My resolution for 2008: more frequent blog postings.

Just got back from a month-long trip to India. Mostly I was kept busy with my Dad's medical tests, but I got to spend plenty of time with my parents, which is always great.

My Dad's CEA test results came in higher than expected and his oncologist recommended a full-body PET-CT scan to find out if there were any recurrences of his colorectal cancer. The scan turned up a metabolically active growth in his adrenal gland, a rare site for recurrence of colorectal cancer. Upon examining his previous scans, the radiologists found that the growth has been present for the past two years, with little or no growth, making it unlikely that the growth is an isolated metastasis of the colon cancer. For now, the plan is to hold off on treatment and to monitor both the CEA level and this mysterious adrenal growth.

So, there is still significant uncertainty as to what will happen with my Dad in the next few months.

Finished my last final today. That means I am done with my classes for this semester. Now for three months of research, punctuated by a month-long trip home. Should be a fun summer.

The Departed showed up from Netflix last week. Still have not watched it; it has reached the stage where I wanted very much to watch it for so long, and now I am not that enthusiastic any more. Happened with Kill Bill Vol. 2 as well, and I still have not watched that movie.

Realized I have not blogged since classes started back up this semester — that translates to about two months! I do have quite a few things to write about, just need some time to dedicate to writing. I am spending tonight poring over crufty C++ code, and slowly coming to the conclusion that undocumented object-oriented code may harder to understand than undocumented procedural code.

Yes, classes started back up last week after a nice long break. I am pretty sure I will be posting much less now, not that I was prolific before.

This time around, all my classes are at the Homewood campus, which means fewer 7:30 a.m. shuttle trips to the medical school. My classes are covering material completely new to me and closely related to my research interests -- should be a fun semester! I am also working on a very interesting rotation looking at gene regulation for Dr. Beer.

Libraries have always been a little intimidating to me. The endless rows of bookshelves packed with scholarly tomes serve only to remind me of the vastness of that which is unknown to me. Even if I spent every minute of every hour reading, I could only hope to scratch the surface, and since the human brain is by no means a bottomless vessel, retention would soon become an issue.

Still, I gathered up my courage to visit the Eisenhower Library at JHU today, so I could have a quiet place to study. After figuring out how to connect to the wifi network, I found there were plenty of vacant study tables, probably due to most people being away for intersession. As I did not want to be on the main floor with all its distractions, I figured I would find a place on one of the higher floors, preferably by a window. Alas, Eisenhower has no higher floors! So I am now two floors underground, surrounded by unoccupied carrels and imposing bookshelves. Nothing like loneliness to complete the feeling of inadequacy. Guess I have no choice but to actually do some work. Weird — my mission in coming to the library was successful!

I spent the day yesterday with Mashal (my best friend from high school) and Parul (my sister) in New York City. We ice-skated at Wollman Rink with what felt like a thousand other people and I managed to make it through about 10 laps around the rink without falling over once. That is pretty amazing for only my second time skating, and considering my last time was a little over 10 years ago.

I spent today recovering from my exertions in the big city. :)

Being in classes again after all these years has been quite an experience, especially since the medical school curriculum is so intense. One of the things I am trying to work on is a good study system that will allow me to do reasonably well on the courses, without spending so much time that my research work suffers. So far, a high-level understanding of the concepts coupled with a hurried attempt to pick up some of the details has worked, and as far as performance is concerned I have no major problems.

I am not enjoying the course as much as I thought. As a Biology major, most of the Molecules and Cells course is a review, maybe with a bit more detail. I had hoped the course would be a Biology refresher, but it has ended up being a rushed look at a lot of concepts with not much retention. The lectures are in a large class format with not much discussion, and the discussion groups often focus on getting enough knowledge to pass the exam rather than on providing a stimulating intellectual exercise. The Journal Club variation of the discussion group is probably what I like the most -- it is unfortunate that they comprise such a small part of the course.

Thankfully, research is going quite well. I will soon have my first opportunity to use a real supercomputer, specifically one at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. I am also trying to find a more challenging but less well-defined project related to Bayesian networks. Once I am done with this semester's classes at the medical school, I should be able to spend more time on research.

I thought that once I was in grad school, I would have more time to update my blog. It has not exactly worked out that way, especially since I am getting the firehose-style preclinical courses at the Hopkins med school. Still, I do want to update at least once a week -- let us see if I manage it from now on.

My new Macbook is working great. The Microsoft Office suite runs like a bear, and there is no hope of improvement until Office 2007 is released in late 2007. Apart from that, OS X has been rock stable (knock on wood), though I had to do a quick Archive-and-Install when I screwed up Rosetta with Monolingual. I am glad I did not wait for the new Core 2 Duo Macbooks, which are still expected sometime before the holidays but not here yet.

Came across this Calvin and Hobbes strip in my sister's copy of "It's a Magical World". Thought it summed up nicely how the realities of the lives we make for ourselves constrict the breadth of our experience, even as adults.

(From this searchable archive of the Calvin and Hobbes comic strips)

New Hope is a charming little Pennsylvania town on the Delaware about 20 minutes from Princeton. I took these photos when I visited this past weekend.

Saw this beautiful place in San Francisco when I was there in 2002. The house overlooks the Palace of Fine Arts down the hill.

A couple of good things have happened in my life recently.

• After five and a half years of working at Bristol-Myers Squibb, I am heading to Johns Hopkins for a PhD in Biomedical Engineering. I am really excited that to be doing research once more, and will be starting at JHU on July 1st.
• I was awarded a video iPod as part of the MyEclipse Ajax iPod giveaway in February. Since I have never won anything in a competition based purely on luck, it was a very nice surprise to win something I had been craving for a while.

As for the title of the post, watch Futurama, and say hello to Bender for me.

Since Gmail can now host other domains, I decided to move my mail hosting and use the cool Gmail interface. The program is still in beta and signup has to be approved, but I was approved within a day or two of submitting my request. Setup was quite simple -- I simply had to switch the MX records for my domain to point to Google's servers.

Advantages so far:

• Great Gmail interface
• 2 GB storage per account, more than what I had at Lunarpages
• Integration with other Google services like Google Talk

Things that are not so good:

• Gmail Notifier does not work with hosted accounts
• No way to import old email (GML and gExodus work fine, but do not preserve timestamps)

I am back in the US after a short 3-week trip home. Bangalore has changed quite a bit in the past four and a half years since I was there last. Plenty of development and plenty of traffic driven by the booming Indian economy. Anyway, now that I am back, I hope to do some more hacking with Cytoscape.

Wanted to clear up a few things before I forgot.

• deathdruid is a nickname I often use online, not an indication of how I have morbid tendencies. Not that I don't.
• There will be no emotional outpourings or soulsearching here. Just some stuff about science, technology, and possibly even the real world.
• I will strive to sound like someone who actually went to college, rather than those teen blogs that sound like they were published by SMS.

That's all for now. Off to dinner.

Well, decided to create a weblog of my own, so I can rave and rant about technology and maybe help some people along the way. Maybe no one will read it, apart from potential employers who Google my name. Still, it's always a good idea to go back and read something you wrote a while ago, so you see just how wrong you were and (you hope) how far you have come since.