I’ve been trying different noise cancelling headphones but none of them gave me a good satisfaction. During the summer I finally got the QuietComfort 3 Acoustic Noise Cancelling headphone from bose. The main reason was that I had to fly long routes often between august and october and sitting in the back of a noisy and cramped coach for 12 hours is no fun. Honestly it is so noisy, especially in an old B747 or 767, that it is painful to listen to something else that the loud ambient noise of the plane racing in the sky at M0.85 . The QuietComfort 3 from bose dramatically reduces the ambient noise and it renders the sound from the iPod very clear. No need to jack-up the volume so high that slowly but surely you’ll be deaf.  Since it cancels much of the ambient noise, you can listen to your music at a volume level quite low. The QuietComfort 3 is freaking expensive, but being in a haven of tranquility with a crystal clear sound in a noisy environment is priceless. I use it almost daily in the lab and it cuts down all the background noises like AC and fan noises. It is a truly amazing headset. Beside its price, the main drawback I can find is that it tends to put a little bit too much pressure on the ear. No big deal…really !

link

X-ray crystallography : The “gold standard” in structure determination. Yep ! Sometime, it is a lot of pain to solve a structure…but no pain no gain right ? But the result is awesome. Science is art !

…instead we had some great teriyaki chicken thighs cooked on the barbecue along with some yummy sweet mush potatoes and asparagus. A couple of bottles of Bordeaux and some unknown, strong but yet delicious home made liquor from a remote village somewhere…helped to get everything down the hatch smoothly. Happy Thanksgiving holiday !

Davis is definitively a quiet college town with no much going on but I like it very much and I will definitively miss it when I will have to leave. I love Davis for many things: the bike lanes everywhere, the feeling to live in a small village even though Davis is not that small. I like also running west Davis around the fields, the airport. It’s only a few blocks away from my house and it is just great for an easy run.

It was this last sunday (11/23/08), a nice afternoon for a sweet flight to the San-Francisco bay with Miriam and Frank. Masayo was there to take great shots of the take-off.

11/23/08 C-172 N711PG Take off runway 34

Among all the MacOS X releases, 10.5 (leopard) is definitively not the most stable. It’s getting better update after update though. In my experience 10.3.x was the most stable.

If for some reasons you get the infamous grey screen which last for ever during the boot, or if the mac keeps on doing loops during the boot, here a solution to your problem by booting in single user mode.

1- reboot the system or force reboot the system if it is stuck by pressing : ctrl+apple+start button

2- immediately after the starting chime, press and hold apple+s

The mac will start in a single user mode which is just a hoardcore unix terminal mode. At this stage, be very careful because you will have full privileges on the system.

3-  type:   fsck -fy  then press enter. fsck command will check/repair your hard-drive.

4- type:    mount -uw /  then press enter

5 –  type:   chmod 775 /  then press enter

6 – type:    reboot   then press enter. The mac will reboot and the glitch is gone…(hopefully)