It would seem that I have been lax with my blogging in the past few weeks. Besides one or two events, there hasn’t been lots happening (which might have explained my silence. Or maybe I’m just lazy and/or addicted to Farmville).
My mom came for a week to visit us. And by us I mean the beastie. She basically threw us out of the house one day so she could have him all to herself. Katy and I were able to have a nice pub meal at the Red Lion and go see a movie (though it would now appear that I’ve forgotten what we went to see – this is me getting old). I do remember that Katy really, really, really enjoyed her bacon double cheeseburger from Burger King :) Pictures will be up as soon as I can get them converted and properly formatted.
My mom had asked for a nice roast and some profiteroles for her birthday, so I happily obliged. The roast rolled shoulder of pork took 6 hours to roast, but damn if it wasn’t nice :) The in-laws and Stu came over for the day to say hello. It was a nice day. The weather was rather unimpressive so we weren’t really able to give my mom a proper tour of Saffron Walden, though she did like the weekend market (and especially the sausage burgers from the Giggly Pig). I did manage to use the power of the for-sale list at work to snag my mom a cheap ipod and load it up with her favourite music for cheap. That reminds me that I need to ask her if she’s using it or not.
Speaking of which, I’m saddened to say that my trusty Shure E3C earphones finally died a death. I had to buy myself another pair of earphones. I got S-Jays and they do live up to their potential. Still, they’re nowhere near as good or comfy as my Shure. Having said that, they’re a fifth of the price so, you know, there is that to consider. Still, I will mourn my old faithful buds.
Things have been brewing with Katy’s employers and we’re investigating options on that front. I don’t want to say a lot more because I’ll start swearing at them again. Bastards and fucktards, the lot of ‘em (well, most of ‘em anyway). Katy’s looking into other avenues, but returns on investments haven’t been all that good. Still, there’s no harm in sending feelers out.
The staff association at work organized a group jaunt to go see Varekai at the Royal Albert Hall last weekend, so Mel and Pam came down to look after the beastie. It was the first time that somebody else than us put him down for the night. Mostly, they did a good job save for a few details and something that bugged me a bit but… meh. No harm no foul, but still a silly thing to do and leave it at that.
The beastie’s been a handful for a few days now. He’s caught a cold and is now a snot monster. He’d been coughing a bit for a few days now but it really went full-blown over the weekend. He’s not been too bad, sleep-wise, in the last night or so so we’re hopeful that it’s not going to last too long. He’s really getting mobile now and can take one or two tottering steps before falling face-first on something or someone.
Katy got some maternity back-pay so we were able to pay off the last of the xmas credit card. We still have a bit left over and we’re itching to buy stuff :) Katy wants to get a Wii and Wii Fit but they seem to be out of stock everywhere I look. I bought a NAS for home backups (mostly because I realized that all of my MP3s, documents and the digital pictures from the last 5 years only exist on the home laptop and a few scattered CDs or DVDs).
I’d like to get a new phone (I’m lusting after the googlephone), a new camera, a camcorder. Thing is, I already have stuff that covers those roles and most of it still works perfectly fine so I can’t really justify the expense. Katy wants a Tassimo and a KitchenAid. The KitchenAid is something that we’ve both been lusting aftet for years now, but it also means that we’d be cooking more cakes and pastries and that’s really not a good plan at this point in time. I’ve put on a helluva lot of weight in the last year and I need to start shifting it before bad things happen.
Besides that, not a lot. Work is work. I’ve reviewed two papers and submitted one. Barring any incident, I should have another first author paper and a few more associated author papers to add to my CV. I received notification that I need to have my end-of-contract review meeting with the powers that be before the end of April. I’ve already fixed a nasty bug in the PRIDE mapping job and I’m in the process of testing code that I wrote before going on holiday that will hopefully make the current PRIDE webapp more responsive. Florian’s buggered off to Costa Rica for a month (not that I blame him) so that means a lot of work’s been dumped on me. The good news is that we have a new team member starting in a few weeks and we’re holding interviews for another position in the coming week. So, busy busy busy but good busy.
Rui from work bought me some japanese cooking supplies from an asian shop on Mill Road so I’ll be able to start playing around making chawanmushi and dobinmushi, as well as wonton soup and spring rolls. Watch this space.
- Ring! Ring!
- Proteomic Services, Richard speaking. How can I help you?
- Hi. Is XXX there?
- No, he’s not in today, can I take a message?
- It’s YYY from purchasing. He asked us to order some software for him and I need to know if it’s for Mac or Windows.
- Well, if you tell me what the software is, I can probably answer that.
- Can you? oh good. It’s a copy of Windows 7 Professional.
- [very loud silence] That’s probably for Windows…
- It would be, wouldn’t it?
