Boston

As the title says, survived the first week - not that it was at all hard.  I think I'm going to like my new role at the Crystal Lab (a.k.a. The Laboratory of Structural Cell Biology) located at the Harvard Medical School (BCMP - Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, CMCD - Center for Molecular and Cellular Dynamics) and the Boston Children's Hospital.  Though, technically I work for HHMI - Howard Hughes Medical Institute.  Hereafter, all of this will be referred to as "The Crystal Lab".  Part of the first week was just to get a grasp of where I was and am and will be. 

Suffice it to say, it's a impressive group of various post-docs who run around like worker bees.  My role in all of this is to maintain the group's several insect cell cultures (Hi5 and SF21) and other more general laboratory support.  What happens in the lab - in a nutshell from what I understand so far - is that they take these cells as well as those from bacterial and/or yeast cultures to produce various complex protein structures which are crystalized and studied further.  This is done via viral infection, transfection, and all a matter of other means - the scope of which I have yet to learn.  In addition, a few of the postdocs are working on structures imitating various diseases sans viral component (Dengue, Malaria).  All of this super charged research work needs some form of support, which I'm happy to be the one to provide.

Also, at the moment getting trained.  The training wheels come off at the end of the month - hopefully I'll be able to integrate myself smoothly so that nothing gets disrupted!

Other perks to working in an academic environment are the various talks (though somewhat over my head) on related research topics as well as the free pizza and drinks.  It seems an appropriate bribe on a Friday at noon. 

The atmosphere is generally relaxed and because some of the work is of a repetitious nature (an onslaught of not so random pipetting, see picture) or a scheduled nature as in cell culture work - this means that although I may be a bit physically tired at the end of the day, my mind is by no means appeased.  As a result, I'm happy and hoping to pursue all the rest of my favourite pursuits.  So the novel writing will continue as well as the on-going Drupal work.  I'm giving myself two weeks to get used to the change in routine before setting any major goals.  In the meantime, working my way through Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, & Steel. 

Starting work in a position in Prof. Stephen Harrison's lab at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) in Boston.  I'm looking forward to getting my hands dirty again and to be in the thick of things.  The last 6 months doing freelance has had its ups and downs and all in all I find that I'm more suited to a semi-structured life of working by day, and superhero freelance geek by night.  The writing will continue as will the web developing. 

Maya is taking the news well considering we have recently obtained a spacious palacial crate to contain her destructive tendancies for when we're gone.  Our local dog walker is also probably thrilled at the news - as the little pampered princess suddenly gets more walks than she did when I was home all day!

Steph is the one taking it the hardest.  His first question, "Will you still be making most of the dinners?", told me exactly where his priorities lay.  That said, he's very happy as long as I'm happy.  That I am.  Now, if only I could pry his latest new Mac away from him so that we can spend some time together! 

The trip to Toronto was a grand success.  Months of anti-social behaviour were quickly remedied with a bit too much socializing which left me completely giddy and spinning from trying to do too much in too little time.  I'm sorry to say I didn't manage to catch up with Kushan or Pat (who did make the effort).  I also am sorry to have experienced rush hour traffic on a Thursday night in Toronto before a long weekend - never again!  I was very happy to have caught up with Karen and her little Maya (a human baby, and a mighty cute one at that!).  As well as to have spent time with the still prego Eun-Ah.  I was most happy to finally meet and hang out with two of our family friends who are recently engaged (to two other people).  Three weddings coming up in the distant future if you count Pat!

Driving back and forth is no holiday - Though driving through Vermont is absolutely breath taking - but we do plan to come down to Toronto more often.  At the moment work comes first.. and then we'll see how it all goes!

Time flies when you're having fun! 

• We bought our first furniture together... (I learnt about buying beds!)
• We bought our first used car
• We bought our second bread maker

And since I'm still unemployed, I made my husband an Artisan style Foccaccia bread and carrot & lentil soup for dinner.  True, it only took me 5 minutes to put all the ingredients together and to put the dough in the bread maker (5 hours kneading/sitting) AND the soup only took around 1/2 hour to make (but he doesn't know it! Ok, maybe he does.)

Either way, life is good and we are lucky to have met a really nice bunch of people while here.  I'm still sad from time to time for having left Europe and for not being in Toronto BUT am happy to still be keeping in touch with friends and family from all over. 

