This weekend, I participated in my first Pumpkin Regatta! Organized by Jim Nienhuis and Irwin Goldman of the UW-Madison Horticulture department, it pits students, kids, and sailors alike against each other in a rowing race of giant proportions. Specifically, giant pumpkins. Which you sit inside. And paddle.

Let me see: Boating, Squash, Competition, Horticulture, and Glory. This has just about everything I need to make a Saturday worthwhile. So I hopped down there to volunteer as the first challenger against the Hoofer Sailing Club’s racer, Bridget. Little did my professors (Jim and Irwin) know that I had won a dinghy race against all the other Sea Explorer ships back in high school, so I surprised them with a victory for Horticulture!* Read More…

Ariela and I were picking up a weird tomato plant at the nursery the other day, and I wanted to see if I could find some pole bean seeds. While I was searching the seed racks (unsuccessfully), Ariela noticed a seed package with a bright red ear of corn on it. I remember reading about a new variety of red sweet corn several years ago, it looks like they’ve finally made seeds available for it! I bought them and sprouted them right away - they’re ready to go in the ground tonight for some late-season sweet corn. But that’s not the best part. It’s got my gene. Read More…

As I have mentioned on this blog before, in addition to my research on locating a gene in sweet corn, I’m making some educational videos on plant breeding. Well, now I’m proud to be able to show you the first in a whole series of them that I’m putting together. With help from my adviser, two film dudes at the Instructional Media Development Center at UW-Madison, and big bags of doubloons from the USDA. Over the past week, I’ve been updating the Plant Breeding and Plant Genetics Program website, and now it has full video functionality. So armed with the plant breeding website powered by a wordpress platform, I give you the how-to on making controlled pollinations with Zea mays - How to breed corn.

You could actually do this in your own backyard using this system, or if you’re running a breeding company or academic lab and need to train employees on how to do this in the field - here’s what you need to succeed with your breeds.

Video below the fold. 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…

Last week, I lamented that I didn’t do very well on my statistics final. Later that same day, the professor sent out an email to the whole class talking about how everyone didn’t do very well on the final, and he would do something about it with the scores. I had an A in the class, running up to the take-home midterm (did not do as well on the take-home), and I was pretty confident that I would do better this semester than last. I was worried, when I took the final, that I would instead do worse this semester on statistics. Well, I just checked my grade and it turns out I’ve got a solid A. Awesomeness. </worry><celebration!>…

I rocked my plant breeding final yesterday afternoon, and today, I have finished my statistics final as well. I’m not sure how well I did on the statistics final, well, because this post was made before I took it. If the rest of the semester is any indication, I shouldn’t have a problem.

As of now, I’ll be off to the field to help my lab-mates finish hand-planting some maize seeds. Don’t get the wrong idea, we won’t be breaking our backs stooping out in the field, we’ll have rocking tools like these ones to plant seeds at regular intervals and depths. Still, it takes some time to do, and I expect my afternoon will be taken up.

This evening, I’ll be making some tablecloths for Ariela’s candle operation (site is coming along, going to add pictures and a shopping cart next week), but I expect I’ll have time to read and respond to comments on the Hume/Kant post. For all those out there who are finishing up their finals, or have yet to take them (I’m so glad I’m not on the quarter system!), may mechanistic causality be tweaked in your favor. (Good Luck!)

Update 17:46: Oy! I could have done better on that stats exam, I came out of it worried about my grade. When I met up with classmates who were also doomed to hand-plant (actually it was fun with the camaraderie) we all breathed a sigh of relief that we weren’t the only ones that were doubtful about it. When I got back, an all-class email was in my inbox from the professor - the class average was way down compared to all the other exams. So it sounds like the grades are going to be weighted - Linear Transformation! Linear Transformation! Goodness of fit stays the same, but the numbers become more meaningful! Maybe I’ll get a bonus point for applying the subject of the class to the grade for the class! Didn’t do so bad after all.

Previously, I mused about my recent busy activities. As if on cue, Jorge Cham of Ph.D. Comics just sketched out what that was like for me.

The Vicious Cycle:

How do they capture grad student life so well and on a daily basis?

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.

The weather is warming up, the birds are chirping, and when I’m nailing and painting bee boxes out behind my apartment it feels like I’m on a camping trip. With my bike thawed out from the tundra, I can get my half-hour of exercise structured into my daily life more consistently again, and I’m looking forward to gardening, going to the Farmer’s Market, and working on more plant breeding film shoots for my media side-project. Read More…

Friday night I attended a dinner with two prospective graduate students for the PBPG program here at UW-Madison. It’s so interesting, being on the other side of the prospecting process. (It will be even more interesting if I become a professor/PI.)

The prospective students were split up into three parties, one that came the Friday before last, another last Monday, and two the Friday that just passed. I didn’t meet any of the other students (been too busy), but I did get a couple of data points, and saw a bit of how I looked one year ago this month. Read More…