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Notes from a bemused canuck

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Teaching people … but are they sucking?

Posted on March 15, 2006 By admin 2 Comments on Teaching people … but are they sucking?

Day 2 of the PRIDE/OLS Hackathon is done and over. We've been inducing small brain seizures in 10 people for the last 2 days with PowerPoint overdoses. The good news is that we have a good spread of cookies and tea and coffee. The bad news is that we still have more powerpoint.

On the plus side, this exercise has forced us to write tons of good documentation – which any decent programmer is loathe to do. This will also be a good preparation for the Thursday morning talk I have been volunteered to do in a month for the whole sequence database group. But I digress.

The hackathon has also been a good training ground to see what kind of mistakes/problems people will experience in the wild. We know how to run the programs – we should, we built them from the ground up. What takes us a little less than an hour to do from scratch is proving to take more than a day for the average user. Mostly, it's because everything works on our laptops. In the wild, we need to deal with older/newer versions of stuff we need, different languages, different operating systems, different ways of thinking of how stuff should work. It's proving enlightning. And frustrating. But that's a whole other story.


On a completely different train of thought, I think that we've actually beginning to be regulars at the pub. We had dinner with the course people there tonight (paid by the EBI). I wanted to bring back a chocolate tart for Katy (as she was feeling a bit down) so I asked for one to take away. The waitress went to place the order and came back a minute later saying that the chef wanted to decorate the plate (as they normally do when you eat it at the restaurant), if they did garnish it prettily, would I mind bringing the plate back tomorrow?

In a word… sa-weet!

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Quick update

Posted on March 13, 2006 By admin 2 Comments on Quick update

– House pictures are up: http://www.flubu.com/various_pics/hinxton/

– We bought the flatscreen LCD. Quite cool, but I will need to contact the customer service monkeys because it hums. I think it's the transformer. This annoys the hell out of me.

– I'm giving a course on PRIDE/OLS with a co-worker all week. Eeeep!!!

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You know you live in a rural area when

Posted on March 9, 2006 By admin 1 Comment on You know you live in a rural area when

… a pair of ducks waddle along next to you as you're going in to work.

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The poshest bottled water ever

Posted on March 8, 2006 By admin 4 Comments on The poshest bottled water ever

Katy and I went shopping at Waitrose on monday night and I came across this:

I just had to get it (but it was only 99p so that's ok). It's Glenlivet bottled water.

From the website: Welcome to Speyside Glenlivet, where we are pleased to share with you some of the fascinating history, background and detail of this very special Scottish Natural Mineral Water. Its unique and natural blend of minerals provides the essence of Speyside Glenlivet's special appeal. Even the most delicate flavours of what you eat and drink are enhanced when they are accompanied by its cool, clean and pure taste. The outstanding quality of this water was the reason why the first whisky distilleries were founded nearby over 200 years ago.

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For <lj user="eniran">

Posted on March 7, 2006 By admin 3 Comments on For <lj user="eniran">

I came across these online and thought of you:

 

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My article is finally published!

Posted on March 7, 2006 By admin 5 Comments on My article is finally published!

The Ontology Lookup Service, a lightweight cross-platform tool for controlled vocabulary queries

Richard G Cote, Philip Jones, Rolf Apweiler, Henning Hermjakob
BMC Bioinformatics 2006, 7:97 (28 February 2006)

Total accesses to this article: 246
Accesses within last 30 days: 246

Your article is also available through PubMed Central, and overall statistics indicate that your article will have been accessed on PubMed Central a roughly equivalent number of times, doubling its total visibility.

This makes me happy.

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Yes, we're still alive

Posted on March 7, 2006 By admin 1 Comment on Yes, we're still alive

Saturday was the big moving day. Katy's dad and uncle came down with a rental van from Leicester in the morning and we got the show on the road. I went with them to the Hinxton house to unpack the first load, which consisted mostly of Ikea stuff and a fridge. I had some work colleagues giving us a hand and it was a mostly smooth process. All in all, it took 4 vanloads to get everything shifted here. Katy and Judith were loading in Cambridge and myself and Charlie (at first) then Sam/Natalyia (afterwards) were here to unload and shift stuff around. I managed to get the bed build in between van trips, so that was a plus. The first priority was to get everything in the approximate rooms and get the basics sorted. Mel and Stu got the wardrobe build while we tackled the kitchen.

When the left, we went to the Red Lion to have a nice dinner. I had a big hunk of dead cow, Katy had the duck. It's a really nice pub. I think I'd like to become a regular there. Since I'm going to be hitting the gym more often, the thought of a regular pint doesn't really scare me.

