motorboat’s diet, merle, and the new new job

this week in seattle…
i started my new job. its so awesome! and daunting. i can do anything i want to do, within the scope of the lab. which is a lot more freedom to investigate things that interest me than i had in the past. but also, its all incumbent upon me to pick interesting questions with the potential for growth. its been very exciting to delve into a completely new area of immunolgy, but talk about feeling behind the 8 ball! its like i’m a first year grad student all over again. i feel really slow. but all my lab mates are helping me catch up. and my new boss (also named mike) has suggested one preliminary experiment that suits something i already know how to do. so that should give me a place to start.

also, joe release merle, his erlang memcached client. memcached is is a useful way to speed up applications & web servers because it retains lists of things in the RAM memory of a computer, instead of putting them on the hard drive. his program interfaces with memcached in erlang (a new computer language). seems like people are excited about it. joe is excited that it works!

and motorboat went on a diet. he’s fat and he loves to eat. so this diet thing is actually kind of difficult, considering mira’s proclivity to graze all day. anything she leaves behind he vacuums up like a pig. so we have to put down breakfast & dinner separately, and now he gets locked in the bathroom for meal times. poor big football-shaped duder-cat.

finally, we’ve been watching “the elegant universe” all about the history of physics & development of string theory. cause working on open source elang & immune complex-mediated antigen presentation projects doesn’t make us big enough dorks.