How do you know you're in Canada? When you pop on Sportscenter and you don't see anything besides hockey for the first 20 minutes. Ba dum pum. Seriously folks, i've got a million of these.

Picking up where i left off, i returned to work on January 2 and got back to thinking deep thoughts. Actually, more like working out how to secure more money for my lab. That's the shame of becoming faculty, that you're really now more involved in administrative duties than actual science. I try to keep my eyes on the latter, but it gets harder and harder as my little "Graves lab" expands. We had our yearly visiting professor symposium that weekend, which went very well but involved me getting to work at 7:45am on a Saturday. Egad.

I really can't say enough about Super Mario Galaxy. While the difficulty level seemed slightly lower than the genuinely tough Super Mario 64, the variety of colorful backdrops, innovative challenges, and mind-bending gravity fields kept it fresh throughout the collection of all of the lost power stars. The Wii's motion-sensitive controller was incorporated well ... during normal gameplay you could point at the screen to highlight and gather scattered "star bits", while some challenges involved delicately controlling a rolling ball or a swimming stingray by positioning the Wii-mote. A home run for Nintendo's runaway hit system. Color me impressed after my initial hating on the big N's "gimmick".

In reviewing my show critiques on the site (which, believe it or not, are actually fully up to date), i realized i haven't been to a concert in quite a while. We've got some coming up ... Editors in early February, the Kills on Valentine's Day ... but i keep having this problem where the bands i really want to see slip into town and leave under my radar. Exactly the job for Sonic Living, but i've lately failed to pay it due attention. In lieu of live music, i've returned to expanding my music library, having finished the herculean task of incorporating Veronica's unkempt and untagged library into my own obsessive compulsive collection. I happened upon a solitary track by Seattle noise rock outfit A Frames among Veronica's songs, and was so impressed that i picked up the rest of their catalog. Because of that random encounter i'm on a noise punk kick. It's odd what you happen upon following these musical leads. Allmusic lists A Frames as "followers" of 90's punk act the Cows, a band my freshman year roommates at Cal were into. I was always intimidated by a band with an album entitled Sexy Pee Story. Now i'm giving them a chance. Perhaps this will lead me to experiment with the Dwarves, whose 1990 album Blood Guts & Pussy i remember staring at in my dorm room because of its cover depicting ... well, you get the idea. Don't even get me started on Type O Negative's Origin of the Feces. Ah yes, and Gwar. Oh, memories.

I passed my illness on to Veronica, whom it hit like a Mack truck and put her in bed and away from work for a week. I therefore spent much of last week taking care of her ... one night composing the ill-fated blog post described in my last entry as she slept. She recovered enough by Friday to weakly return to work, and to accompany me to my department's holiday party at Palo Alto's Four Seasons on Saturday night. A holiday party in January may sound a bit odd, but consider this an improvement over last year's March party. We'd never been to the swanky hotel, and although the food failed to impress the company and festivities certainly did. Also over the weekend i convinced Veronica to take me shopping for my Christmas gift, a new suitcase. She'd spotted a limited edition Samsonite that she fancied for me, while i'm a Tumi fan. We went to both stores in SF on Saturday afternoon, and couldn't find something i wanted, although we were incredibly successful finding bargains at Kenneth Cole. V knew of a Tumi outlet store way up past Napa in St. Helena, and i twisted her arm to drive up there on Sunday afternoon. As poor Tara had been cooped up at home for a while, we loaded her into the car as well. She loves to go for rides, but after 20 minutes or so seems to get upset that we're not stopping at any of the fantastic locales she's been spying out the window. We drove across the Golden Gate bridge and stopped at our favorite diner in Sausalito for lunch, while Tara looked peeved sitting across the street in the car. We then drove another hour or so up through wine country to St. Helena, locating the outlet oddly tucked in between several wineries. There i got a great deal on a Tumi T-Tech suitcase, as well as a messenger bag i'd been eyeing for a couple of years. Tara got to wander around the countryside, and was even welcomed into the store by the friendly clerk and oohed and aahed over by other customers. We then hopped back in the car and headed back down Marin, stopping at the A&W for an "All American meal" (read, crap and root beer floats). Tara was happy to receive the leftovers.

I got in a packed Monday at Stanford, ending with the monthly MIPS seminar and another fabulous Evvia dinner. Our dinner conversation was particularly interesting as our 65 year old speaker revealed that he was an avid mountain climber, having been to Everest base camp recently and boasting stamina that certainly bests mine. And as if that's not enough, he's recently facilitated some of his engineering work by building a cluster of PlayStation 3's. He had three of his students in line at the local Wal-Mart the day they were released, occupying spots 1, 2, and 6. I can't imagine how many little hearts were broken when the students emerged and were asked what they were going to do first with the system, and replied that they were going to strip it down, wipe the OS, and build a supercomputer. Apparently the PS3's cell processor trounces the top AMD processor in raw computational power.

Then Tuesday i packed my new Tumi bags and headed off to the airport for my flight to Vancouver. I decided to try out taking Caltrain to SFO, which was decent. I find it strange that when you transfer to BART at the Millbrae station, you have to get on a northbound train, then immediately switch to a southbound train at the next stop in order to get over to the airport. Then you're dropped off in the international terminal, which for me meant a walk around the airport to get to the domestic terminal. Anyhoo, i arrived in time to find my flight was delayed. My postdoc Ivana and i eventually arrived in Vancouver and cabbed over to the hotel in time for the evening's keynote addresses. Unfortunately, to our shock one of the speakers, angiogenesis pioneer and hugely influential scientist Judah Folkman, had passed away in the Denver airport the day before while connecting to his Vancouver flight. Folkman postulated the idea that tumors are dependent on blood vessel recruitment, and staunchly defended this hypothesis throughout the 70's and 80's until it is now a widely accepted tenet of cancer biology. Truly a huge loss for the field.

In addition to the meeting (my first true "biology" conference, and as such a huge learning experience), i've had a little time to explore the city. Ivana is a Vancouver native, as are several of the other students in our division that have come to the meeting. Ivana showed me the waterfront and the mountains on the far side of the inlet, and then we walked through the old "Gastown" area. It's a very clean and charming city. It is f@$#ing cold though ... daily high temperatures have been around 38°F. There hasn't been much wind though, so a jacket and scarf have sufficed in keeping me warm during my walks around town. I only recently realized that i was going to a foreign country, and as such would need my passport. I lucked out as my passport is due to expire in a few weeks. I was worried the officials at SFO wouldn't let me travel with a passport so close to expiration, but luckily no concerns were raised. I've learned about "loonies" and "toonies" ... thankfully someone explained these terms to me before i was introduced to them by a local. And despite the general absence of French in conversation on this side of Canada, the bilingual nature of the country means there is a French TV station and all the traffic signs are in both languages. So this really is a foreign country. That "51st state" stereotype dies hard.

Shouldn't fabulous indie rock bands be forming on every corner?