Nota bene

Posted on August 23, 2011 by Cath@VWXYNot?

“It is disrespectful to the speaker to show up to a lab meeting – especially one at which a student is giving a practice presentation for an upcoming comprehensive exam and has specifically asked for feedback – without a pen, paper, laptop, tablet, or any other means of taking notes. It signals that you’re only there because you have to be, and that you have no expectation of learning anything useful or interesting, or of contributing any feedback”.

Discuss.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

(Too busy for real posts. Grant season. One grant going in on Friday, two on September 15th, one on October 3rd, two on October 15th. See you at Hallowe’en).

Posted in career, grant wrangling, rants, science | 26 Comments

SNAFU

Posted on August 18, 2011 by Cath@VWXYNot?

Posted without comment

Note URL...

Posted in grant wrangling, silliness, technology | 17 Comments

The EndNote is nigh

Posted on August 16, 2011 by Cath@VWXYNot?

First of all, many thanks to all of you who commented on my last post. My mother-in-law isn’t out of the woods yet, but is taking baby steps in the right direction. We’re all gradually exhaling and trying to adjust to our “new normal”, which for me involves reclaiming at least some of my usual blogging and other online time, which I need if I’m going to retain my sanity!

And so, with no further ado, on with the usual grant deadline day software screenshots and rants!

EndNote, this time. (It’s not my fault; everyone uses EndNote at work, and so I have no other choice).

Now, when EndNote and Word both feel like playing nicely together, it’s not the world’s worst set-up. However, when hustling to consolidate all six latest versions of the proposal text in time for the 5pm deadline, playing nicely goes straight out the window and a full-on playground fight tends to break out.

I’ll spare you the details of EndNote crashing Word and thereby uninstalling its own macro (TWICE today), and of seemingly random recognition of some inserted references but not others, and focus instead on a bug in EndNote’s PubMed search feature.

Some of the PIs had peppered their versions of the grant with PMIDs to indicate which reference should go where, making my life extremely easy. However, others had inserted numbered references corresponding to a list from another document, which may or may not have been provided to me, and still others used references in the format “CA Dunn, Gene, 2005” (one of my own papers, not at all related to the grant, used merely as illustration, etc.).

Now, I could have searched each of these references in PubMed, grabbed the PMID, and used that to import the reference into EndNote. But I was rather hoping to be able to use the provided information directly, thereby skipping a step. But look what happened:

It took me a good three or four such failures to realise that the difference between “Dunn CA” and “Dunn, C.A.” was responsible for these failed searches.

Really, EndNote?

Really?

Is it so hard to ignore all that (ridiculous and unnecessary) punctuation and just import the damn reference?

It might not seem like a big deal, but when you’re dealing with well over 100 references, the time required to reformat those author names really starts to add up.

So, in conclusion:

EndNote can bite me.

(I feel much more normal now, thank you very much!)

Posted in career, grant wrangling, personal, rants, technology | 18 Comments

In limbo

Posted on August 8, 2011 by Cath@VWXYNot?

Well, the post I’d planned to write next was going to be about how much I’ve learned from blogs written by cancer patients, and how that knowledge has impacted my work in a basic and translational cancer research department.

But that plan, like all our other plans, was shattered by a phone call on Friday morning: Mr E Man’s oldest sister phoned to tell him that their Mum had had a brain hemorrhage, and was in hospital on the Sunshine Coast waiting for a helicopter to transfer her to Vancouver.

Since that initial, terrible, huge piece of bad news, every tiny morsel of information we’ve had has been on the positive end of the spectrum of possible outcomes for each stage of the journey: her vitals have remained good; the initial surgery to relieve the pressure in her skull was a success; the angiogram they did the next day identified exactly what they’d expected it to; the bleed was small and accessible; yesterday’s surgery to fix the blood vessel went smoothly. But we won’t know the extent of the damage done until they lift the very heavy sedation she’s currently under, and which they plan to maintain for at least another couple of days. So after spending all day Friday and almost all weekend at the hospital we’re all at work today, trying to concentrate and waiting for updates (they told us that having noise and movement around her would cause too much brain activity; they’d rather everything was as quiet and still as possible, so they’ve asked us to stay away for now unless they call to say otherwise).

