I continued my journey into the realm of attempting to label samples, and worked more and more on developing a technique to determine pathways or at least illuminate possible targets from a list of genes using gene ontology. crito, the SQL server spent most of the day crunching on a few million records that were entered into the database. Some of these are most likely duplicates, but hopefully I'll be able to figure them out sometime tomorrow.

After cooking and eating chorizo and eggs, I spent a little bit of time tweaking the new diary system for donarmstrong.com, which hopefully you'll be reading these entries from soon, and then wandered off to Dicky's. At Dicky's a group was starting to thspin old skool hip-hop/funk tracks before they started a live funk/jazz set that was pretty jamming. Dicky's is a nice intimate place, and it would have been nice to hear the crew on a real sound system, but still, it was definetly worth listening to.

I'm continuing reading the book of lost tales part one. Hopefully I get a bit farther into it before I cease thinking for this evening.

Discussed the new labelling methodoloyg with the scientific meeting at socratech way early this morning (well, early for me anyway). They seemed to like the concept, so it looks like we'll be able to roll it out, assuming we can get budgetary approval of the label printer. Have I mentioned yet that I hate justifying fundage? Just show me the money already!

I then spent the rest of the day at working alternating between trying to get GO Ontology's perl API to work and reading papers on Cholesterol and NMR. For some reason, they've coded the thing up like a bunch of twelfth graders. But whatever. It looks like it might become semi-usefull in a bit. Hopefully I'll be able to get that straightened out sometime tomorrow if someone else doesn't try to monopolize my time.

After a bit more reading, I came home and cooked up some chicken while continuing work on the new backend for donarmstrong.com. It's comming along swimingly, although, the diary section (arguably the most complex component) has a bit more work required before I'm ready to roll it on on donarmstrong.com. However, I did manage to get the ELikeUrls filter working in TemplateToolkit, and currently am working on getting the display_month function to be called correctly. [It displays the neat little calendars that everyone has become so used to seeing on my sites.]

I also managed to run across a copy of Design is Kinky, the book that I forgot I was looking for so long ago. But I have yet to order it, because it's from some stone age non-online store. [Well, sorta-online, but with a hard copy order process. I'll probably end up sending them a check in a bit.]

Tomorrow I should be able to get the diary stuff finished up enough to be able to post them on donarmstrong.com so you call can see whatever I've been up to.

Started out the day with yet another meeting, this time on the gene discovery at socratech, and discussed how the samples are going to be labeled along with the assays that are going to be run.

I spent most of the rest of the day working with gene ontology and with the sample insertion portion of hemlock, with a brief break for lunch at Pelligrinos, which has probably the best collection of subs in rochester.

The [http://www.lugor.org/|LUGOR] meeting was at 7P EST this evening, and I was late to it as usual. heard a bit about apt-get for redhat (blech) and then discussed various things with different people before talking about using spamassasin with spamc|d and milters within sendmail.

Dinner at my appartment with ye olde standard chicken and rice before spending the rest of the night working on the diary system. I've decided to chuck out support for the mini calendars in the diary section since it was making the page generation crawl.

I also answered a bunch of questions on #debian before calling it an evening.

Tomorrow I'll be playing at the Rocket Cafe on 171 Monroe from 6-11ish along with Mighty, Kevin, and whoever else shows up before I head over to tilt for bliss. Not sure who is playing at bliss, but hopefully it will be good.

Well, I finally rolled out the new system. There are a few bugs here and there, so if you find them, please e-mail me and I'll probably correct them. I'll also hopefully get around to sticking the source for this attrocious piece of ware up sometime too, so you can check it out.

I spent a good part of the day hacking on this site, but I took a break around 9P to go see Gangs of New York. Gangs of NY was a surprisingly decent film, although I perhaps wrongly expected much much more of Scorsese. At times the film was a bit more disjointed than it could be, with some scenes, while obviously intended to be distinct to impart the break in Amsterdam's emotions, were almost haphazardly strewn about. The soundtrack was also abysmal both in content, and in terms the mixdown, although the non-music portion of the audio track was spot on. DiCapro disapeared in his character, even though the love scenes in the movie were kind of childish.

All in all, it was a prety decent flick, and I enjoyed being forced to deploy the butcher at least initially, then beginning to see things from his point of view and pittying him, then once again disdaining his presence, and finally as he dies, identifying with his ultimate pitifullness and the tiny part he has to play in the life of New York around five points itself.

Anyway, hopefully things are working.

After reading a few of the articles linked from [http://boingboing.net|Boing Boing] about people living in [http://www.citypages.com/databank/18/849/article3322.asp|garbage dumps ne houses], I decided that it was high time to clean out my little studio. No, I'm not living in a moldy environment, but I'm a guy, and I tend to get a bit cluttered.

Then I spent some more time reading random things online, including checking out some new pictures on the [http://blogs.salon.com/0001437/|Reverse Cowgirl's Blog] of [http://gallery.donarmstrong.com/clippings/reverse_cowgirls_pictures|Hollywood Boulevard.] (Susannah Breslin consistently blogs some impressive things, and her appreciation of the oddball nature of Los Angeles is quite refreshing. Reminds me of how much I've been missing LA in the 6 months I've been away.)

Stubling around in my usual semi-awake stupor at the start of my day, I go to slice a bagel in half with a butter knife. Applying force as required to the handle and the bagel I proceed to slice it in half, almost all the way to the end. However, the last few milimeters of the bagel slipped by like butter and I soon found the knife wedged in my left hand. Ow. "What a great start to my day" I think, as I search for something to staunch the blood and chuck the now supiciously pliant bagel into the toaster. "I wonder what else the day has in store for me?"

