In case any of you may have been wondering why not much has been going on on this site in the last month and a half, I now have you’re answer: We just bought a house! I don’t have any fabulous photos of it, so here are a couple pictures that we took while we were first looking at the house in early September. At the end of the month, we reached a deal with the seller, and as of 1 pm Friday afternoon, we closed and join the millions of Americans who are deep in debt. Oh yeah! Read More…

Ariela and I went down to the Municipal Fortress of Justice (courthouse) this morning, and met with a judge. Why, might you ask? To get our names changed of course! Armed with our birth certificates, proof of publication affidavit, and a little coffee, we have officially, legally become Karl & Ariela Haro von Mogel. Read More…

Wow, what a week. After finishing a sequencing plate at work on Tuesday, Ariela and I were off to California to finish planning for an incredible party on Saturday. I must have had too much fun or too much to drink, because I think some scientist nabbed me and affixed a tracking device to my left hand. Ariela got one exactly like it too. Maybe we’re part of some sociologists’s study of pair bonded humans. Anybody ever seen anything like this shiny metal band before? Read More…

A chill breeze from the mountaintops
can freeze the purest streams.
As ice expands within the rock,
It splits upon its seams.

The removal of schistostic stone
erects a talus in the vale,
exposing igneous plutons that
in time shall also fail.

The forces of wind and water
and the quakes from underneath,
will rend the very monuments
that my love for you will leave.

But they who only seek to carve
A canyon between us each,
will never know the heat that boils
where shivers never reach.

For far beneath the crust upwells
a heat that none can quench.
It turns their water into steam
when leaks attempt to drench.

The spires my magma builds for you
will fault and fall someday,
but this burning love will build anew
a stone that won’t give way.

Together we will touch the stars
where clouds will never go,
and let our love build mountaintops
that winds will never know.

Hey folks,

There are simply too many things for me to do before I leave Wisconsin this week to get hitched - I’ve got some good stuff for a show, and it’s half completed, but it will have to wait until I get back to Madison. Fear not! We’re not going on some long honeymoon that will take us to the other side of the world, we’re just taking a nice two-day ‘mini-moon’ that will land us back in Madison on the 24th. So during the weekend after I get back, I’ll finish up episode 79 and get it posted right away.

This will work better anyway, why upload only one episode only to have a two week gap before continuing? I’ll still be able to write and post some more wedding details this week, I haven’t told everyone all about the fun details yet!

I meant to post this on May 10, 2008, exactly one year after I popped The Question to Ariela on the air, unscripted, live, and obviously so. But today should do just as well, for it is now exactly one month until the day we get hitched. Let me tell you about The Haro von Mogel Wedding.™

Ariela and I have been together since December 4, 2003. We knew within a few months that we were more than just together, we were an indivisible unit - a system that was more than the sum of its parts, with the emergent property called love. We were friends for half a year before we hooked up, and living as neighbors. But when we got together we were inseparable. Really. We had to flip a coin each night to decide who’s place we slept in, to keep it fair. Before we had left the co-ops we lived in (more like large apartments than anything else), we were fundamentally in an irreducible state.

Ariela was deciding what she wanted to study when we first got together, and she settled on sociology. Ariela’s real passion is music history, particularly classical music, and especially Mozart. I graduated first with my degree in genetics, and a passion for being scientific and communicating things scientific. Sharing interests in philosophy, sleeping in, talking about all things academic and nerdy, food, bees, and buttered popcorn with orange juice, it’s been a real fun time for both of us. We’re all set to build a life together. Actually, we’ve already started.

You know you’re getting married when you start talking about the sound system you’ll eventually buy 2-3 years down the road. Or when you whip out paper to re-design the Ideal Home™ and decide for yourselves what functions belong in each room. Who needs a formal ‘presentation’ living room? What a waste. When I got accepted to grad school, we made plans to move across the country and start anew. It was never a question that we were going together, it didn’t even need to be said. Read More…

Wonderful news! I was thrilled to hear about it a couple days ago, though I was too busy to post it then. The graduate school has just seen fit to award me the O.N. Allen Graduate Scholarship this year! Awesome!

Yeah, so the scholarship award was based on my undergraduate record and GRE scores, and my project description. I’m not entirely sure what the history of the award is, but I’ll know soon enough. It’s good to learn about the history of these things. Anyway, I’m not sure when I’ll be getting it, but at some point in the near future I’ll probably have a nice piece of fancy paper with my name on it, and a huge cash windfall to the tune of Read More…

Hoo boy. I am tired. I’ve had a busy busy month! First, if you recall, I upgraded my hosting account to a virtual server, which was supposed to be moved overnight. We all know how that turned out. Two weeks later, the blog is finally transferred over, and my email works again. Meanwhile, I had a midterm, a term paper, and a take-home midterm. Plus I’ve been sending off samples of amplified DNA to be sequenced so I can work on pinning down my gene. Oh yeah, I got bees, and am planning a wedding!