So, instead of writing about how much I’ve learned and how useful it’s been, I’m left pondering the very opposite…

All those years of studying and researching how human cells and genes work?

Completely useless, when it comes down to it. I didn’t know a single thing more than anyone else while we were waiting at the hospital – not one useful thing that could help anyone – and I couldn’t answer a single medical question that anyone asked me. It was a very humbling experience, to say the least.

We agreed yesterday that the current situation feels like we’re in limbo: there’s a small army of us, all desperate to help, but absolutely nothing that any of us can do. This will change over the next few days and weeks, obviously, but right now we have all this nervous energy and nothing to do with it. Some people are frantically parsing every single possibility – if this happens we’ll do X, but if that happens we’ll do Y – while others (including me) are passing the time with busy work, like cleaning the house.

I did manage to contribute one thing: I used LinkedIn (which no-one else in the family is on) to figure out who my globe-trotting brother-in-law is currently working for, and which country he’s in, as no-one had been able to contact him by phone, email, or Facebook. I then called the parent organisation’s head office in Washington DC, and the people there managed to get in touch with him. He’s flying in tomorrow. I’ve also made approximately 107 cups of tea for everyone.

So: social networking and basic kettle skills are, officially, much more useful than letters after your name. Also: blogging is therapy, as always. Once the limbo lifts, I probably won’t be online much for a while, but for now I’m very grateful to have this space.

Thanks for listening.

Posted in career, education, family, medicine, personal | 43 Comments

This.

Posted on August 3, 2011 by Cath@VWXYNot?

(“Federal scientist unfairly silenced, union says” – CBC News)

I wonder how long this whole social media experiment of direct communication with The People will last…

(My favourite comment on the cat photo album: “Please don’t eat this one, Prime Minister”. Yes, Our Glorious Leader apparently has nothing better to do than post photos of his cute new kitteh on Google+. I don’t necessarily disapprove; I like kittehs, and it’s better than some of the alternative ways in which he could be spending his time. I’m just sayin’).

Posted in bad people, Canada, communication, current affairs, environment, furry friends, politics, science | 13 Comments

Bridges on the River Fraser: a bike tour of Richmond, New Westminster, Burnaby, and Vancouver

Posted on July 31, 2011 by Cath@VWXYNot?

When I was training for the Vancouver-Seattle ride last year, my Sunday training usually involved a really nice loop from my house, over the river into Richmond, along River Road, back over the river to New Westminster, and then back through Burnaby on the Central Valley Greenway bike path. I loved the route, but was too focused on keeping my average speed up to really enjoy it to its full potential. I kept thinking how nice it would be to come back and do the same ride at a much more leisurely pace, with a camera to capture all the interesting things I was passing. However, a long bike ride was the last thing I wanted to do once the ride was over, and it took 13 months and a nice sunny day to find the motivation to go back, which I finally did yesterday.

Here’s my route, screencapped from the Cyclemeter iPhone app:

You're all in my "no, I'm NOT going to show you exactly where I live!" circle

(all other photos in this post were taken on my iPhone 4, with the native camera app and no filters or other kinds of processing).

The first time I trained in lovely flat Richmond (on a different loop to the one I did yesterday), I went with a friend who brought us back along the highway (which has a nice wide shoulder, but no protection when crossing on- and off-ramps / slip roads), and over the scarily busy Knight Street Bridge (we missed the entrance to the separated pedestrian and bike path and rode on the very narrow, glass- and gravel-strewn shoulder with drivers honking at us the whole way). Before my next ride, I checked the map and planned a route that would avoid the highway and use the fantastic purpose-built bike/pedestrian/SkyTrain bridge instead, and I’ve never looked back. So the first part of yesterday’s ride was from my house (at almost the highest point in the city) down to the river at Heather street.

