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Treasure hunter
Sep. 22nd, 2002 03:29 pmDunno where the X-ray will go. It has someone's name clearly printed on it, so if we display it, visitors will no doubt ask who this person is. Probably we'll just shrug. We could black out the name, but then people would likely assume that it's one of our chests, instead.
I suppose we could also try finding the person and returning it. Who knows?
I'm not sure where the book is. Erik and the rest of my former cronies in the ORA tools group converted it my TR draft to PDF two Fridays ago, and Chuck pinged me on Monday for help connecting to the book's CVS repository, which I keep on ol' undef.jmac.org. I've heard nor sought nothing since. As of Wednesday or Thursday, the Arcus boys hadn't gotten their copies yet, according to Jim. I told him that I really was in no mood to rush things, since I was so enjoying the reprieve that lets me plunge myself into my Harvard work and makes me feel like I'm actually earning the money they relentlessly shovel at me. (I've mentioned that I'm somehow still not quite used to having a salary again, right?)
I've found it hard to think at all about the book for the last 10 days or so; equal-and-opposite of the obsessive scrambling I was doing throughout August and the beginning of September. On the other hand, I'm aware that work I do now, while things are mellow, will lessen the scrambling necessary once the TR responses do hit. Once again, I am master of my own fate, and whose bright idea was that, anyway?
So, what have I been thinking about? The Big Thing is surely my work at the ICCB. Now that my first project is approaching usability (I'm scheduled to demo it to some relevant folks on Tuesday), it's been feeding back lots of encouragement and inspiration at me. As a result, I have two or three (not sure how I'll split them up yet) bundles of stand-alone Perl modules that I'm looking forward to placing on SourceForge and CPAN as soon as boss and I agree on the namespaces they should use. (Not that we're disagreeing; we just haven't talked about it yet.) They all deal with chemical informatics, of course: molecular modeling and representation, parsing and generation of some common cheminformatics file formats, and working with HTS (high-throughput screening) data. The latter of these is key to my ICCB project, and the former two I actually haven't applied to anything practical yet; I build them because it seemed fun, challenging, and the sort of thing that you know you'll find a use for once you've got it.
As an unavoidable side-track to this side-track, I have been ramping up quite an interest in chemistry, very lately. Boss likes to see this, and encourages me to sign up for some classes and get some "wet lab" experience as soon as I can. Things are too wobbly right now, but I think this will sound like a very good idea for the spring 2003 semester.
Interesting: Looney Labs is now selling packs of blank cards (well, blank on one side) called "Glotz", named after LL's perennial working title for their current major game-in-development. Five bucks gives you 52 cards ready for markup for whatever crazy project you're working on. Hmm... time to make an order.