Amethyst's Shiny Pebbles

It's a slow day at work today.  Our boss is out of town.  Normally, she'd send us an email with a list of what DNA samples to start on the sequencing process, but we haven't seen anything from her.  Or some of the sequencing machines would need tending, but everything's just humming along, doing its thing.  And half the network drives (which contain data that I could analyze) are out of commission for some computer-y reason.

I've already gone for a long lunch with a friend.  I probably shouldn't just disappear for the remainder of the day, but I'm certainly taking suggestions as to things I could do while remaining here at work...

(This sort of thing happens from time to time.  It's all right; we're probably going to get hammered next week once my boss is back.  It all works out.)

Bad: Area of itchy red slightly hurty area increased again since last night.

Good: I have a doctor's appt to get it looked at this afternoon.

Bad: This makes today really complicated, workwise.

Good: I got confirmation that Other Professor and Person Making Hiring Decision really do want to hire me!!!  More on this later when I have time to post about it, prolly tonight.

Program Coordinator
1A4 – Non Exempt
Simbios, the National Center for Physics-Based Simulation of Biological Structures in the School of Engineering at Stanford, is a large interdisciplinary, multi-institution national center with many moving parts and we are looking for an experienced, flexible, and diplomatic administrator to help us coordinate them. This will involve a wide range of tasks, and the successful applicant will have both high-level skills and a willingness to do what’s needed. Under general supervision, you will independently manage multiple responsibilities and projects as assigned, and help support and coordinate the activities of Simbios faculty, staff, postdoctoral fellows, and students mostly at Stanford but also at other institutions. You will work closely with our Director of Dissemination to help manage our interactions with our many outside users and help administer the grant.
Key duties, which involve a significant degree of independence and accuracy, include: maintain websites, prepare and arrange reimbursements, pay invoices, obtain supplies, manage external correspondence, provide phone support, schedule meetings, assist with conference/event/workshop planning, videotape events and post them on the web, make travel arrangements, and assist with grant preparation and submission.
In addition, you will provide post-award grants management for the center, which is supported by a $10.6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). You will be responsible for tracking, monitoring, reconciling, and resolving discrepancies with this grant. Specific tasks include but are not limited to reviewing and ensuring PI certification of expenditure statements, preparing customized reports for PIs and other managers as requested, and using various management reporting tools to accomplish these tasks.

Minimum of 3 years directly related work experience as an administrative associate

• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills with professional manner
• Excellent organizational and project management skills
• Good time management skills with ability to track deadlines
• Ability to multitask effectively and deal positively with interruptions
• Strong computer skills with experience in MS Word, Excel, Power Point and the use of email
• Ability and willingness to learn how to update our website, manage on-line registrations and surveys, and perform other routine web-related tasks.
Education:
• Two year degree required, Bachelor’s degree preferred.
Desired skills:
• Experience in maintaining web pages and video editing highly desired. Working knowledge of HTML is helpful
• Experience with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator
• Experience in research administration of federal and non-federal grants and contracts
• Knowledge and proficiency in fund accounting concepts, especially university practices

Link to position here.  Or contact Huz.

I seem to be posting with an average frequency of about once a week these days.  All that means, really, is that life is not hectic/stressful enough for me to post about it (which is good), nor is it exciting enough for me to post about it Right This Instant, which frankly is also fine.  That's not to say that some good things haven't happened; they're just more everyday kinds of good things than, say, the day a cousin who'd grown fond of my parents gave each member of my family the maximum allowable gift one can give without triggering the gift tax.  (That was a number of years ago.  But I was so astounded when my mom called me to tell me about it that I blurted it out to everyone who happened to be in the room at the time, which included a handful of guests.)

( The usual: sick bad, work good, recent purchases )

• Huz is back!  We are both pleased.

• Many many thanks to nezumiko , who let me hang out with her Thursday night and Friday during the day.  It was awesome and excellent, and we need to do it again sometime.

