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Had a wonderful, full day yesterday. Got up early enough to enjoy an Early-Bird breakfast at the Blue Shirt, went home for some video fun zap zap, and then worked on Volity for several hours, successfully nixing some issues with the protocol I've had for the last year or so (will summarize things on the mailing list once I complete this work-unit; it's still open on my desk). Also working with daerr over the phone at one point as I tried to figure out some deep voodoo he slipped into the CVS tree recently. He gets an award for putting the first (legitimately used!) goto statement into Volity's code, and I felt kinda bad about having to remove it in order to get his module to run on my Mac's version of Perl.

The introverted part of my day complete, went to that Wikipedia meet-up, expecting lameness but surprised by a pleasant time. Hastily planned, it looked from the disorganized organization page that somewhere between 0 and 3 others would be in attendance, but around a dozen showed up at the Harvard Square meet-point, and together we did consume the yummy Malaysian dishes and ice cream while talking about many things, sometimes Wikipedia.

Interesting group dynamic; there were varying patterns of people who already knew one another, with me being one of only two or three actual Total Strangers, but got along swimmingly with all anyway, as I usually do. I think that literally everyone was either Harvard or MIT (but really, what would one expect), and sub-groups such as ex-ArsDigita later became evident. Fields present included physics, economics, library science, medicine, mathematics, and me waving my little (bio|chem)informatics flag. Semi-surprisingly, no CS people! This was depressing, because we all sat at a round table with two chopsticks at every plate, and I made a joke about taking half the chopsticks away so we could simulate the dining philosophers problem and nobody knew what I was talking about. So I had to explain it, and at least this had the built-in punchline of "Ha ha! Cool! So what's the solution?" "I dunno, man, I flunked CS."

I further confused everyone when, in response to one of the economists' asking what got me into Wikipedia, I started talking loudly about goatse. But I had to, because it's the first Wikipedia article I recall reading, and the one that made me dismiss the whole site as scary-stupid for months... until I needed a refresher course on how normal distributions worked, and I discovered that Wikipedia knew everything about that, too. Thus having discovered two extremes of subject matter, I started exploring the site more thoroughly, and found it Very Nice. Some time later I started contributing it to it myself. The end.

Anyway, based on new local contacts made and things learned, I am now fired up about getting more involved in WP, or at least more locally active somehow; the person who arranged the meetup was deep into Wikipedia's backend and the culture that makes it work, about which I knew nothing before last night. Looking forward to seeing where this carries me.

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On getting up early: I cautiously say that think that I have succeeded in permanently pushing my sleep cycle back an hour: I seem to now average around 1am-9am, versus 2am-10am. The fall-back time shift may have had something to do with this, but if so, I haven't slipped forward since then.

Am now aiming for midnight-8am.

(no subject)

My Safari bookmarks bar is gone! Someone has been sleeping in my bed.

Time to turn on the screensaver password thing, even though I hate it and it's hackable anyway. But it will keep all 1 hit-die gremlins away.

This actually leads to concern... the way to make the bookmarks bar go away is to select View->Bookmarks Bar, which works as a display toggle. So was someone with no Mac experience fumbling around, trying to see a list of all my bookmarks? Paranoia

Important Cheminformatics news

The elusive Anatomically Correct Snowman compound has been found.