(no subject)

[prog]

Having a worky sort of weekend. Have a presentation to give on Monday, so I've been slaving over a hot Powerpoint for days, and think I've bascially done all I can there. (It's actually Keynote, not Powerpoint, but nobody knows what Keynote is so I say "Powerpoint". And then I say "It's actually Keynote, not Powerpoint." Just awful.) Originally I was thinking I'd be more "cute" with the presentation, filling it with hand-drawn cartoon art and ads for my books, but I thought: if I was in my own audience, I'd find that annoying, or unclear, or both. So, yeah, it's mostly bullet lists, except for an "animated" bit in the middle filled with a lot of fun stuff I found via Google Images. I figure that once I get up there it'll be mostly improvisational anyway, with the slideshow just giving people something to look at while I babble for half an hour. Maybe later I can be Damian Conway, but not tomorrow.

I still envision myself hand-drawing the entirety of a poster explaining my work, or prehaps all of the informatics group's work, if we end up scheduling a postery presence for this fall's annual ICCB retreat. It would not surprise me if this turned out the be the case.

Hmmf. Supposed to have HTS Manager beta-ready by tomorrow, too. In truth it works great, except for a couple of niggling details... maybe I can hammer those out today. Didn't think about this at all yesterday because I got completely reabsorbed in my combinatorial chemistry research project from last month. My little Perl program can now combine an arbitrary number of carbon and nitrogen atoms in every possible way... at least, according to my (very) limited understanding of basic chemistry. That's good, but the goal is to build all possible compounds from any pool of elements you feed it (though the folks I work with only really care about the organic-chemistry subset of the ol' periodic table), up to a given limit of number of atoms per compounds (not including valence-filling hydrogens). This means I must finally get my Perl chemistry library to work with stereochemistry correctly, because this molecule [holds up right hand, palm facing you] is a different and distinct compound from this one [holds up left hand]. Or this one [crosses index and middle fingers]. I think. It's strange and interesting. Much to learn.