We spent all day Sunday unpacking stuff. I'm happy to report that 99% of the boxes are empty and neatly stacked in one of our many shed out back. All the dishes have been washed (thanks to the Katy girl) and most of the things are, if not in their final resting place, close to it. The wardrobe is full and so is the new chest of drawers.

I was off work on Monday to wait for the Sky cable man to come round to install our new mini dish so I busied myself by building the last of the furniture while I was waiting. The table looks really nice and is heavy as hell. The corner office took forever to build and will only come out of the room in pieces because there's no way in hell it'll fit through the door. Speaking of, we'll probably have to unhinge it because that room won't accommodate the desk and the bookshelf. Oh well.

Katy started her new job yesterday and gave her day a solid 8 out of 10. A promising sign. She's not actually working on campus yet, which is a bit annoying. They're in the process of opening the new wing and moving bits out of the old buildings gradually into the new ones. That means that they still need staff at the old place. That's only temporary and she should be working here within a month or so. It's only 3 miles away, so it's not a biggie.

I hope it all goes well for her. She's been really anxious about it. It has translated
into a grumpy girl who spent a whole afternoon being snarky because she couldn't find her slippers (that she'd packed herself, spent the whole of Sunday manically looking for them, and managed to overlook them twice…)

Things are settling in nicely. We sold the TV and the woman is coming to pick it up this weekend. We're probably going to buy the new one this weekend when Katy's parents come to visit. Most of the change of addresses are done. I need to get in touch with Mrs Simmonds to give her back the keys and go over the inventory with her and finalize the paperwork for the old flat.

The next step is to get used to cooking with a gas hob now. I just need to figure out the heat levels and gas marks. Last night's dinner was good, so that's a positive start.

On a last note, I strongly recommend the song that I'm currently listening to. We've been listening to an assload of BBC Radio 1 (as it was the only form of entertainment while we were painting/moving) and I've grown to really love it.

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Jaysus. You know you're going to have a busy morning when…

Posted on March 7, 2006 By admin

you're off email for 2 days and you have 115 emails in your inbox.

I've been answering emails for the last 3 hours and I'm still not done!

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DIY – Day 3 (a.k.a. jeez, we made it!!)

Posted on March 4, 2006 By admin 2 Comments on DIY – Day 3 (a.k.a. jeez, we made it!!)

It's been a looooong day, but it's over and we're done. For now. We finished what we wanted to do. The upstairs rooms are done and so is the kitchen.

We thought we were ahead of schedule this morning but then Sod's law reared its ugly head. The smallest room required the most work. The white walls required 3 coats of paint to finally cover (compared to only one coat for the blue paint). We then had to give another coat to the last wall on the bedroom when we noticed that it had streaked.

Finally, we got everything sorted out and started out on the kitchen. The first coat was scary as hell because we realized just how many bits and pieces there were to paint and we thought the paint wouldn't cover well. The second one went on smoothly though and the kitchen looks great!

So now we're back home and we need to pack the last of our things.

Tomorrow is going to be a bitch.

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DIY – Day 2 (a.k.a God, I ache all over!)

Posted on March 3, 2006 By admin 3 Comments on DIY – Day 2 (a.k.a God, I ache all over!)

We're dead on our feet. The enormity of the scope of the job we've taken on is starting to sink in. Thinking that we could ompletely repaint a 2-story 3 bedroom house in 3 days is hubris. Our schedule was particularly blown out of the water today because we realized that we'd need to give 2 coats of paint to most of the surfaces. What's not helping also is that we were supposed to have another pair of hands to help out, which has subsequently fallen off the map rather suddenly.

The house is also making its displeasure felt at being given a facelift. As I was masking walls to prep them for paint, I needed to reposition a length of tape – only to be faced with a long line of paint being stripped off the ceiling when I took it off. The paint is so old and so layered that it's falling off in chunks if you pull at it. I ended up having to cut in by hand, without taping. Results are mostly good, except for the odd oopsie that I'll need to correct. As a side note, the oopsies mostly happened at the end of the day when we both were tired, hungry and rather fed up :)

Anyway, at the end of today, we can say that the living room is done and sparkling, and we have two coats of the light shade we're putting in the bedroom and guest bedroom. What's on the menu for tomorrow is:

– putting two coats of light color in the office (2 walls)
– fixing the ceiling oopsies in all the rooms
– putting two coats of dark (1 wall)
– putting two coats of dark color in the office (2 walls)
– putting two coats of single color in the kitchen

The bathroom and the trim/baseboards have been pushed off the schedule for now, because they can be done after we've moved in with a minimum of fuss.

A long, warm shower is now called for to get rid of all the paint that has managed to make its way in the various nooks and crannies of my body.

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