Chemical Shift

I turned 31 today. I don’t usually make a big deal about it. I heard from most of my family today, which hasn’t happened in a long, long time. My mom informed me of how old I was and I said: “I am!?!… really!?!”

We watched “Chicken Little”, tonight. It was pretty good. Apparently, my skill at picking bad movies doesn’t extend into children’s movies. I enjoy most of Zach Braff’s work, the actor who performed the voice of the title character, in “Scrubs”. I haven’t seen his movie “Garden State”, yet, but might rent it soon. I just have to say: “So’s your face!”

Melissa got me a couple books for my birthday: The Zen of CSS Design and The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks, and Hacks. I need to learn more about CSS in order to fix our sites and figure out how to account for the shortcomings of Internet Explorer and its pitiful support of web recommendations/standards. If we end up staying where we are, we will probably take some courses at the local community college to be better web developers and graphic designers.

Melissa also got me an Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-500MCE Dual TV/FM card for my computer. I am now able to use the PVR functionality that’s built in to Windows XP Media Center 2005. The picture quality is pretty good and now we can record three programs that are scheduled at the same, including our ReplayTV in the living room. Of course, how often does that really happen?

Oh yeah, work is going well. I was able to make a compound recently that another chemist on the wing had trouble with earlier. Also, I figured out how to make a similar derivative that will likely have better properties for the final polymer than the one I’ve already made, and that one has worked exceptionally well. I’m also writing up the synthetic part of our latest paper, which should be sent out soon. This will be the third one I will have from my work here, and more should come after these.