Caturday!

There are a lot of stray dogs in Buenos Aires, it seems. Today I saw a stray cat. It was different.

I also saw some young boys teasing a little girl until she cried. It was not very different (just in Spanish.) So it goes.

So, I have been given my own office space at work, which is cool. It's in a common room for graduate students, there's five of us in there, but there's plenty of space (the room is really big, we could easily fit 3 more people). I've got a corner desk and a computer, which gives me the best set-up of any of the students here, since everyone else is doing experimental work (as opposed to in silico simulation work), so they have to wait for machines and equipment and spend a lot of time waiting. I spend a lot of time doing nothing too, but at least it's not because I'm waiting to use equipment.

On the other hand, there is a slight problem with my setup. I do all of my simulation work using Matlab's SimBiology package, which is not installed on my system, so I use the lab server's copy by accessing it remotely. Except that the network is heavily firewalled and there's a lot of information going back and forth when I do, well, anything. Plus, I swear the network relys on a single photon laser to communicate it's information, it goes so slow. And by slow, I mean glacial, opening a menu takes 5+ minutes!

Luckily the problem is solely in the network, so I was able to circumvent the issue by running matlab through the command-line in the UNIX terminal. Which means I have to set-up my simulations hard-core programmer style, but honestly I kinda like it. It'll give me more familiarity with UNIX (more or less, it's still mostly matlab), and I'm learning Matlab much better this way.

On another note, a tree fell on the truck in front of my bus the other night coming home. Seriously, we were in traffic and, at least from my perspective, the tree just suddenly fell over onto the truck in front of us. It was wild.

Also, I found this great pizza place less than a block from my apartment. It's this tiny place with three guys who make pizzas and such, and is really great (also, cheap!). They seem to be amused to have an American who doesn't speak spanish in the place, and the one guy who makes the pizzas likes to try to teach me some basic spanish as it relates to pizza making. It's kinda cool.

Okay, all for now.
-J