I don’t usually blog about personal matters, but a close friend of the family, a civil rights lawyer named Ashley, has been diagnosed with a fairly aggressive form of inoperable cancer. This is especially painful since she successfully fought off ovarian cancer not quite a year ago. I’m out of the country right now so that’s about as much detail as I know, which is handy since that’s about as much detail as I feel comfortable sharing.

If you find it appropriate to pray, please do so. If there’s some other personal practice that you do when a wonderful family falls on hard times, please do that. I’ve known Ashley since I was 12, and she’s consistently been a simultaneously well-grounded and inspirational voice helping me do what I needed a little nudge to take on. She’s more brave and brazen than anyone I know, and I hope you’ll take a moment to ask yourself what awesome things you’ll do with your life, because without Ashley at least 20 of us are going to have to step it up. She’s been working to make the world a better place and she’s been having an awesome time doing it.

If you’ll excuse me I think I’m going to go enjoy the hell out of my vacation, since that’s what she told me to do.

On Thursday I rode with my good friend Travis from Chapel Hill to High Point. Got a bit of a sunburn, but otherwise enjoyed the road. We had a stretch of about six miles after we turned off of Greensboro Chapel Hill Road where we only saw one car. It was sublime.

Travis left on Friday for Paris, and he’ll be spending the summer biking around Europe. I’m supremely jealous. I’ve resolved to bike around some continent other than North America in the next five years. I’m thinking I should start a savings account for that now.

That robocall I posted about earlier also got posted on Orange Politics, where it got a lot of reads and a lot of comments fairly quickly. I started a tumblr blog to be able to easily post the audio of the robocall.

At the Daily Grind just now the young lady ahead of me had a stack of brightly-colored flash cards. On the flash cards were the amino acids. Seeing that brought back a lot of NCSSM memories again. This past weekend I did a fair bit of cleaning/purging and ended up parting with physics, cell biology, and other class notes from my NCSSM days. I’m a bit embarrassed that I still had all those notes, but “molecell” with Dr. Naiman was SO AWESOME. I owe so much to that school.

• did some canvassing for Obama, enjoyed the rain.
• had a new flavor at locopops.
• played a bit of Mario Party with frijole & friends on his new, massive TV.
• got my 30-track fix from emusic, including Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92.
• helped a friend of my mom’s clean out for a move. Got about 20 free paperbacks out of the effort.
• Now supposedly doing work due this week (wish me luck).

The end of the semester is upon us. Prepare for craziness.

I think the most awesome part about this video was finding it via a twitter from my boss:

• Ten things to do before I die
• Public figures who make me want to puke
• Jobs I should have learned a lesson from but didn’t
• Crushes I wish I’d acted on
• This list
• Top ten strangest RT tickets I’ve received
• Out-of-date wiki pages I should have updated or deleted

Bad picture taken with my phone:

Stylish! Shape!

I’m in the middle of finishing up some work that’s still crushing me, so I’ll make this quick.

See the bottom of the left sidebar for a new google reader widget I added yesterday. Google is getting more social, it would seem. If you use blogger they make it push-button simple for you to add the same widget to your blog. In my case I made a braindead wordpress sidebar widget with the two lines of javascript that google supplied. If you want my wordpress widget for your own wordpress joy, let me know.

The other change I made to this blog is the addition of a Zotero plugin that exposes COinS metadata. If you have Zotero installed, you should now see a little icon in your address bar when visiting my site. Metadata sweetness! Let me know if the plugin magically breaks anything, eh?

Peace out. Imma finish writing now.

I haz a burrowing cat. Generalizing a bit (and building on previous work), here’s my hypothesis in graphical form:

And to help guarantee that I’m right, witness: