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Wooden magnetic bottle opener Christmas gifts

By Tina - December 25, 2015
I made two magnetic bottle openers for Christmas. I originally planned on making a third, but the last one had a design that required a laser engraver. My dad bought one for $400 from a Chinese company, but the laser engraver needed some serious TLC. All the mirrors were gross and dirty and just a lot of things about it wasn't consumer ready....

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Travel diary: Seattle

By Tina - December 24, 2015
I vacationed in Seattle a few weeks ago. It was fun and not as rainy as expected.  We split our stay into two different places, the first few nights in the University District (University Inn) and then the following nights in Downtown (Hotel 1000).  We ate so much food. Everything was delicious. Well, except for the Asian food. San Gabriel Valley does that...

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Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2015

By Tina - December 09, 2015
The Nobel Peace Prize Award Ceremony will be happening tomorrow (Thursday, Dec. 10).  This year the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich, and Aziz Sancar "for mechanistic studies of DNA repair".  Now I haven't read any of their published work, and I'm not a super scientist or anything close to that, but I...

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Christmas card crafting

By Tina - December 07, 2015
So I recently started making cards for friends and family. It is a lot of fun and there are actually some really cool techniques. I am currently obsessed with thermography (printing technique that uses slow drying inked image -the substrate- coated with thermoplastic polymer resin to make a dimensional impression after applying heat -curing-). It's really cool and I do think that embossing...

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CFA exam reflection

By Tina - December 06, 2015
I took the CFA Level 1 exam yesterday... won't know the results until a month+ later.  It was a very long day.  But now I get to do my own things again. Hooray! IMAGE SOURCE: http://www.readmeindia.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/stay-awake-all-night-to-study.jpg ...

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Dungeness crab and toxic algae

By Tina - November 12, 2015
I wanted to make a crab cake casserole for Thanksgiving this year, but because of the current toxic algae situation along the California coast, it doesn't look like the crab cakes will happen. Bummer.  The toxic algal bloom (brought on by warm El Nino waters) has caused the commercial crab season to be postponed until further notice (that super sucks for the fishermen)....

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