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June 27th, 2008:

I’m the second hit on google!

This is very thrilling. Of course I’m still losing out to a genealogy site, so it reflects more the rarity of my name than my importance in the world. Just like a search for James Giant Corn returns this site as the top hit, there just isn’t a lot of competition. But I sure showed the guy with my name who finished in the mid-40s in a bass fishing contest who’s boss! 😉

Work, Class, and Dreams of Cake-Shakes

Two years ago, I said the most fun I’d ever had while getting paid was the afternoon I spent doing sequence analysis for a seed company while listening to female fronted metal music. Well I’ve earned more money and had more fun since then, but there’s still something about working at a speed limited only by your own ability to think, while listening to a song like “Ice Queen.” I’ve been working on an computational genomics project in the lab, which means I’ve been coding and analyzing to Within Temptation and Leaves’ Eyes all week. The nice thing is that when I make a mistake with working on the computer it usually takes me a few minutes to correct it. Working in a wetlab a simple mistake could close me anywhere from an hour (I forgot to add something to a PCR reaction) to two weeks (I grew seedlings, harvested their tissue at the right age, extracted RNA, and then somehow let the RNA degrade to uselessness). So that’s the good news. The bad news is that I make a lot more mistakes working with the computer. But I’m getting better.

And a lot of the credit goes to the guy I’m working for, who has given me a project that was right on the edge of my ability and then known when to throw me a life preserver and when to let me sink or swim on my own. It means I’m producing results more slowly than I would have on a project more in my area of my experience, but I’m sitting right in the optimal part of the learning curve.

The two weeks of class before this were very instructional. We learned everything from R (A mathematical computer language that does a lot of the same stuff as matlab, only instead of costing hundreds of dollars it’s free), to machine learning algorithms (not as cool as they sound, but still plenty cool), to online annotation of genomes (it’s crowd sourcing for geneticists, but do all the geneticists in the world constitute a big enough crowd to be useful?).

What sounds like the lone surviving toad (apparently the new cat doesn’t turn his nose up at them like that old one) is singing in the pond out back. 

There was another mention of cake shakes this weekend (possibly tied to monty burgers) but I’ll have to wait and see what happens.