Looking north, from the Richmond side, toward Vancouver and beyond to the North Shore Mountains

Once over the bridge, I turned left and followed River Road eastward. The first section is quite industrial, so the lack of any kind of official bike lane can be a little scary when there are trucks squeezing past you. But there are so many cyclists on this route that drivers know to look out for you, and I’ve never had a problem with overly fast or aggressive trucks or cars.

Once the last industrial turn-off – and the associated traffic – are behind you, you enter a seemingly forgotten, lost-in-time landscape with large homes and small farms on your right, reached by bridges over a little stream, and the sleepily rolling river Fraser to your left.

All aboard HMCS Failboat!

I just missed capturing a tug boat coming through. Sorry.

This part of the ride is my favourite, but unfortunately it soon merges into my least favourite: a (non-separated but wide and well-respected) painted bike lane on the side of the highway, and then a (separated but incredibly noisy and fumy) lane on the Queensborough Bridge as you cross the river again into New Westminster.

From this point onward the route follows that of the Millenium Line SkyTrain, which allows bikes at off-peak times, so you can decide you’ve had enough and let the train take the strain at pretty much any point from crossing the Queensborough to the end of the ride.

Both the separated and the painted bike lanes in New West itself are pretty good, but again a little too close to the noise and fumes of the highway. At least I now know where to turn to cross the railway tracks into the Quay area and the official start of the Central Valley Greenway; until I found the unsignposted turn, on my fourth or fifth attempt, I had to dash across the highway and then always got lost in a maze of streets featuring adult book stores and similarly classy establishments before somehow muddling my way onto the official route.

Shortly after I’d started the official Greenway route, I stopped for a sandwich and a smoothie in New West (an unknown luxury on my training rides, where water and a granola bar were all I had time to stop for), then continued on the stop-start traffic light heavy section of the road. As I approached the steepest hill on the whole ride, up past the hospital entrance, I went back and forth in my mind as to whether I should attempt to ride up it or just get off and push (again, not a luxury that was on offer when training), but when I got there the bike lane was closed and I had no choice but to push my bike on the shady sidewalk on the other side of the street, rather than slogging up the hill on my bike in the blazing sun. What a shame…

The Greenway gets considerably more green once it leaves the main streets, taking you through a nice park and then on a riverside path toward Burnaby. When I was training last year the path was newly built and covered in quite fine, but still arduous, gravel; the countless bikes to use the path since then have worn some narrow bare tracks into the gravel, which make this section of the path much smoother and easier.

NOT the mighty Fraser River; this is the Brunette. It's very nice.

The gravel path spits you out onto a very nice section of road, where you’re in an unseparated painted bike path but on a lovely wide, smooth road without much traffic, featuring some rolling hills where the climbs are long enough to make you huff and puff, but the descents are long enough to pick up some real speed and take some good momentum into the next climb. You cross the road and railway tracks at another purpose-built bike and pedestrian bridge at the Sperling-Burnaby Lake SkyTrain station,

There used to be a Bill Murray stencil graffiti on the bridge, but it's been scrubbed off now. Boooooo.

and then take another section of gravel road before reaching the final stage, a smoothly paved bike and pedestrian path under the SkyTrain tracks. This part of the ride isn’t all that visually interesting, with the exception of my favourite of Vancouver’s many murals, just west of the Renfrew SkyTrain station:

The full mural's triple the width of this section, but I had to take this photo by lifting my phone above my head to see over a wire fence, pointing it in vaguely the right direction, and hoping for the best, so you'll just have to trust me on this.

