(no subject)

Things are going well. I am getting emails that say things like Yes, small molecules are transferred in nanoliter amounts from library plates to assay plates. The assay plates have the same cells in every well and are plated in the microliter range. And I more or less understand what they mean, and now I am eating a peanut-butter cookie.

I think this is my greatest skill, maybe the only real skill I have: I can pick up on interesting things very quickly through osmosis, enough to be useful with it, and to figure out the right questions to ask. Watch as I make little data representations of chemical-handling equipment with Perl, which will eventually fit into programs that the researchers bustling about down the hall should find quite useful. I would have to take several semesters' worth of biochemistry courses to grok what those researchers are actually doing, though.

But, hey, I just might. I get to go to school (at Harvard or elsewhere) as a benny, either fully or partially covered (I forget... I think the coverage level has to do with how on-topic the classes are). Um, need to clear up my schedule a bit first, though.

Starbucks has pretty good cookie but their coffee actually is pretty bad. I am drinking a "Mild" now, because it tastes slightly less charred than their other kind, and I fall down without coffee now zzzz. I'd rather drink it than Office Coffee, but there's nothing like the Diesel or the Someday 'round these parts. I guess I can hit Dunkin's if it gets too hectic.

battle beer

Reiner Knizia's Battle Line is a great game, even though Mel&c just beat me at it for the third time in a row. We have each played it exactly three times. First game we blundered around and she won simply because someone had to eventually. Second game we both grasped the strategy but I made lots of dumb mistakes, oo, that made me sore. This game we both played very well, and it was pretty close. Next time. It really is a fine game. I'll bring it to the ol' MLGN on Wednesday.

Hey, neat... GMT games has a Battle Line cheat sheet PDF. That's nice of them!

As we played, M said, "It's a shame more people don't play games." I thought of two things:

1. According to Reiner Knizia (uggh -- will I ever finish that Origins report?) games are quite mainstream in European culture, especially in Germany. So it isn't intrinsic in humans to not play games, as I sometimes have feared... it's just not a facet of current American culture.


2. I still want to help change this fact. The way may have grown less clear, with my failure to enter grad school under my plan to mess around with games full-time for a while... but my options are still many, many, o yes.

---

I just let a can man take my cans. Actually, he's not much of a can man... he looks distinctly non-homeless and is using hand-carried plastic bags instead of a cart, but he nevertheless retreated to the shadows when I carried out the trash & recycling, and several minutes later has finally descended upon it, noisily. (We have a lot of glass this week.) Not sure how I feel about this.

We have a lot of glass from Noah's impulse purchase of the variety of bottled beer, whence came Hocus Snood -- which very well may have become my favorite alkyhol, though I have had but the one bottle. Happily, Noah scored it at the wine & spirits store right across the street. Do you suppose I may visit it sometime later? I may.