Thursday, December 18, 2008

Oh, yeah, we went to Romania cause my husband is awesome



We have had the best year ever. Really, we have. Globetrotting and at home, everything has been pretty darn marvelous.

Friday, November 14, 2008

Friday tomfoolery




Sarah Wright's Dewey Decimal Section:

078 Newspapers in Scandinavia

Sarah Wright = 91818389780 = 918+183+897+80 = 2078


Class:
000 Computer Science, Information & General Works


Contains:
Encyclopedias, magazines, journals and books with quotations.



What it says about you:
You are very informative and up to date. You're working on living in the here and now, not the past. You go through a lot of changes. When you make a decision you can be very sure of yourself, maybe even stubborn, but your friends appreciate your honesty and resolve.

Find your Dewey Decimal Section at Spacefem.com

Monday, October 20, 2008

Zombie escape made simple

How I do love commoncraft. They make all of the crazy-complex stuff in life seem so much simpler, fun even. And for Halloween, they even help us stay safe from zombies.







Zombies don't eat candy, don't dance, and can't swim. They don't sound like much fun at all.

Monday, October 13, 2008

This is a purely technical, experimental, and mostly boring post


Nbii.gov partners 2007-2008
created at TagCrowd.com
As it says, I used TagCrowd.com, a quick and easy way to turn text into a tag cloud. I especially like doing it to my information science papers to see how big the words data, information and academic get, usually correlated to how boring my paper is. The best part is seeing the words you don't expect pop out at you. Like service, or even better, texas.

Many good tools exist to do this for you, starting with all kinds of input: your blog, website, excel spreadsheet (IBM Many Eyes = lots of text analysis tools), or just cut and paste text from anywhere. A list of cloud generators can be found here.

The cloud you see above is part of my practicum project this semester, studying the National Biological Information Infrastructure (Nbii.gov). I'll spare you the details. This is just a test--don't go thinking that this is valid, complete data, 'cause it aint.

Wednesday, May 7, 2008

We got married!?


After eight years of bliss, we decided to spice it up a bit. So we went to the courthouse and tied the old knot. We don't have pictures of that here, but here is our low-key, friends and close family party in the mountains that we threw to celebrate:


On the left is our friend who is designing our rings; he is a highly skilled jeweler in addition to being a lifelong friend (I can remember rolling around in his bunk bed when we were 3 or 4). He also teaches at John C. Campbell Folk School, if you're interested. On the right is my father-in-law. Ah, the naming of people is so much easier when you are married. He used to be my boyfriend of eight years' father, or some other complicated thing! That's really the only reason we got married. But we love each other, too, of course.



And Ranger Bob let my mother wear his hat, most likely against park regulations. But she sure was happy about it.






And the food was fantastic. One of my vegetarian friends said she would pay to attend a buffet like that. Hmmm...







This pesto was amazing, especially with the home-made bread.







Then my Dad got his banjo out, and things got a little bit more fun. Cause that's why banjos were invented.





















And then one of our guests drank a little too much a little too fast. . . and suffered the consequences. Either that, or the banjo music attracted zombies. It does that sometimes.