The route ends at Victoria and Commercial, from where I took some of Vancouver’s designated bike route side streets back up the hill to my house, thankful for the bike routes but questioning my decision to buy a house at almost the highest point in the city. Those last few blocks of my 53 km ride were definitely the hardest… but hey, at least I didn’t have to do two loops, or ride again the next day, or any of the other things I had to do during my training! Yay for voluntary bike riding for no particular reason other than to have a lovely day out in the sun!

Posted in cycling, exercise, photos, Vancouver | 6 Comments

Time travelling to reach you

Posted on July 29, 2011 by Cath@VWXYNot?

If time travel is supposedly impossible now, how did a podcast just send me back in time by more than a decade?

I listen to various music podcasts at work, and this morning I selected a 2009 episode of “Y-Pod: The Y-Rock on XPN” that featured an interview and three live songs by Travis, an old favourite band of mine from the late nineties / early naughties. I did my PhD in their home town of Glasgow just when they were really getting big, and saw them live at a couple of local festivals and then at a much smaller venue in Paris, where they put on one of the best concerts I’ve ever been to, so I was keen to hear what they’d been up to lately(ish).

The nostalgia started within the first few moments; man, I miss hearing those lovely accents! (No, really – the softer versions of the Glasgow accent are amazing). And I enjoyed the first song they played, a new one, although it was more pleasant than memorable.

But then, they announced that they would play “Writing to Reach You” next.

This song was HUGE. It was their biggest hit, at the peak of their popularity – the one they played as the last song of the encore when they headlined festivals, with thousands of people singing along with every word. But it wasn’t just that: Fran Healy was reminiscing about writing the song – about an ex-girlfriend who’d just dumped him – during the coldest winter in Glasgow’s recent history, when it was -20C outside and he didn’t have central heating and almost gassed himself trying to keep warm, sitting with his guitar between two dodgy gas heaters.

OMG!

I was there that winter, living in a flat with no central heating* and inch-wide gaps around all the windows, open to the freezing air! We had a dodgy gas heater, which we surrounded with dozens of carbon monoxide monitors, that we didn’t trust enough to leave on at night, meaning that we all slept wearing head-to-toe fleece (including hats and gloves), in sleeping bags, under duvets! And “Writing to Reach You” subsequently became one of “our songs” with an ex-boyfriend, during the long-distance phase of our relationship and immediately after he subsequently dumped me! And it was one of the songs I used to teach one of my flatmates to play guitar** on cider-fuelled nights when we didn’t have enough money to go out!

So, physics shmysics: time travel is possible, but only musicians know its secrets.

This one’s for you, fellow travellers!

http://youtu.be/o7HyMvddF8c

*no shortage of Christmas trees, though.

**we changed the lyrics for the benefit of our other flatmate, and serenaded her on mornings when she had a hangover.

Original lyrics:

Every day I wake up and it’s Sunday
Whatever’s in my head won’t go away
The radio is playing all the usual
And what’s a Wonderwall anyway?

Because my inside is outside
My right side’s on the left side
Cause I’m writing to reach you now but
I might never reach you
Only want to teach you
About you
But that’s not you

Our lyrics:

Every day she wakes up and it’s Sunday
The banging in her head won’t go away
She hasn’t had a sober day since Christmas
And what’s a PhD worth anyway?

Because her insides are outside
Her coat’s still on the South Side
She’s Hungover [flatmate’s name] yeah
The one that we all know
Always on the go
In Glasgow
Hungover [flatmate’s name]

Good times… this was when we also wrote The PhD Blues, which we still sing when we get together!

Posted in drunkenness, music, personal, silliness, travel, UK, videos | 2 Comments

Update on two previous posts…

Posted on July 26, 2011 by Cath@VWXYNot?

…because I know you’ve all been on the edge of your seats.

1) We had the “good riddance, pink form!” party that my colleague suggested when our internal grant review form was retired. Someone made pink cupcakes, I brought pink grapefruit juice and raspberry ginger ale (and recycled, biodegradable paper cups, before anyone says anything!),

and everyone brought at least one copy of the pink form, for ceremonial destruction purposes.