They’re antsy and edgy, tired of waiting for promotion opportunities at work as their elders put off retirement. A good number of them are just waiting for the economy to pick up so they can hop to the next job and get what they think they deserve. Oh, and they want work-life balance, too.
Sounds like Generation Y, the “entitlement generation,” right?
Not necessarily, say people who track the generations. In these hard times, they’re also hearing strong rumblings of discontent from Generation X. They’re the 32- to 44-year-olds who are wedged between Baby Boomers and their children, often feeling like forgotten middle siblings and increasingly restless at work as a result.
“All of a sudden, we’ve gone from being the young upstarts to being the curmudgeons,” says Bruce Tulgan, a generational consultant who’s written books about various age groups, including his fellow Gen Xers.
This isn’t the first time Gen Xers have faced tough times. They came of age during a recession and survived the dot-com bust. In recent years, though, more members of the generation – stereotyped early on as jaded individualists – began settling down. It was time, they thought, to enjoy the rewards of paying some dues.
“We were starting to buy into the system, at least to some extent,” Tulgan says, “and then we got the rug pulled out from under us.”
Now, in this latest recession, nearly two-thirds of Baby Boomer workers, ages 50 to 61, say they might have to push back their retirement, according to a recent survey from Pew Research.
Meanwhile, on the other end of the age spectrum are members of Generation Y, who are often cheaper to hire and heralded for their coveted high-tech knowledge, even though many Gen Xers consider themselves just as technologically savvy.
“It’s so annoying,” says Lisa Chamberlain, another Gen Xer who wrote the book “Slackonomics: Generation X in the Age of Creative Destruction.” “First, it was always the Baby Boomers overshadowing everything. Then there was this brief period in the mid-’90s where Gen X was cool.
“Now it’s, ‘What are the new kids doing?’ It’s like ‘Yo, hello, the Google guys are Gen Xers.’ ”
They can sound a little whiny. But there’s also some evidence that Gen Xers really are being taken for granted at work.
One survey done this year for Deloitte Consulting LLP, for instance, found that nearly two-thirds of executives at large companies were most concerned about losing Generation Y employees, while fewer than half of them had similar concerns about Gen Xers.
The assumption is often that members of Generation Y are the least loyal and most mobile, says Robin Erickson, a manager with Deloitte’s human-capital division.
However, she points out that a companion survey found that only about 37 percent of Gen Xers said they planned to stay in their current jobs after the recession ends, compared with 44 percent of members of Generation Y and 50 percent of Baby Boomers.
Setting: Matthieu is back from The Netherlands and brought back some Stroopwafels
Florian: ooooooooooooh!
Me: What are those?
Florian: Stroopwafels.
Me: Oh, damnit.
Florian: What? you can’t eat them?
Me: No, I can, that’s the problem. Those things are evil.
Florian: Now you complain when you can eat stuff?
Me: Yes, you can’t win.
Florian: Next time I’m in Germany, I bring back a teeeny-tiny bit of chocolate you can eat and giant bunch of stuff you can’t, so that way you have something you can eat but you can’t complain about the size of it.
Me: You know you’re evil incarnate, right?
Florian: Yes, and I love it.
Hail to the chief! It was Lennart’s last day at the office yesterday. Even though he’s only leaving next week for Belgium, he’s on holiday from today to use up the last of his leave time. It’s going to be weird without him at the office. I’m happy for him though – a full tenured professorship and senior lecturer and he’s only 33. That’s impressive, and it’s also an offer he couldn’t refuse. As a gag-ish gift, we bought him a tweed jacket and had leather patches sewn on the elbows, as now befitting to his stature ;) Getting people to sign the card was a nightmare though. Between holidays, sickness, conferences and general not-being-at-the-officeness, it was a cast iron PITA to get hold of people.
On a professional note, the office is going to be rudderless for the next 6 months – at least – until we can hire his replacement and that person comes in and gets a feel for things. I can only hope that it’s somebody with a decent head on their shoulders and that will fight for us, not against us. Said person will have mighty big shoes to fill. I have to say that we’re all a bit anxious about the state of things to come.
On a personal note, I’m saddened that a friend is leaving. I don’t have many of those in the UK and I’m going to miss him and his various zen koans and happy demeanour.
As part of doing something else, I noticed that my publication record is increasing. This is not bad at all, considering that I’m not really an academic :)
1: Stockinger H, Attwood T, Chohan SN, Côté R, Cudré-Mauroux P, Falquet L,
Fernandes P, Finn RD, Hupponen T, Korpelainen E, Labarga A, Laugraud A, Lima T,
Pafilis E, Pagni M, Pettifer S, Phan I, Rahman N. Experience using web services
for biological sequence analysis. Brief Bioinform. 2008 Nov;9(6):493-505. Epub
2008 Jul 11. PubMed PMID: 18621748.
2: Jones P, Côté R. The PRIDE proteomics identifications database: data
submission, query, and dataset comparison. Methods Mol Biol. 2008;484:287-303.