This week, Ariela and I were making our wedding invitations, and we finished them last night and sent them off by mail today. Just in time to beat the price increase at the post office so we could still use the American Scientist stamps! Right in the middle of all this, on Wednesday, my website shuts down. Again.

At first, I thought it was an issue with server settings. Didn’t seem to be. Then I thought I needed to upgrade my version of wordpress. Only the .php files in the website weren’t working; HTML placeholder pages, pictures, XML feeds, those were still there. Yup, must be the wordpress, perhaps a compatibility issue with the new server digs. I soon found out that I couldn’t edit my folders on the server - because they were under the control of some other username, not my own, from the transfer. Luckily, that was quickly addressed by Startlogic, luckily for them I should say. Still, no avail, every PHP file came up blank and useless. Today they tested a separate PHP file and it worked on its own, and suggested that I reinstall wordpress from scratch.

Great.

That’s what I told the tech support person who was helping me.

Later today, I got a call that our garden plot could be roto-tilled for us if we got ourselves out to the garden, so I finished up planning out my new molecular marker, and took off to get this new time draw underway. Yep, gotta love gardening. Actually, it should be way better than Davis - it rains all summer here in Madison! I can almost forget about it at times. Tilled to shreds, with the help of some fossil fuels, our organic garden plot needed mulch, which took up the next hour.

After dinner, I set myself to the task of finally fixing this everlasting website problem. I deleted all m wordpress files, created a new MySQL database for a new installation of the latest version of wordpress, and uploaded it to be installed. A few short moments later (Their famous 5-minute install is an exaggeration) I was back in business. With an empty blog.

All of my 360+ posts, all the comments, categories, registered users, drafts, pages, settings, blogroll, were sitting in the old database file on the server. Any attempt to link the new wordpress installation to the old database was met with the now-familiar-to-me White Screen of Doom, and I needed a special export of my database made by a functional wordpress installation to import it into the new one! Any attempt to import the old database into the new one was met with insurmountable error messages. A conundrum. Page after page of wordpress support forum topics and questions provided no answer, until I happened upon this page.

It presented a simple plan. Export each table from your old database into a zipped text file, delete the corresponding table from the new, empty database, and import each table one by one. At less than ten tables to export, I thought I would just try one for starters. An export of my “posts” table, a deletion, and an import later and BOOM. Posts restored to the blog instantly. Not ten minutes later I had everything back in, and I proceeded to set up my plugins. Everything except for the video plugin is working again, my theme is back up, I can write posts, and I already had 25 spam comments for me to delete, left over from before the big crash!

Wow, I crunched some sequence data and made something useful out of it. I learned all about MySQL today. I chased down my last (hopefully) server demon and fixed my site again. I [we] got our plot tilled and covered in mulch. I made Lasagna. I’m tired.

Really tired. The last month has been a blur for me, and now that it seems all this craziness is over, there’s still more. We’ve got to fly to California tomorrow to see a fading grandmother who will receive an invitation to a wedding she may not make it to.

Then, next week comes my finals! Yay…

As you can see, I’ve been a little too busy to make new episodes, but that will soon change in the following week.

Hey, this is life, isn’t it, a mixture of boredom, intrigue, work, hobbies, rest, life, death, and bees?

I think its time for me to go to bed. Stay tuned for some news on Saturday.

I just got an email from Jeff Shaw, my friend back in Davis who I got to know because he is the station manager for KDRT LP-FM, a low-power community radio station where I got my start on the air.

There’s been trouble brewing for quite a while about the status of low-power fm stations, which are currently considered second-class citizens next to full-power stations. A full-power commercial station can just up and sit on an LPFM station and take its spot on the radio dial if it feels like it. KDRT was at risk for being run out of town by a station called KMJE that was going to move close enough to Davis to interfere with KDRT’s signal - they are both 101.5 fm. It didn’t matter that KMJE was the one moving, KDRT would have had to shut down or be legally an “encroacher.” Fortunately, there has been such an upwelling of support for Davis’s community station that KMJE realized that they were about to piss off the new market they were trying to reach, and has backed off with intent to negotiate KDRTs continued existence. But not every LPFM station will be that fortunate.

Fortunately, the FCC is cluing into the inequities involved, and the value that small local stations have for their communities, and is looking to change the rules to give LPFM stations more security. Many media reform groups such as Prometheus Radio and The Future of Music endorse this plan, but they have one big obstacle, one enemy, that will stop at nothing to prevent LPFM stations from having a means to prevent being overrun by bigger stations that just feel like doing it. Who, might you ask? Is it the conglomeromegacommercial stations? An FCC dissenter? Rush Limbaugh?

No, it’s NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO.

Oh, they don’t just think that the FCC shouldn’t decide in favor of the low-power community stations, they claim that they have the laws of physics on their side. What? Oh get ready for some Monday Madness! Read More…

The cat’s out of the bag! My fiancée Ariela just answered the Seven Things blog meme I tagged her with, and she’s coming out and admitting she’s a cheater. Yes, a Mexican who cheated on a Spanish test. Hehe. She also spills the beans on a few other things, including a secret project that will soon come to light.

Read more at Sociologique.