Day: May 25, 2005

You know, there are songs that you just associate with people, for a variety of reasons.

For example, the song that's playing right now will always remind me of my friend PO (and goes all the way back to CEGEP, all those years ago).

So my question to you, general public, is what song reminds you of me?

I started a new book today, The Dice Man, from Luke Rhineheart.

After having lived in moderate happiness with moderate success with an average wife and family for seven years, I found suddenly, around my thirty-second birthday, that I wanted to kill myself. And to kill several other people too. […] Now the desire to kill oneself and to assassinate, poison, obliterate or rape others is generally considered by the psychiatric profession as 'unhealthy'. Bad. Evil. More accurately, sin. When you have the desire to kill yourself, you are supposed to see it and 'accept it', but not, for Christ's sake, to kill yourself. If you desire to have carnal knowledge of a helpless teenybopper, you are to accept your lust, and not lay a finger on even her big toe. If you hate your father, fine – but don't slug the bastard with a baseball bat. Understand yourself, accept yourself, but do not be yourself. It is a conservative doctrine, guaranteed to help the patient avoid violent, passionate and unusual acts and to permit a prolonged, respectable life of moderate misery.

It shows promise :)

I slept in my own bed for the first time in over a month last night. It's weird, cause I need to get used to my mattress again. I've also discovered that the back garden is FULL of songbirds that think that 4am is a perfectly wonderful time to start tweeting. I must consider investing in a shotgun.

People have been asking me if I like my new job and what exactly it is I'm doing here. Short answers for both: I love my job and I'm designing and implementing web services for ontology and controlled vocabulary lookups.

It's amazing the surge of productivity I've seen in myself since I moved here. The job I was doing at McGill was, to put it mildly, not up my alley. I could do it, but I hated every minute of it. To those people who know me well, this will say it all: I'm looking forward to go to work in the morning now and I haven't been late once! (though the fear of missing my only means of getting to the office might have a bit to do with that last one)

As to what I'm doing, we need a centralized source to query ontologies like GO and MeSH (to name a few). Things like that's the ID associated with this term, or what are all the child terms that are linked to this ID. Since this is going to be reused by a few people, we decided to go for broke and make a nice series of webservices, cause we're nice like that. You'll find the database schema and the class diagram below:

 

This has been my moment of geekiness, please ignore all of the above if you're not computationally enclined.