PubMed PMID: 18592187.
3: Côté RG, Jones P, Martens L, Apweiler R, Hermjakob H. The Ontology Lookup
Service: more data and better tools for controlled vocabulary queries. Nucleic
Acids Res. 2008 Jul 1;36(Web Server issue):W372-6. Epub 2008 May 8. PubMed PMID:
18467421; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC2447739.
4: Siepen JA, Belhajjame K, Selley JN, Embury SM, Paton NW, Goble CA, Oliver SG,
Stevens R, Zamboulis L, Martin N, Poulovassillis A, Jones P, Côté R, Hermjakob H,
Pentony MM, Jones DT, Orengo CA, Hubbard SJ. ISPIDER Central: an integrated
database web-server for proteomics. Nucleic Acids Res. 2008 Jul 1;36(Web Server
issue):W485-90. Epub 2008 Apr 25. PubMed PMID: 18440977; PubMed Central PMCID:
PMC2447780.
5: Martens L, Jones P, Côté R. Using the Proteomics Identifications Database
(PRIDE). Curr Protoc Bioinformatics. 2008 Mar;Chapter 13:Unit 13.8. PubMed PMID:
18428683.
6: Mueller M, Vizcaíno JA, Jones P, Côté R, Thorneycroft D, Apweiler R, Hermjakob
H, Martens L. Analysis of the experimental detection of central nervous
system-related genes in human brain and cerebrospinal fluid datasets. Proteomics.
2008 Mar;8(6):1138-48. PubMed PMID: 18283668.
7: Jones P, Côté RG, Cho SY, Klie S, Martens L, Quinn AF, Thorneycroft D,
Hermjakob H. PRIDE: new developments and new datasets. Nucleic Acids Res. 2008
Jan;36(Database issue):D878-83. Epub 2007 Nov 22. PubMed PMID: 18033805; PubMed
Central PMCID: PMC2238846.
8: Côté RG, Jones P, Martens L, Kerrien S, Reisinger F, Lin Q, Leinonen R,
Apweiler R, Hermjakob H. The Protein Identifier Cross-Referencing (PICR) service:
reconciling protein identifiers across multiple source databases. BMC
Bioinformatics. 2007 Oct 18;8:401. PubMed PMID: 17945017; PubMed Central PMCID:
PMC2151082.
9: Côté RG, Jones P, Apweiler R, Hermjakob H. The Ontology Lookup Service, a
lightweight cross-platform tool for controlled vocabulary queries. BMC
Bioinformatics. 2006 Feb 28;7:97. PubMed PMID: 16507094; PubMed Central PMCID:
PMC1420335.
10: Jones P, Côté RG, Martens L, Quinn AF, Taylor CF, Derache W, Hermjakob H,
Apweiler R. PRIDE: a public repository of protein and peptide identifications for
the proteomics community. Nucleic Acids Res. 2006 Jan 1;34(Database
issue):D659-63. PubMed PMID: 16381953; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC1347500.
11: Klie S, Martens L, Vizcaíno JA, Côté R, Jones P, Apweiler R, Hinneburg A,
Hermjakob H. Analyzing large-scale proteomics projects with latent semantic
indexing. J Proteome Res. 2008 Jan;7(1):182-91. Epub 2007 Nov 30. PubMed PMID:
18047271.
We have been notified of the first member of staff that has contracted swine flu. The person works in the EBI and was at home when they first recognised symptoms. They will obviously stay at home and away from campus for the duration of their illness. Their close colleagues and contacts in the EBI have been informed of the case.
It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.
In a stunning display of cleverness, I managed to lock the shed keys in the shed, requiring a visit from our friendly neighbourhood locksmith
we re-painted the whole upstairs floor of our old house
I went to Scotland for a business trip
we are all completely exhausted and I think I gave myself a bad case of carpal in the process
Notable events during this time:
the mouse, that damned mouse, stowed away and is now living somewhere behind our cupboards. Our cats are useless.
said cats are driving us nuts by destroying the house and running rampant all night
the boy is on solids and is discovering the joys of carrots and sweet potato
I managed to go to Scotland and not eat a single deep-fried, battered food item
the Scottish tried to kill me many times with food, but I have to give mad props to a Spanish tapas bar that catered with much success to my multiple allergies.
we bought a new bed and a new mattress. This is a source of joy, and debt.
we should have internet access at home shortly
More on all these when I can spare the time. In the meantime, know that I am still alive and tired as sin.
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