• Thanks also to orichalcum  and cerebralpaladin , who were kind enough to let me come over Wednesday night.  Really, it was as much for their sake as for my cats' that I didn't spend the night, much as Mac might have liked me to.

• Rest in peace, Christopher Booth (icyjumbo on the Librivox forums).  You were a brave, funny man who wrote eloquently about living with cancer on your blog, A Mammoth Undertaking.  I am grateful that you were not just functional but able to enjoy activities and friends until such a relatively short time before the end.  May God bless you and be with your wife Gillian as she mourns you.

• Congratulations to the Choice of Broadsides team in getting a nice critical mention in the Guardian!

• Crystal Bearers is growing on me, at least some.  The camera, while annoying, is manageable: I'm getting used to nubbing the D-pad as I move to orient things properly.  The save business isn't actually so bad: in addition to the scattered Save Points, the game autosaves pretty much every time you enter a new area.  This generally means that your saves aren't more than 10-15 minutes apart, depending on how fast you cover ground and how much time you spend noodling around playing (for example) the requisite fishing minigame.  (It would still be really nice to just have the option of saving anywhere!)  No... If I could change any single thing about the game, after ~3 hours in, I'd add a map.  No map = really really annoying and easy to get turned around in Hyrule Field - oops, I mean the Wildlands - and in cities.

• Done with going to Berkeley for the moment.  Sure I'll be back in another couple of weeks with a new batch of clones to sequence.  Yay?

Hmm, I don't seem to be posting all that much...

I've been busy!  Work continues to be very busy - I'm in the middle of a spin-off project from the interactome that should be really interesting if the results come out cleanly.  I'm also working on The Interactome Part II/III: working on extracellular proteins that have LRRs, FnIIIs, and other interesting domains.  I haven't started cloning yet (waiting for our collaborators to do primer design and synthesis), but I've been toiling away looking at domain boundaries for some of those 'other' domains - there's a quite large list of the things - and determining whether our collaborator has usable clones.  Yeah, I know it sounds like technobabble; sorry 'bout that.

The past weekend was really nice (apart from the &^#!&%! California poplar tree in our neighbor's yard, which goes into bloom about now every year and which produces copious amount of pollen to which I am horrendously allergic).  We had skating class for the first time in about three weeks on Saturday, and did things both useful and pleasant the rest of the day, including getting the rear driver door of my car fixed such that it locks along with the rest of the doors when it's supposed to.  (Metroid Prime ice beam, you are mine now!)  Sunday we went to the early bird showing of Toy Story 3-3D.  We really enjoyed it - I want more of the hedgehog! - though, like ladybird97 , I would be very cautious about what small children to bring to it, for the same almost-incredibly-traumatic scene near the end.  I have to admit, I'd really wondered whether Pixar would find anything new to say or do in this world... and, well, they did.  They're brilliant.  It was a little weird coming out of the movie at 1 PM and realizing we had the entire rest of the day to do with as we liked/needed.

What else?  I've started a new solo project over at Librivox.  It feels great to FINALLY  be recording again, after literally months of not doing so.  (I think the last time I'd made a recording before this past weekend was back in very early March, before the whole recent series of adventures started.)   We have an upcoming D&D game with cerebralpaladin  and co. this weekend.  I'm almost finished writing thank-you notes for Important People who came to Mom's memorial service last month.  There's still buckets of things I need to take care of that got shoved into the "After June" category: dentist appt, doctor's appt (annual checkup), calling United to get into my electronic account info, learning to drive a stick shift, calling a lawyer to formally put wills together... 

But it doesn't all have to be done today.  'Specially since it's our 14th wedding anniversary.  No, we're not doing anything much special today; the New Zealand trip was our anniversary gift this year.  But as noted, I am eternally grateful to and in love with my Huz, for everything he does and everything he is for me.  <3

Huz is on his way to Edinburgh for a conference!  All very exciting, yes.  His original flight schedule: leave SFO at ~1 PM, arrive at Newark and have a 45-minute connection time for his international flight.

