Regular readers of this blog, of which there are none, will no doubt have noticed the long gap since I last posted. I’ve generally been a fairly frequent poster, but it’s been nearly two months since my last. Well, I’ve been busy. So, what has happened?

Northern Rock Cyclone: So, after a reasonable amount of training, I managed to do the middle distance race which was 62 miles long. If you add in the distance from my house to the start and back, this was 68 miles in one go. Okay, at 12 mph, it’s a bit of a trundle, but I felt good about doing it. If I can speed things up a bit, then I might try for the 100 next year.

Brewery Demolition: I saw explosive demolition of the old Brewery. Had a great view from from over the road at St James’ Park. On film, buildings always fall down majestically; the brewery wasn’t like that. We heard to countdown from the security guy’s radio, then there was a flash of deep red light from the bowels of the building. Then it fell down. No majestic collapse, the building just fell to the ground. The dust rose up and swirled around in the brisk wind. Finally, it cleared and there was a pile of rubble. Deeply scary.

InstantSOAP: This was my first independent research project. It was only a year long, but because of a big gap in the middle, it finally finished in a short while ago. I ended up doing a reasonble amount of the documentation for it, and I’ve started to repurpose it for my neuroinformatics project, Carmen. It’s basically an easy way of doing web services; I have it doing R now. It’s being trialed out in a user tutorial in a few weeks.

Houses: I’ve moved houses, and am now living in St Peters Wharf. It’s really nice. It nestles in between the river, an industrial estate, a waste recovery centre (that’s a tip to you and me), and Walker.

Bio-Ontologies: I’m on my way to Toronto for ISMB and my SIG, bio-ontologies. We’ve gone against the main conference this year and, yet, registrations are up. I feel good about this.

Anyway, with that lot combined I’ve been far to busy to write blog posts. Hopefully, they’ll get a bit more regularly again.

Originally published on my old blog site.