Clevercanaries

So for the past few months I have been working in a research lab at UCSF. Specifically, the Ahituv lab. The lab investigates the portions of the genetic code that do not code for a protein, and are evolutionarily conserved. It’s pretty interesting work.

http://bts.ucsf.edu/ahituv

I started my new year by getting up at 4:30 in the morning and driving up to Leggett. My sources told me the river was in great shape and getting better every hour. I made it to Rob’s at 8, almost exactly 3 hours after leaving the house.

I really didn’t need to rush up there so quickly. We had to wait until the guy that owns the property at the take out to launch his boat. It seems he has a problem with boats that use that take out fishing ahead of him. In my opinion it doesn’t make much difference which boat fishes first, but I don’t own the property, so I can’t make the rules.

Anyway, we finally launched at about 12:30. The other boat was fishing the first hole when we got there but they soon continued downstream. We didn’t even make it out of the first hole before we had our first fish in the boat.

We ended up catching one more down near the river gauge, but there’s no picture because the photographer caught the fish.

The boat that insisted on launching first caught one fish the whole drift. They were using bait and we were pulling plugs so they fished a little slower then us. We caught up with them right below the gauging station and had to hold back so we didn’t pass them. The only problem with that is we had to hurry, because daylight was getting scarce.

It was a good day, but the next day was promising to be epic, as long as it didn’t rain. But rain it did, hard and all night. By the morning the river had gone up from 598 cfs, to 1,100 cfs by 8 AM. It continued climbing until peaking at 2,010 around 4 in the afternoon.

We made the best of the day and got a lot of stuff done on Rob’s property. It was almost like an episode of Dirtiest Jobs. First we uncovered the septic tank in order to figure out where he could place a modular home. Then I cut up a pine tree that had fallen last year. We hauled the pieces up the hill with the backhoe and a chain. It had been awhile since I had done any work like that and my back was gone by the early afternoon. After taking some ibuprofen and eating some lunch we started a burn pile and got rid of a bunch of crap that had been lying around.

By this morning the weather had cleared up but it was pretty cold. The river was still blown out so I decided to head home. All in all it was a good trip. Nothing like starting the year steelhead fishing.

It’s been kind of a dead week. I’ve seen no arborist jobs advertised at all in the last couple weeks. Being the week between Christmas and New Years doesn’t help either. There have been a few website, computer support and small writing jobs in Craigslist I’ve responded to, but either they don’t get back to me or they reply once then I don’t hear from them again. It’s kind of frustrating.

It’s also been raining up north and that has the river out of shape, so no escape there. I might go up anyway just to chill. Right now I’m open to anything. I would like to fish one more day this year.

This is the graph that I check many times a day during the winter. The level I want to see before I get excited is about 650cfs and dropping.

Christmas has finally come and is almost gone. Now I can concentrate on steelhead fishing. It’s hard to juggle work and winter fishing since the fishing is so dependent of timing. Being there when the river is at the right level and flow makes all the difference.

Right now I’m constantly checking the weather up north and the river levels. I wish I had a webcam set up so I could look at the color. I know what the conditions were when I’ve caught fish in the past, so I know what to look for now. Then I can leave on a moments notice.

One of the things I hated about working at my last job was not getting time off on short notice, so if I had to pick a time of the year to be not working this would be it. I guess that’s one way to be grateful.

Still trying to figure out another way of making money. I signed up for a Twitter account about 2 years after it was hot. Mainly I want to see how it works and how I can possibly make use of another domain name I own.

So I’m going through the API and am going to try some stuff out in the next few weeks. Maybe I’ll get some friends out of it. Only 2 people in my address book use Twitter now, and I have a feeling one of them forgot he even has the account. (I don’t know how many things I’ve signed up for that I’ve forgotten about, because if I did know, I wouldn’t have forgotten.)

When I first built my superduper gaming machine in 2004 I of course installed XP on it. I played a lot of Call of Duty, both Max Payne titles, Halo, Far Cry, etc. After a few months I started to get more interested in Linux while playing with it on my laptop. I bought another hard drive and installed Slackware 9.0 on it. Since then I probably booted into windows under ten times. Once to use Turbo Tax, and a few times to get some photo or document I needed off of it.

When I discovered how to mount the XP partition in Slackware using LVM, I never had to boot into windows at all. It has been about a year I think.

Now I don’t have a choice. I repartitioned that array and installed Kubuntu 8.10 on it. (Sorry it wasn’t Gentoo Alex). I don’t like Gnome and I wanted to be able to say I’ve installed and used a *buntu recently. Not everything Slackware does is transferable to all Linux distributions, so I thought I’d expand my horizons.

While I’m applying for other jobs I decided to place some ads of my own. Placed it this morning and haven’t got a hit yet. I need to find other places to advertise my services. I did notice a lot of tree service ads today, but none from econotree. Perhaps if they stuck to my schedule they would have more work.

On the bright side econotree hasn’t placed an ad to fill my position.

I just filled out my first unemployment form this afternoon. That’s always been good luck for me. The longest I’ve been on unemployment is 2 weeks. I usually get one check, then a job.

I did see a post on craigslist for someone to upgrade a Wordpress (<< Wordpress spell check flags Wordpress, wtf?) blog from 2.6 to 2.7. I replied, but of course heard nothing back. I have done a lot of upgrades to this server over the years, including one that went horribly wrong, so I decided to at least do the 2.6 - 2.7 upgrade on this blog. It went well. Maybe I should advertise my services.

I also set up openID for myself. I’ve never had an occasion to use it until now, but it’s something else I know how to do.

At least I’m not alone. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics 533,000 people lost their jobs in November. That’s a lot of competition.

I did find out that I’ll be receiving unemployment. I send in the form on the 14th and can expect to get a check within 10 days. Since there’s a one week waiting period I’ll be getting just enough to make my car payment before the end of the month. So it looks like I can at least keep my wheels.

Since I’m treating the job search as a job I’ve been trying to let up a little on the weekends. However I did find a couple of good leads today. Both are government jobs, and one of them does not open until tomorrow. I already have the application downloaded and ready to fill out as soon as the listing is posted.

The unemployment benefits have taken some pressure off. I still need to make this next week count and continue to be productive.