This is completely awesome. I don’t have an iPhone, and I haven’t really considered getting one anytime soon, but this made me have a temporary change of heart. Too bad I won’t have any patients for the next few years. Maybe someone should write an app for keeping track of blots.

A and I got a dog. He is probably the coolest dog in the world. We got him from a rescue shelter on the west side of Chicago, who themselves picked him up from a kill facility the day before he was scheduled to be put down. After an initial visit and a week’s worth of incredibly pestering emails to their adoption coordinator (look at him—we didn’t want someone else to swoop in and adopt him before us), we picked him up. Hey, if his previous owners didn’t want him, we’re more than happy to take him off their hands.

At any rate, meet Charles Tastic O’Hara (may also respond to Charlie, Chuck, Charles Tizzle, Chucky-T et cetera): (more…)

The MacBook Pro arrived, after a long and painful waiting period, a week ago today, and I’ve spent considerable time playing around with it and setting it up to my liking. It’s gorgeous. The screen is so bright that I can only keep it on its full brightness setting in a dark room for several seconds before my eyes start hurting; in full daylight, the brightness eliminates most of the glare on the screen’s surface. It’s quite snappy too, which has been great for manipulating the 20 or so journal articles and sequences and browser windows I have open most of the time.

Perhaps the best thing about it so far is the size of the screen, on which I’ve found I can read two pages of a journal article side-by-side in Preview. This is extremely useful, especially for articles in Cell, for example, which commonly publishes figures several pages away from its corresponding text, making for a difficult on-computer read typically. On this setup, I can read a given portion of text and look at its figure three pages ahead on the same screen, avoiding the need for constant scrolling back and forth and relocating one’s place. Small detail, but incredibly convenient and, ultimately, both time- and paper-saving.

Other really cool things, even unexpectedly so, are the ability to scroll and right-click using only the trackpad, which also saves a whole lot of time and prevents the need to find the scroll bar every time I want to move down a page.

Very cool. My life is so much better now. Anyone in the market for a 12″ Powerbook?

1. That, although it’s within a highly regarded and technologically advanced hospital, wireless internet, more or less, does not exist. When it does, it’s bootlegged off someone else’s network, not the University’s, and it’s colicky, oscillating in and out in intervals lasting between 15 seconds and 15 minutes. This makes Pubmed searches extraordinarily difficult. The hospital cites “financial reasons” for remaining medieval.
2. That the room I work in is as hot or hotter than our warm room, which is kept at a steady 37°C, or 98.6°F, and provides one with a blast of 25 extra degrees of suntasticness upon entering from the hallway. I literally went into the warm room today to see which was hotter—the warm room or the main room itself—and in doing so I cooled off. The governing thermostat, which may actually be the prototype thermostat back from when air conditioning was invented, is set to 54°F, placing it squarely under the category of “broke-ass.”

Other than that, it’s a pretty cool place.