An Exercise in Irrelevance

Well, things have improved somewhat. We have notice from the bank that the hearing will now no longer go ahead, which suggests that the landlord has paid. Also, British Gas came and fixed our heating; it took a long time to work out, but this consisted of turning a valve that the first plumber had switched off, back on again.

It’s all pretty tiresome.

Originally published on my old blog site.

I’ve never been here before. but I like it. The Scandinavian countries all seem lovely. They are understated, quiet and have an effortless beauty about them. It’s a wonderful place; the sort of place that I would love to spend some time in, even if all the road signs are incomprehensible. If I could afford to spend more time here, then I probably would.

Now it’s late, so time to sleep.

Originally published on my old blog site.

Today, we have neuroinformatics meets bioinformatics. I’ve been looking forward to this; unfortunately, I’m feeling a bit washed out having slept badly. I went to be at 10ish (I was tired!) and went to sleep at 2ish. The room was too hot and, by bad design, I left my melatonin at home so I lack even chemical solutions.

We’ve started off with a talk by Ed Lein from the Allen Brain Atlas. Lots and lots of gene expression analysis!

Originally published on my old blog site.

I’ve started to give bazaar a go in anger; my hope was that I could get the offline advantages of RCS, with a newer system (renaming and such like) as well as something that works for collaboration.

The emacs support is a bit primitive yet. There is a vc-bzr.el, though, so I tried this but it didn’t work. This turned out to be because it doesn’t work with cygwin out of the box. I’ve tried the windows version and it all seems to behave nicely. But it doesn’t understand symlinks which is a major pain — I need those symlinks!

Life can be hard at times.

Originally published on my old blog site.

So far, we’ve had two talks, one from David Essen, one from Mary Kennedy. A nice bit of organisation because they have jumped scales — the first was mostly about brain gross anatomy and the second about molecular modelling.

A bit like it’s forerunner — databasing the brain — there is not that much informatics here. The keynotes have been very much about the neuroscience; this makes it both novel and interesting for me, although fairly heavy going at times.

It confirms my feeling that neurosinformatics is much less mature than bioinformatics; it’s not really a separate discipline yet. Not that this is a bad thing; I’ve been at bioinformatics conferences where the "bio" seems barely relevant. If I am honest about it, I think more about computers these days and sometimes forget the point — understanding life — although I guess this is inevitable working in a computer science department. Less mature is another phrase for new, young and fresh. It feels good to be in this environment.

Originally published on my old blog site.

Ah, off to a conference again. Depressingly on saturday, so the airport is heaving. I’m going to Neuroscience 2008 which is a new one to me, in Stockholm which is also new. I’m taking a poster which seems distressingly old. Been a long time since I’ve done this. It’s already been a struggle — some of my colleagues didn’t like it; I think because neuroscientists tend toward lots of text, while I do a light-weight, advert-style, if-you-want-more-details-read-the-paper form of poster. And I hate travelling with a poster; it’s hard to replace your belt while carrying a bag and an A0 poster tube. My subconscious tried to leave it at a Starbucks in Schipol, but my better judgement forced me to go back for it.

I’m not in the best of moods: my toe, which I appear to have broken is nothing but a a dull ache and I was frozen on the flight having got a bath between the terminal at Newcastle and the plane. Still the conference should be fun.

Originally published on my old blog site.