From the campus for-sale mailing list:
Free to a good home, young goat called George.
Anybody having designs on making curry goat need not apply ;-)
Current Mood:
Amused
It’s friday, there must be weirdness
Tag: work
yawm!, and ow!
After more than 3 years of working at the EBI, I finally have an office inside the main building. I’m of mixed feelings about this. I’m going to miss the air conditioning and the water cooler but I’m not going to miss having to go out in the rain to go to the loo. In the process of moving to our new office, we had to move some desks around and I managed to magnificently squish my thumb between a metal desk and a door frame. The nail is turning a nice shade of purple and it hurts like a mofo but at least the swelling is going down.
It’s going to be a long day today. Katy had to be at work for 7am and that meant getting up at 6:30. We were both rather braindead over our cheerios this morning and I don’t see it getting any better during the day.
Current Mood:
Sick & 
Tired
I can’t brain today
My head feels like it’s a giant cotton bud. Everything seems hella complicated and I honestly can’t be arsed today. I didn’t particularly sleep well last night. Reenie was in uber-whore mode last night. She jumped up on the bed at 1:30am and demanded attention. She ended up sleeping on my body pillow for about 30 minutes before buggering off. I needed to go to the bathroom and, on my way back, discovered that one of the cats had gifted us with a dead field mouse in the bedroom by the simple and effective method of stepping on it. I then had to dispose of said present and go wash my feet in the sink. At 2am. This did not please me. After that, I couldn’t get back to sleep for the longest time and, when I finally did get to sleep, kept having the weirdest dreams ever.
Because of this, I will be completely useless today. So I’m giving up and not even trying any more.
Current Mood:
Aggravated & 
Crappy & 
Horny & Tired
It's always nice to know your boss has a sense of humour
Email received today sent to everybody at the EBI:
From: Big Boss
To: Reception
CC: All at EBI
Subject: Re: Guillotine – URGENT
To: Reception
CC: All at EBI
Subject: Re: Guillotine – URGENT
Reception wrote:
> If you have borrowed the Guillotine please return it to the post
> room. It is needed urgently.
>
> Thank you – P
Who will be executed?
Ho hum
I've realized that I'm feeling very blah at the moment. Part of it is probably due to the February blues, but I think there's a bit more. I've been having a lot of very weird and sometimes distrubing dreams lately (though I blame Pam's curry for a batch of those) and I find that I'm not as productive as work as I'd like (now having said that, I can still slam out some bitchin' code when I feel like it – I just don't seem to feel like it as often as I did these days).
I dunno. Sometimes it feels like I'm so anxious about getting the 5-year plan mapped out that I'm missing the day-to-day fun stuff. Thoughts about having kids, buying a house, staying in the UK or going back to Canada post-EBI, yada yada are sometimes a bit heavy going.
I sometimes wish I could somehow throw my hands in the air, say sod it all and take a reality break for a few weeks. I dunno, just hop on a plane with Katy for a long trip just the two of us, and no other worries.
But then reality kicks back in and tells me that I need to get this new code into production before the end of the week.
Yay.
It's finally published!
The Protein Identifier Cross-Reference (PICR) service: reconciling protein identifiers across multiple source databases
Richard G Cote, Philip Jones, Lennart Martens, Samuel Kerrien, Florian Reisinger, Quan Lin, Rasko Leinonen, Rolf Apweiler and Henning Hermjakob
BMC Bioinformatics 2007, 8:401doi:10.1186/1471-2105-8-401
Published: 18 October 2007
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/8/401/abstract
Back at work
Ireland was wonderful and I'll write about it later as I have pages and pages of trip notes to blog about. I did not bring a laptop with me (shocking!) nor did I have access to anything even remotely networked. Best thing, I only thought about my email twice (once to remark that I hadn't checked it in over a week and once more to inform Katy about said incredible fact).
The flip side of this, of course, is having over 400 emails in my inbox this morning :)
Now that's interesting…
I've just had a phone call from a headhunter. Apparently, somebody has given them a glowing referral about my software engineering skills and they'd like to talk to me about opportunities in the London-based banking software engineering field. They're going to call me later on tonight to talk about it.
In a word, buh???
Slowly losing my mind
I'm really not into it today and my mind is going. Stop Dave! What are you doing, Dave? I can't let you do that Dave…
Ever since I've been at the office, I keep wanting to do stuff, and then completely forget what it is I wanted to do in the first place. It's highly annoying.
Blogging from the loo
Sometimes I'm such a nerd, I scare myself.
What do you do when you *really* want to check your email because you've not had a chance to do it all day but you *really* need to go powder your nose?
You take your wireless laptop with you, of course.
Sad, sad man I am. Having said that, I'm sure that among my readers I'm not the only person to have ever done so.
In other news, good news for a change.
I came back from a wii session in the Sanger shared facilities conference room this morning to find that I had a plain brown enveloppe waiting for me at home. Opening said enveloppe revealed a short letter and a handwritten cheque. It seems that the Home Office has refunded my failed passport application. This is more confusing that it seems, as it's written in big bold letters on the application form that refused applications will not be reimbursed. That's why I was so pissed when it first got refused, over a month ago. I so wasn't expecting this (and neither was Katy – her reply being “Since when has the government decided to be nice?”).
I'm guessing that it's a spin-off effect of my “pseudo” diplomatic visa. In any case, I'm not complaining and it's £335 that's going straight in the piggy bank.
Went into town to go pay that cheque in and send off my grandfather's 100th birthday gift. The old coot has been saying that he won't make it through the winter for the last 40 years and now he's going to receive a letter from the Queen :)
Now I'm back home alone save for the cat. Katy is in Derby (pronounced Daaaaaaaaaarby – the 'r' being optional even) to visit Rita. The cat is being shockingly nice. He's jumped on the bed this morning and butted me in the face demanding fuss. He's jumping on the couch to sit on my leg and watch the snooker world championships. He's climbing on the coffee table to stretch and put his paws on my stomach to beg for fuss.
Somebody has clearly doppelgangered our cat, but I'm not complaining. He did however finally kill Katy's plant that, frankly, had been slowly dying of neglect on the windowsill in any case. It did require some impromptu vacuuming lest he be tempted to use the soil on the carpet as a room-sized litter box but it's a small price to pay if he remains such a nice cat.
And now, Daleks!
EXTERMINATE!!!!