Office, take 2

Now that the office is more or less in working order (if we exclude the lack of chairs) I thought I’d post something about it. I finally finished setting everything up (including the 250 Gb network drive) today, so I can finally resume my real work next week (that is, bioinformatic analysis). I plan on buying a cheap chair this weekend so I can get at least a place to sit: there are two chairs only for 6 stations.

January 16, 2006

Fate/stay night

[![Saber from the opening animation]({{ site.url }}/images/_saber.png)]({{ site.url }}/images/saber.png) I just got around to see the first two episodes of this anime, which is an animated version of TYPE-MOON’s H game (without the H aspects, luckily). So far I like it. Despite being from Studio DEEN, the animation quality is good (for now) and the story seems intriguing enough to keep on watching. Music is by Kenji Kawai and is also nice.

January 16, 2006

Moved

Finally today there was the (largely) anticipated move from the LITA to the CISI. I actually showed up at the CISI first, to do some research work, then after the lunch break I and a colleague went to the LITA to pack things up. We almost looked like robbers (and for sure got some funny looks from people as we moved to put things in the car): we had four computers, four monitors and keyboards, lots of cables, my notebooks, and more.

January 14, 2006

New S.T.E.A.L. snapshot

After about six months of inactivity, I finally got myself to write more (thanks also for WINE so I can use a dictionary on Linux), and this takes form of a new snapshot of the novel. Changes are mostly in the last part, and include some paragraphs adjusted and rewritten from scratch (I didn’t like them at all). Plans are to complete the next part of the chapter soon (more action packed).

January 11, 2006

Always needed

I haven’t been able to write because I always end up extremely tired from work. Since I’m moving to the CISI next week, it looks like everyone needs me. I managed to study a bit, then I had to help a couple people with a protocol, then work on the firewall/router migration (we’re restructuring our Intranet once I move a few computers there) then help with a software, etc. And tomorrow looks the same.

January 9, 2006

Moving? Not yet

Today I thought I was going to move from my current location (LITA building, University of Milano ) to the new one, the CISI. However I didn’t think up that some stuff (including the arrival of 3 new people at our laboratory, Sarah, Guya and Alessandra) would have held me back. I won’t relocate till next Monday. In the mean time I spent the day testing out some procedures and creating a draft proposal for the new laboratory’s network structure, and getting the equipment to put that in place.

January 8, 2006

Programming quality

Yesterday I tried to run an electronic Italian-English dictionary I own. As I write my novel using LaTeX and I have an environment on Linux, I thought it would good to use WINE to read it. I was wrong. Wine has progressed immensely and the commercial offerings (for example CodeWeavers) are even capable of running Office in its latest incarnation: however they are totally useless in front of the extremely bad quality of those dictionaries (from a programming point of view).

January 7, 2006

Money oddities

Some things strike me as being really odd. Regarding the [commission post]({{ site.url }}/2006/01/05/drawing-commissions/) I made: it’s not the first time I try doing this. After I realized that asking for free was not really going to help (because many people don’t have time, or the will to do such a project) I already tried in the past about offering money. And in the past I didn’t get any responses. Perhaps I chose the wrong channel of communication?

January 5, 2006

Drawing commissions

The few people who know me may have heard of one of my pet projects, [S.T.E.A.L.]({{ site.url }}/interests/), whose draft PDF is available [here]({{ site.url }}/steal/steal.pdf). I’ve been trying for ages to get an illustrator to do some b/w art for it (a la Slayers), but always with bad results. I’ll be trying to commission it, now that I can afford it, let’s hope I can get some results done at least with money…

January 5, 2006

DVD burning

I’ve just wasted an expensive DVD+R dual layer thanks to some bugs in the burning program. My laptop could handle the burning fine (hopefully) but I couldn’t read the source DVD because of the crappy quality of the DVD reader inside (I had the same exact problem with my old laptop), and on my desktop (MDV 2006.0) k3b refuses to burn, and growisofs borks mid-way with a generic error, in any case the DVD is wasted, bah.