With the exception of going out to a Field Museum benefit this weekend celebrating their new Chinese exhibit, the weekend was relatively uneventful. In addition to the benefit, I watched my three Netflix DVDs, played some F-Zero and put a new server in my closet. This morning, I also managed to rearrange my bedroom to accommodate the increasing chaos of new furniture, computer parts, and so forth. I guess the weekend wasn't that uneventful afterall.
So first, the Field Museum benefit... My in to the event was via an e-mail to the princeton-chicago e-mail list. Tickets were $75 a person. This is a bit pricey, but on the other hand, I've not been to one of these things before. I figured I might as learn what goes on at these things, meet some people, and figure out what the appropriate level of attire is for future reference. I had a lot of fun, noticed that I'm starting to appreciate gin as a drink more, and learned an interesting fact. Since the person I purchased the tickets from was a museum employee, I and a few other in the group received a tour of the Field Museum's bird and mammal sections. These are the sections where real scientists do real work, not the exhibits. Anyways, one of the things that these scientists study are the skeletons of various birds and mammals. The difficult part of studying this is keeping the skeletal structure intact while removing the flesh. On Friday, I learned that this process is done not by using some super acid or high-tech laser removal, but is done using a species of flesh-eating beetles. There seemed to be two main parts. In the first part, you take the carcass and put in some sort of container that speeds the rotting process. After the carcass is rotting, you take it to a room with these beetles, put it in a glass tank, and let the bugs go to dinner. After the bugs have managed to remove all the flesh and have left the skeleton, you take the skeletal carcass and place it in a refrigerator to kill off any stragglers left on the bones. While the room that the beetles and the rotten flesh reside in during this process smell pretty bad - rotting flesh and all - I found the entire process to be extremely ingenious and interesting. It's reassuring to see that there are still some things that humans will concede that nature will do better than any NASA-inspired high tech gizmo.
In terms of DVDs, I have started on the first season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I haven't seen much of the series at all, but the premise seems interesting. It seems that in the 1990's, the core conflict in Star Trek was between the Federation, Bajorans, and the Cardassians. Effects are pretty prominent in Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and in Voyager. I also keep hearing something about the Dominion War later on, so I'm excited to be taking in more of the Star Trek mythos. I also watched "Dude, Where's My Car?" out of curiosity (poor Jennifer Garner, she had to hustle for her position now), and I watched the last episodes of Cowboy Bebop. Bebop was only marginally interesting to me as I thought that the story meandered too much throughout the series. However, the last two episodes that wrap up the Spike and Vicious story was exceptional in every way. The writing was good, as was the animation and production. One of the things I'm now wondering is why Americans haven't seemed to be able to do any serial storytelling of this sort as well as the Japanese. Smallville seems to be the closest thing in terms of story, while Enterprise has been trying (and largely failing this season). I guess what I'm interested in is a series that is completely written and planned out prior to the pilot airing that would last thirty to fifty episodes and tell a good and self-contained story.
In addition to partying and over-saturating myself with media, I finally got around to putting up a new server in my closet. I have a 266 MHz PII that has been sitting around for a while, and I went ahead and installed Debian on it, in anticipation that it will be doing things like backup DNS hosting and other supporting chores. I'd also broken my Windows XP machine out of the closet a few weeks ago, and it's been in my bedroom since. Because the arrangement of the desk I have and my bed and the computer monitor was not very Fung-Shui or functional, I went ahead and rearranged the bedroom. With a bit of electronics shuffling, wire hunting, and lots of noise, I now have a fully functional XP machine next to my bed that does my Quicken, is a decent gaming platform and plays DVD's. I yanked the VCR out of the living room and hooked it to the video card and now I have cable in my bedroom. I doubt that I'll watch it much in there, but the parts were not doing anything otherwise. And for the first time since I've moved here, the bedroom doesn't seem like a barren room wanting for furniture or attention.
At the moment, I'm procrastinating. I should be doing laundry, but I think that I'll skip it until Tuesday and head to bed early. I've managed to let things pile up in my e-mail over the weekend, so I'll have plenty of work to attend to when I get into the office tomorrow morning.
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