Mr. Gregory Lane, Please Take a Bow

Okay, so today was another "meh" kind of day. I accomplished almost nothing at work today, simply because I had no real work to do. I mean, I fixed a small error in the model and added a second version with some different parameters, but nothing major. I mean, that all took me less than an hour. I spoke to Adrian about my work. He was telling me about his "ideas" for where we could go with our analysis. Apparently he has a lot. Which means little in the specifics department. Which means it's going to be a pain for me, because I am not a biochemist. I'm just the math guy. I do the modeling, not the science (not here, if we were doing combinatorics or physics or computer science even, sure, I could probably think up questions, but I am not a molecular biologist nor do I wish to be one. So it goes...) Anyway, I interpreted this as "you're going to be on a wild goose chase for a while". Hopefully I'll just get to work on writing code for some software tools or something. Hell, that'd be better than a paper if I apply to grad school in CS, which is what I'm thinking these days (I mean, I like theoretical computer science and machine learning, goddamit, I wrote a paper in cryptography!)

Okay, work complaints aside, it wasn't all that bad a day. I fixed the toilet and found an irish pub. Okay, less found, more realized that my bus stop is actually in front of an irish pub. So today I worked up the courage to go in alone (usually I have someone who can interpret for me). So worth it. I had popcorn (apparently the argentine equivalent of free bar snacks?) and three pints of guiness. The guiness was expensive, but oh so worth it. I've been dying for a drink from home, and this was just what I needed.

Anyway, getting to the title of the post, I'd really like to thank my stepdad here for taking the time to teach me valuable life skills like finding good wine and fixing basic plumbing problems. My roommate is totally useless when it comes to things like the toilet is busted, and given that I speak no (useful) spanish, it really comes in handy to know a few basics about plumbing and other household handyman kind of issues. I may not be that good, but at least I can survive a clogged toilet in Argentina!

JC