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I can has sleep nao pls?

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Q: Why am I speaking like a lolcat?
A: Cause I’m tired.

I’ve been sitting in a saunaauditorium for the past two days attending a conference in Leicester. I’m sure the talks are excellent but I’m having the damnedest time concentrating on them because of the heat. The talk I gave this morning seemed well received, so thats good.

BenBen’s sleeping pattern have gone to pot. He’s woken up at 5am for the last two days and he’s not napping all that well. We think it’s the heat. We;re in Leics until Sunday. Hopefully the weather is going to chill out – literally – and he’ll settle down a bit.

Katy and I went to see Transformers 2. I can see why it’s being nominated for worst movie of the decade. Michael Bay managed to create *two* characters even more obnoxious and stereotypically un-PC than Jar Jar Binks. That deserves recognition. And a kick in the face. The movie was so bad it went all the way to almost good. Everything blows up. It’s one giant fight scene, and nobody but the bad guys get hurt. The robots have testicles. They hump your leg. I kid you not. I’ll go see Transformers 3 when it comes out, but I don’t think I’ll buy the dvd…

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Weekend redux

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The family went to Saffron Walden on Saturday to pick up some veg from the farmer’s market and have a peek at the French market that was being held on the common. Nothing spectacular, but the food looked nice. Will and Donna came over on Sunday afternoon for a very carnivorous BBQ. I’d made sausages, burgers and home-made lamb koftas. I have to say, the kebabs were a brilliant success. Combine lamb mince with tumeric, chili powder, cumin, coriander powder, paprika, ginger, salt, pepper and minced onions and form onto soaked bamboo skewers. Grill on the BBQ and baste a few times with reggae reggae sauce until well done. Serve in olive oil-basted pitas that have been toasted on the BBQ with some fresh, home-made tzaziki. DELISH! This is a perfect way to cook lamb mince because the fat renders out and you’re left with a juicy kebab that’s not floating in fat.

I spent part of Sunday putting up a curtain pole and a shelf in the master bedroom. We moved our stuff over from the guest bedroom and slept in our new bed for the first time. It’s going to take a bit of getting used to. For starters, it’s a lot higher off the ground than our previous one and we’ll need to jerry-rig something to prevent our pillows from falling through the headboard all the time. Still, comfy. We didn’t sleep all that well because there were no curtains in the room so we both woke up at 5am with sunlight streaming into the room.

The beastie is getting to be a handful at times now. His nap pattern is shifting and he’s alternating between tired/grumpy and awake/entertain-me-now mode. It’s going to be a fun few weeks until things settle down. Still, could be worse. My cough seems to want to clear up – finally – but Katy is still feeling under the weather. If she’s still not right when we come back from Leicester, I’ll nag her to go to see the doc.

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Publication record

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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.

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And lo, the 7th seal is opening…

Posted on By admin 2 Comments on And lo, the 7th seal is opening…

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.

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This is why you always *think* before you get inked

Posted on By admin 1 Comment on This is why you always *think* before you get inked

Girl with 56 stars tattooed on face admits she asked for them

A teenage girl who claimed 56 stars were tattooed on her on her face as she slept when she asked for three has admitted she was awake the whole time – and lied because her father was “furious”.

stupid girl

Kimberley Vlaminck had insisted she dozed off after asking the tattooist for just three small stars – then woke in horror to find her face was covered. The Belgian blamed the Flemish-speaking tattooist for not being able to understand her French and English instructions.

Amid a frenzy of media attention, she then pledged to sue the tattoo artist, Rouslan Toumaniantz, for the £9,000 she needed for laser surgery to have them removed.

She said after the tattooing last week: “It is terrible for me. I cannot go out on to the street. I look like a freak.”

But the 18-year-old has finally confessed she did not fall asleep, that she wanted all the stars and was “fully aware” of what Mr Toumaniantz was doing. Ms Vlaminck told a Dutch TV crew: “I asked for 56 stars and initially adored them. But when my father saw them, he was furious. So I said I fell asleep and the that the tattooist mad made a mistake.”

Mr Toumaniantz – himself covered from head to foot in tattoos and piercings – had consistently denied he had made a mistake and always insisted Vlaminck wanted all 56 stars. He said at the time: “I maintain that she absolutely agreed that I tattoo those 56 stars on the left side of her face.”

But despite insisting she had asked for 56 stars, he still initially agreed to pay for half of the treatment to remove the tattoos. He said: “Kimberley is unhappy and it is not my wish to have an unsatisfied client. I don’t regret it. To tell you the truth, this has given me some publicity.” Mr Toumanaintz is now said to have withdrawn his cash offer and said from now on he will get written consent from clients before he begins tattooing.

I’m sorry, but the girl is an idiot precious-snowflake-attention-whore. Remember kiddies, this is why you actually need to think about the consequences of getting tattooed and that it pays to reflect on what you’re actually getting inked onto yourself. I have ink. I do not regret it at all. I want more, and I think that the design that I want is starting to percolate towards a solid concept. Just remember this:

ganked from cracked.com

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Been a trying weekend…

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Health matters have been problematic in the last two weeks. I’ve just about gotten back all the mobility in my foot but I now have this stupid phlegm-y chest cough. Katy had a migraine last Wednesday that left her vomiting for most of the night and part of the following day. I stayed home from work and managed to catch either a 24-hour bug or a touch of food poisoning. The result of which was I was puking my guts out Friday night and was completely useless on Saturday. I was back on my feet – mostly – on Sunday but Katy is still feeling out of sorts. She went to the doctor today so hopefully that’ll be on its way to being sorted out, but with the beastie being difficult because of his teeth these days, it still promises to be a bumpy ride for the next few days. I’ve already taken a lot of leave time so I’m a bit conflicted about staying home, but at the same time, if she needs it, family comes before work. Still, I just wish things would settle down for a bit and the universe would give us a break.

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Waited a lot, mumbled a bit, became British.

Posted on By admin 3 Comments on Waited a lot, mumbled a bit, became British.

I affirmed a pledge of allegiance to Her Majesty the Queen yesterday and became naturalized as a British citizen. The ceremony was, to be honest, a bit hokey, but the symbolism of it was nice. It would have been a lot better if I hadn’t been in the middle of a nasty migraine. Afterwards, people were complimenting Katy and I on how well behaved the beastie had been. He, of course, was flirting with everything that would smile at him.

The highlight of the day came when we were making our way to the Cambridge City Council offices and ran into Santa Claus in his off-duty summer outfit. Imagine a fat old dude, with a kick-ass white beard, fabulously working flaming, scarlet red trousers and a buttoned shirt of the same colour. Fantabulous!

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