And Maya is the best thing EVER! :D

Its not the easiest thing to be in a new town without the company of your nearest and dearest. Steph is off in Washington at the 8th Int. Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2009).  I'm very proud of his work and support him as I can.  The coolest thing is that RDFa is now a part of Drupal7 core - which makes Drupal that much more competitive in the market at large as it takes its first steps into the next generation of the web. 

In the meantime, I attended Dries Buytaert's talk at MIT last night with all the Drupalgangers in the Boston area and a few who came from as far away as Montreal!  Granted, they were already in town on business - but was very happy to make new acquaintances.  Drupal is now the CMS of choice for the white house website - again, showing this is no small thing to be a part of!

In other news, Maya succeeded in staying home alone for 45 minutes without destroying anything.  That said, when I left her alone later that night for several hours - I came home to find one or two things chewed up and a tissue box in ruins.  Today, she was back to being crated.  Slowly but surely I hope she'll overcome her separation anxiety. 

Lisa was great company to me last night and this morning as we traded advice over crépes - I'm yet to improve my recent blog entries on patching.  We also made a visit to Charleston & Bunker Hill via bus.  My first time doing any type of sight-seeing in Boston! 

Its hard to keep inspired and motivated - but as Scarlett would say, Tomorrow is another day!

Highlights c/o Flickr

At my first Drupal Boston meet up - lightening presentations by Christefano, Peter, Ed, Kelley, Erik, Jake, Scor,  & Dave.

Christefano & Lee (a Drupal husband and wife team) started off talking about a Drupal-based facebook-like site for kids featuring facial recognition.  http://whatswhat.me

For kids who are 8 to 14.  Separation of kids by school, by age, by groups - allowing for more protection and control of what and who they are accessing. 

The question was - how do you ensure there are no adults pretending to be kids?  Their answer - facial recognition to determine whether you are who you are.  The interface works seemlessly.  The baseline photo is taken every six months to ensure it still matches the growing child.  (It works by 1. Recognize face 2. Match face)  Things that cause problems - Lighting can cause it to fail.  Hats and glasses. Smiling and teeth. Pictures are screened for adults by administrators & moderators causing a secure playground for kids.

Peter talked about drush on a PC - a command line interface for drupal (scor already introduced me to this one for MAC!).  It can be a little involved to get it working on a PC and so he's looking for some volunteers with PCs to help test it. 

Ed started a good conversation - Imagecache and the FCKeditor - How to add your own styles to the WYSIWYG editor - assigning different toolbars to different users.  He opened the fckeditor.config.js file and edited as he wanted.  (But this can also be done via Drupal directly). CKeditor is the new version of FCKeditor.  Using WYSIWYG you can connect input filters by role and better formats.  There's a libraries module that handles this. 

Imagecache is an invaluable tool.  Allows you to assing presets to the image.  You can sharpen, crop, etc. Its like having a lightweight photoshop tool on the Drupal server itself allowing for live editing of the image.  This will be part of core in Drupal 7.  Paired with image resize filter is said to be amazing.

Kelley is working on a site for a non-profit - Mass alliance on teen pregnancy.  The issue is one of taxonomy versus menus.  As well about how to layout blocks versus existing layout.  Suggestions included pre-populate module... Views paired with Panels... context module with menus... menu block... already being used is footer map (but with some problems).  Taxonomy blocks... views combined with blocks.  So lots of potential solutions and as usual with Drupal - many ways to make things work.

Erik asked a question of grouping of taxonomy.  Unfortunately, my attention span drifted and I lost the gist of the discussion.  Views_embed_view/Views_pre_render.  Actually, this is way over my head. 

Jake asked a concept question - trying to determine the benefit of being involved in the Drupal community - interested in creating a standard format conference/meetup model for the quick and efficient advertisement of upcoming camps and meetups.  This was also brought up at the Drupalcon Paris (Benjamin, Stella, Heather, etc.).

Scor declared himself as a Drupal developer as opposed to site-builder.  Patching... simpletest... here we go off the deep end!  (At least he's not talking about RDF again! As his wife I'm allowed to complain).   Uh.. well, he snuck it in as an intro!  He showed us how to review patches... and what is a patch too. He also showed us what a test is and how to test it on Drupal core. Dreditor - Drupal editor. 

Dave talked about imagecache_actions and other extensions to imagecache.  imagecache_customaction

So ended a good session - looking forward to going home and getting my dinner!