We were nothing short of astounded this AM when we found a phone message from someone at Continental informing him that a lot of flights getting into the Newark/New York area were being delayed 'cuz of weather and requesting that he allow them to switch him to another flight out of SFO that left a good two hours earlier.  He called back, the itinerary was changed, all was well and good.  His new flight out was delayed by half an hour, but no biggie - as he said this morning, he'd rather wait around in the Newark airport when he didn't have to worry about missing further connections.

All that preparation came to no good, though.  The plane that the group will be flying out on is en route from Florida, nearly FIVE HOURS late.  (I think this was not the original plane they meant to depart on, but I don't know what happened to that plane.  Maybe giant penguins hijacked it to Antarctica.)

Huz's Edinburgh flight is scheduled to depart just shy of four hours later than originally planned.

He will have spent over 6 hours hanging about in the Newark airport.  Poor guy!

And to top things off, his NexusOne seems to have bricked - it won't turn on when he presses the power button.  :( 

Here's hoping the rest of his trip goes better than this first bit has.

• This has been a pretty busy work week-and-a-bit.  After some initial kerfuffle with the cells we needed to transfect, we started The Transfection Part only a few days later than originally scheduled.  With one person being responsible for maintaining, splitting, and aliquoting cells, and two of us doing the transfections, we got through all 264 transfections in the projected time.  And early Western results show that we're getting good expression of the proteins we're trying to make.  Yay!  We will be able to embark on the actual screen for novel binding partners within the Ig superfamily (IgSF) within Drosophila sometime next week.

• Huz is on the last section of Metroid Prime, having defeated Meta Ridley with the help of a walkthrough.  I am nowhere near done, being just about ready to get the Heat Visor.

• Tried out the demo for Miles Edgeworth last night.  Walking around to examine things feels kind of klunky - at least using the interface they had in the demo.  But the story and characters look to be their usual crazy, marvelous selves.  (Who knew Edgeworth was a fanboy of the Steel Samurai?)  Will keep my eyes open for a used copy.

• Speaking of which, someone thought it would be a good idea to write a musical using the characters and concepts of the Phoenix Wright games.  Youtube of the first segment of the musical is here.  Weirdness: all the characters seem to be played by females -- eh, whatever.  From the little bit that I've seen (the equivalent of the 'intro' section of one of the cases), I can't tell whether it's any good or not.

• Our New Zealand trip is coming right up!  I went and got new sneakers today. At least I have that concern out of my mind now.

• We have a bunch of Meyer lemons, thanks to a labmate of mine.  Meyer lemon bars for D&D tomorrow!

• Prices on airfare to NZ are climbing.  I picked the wrong week for the condo; have emailed the owner asking if the same days the previous week (when tix for our desired itinerary are a good $1000 cheaper for the two of us combined) are available.  Fingers crossed!

• The SF Bay Bridge is broken.  Thank goodness nobody was seriously injured.  I wonder when it will be reopened?  Thank heavens I'm not trying to commute to the East Bay, but I'm really sorry for everyone who normally uses that bridge.

• Bah, silly minor cold-thing.  Not even really symptomatic, just tired and muzzy.  No fever, and scratchy throat.  NOT H1N1.  

• Bah, work stuff (contamination of cell cultures the last couple of times, failure to construct a couple of rather important vectors.  We'll get it, it's just taking too long.

Ganked from orichalcum , mostly for the benefit of the portion of my friendslist that doesn't overlap with hers:

Dead fish lights up when shown pictures of humans, a study that shows that neuroimaging experiments can give a lot of false positives.

----

In other work-related news:

• We've begun the Big Project that I've been making stuff for, like, a year for!  On a practical level, this means that I do pretty much the same physical actions day after day for probably about the next month and a half, doing a gazillion transfections.  It's tiring, believe me.

• It's nice to have a perfectly sensible explanation as to why a particular cloning didn't work.  It helps to have both enzymes functional in a double digest, just for example.