Poked.net

To continue with the bird theme: At the Cline vineyards, we had a chance to meet George, the local friendly duck who was willing to pose for some great shots.

Cline had some great wines and a wonderful estate to look around. Check out this entire photoset on flickr to see some of the flowers we found here.

Recently visited Sonoma valley with Cristin and a couple friends in the area. We all took turns taking photos with Cristin's Camera. This one was from the champagne caverns which we declined to taste at, but spotted a little hummingbird flitting around in the nearby trees. Out of about a dozen photos, this one was probably the best.

 
 

I'm now in colorodo springs, home of pikes peak, the tallest point in the US. We came across from kansas city yesterday and saw some great plains - antelope, farming, horses, cattle, sagebrush. The day before we hit up St. Louis and rode the gateway arch to the top for a birds eye view of the mississippi river and the priii parked below. Today we might hit up pikes peak, and then head southwest a bit. Who knows.

I had a long post about reflections on leaving blacksburg, but decided that it was a bit too personal and I would end up deleting it later. Nevertheless, I thought I'd just add for posterity that it is a very odd feeling leaving - a big transition, and yet not really that big anymore. I am very excited to be moving into the next stage, and simultaneously very sad to be leaving this one.

From the Someone Needs to create this department:

I love RSS feeds for websites - blogs, news, etc. I like to read them in an rss reader. But that's just me. Numerous people don't know what RSS feeds are, my sister included (no offense sis). My sis has a wonderful website with lots of feeds - one for the news on her front page, one for her art image gallery, etc. She doesn't even know there are feeds there, nor what they can be used for. The same with most of her target audience. Mailing lists are a much better solution for her and her audience. It would be a great if a web service existed that would convert feeds to mailing lists, and allow my sister to put a subscription box right on her website that builds said mailing list without any programming experience whatsoever.

I'd implement this if not for lack of time.

We found a bat resting above our doorway last night. Cute little guy.

I just checked. I have 8 copies of my thesis:

1. laptop
2. home desktop + (raid backup drive)
   
3. bioinformatics server + (raid backup drive)
4. expresso server
   
5. tape backup
6. paper copy

I think I need to burn a few CDs and send to friends in distant locations ... just to be safe.

So, I try not to point people to random links these days that they could find on their own through boing boing, del.icio.us, or a multitude of blogs. I'd rather contribute my own content, not just re-link to other people's content. Nevertheless, I'm going to add this link to My Sister, Grace Grothaus' Art Gallery Website. I put the technology for the site together, but she keeps it continually updated with photographs of her work. It runs on movable type for the "recent news" on the front page, and has a backend of Gallery for the photo gallery. Interesting fusion of technologies in my humble opinion.

For the 2.3 people that still read this thing, I will be:

• graduating in may
• finishing my thesis on cancer classification through microarrays in the next 2.5 weeks
  
• taking a job with google
• travelling to san francisco
• on a road trip
• in a brand new toyota prius
• in late june/early july
• no longer working on Tag-Board, not even on the side