tuxedos from Men’s Wearhouse.  In the process of creating an account with them, I signed myself up for their Perfect Fit program.  This is a rewards program based on the money you spend at the store – not too difficult.  I have been fortunate to get a designer suit and a couple of fitted shirts for dirt cheap based on their promotions, but none of them top this latest one.  Here is what I paid for that shirt:

Pretty hard to beat that deal.  The funny thing is, I don’t really like Men’s Wearhouse that much.  Their selection is less than stellar, and for the most part they are overpriced.  But if I continue to get deals like this one, I might have to keep shopping there.

Goodbye Ithaca

I suppose I’m a few days late on my website-related new years resolution, but I think most people will understand a lull here in the coming weeks.

The most recent big change in our lives is the move to Oxford, England.  Part of that change was saying goodbye to Ithaca, New York, the area we called home for 5.5 years.

I figured this pictures sums up Ithaca.  Cold, beautiful terrain, and not much around.  Also, I lost most of my pictures of Ithaca when my hard drive crashed a while back.  Chelsea and I left Ithaca just before Christmas, for what we thought was for good.  Thanks to our friends Marisa and Leo, and Sam and David, for hosting two grand going away parties, we got to see almost everyone before we left.

As with most things lab related, nothing ever works as planned.  I came back last week in order to finish some experiments and wrap up everything in the lab.

The image above represents the last 4 years of work in the lab.  All of my work can pretty much be boiled down to ~300 plasmids.  Well, at least this is the stuff worth keeping for future projects.  Paring down all the reagents and material you have spent years accumulating into three small boxes destined for the -80 freezer is a strange feeling.

Some of you might recognize this as my lab bench area, and you will immediately notice this is the cleanest it has been in years.  Here you can see the empty shelves that held the various bottles from years of productive experiments.

After a crazy week  (I was awake for 86 of 96 hours at one point), it became time for me to finally say goodbye.  So thank you to all of our friends, which we will undoubtedly miss the most.  We hope to run into you all sooner than later.