I found it!!!

I vaguely remember owning a blog somewhere.  Took me a while to find it after 3 years of not using it. :)  Hopefully, I'll start bloggin in English pretty soon.

Looking for a Place in Gaithersburg

Yesterday, I've once again started looking for a place to live in Gaithersburg, MD. Main search tool is Craigslist. The price range is shockingly wide and is solely dependend on people's greed. I understand that they've signed up for some obscene mortgages, but that's not really my problem. Nobody forced them to get in way over their heads in the whole housing bubble.

The situation right now is getting a little bit more desparate for those people. I've been looking at the places off and on for about 6 months now and demographic situation started to change recently. Back in the summer you wouldn't even see any WASPs renting out bedrooms in their houses. Mostly, ethnic minority families that thought they could quickly turn around profit by buying a house and selling it next year for substantial profit.

Most of them didn't have contingency plans in case the market cooled down. This summer they realized that getting rid of the house is very hard. WASPs, apparently, were in for a little longer haul than the rest. Only now that I see them trying to supplement their income by renting out spare rooms. Season for house sales is over until next year's spring and even then no one's sure if the situation will improve.

Another indicator of lowered expectations is the fact that people are willing to forego a credit check on their potential tenants. I usually don't even bother with going through all that BS. My credit isn't perfect (few unpaid ER & ambulance bills), so paying $30 to get turned down by some morons who think that my credit is going to give them indication of my paying ability is illogical.

So, here I am, still entertaining myself by going to other people's houses and amazing myself by obscene amounts of rent money people trying to extract for their basements, closets, and shared bathrooms.

I'm Done ... for now!

Turned in my thesis today. Two days of running around, gathering signatures of various people in two different cities and two different counties. BTW, the title of my manuscript is "Design & Implementation of a Pipeline for High-Throughput Enzyme Function Prediction". Below is the link to the Word document. Beware, it's 96 pages long. :)



My Thesis

Rat Poison is Out, Polonium 210 is In

Sophistication behind spy's poisoning
By Paul Rincon
Science reporter, BBC News

The poisoning of the former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko would have required considerable scientific know-how, according to experts.

Apparently, it's not that hard to get a Polonium 210. Rat poison may be even harder to come by. New Mexico company sells Polonium 210 along with its beta & gama emitter bodies with no license for one low price of $175. Amateur poisoners take notice!!!

United Nuclear Website

Cocaine

If all else fails, I can fall back on my minor in Chemistry ;)

Making Sense of Blogger

Still trying to make sense of Blogger. Now I can upload pictures!!! World beware! :twisted:

First Post On My Domain

Woohoo!!! This is the first post on my own domain!!!