number 10 at the corona complex

...which really only has 13 units, so I don't think it qualifies as a 'complex.' If it did, maybe there'd be enough pressure (or, I don't know, complaints to the city) that the owner would actually have to make some modicum of effort at soundproofing the apartments. Really, it is no fault of my neighbors that I hear when they blow their noses, open & close cupboards, or play NPR. ...Well, he plays NPR pretty loud, so that one's a bit iffy, but it's not loud enough to warrant how clearly I hear it. I mean, it's clearer than my own music if I'm standing closer to that wall than to my computer.

I took these a few weeks ago (not too long after moving in). It's a little cleaner than this now, promise. Just as small, though - the studio is about 270 sq. ft. including the interior walls (15.5 x 17.5').

Also, as you can see, it was designed by a genius:

Here's one from a different angle, in case that wasn't clear enough. This involved a mildly tricky balancing act (leaning over & around the stove & trying not to have my feet in the picture, or fall on said stove), so I hope you appreciate it.

Incidentally, there's a good 4-6" of 'kitchen' (laminate floor) on the other side of the stove. As I said, genius.

meadow creek b&b

Yeah, finally - these have been parked on my hard drive for a month.

{Telling secrets?}

{Kelly's smiling because she's an attention hog, and there are lots of targets people around.}

Taylor's Gold pears - oh my goodness, try them. I think they may be just coming into season, because I just noticed them on sale at the store this weekend. Haven't noticed them in stores before, but I think that was the best pear I've ever had.

hallack park

This is a park four blocks from the office where I work - and am, for interest's sake, a bit past halfway through my eleven-month contract as receptionist. Ay. Only half. I think it goes slower when most of the people you see at work are high school dropouts who never learned "indoor voice" ...and things of this nature. Anyway, playground at Hallack Park.

volunteer computing

I've seen BOINC on a computer or two before (including the one I use at work, which really hasn't got the cpu or ram for it), but I never realized what it is. But the other day I saw a brief article that Scientific American ran on their 60-Second Science Blog about one of the BOINC projects. The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (@UC Berkeley) is a system for scientific projects that require a lot of computing power to process their data and simulations - more power than they have, unless they want the projects to take a really long time.

So they add their projects to the system, and BOINC lets us the end users pick whichever projects catch our interest, download the program and set it to run when the computer is idle (or whenever and with whatever amount of its resources we set it to). Basically, it's a way to donate computing power & time to scientific projects from research on protein interactions (aiming at new treatments for various diseases) to climate model simulations to ... the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Yep. ET.

Seems pretty cool, anyway. The projects come from all over - Purdue to Oxford, Lithuania to Chile.