it…out

A steaming pile of grits started off more bioinformatics conference fun today in Blacksburg. The last time I had grits I was in Florida back in 1995. I may wait another 10 years before trying them again.

The presentations today were varied and interesting. I finally have a good understanding of what biomoby is all about, and learned about some interesting work with G-BLAST (the only semi-good link I found with google was this, and it doesn’t really say much). It sounds like a direction in which we could steer the cluster project.

During the presentations I noticed many laptops open. Practically everyone (including me) was checking their email. I had wondered what advantage there was in bringing a laptop to a talk, and now I see: you can check your email. I saw a wide variety of email clients including Outlook, Thunderbird, Apple’s mail.app, and even one guy using pine, complete with a green-on-black color scheme. As the afternoon wore on I even noticed one guy surfing ebay. Useless timewasting aside, it was nice to have the laptop available during the talks. I was able to google each presenter’s projects and even download and review the code for the open source ones.

Afterwards, I set out to find Tommy a stuffed hokie(I didn’t know what one was either), but I was too late and all the university-swag shops had already closed. I did get to return to Poor Billy’s for some Dynamite sushi. Good sushi eats.