Bugs And Personal Sites

Had my second day working in the bug lab today. All I’ve done so far is identify a bunch of different Trichoptera with a dissecting scope and dichotomous key, which is both something that I find fun and something that I knew would be 99% of what I’ll be doing when I signed up. So no surprises save for the fact that caddisflies look incredible under a microscope - most of them are a deep, reddish brown, with delicate hairs and spines on their legs and bodies. Their wings are some of my least favorite part, honestly, despite the fact that they’re quite beautiful–a lot of the characters we’re looking at are on the thorax, which means that the wings are often in the way.

When I came in, there was a station set up where someone had been sketching some sort of large beetle (stag beetle? I’m not sure) with a scope and a light, which makes me want to see if public surplus has any cheap microscopes again - I’d like to draw with one! I do think that remembering the characteristics of each family under the microscope and drawing it later is an interesting challenge (and what I did last time, and will probably do today).

Speaking of remembering the distinct characteristics of each family, A and I spent a good hour and a half sorting through a vial of misclassified specimens. We suspected that someone had either gotten confused by the key, or accidentally swapped the vials. Either way, the end result is that I’ve become pretty good at deciding which of the two families a specimen falls in. Now I just need to become that confident with the other ~15 families on the key…

Looking forward to potential fieldwork, as always. There are a few projects in the lab that may need people, but I believe that they’ll be in the spring. Hopefully I’m still there.

Got some advice on classes from someone who’d already taken both of the ones I’m thinking about for next semester. More helpful by far than hearing about it from the advisor/professor, though I’m sure they both tried. Especially since they’d taken one of the classes with the same professor I’d have.

On a more this-blog focused note, I’ve un-personalized a version of this site’s code and made it available as “mossbeasts’ blog skeletonizer. I’ve offered to set up sites for a few friends (in addition to the one I already mentioned), so hopefully using that instead of the actual live repo for this blog will be a little more straightforward. Eventually I’d like to write some documentation on posting + customizing this kind of site for people who don’t necessarily have any CLI/github experience, since the github docs are aimed pretty much at people hwo have both. Then I can just have people for the blog-skeletonizer repo, if they’d like to set up their own blog.

(Not that I mind setting up sites for other people; in fact, I love messing around with CSS. But site-I built-myself has a different feel to it than site-my-friend-built-for-me.)

Added a little bit about it in my about section, along with links to a few friends’ sites who use it (or just the version of it that’s this site and their site’s latest common ancestor). I’ll take them down if they want (in fact, I’m going to go ask as soon as I publish this post), but I think it would be fun to set up a little webring.

I can - and will - delete any comment at any time for any reason I want. Write comments that won't make me want to delete them.

Also, refer to people with initials or with their github username. I'd like to maintain the thin veneer of possible anonymity this site currently has.