No-one had a lighter, but the ripping was very satisfying, and probably less likely to get us in trouble with the fire safety officer.

Apparently the people in our grants office got wind of the party, and thought it was hilarious – although I hear they were quite astonished to learn how much everyone hated the form!

2) Mr E Man responded (on Facebook) to the rib sauce notification method controversy post:

“I am a nonconformist. The fact that most people agree on something doesn’t make it any more correct in my mind. Plus you skewed the results by claiming I called you a “freak” (complete falsification of data) and then giving a scientific reason for your correctness. Of course all your blog friends would agree with you. That doesn’t change my opinion that a mirror image is more intuitive. Your poll is thus irrelevant. I love you none the less though, freak that you are”.

To which I responded:

“ah, the “I didn’t call you a freak, you freak!” defense. I have no answer to that, other than that I love you too :)”

(nauseating, isn’t it?)

Anyway, the final result of that reader poll seems to be “vive la difference! Now let’s go out for ribs!”

Posted in career, communication, food glorious food, grant wrangling, meta, personal, photos, silliness | 7 Comments

Yay, Starbucks! (No, really!)

Posted on July 23, 2011 by Cath@VWXYNot?

I bought a Starbucks coffee and sandwich on Wednesday, and it made my day.

This might sound like a very bizarre statement, especially in a city with an abnormally high Starbucks density (two per block in places), and indeed I don’t usually go there. But Wednesday’s purchase represents much more than just lunch…

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I admit thatthe main reason we bought a house where we did was price; it’s not a fashionable area, at all, and we’re on a main road to boot, so the house prices aren’t quite as insane as elsewhere in the city (although it’s all relative). But we’ve come to really like the area. We’re friendly, rather than friends, with our neighbours, which is a wee bit of a shame, although there are a few people I stop and chat with on a regular basis, and many more I know by sight. But it’s very pleasant, up on a hill with lots of trees and green space and a partial mountain view, and safe: our tenant has stored his kid’s bike out in the back yard, visible from the back alley and with no lock, for almost two years; I’ve accidentally left our back door unlocked for a couple of days at a time, with no ill effects; and an Amazon package (containing the final Harry Potter book on the day of its publication, no less) once sat undisturbed and unstolen on our front step for a whole long weekend. Oh, and we got a flyer through our door last week saying that the city is going to start holding live Sunday evening concerts in one of the parks in August! SCORE!

The problem, though, is that there’s nothing there. Well, nothing except for houses; no shops. The closest two places where I can buy any food at all are gas stations, and they’re only good for junk food cravings. There used to be a really depressing strip mall a few blocks away, consisting of a grocery store that had sticky floors and smelled just like the animal facility at work, a decent-looking bakery that I think was only open from 1:02 – 3:13 pm every second Tuesday or something like that, a Polish deli that I never saw open even once, and the world’s dirtiest and scariest looking dentist. Oh, and there was a Sri Lankan curry place that we really liked, but they closed a few months after we moved in.

As for dining out: we’ve tried, we really have. There are numerous hole-in-the-wall, family-run, mostly Asian restaurants a few blocks away in either direction, but we’ve not found a good one yet. The ones that look good from the outside have served extremely salty, cold, bland, or otherwise bad food, and the rest… look, I know it’s a tough and very competitive industry, with very tight margins, but how much does it cost you to fill a bucket with soap and water and clean your windows and awnings?! Some of them are filthy, looking like they haven’t been cleaned in years – if not generations – and while I’m sure the food in some of these restaurants is excellent, I just don’t trust them not to give me food poisoning.

Main Street, which is an awesome little mecca of good cafes, restaurants, bars and vintage and designer clothing stores, is within walking distance in the summer, but not realistically in the dark, cold, and/or rain. And so if we want to eat out, we usually drive or bus-out-taxi-home to Main Street, Commercial Drive, or Granville Island, where there’s a plethora of appetising options.