As I run through sheets of toilet paper stained a beautiful red, I finish getting ready and manage to make a sandwich of something else besides blood. I go outside, clear 4 inches of snow of my valiant steed, and proceed to start on the slippery roads to work. As I reach work, panic strikes me. I seem to have forgotten my ID somewhere. Searching through my pockets, I hear a strange crackle and pop. Out of my left jacket pocket comes 4 pieces of my ID that was once whole. To my chagrin, an ID in 4 pieces doesn't operate the magstripe reader. Luckily, someone came upon me who had a key, and let me into the parking lot. "Well, that sucked. I wonder how the hell I'm going to get to the 6th floor with my busted ID card?"

So, I try my luck again at the elevator, and manage to ride it up to the 5th floor because someone called it, and stubled up the stairs to my little desk on the 6th. "At least I'm in the office now. Things won't deteriorate much here."

Luckily for me they didn't. Although in restrospect, it's not wise to tempt fate like that. I kept to myself, and completed the random things that required my eclectic expertise, and continued working on the various projects that I've gone on about at length.

You never know what sort of madness the day has in store, or the side effects a single choice might contain. The beginning of the day today, was one not unlike many others. I spent it working on problems that affect my research into many different areas. Progress was made upon them, in some areas progress that was unexpected.

Yet today, a subtle decision to go see a movie, obstensibly about orchids, brought with it a whole other side of life stories. A man struggling to find identity in his own pathetic little life, albiet in show business where no one really knows who he is exactly, finds himself rediscovering the life that he thought he lost through the resurgence of passion in those around him.

Obviously I was extremly impressed by Adaptation, one of the new filmes by Charlie Kaufman. If you haven't yet seen it, you definetly should.

I spent most of the day today working on implementing a procedure to determine the noise level present in the gene microarrays that we are using at socratech. I ended up implementing a method described in a paper by Rocke and Durbin in R. I've chucked the code up on [http://rzlab.ucr.edu/scripts/ma_error/|rzlab.ucr.edu]. Note that it works, but is not completely tested as of right now.

After leaving work, I went out to Dicky's Restaurant to listen to Chyna and Greg spin. Seems that I spend most tuesday evenings there playing pool and listening to awesome music.

Of course, I should definetly admit that I still suck at pool, but I am getting slightly better. At least, I can make shots from time to time.

Over the past 24 hours, an interesting set of threads has been going on in [http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel|debian-devel] and [http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal|debian-legal] about the possible inclusion of [http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/|mplayer] in Debian. Well, actually, it was much more of a flamewar that only occasionally touched on the actually inclusion, and spent more time dealing with anciliary name calling and pointless unreferenced performance information. Not like that is all that big of a surprise, considering the [http://216.239.57.100/search?q=cache:ma_D0T3sFhoC:mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-flame/2001-December/000160.html+mplayer+developers+flaming&hl=en&ie=UTF-8|track] [http://www.linuxworld.com/site-stories/2001/1214.mplayer.html|record] of [http://freshmeat.net/projects/mplayer/?topic_id=127%2C128|abuse] leveled at users.

So that was interesting, until it links to the thread get pasted to [http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/|mplayer's website], and then finally, [http://www.slashdot.org/|slashdot], and the hordes of trolls are unleashed upon debian-devel and debian-legal. One wonders what the ftp masters are going to do considering that the packages have been uploaded to incomming.

I spent the first part of work working on a set of figures that are going to go into a grant. Granted, they're not figures that I've developed the data for, so the figures are in powerpoint, word, and all sorts of other crappy formats. It's no surpise that people can't make their figures in something semi-intelligent like illustrator, and then export the figure into their word processor. Or even better, write like I do, and generate the figures appropriately, and then chuck them into LaTeX, so LaTeX can deal with moving the figures about and labeling them appropriately.

Oh well. They're only biologists, not physisists or mathematicians.

I also took care of my laundry for the first time in a long time, and spent some time checking out some random blogs out in the blogosphere. The [http://tardblog.com/|tard blog] dare I say it, is quite hilarious. It saddens me that the children involved in Riti Sped's stories have such crappy parental involvement, but at lesat the people who are helping to teach them are able to keep their sanity while providing amusement for the rest of us who are just normally retarded.

At work today I dealt with the final revisions to a set of figures for the grant that had to be fedex'ed out overnight. Not that big of a deal, but it took some time to make all of the corrections. I then spent the rest of the day dealing with random issues before heading home to pick up records before going to Rocket.

While at rocket, I met matt who was spinning when I walked in the door, along with Jerry who was there and a few other people. It was kind of chill and not particularly crowded until a band arrived at around 8 and began to setup for their set at 9. I closed out at around 8:50 and then helped jerry tear down his setup and brought it back to his place, where we ate dinner. I ended up playing Tom Clancy's current rainbow six style game for a bit, before we headed over to bliss.

At bliss, [http://gallery.donarmstrong.com/parties_clubs/bliss_01312003/bliss_james_revival_01312003.jpg|James Revival] was spinning some nice tracks, albiet a little bit harder and more chicago than I like [being a west-coast freak] but definetly banging. A whole bunch of people were there dancing their brains out, which is always good to see, although an even larger population of people were at the bar area away from the dancefloor watering themselves. Can you tell that I prefer people who dance?