All this is starting to change, though.

The aforementioned depressing strip mall was torn down a couple of years ago, and we got wind of a mixed residential and commercial development that would replace it. This is now nearing completion; the Shopper’s Drug Mart opened a few weeks ago (as well as the pharmacy and cosmetics, they have a food section with – miracle of miracles – such exotic offerings as cans of soup, pasta and sauces, milk, juice, eggs, bacon, sausages, cheese and bread. I can now walk to buy the ingredients for an admittedly basic breakfast or dinner! This is a revelation! It’s sad how excited I am!), and the grocery store is starting to stock up and looks ready to open soon.

And now the Starbucks is open!

I passed the development on my way home on Wednesday (I decided at lunch time to go and work from home all afternoon), and was super-duper-awesomely excited to see the lights on and tables set up outside. I just had to get off the bus a few stops early and go and celebrate with a coffee and a sandwich. I hate to be one of those people, but in other areas of the city, Starbucks has been the first business in the first wave of gentrification, and other cozy cafes and nice-looking restaurants and bars have sprung up around them within a few months. Indeed, I’ve heard from a very reliable source (the developer, who’s a friend) that a new restaurant and/or bar will be launching within a few blocks of the new Starbucks some time in 2012. I can’t wait to be able to walk a few short blocks to buy groceries, sit in a nice coffee shop, and go out for dinner!

Part of me feels a leeeetle bad for all the existing business owners, who will no doubt be pushed out, just as the rising rents on Main Street are starting to push businesses out to the east (towards us, yay!). But hey – Starbucks may be many things, but at least it’s clean, with free Wi-Fi, and open at reasonable hours. And their cookies are awesome.

So.

Seriously.

Yay, Starbucks.

Posted in first world problems, food glorious food, personal, rants, shopping, Vancouver, whining | 19 Comments

On the sauce: reflections.

Posted on July 21, 2011 by Cath@VWXYNot?

Mr E Man’s quest to find the best ribs in Vancouver is over: he’s admitted that he’s unlikely to find anywhere that makes them better than Ouisi’s does, and so that’s where we found ourselves when a craving hit him on Saturday night.

These ribs really are good (yes, I tithed my usual amount, after donating a similarly sized amount of my yummy chicken). And naturally, a little of the sauce found its way onto Mr E Man’s face. Wishing to discreetly draw his attention to this fact, I touched my own face on one side of my mouth…

…and he promptly wiped the wrong side of his face with the napkin.

This always happens to us. The reason is that when Mr E Man’s telling me that I have something on my face, his instinct is to touch his face in a mirror image of mine. So if I have sauce on the left hand side of my face, he’ll touch the right hand side of his own, which is on my left as I’m facing him. But I do it the other way around: if Mr E Man has sauce on the left hand side of his face, my instinct is to touch the left hand side of my own face, which is on his right as he’s looking at me and therefore not directly opposite where the sauce actually is. I sometimes manage to remember that we do it differently, and so I do it his way, in a mirror image; however, this usually happens at the same time that he remembers that we do it differently, and he still goes to wipe the wrong side of his face. This double-bluff situation is what confounded us last week.

Naturally, Mr E Man thinks I’m a freak, and he may well be correct. But I did, of course, have to try and defend myself by explaining why I do things the way I do. What I came up with is that my training in the life sciences involved looking at lots of diagrams like this one:

where the appendix is on the left hand side of the drawing, but the right hand side of your actual body. Other possible explanations include gender- and country-specific practices.

So, O Wise Readers… am I a freak, or does anyone else do the “you have a little something on your face” thing my way? Do you think the difference has anything to do with gender, age, nationality, or scientific training?

I hereby agree to abide by my readers’ decision, and to allow Mr E Man to call me a freak if warranted by the results of this informal survey.

Posted in communication, first world problems, food glorious food, freakishness, personal, science, silliness | 28 Comments