10/26/09 – 11/01/09
Another week in the life of Hoxie.
After last week’s bike wipeout, I was taking it easy this week in an attempt to recover. I won’t go into details about my assorted injuries and their various states of spewing pus, bleeding, and scabbing, but it looks like I’m going to make a full recovery. I had some new brake pads installed on the Ninjamobile on Monday, so hopefully next time someone is about to cut me off, I’ll stop with a little less throwing-Hoxie-to-the-pavement action.
That said, it was a busy week in the worlds of work and grad school prep. I found out on Tuesday that I’m giving a presentation at next Wednesday’s PML team meeting, so I spent the second half of the week aggregating results and plotting up a storm. My big project at work lately has been building a data processing/analysis pipeline in R to standardize methodologies and streamline transitions between steps. While I doubt that the PML team wants to hear about common obstacles in a typical statistical genetics analysis or pore over 1300 lines of R code (although it’s very elegant code, if I do say so myself), I’ve been testing the pipeline on a couple of data sets and actually found a few interesting results in the process. I might have to put in some overtime on Monday and Tuesday to get things really polished, but I’m excited about my first PML team presentation.
My list of grad schools has changed over the last couple of weeks, too. I discovered that a Pine Crest classmate of mine, Amol Kapila, recently started his PhD in Statistics at UWashington (and a website that’s very similar in format to mine). We exchanged a couple of interesting emails about his application process, and I spoke with my adviser and a couple of other professors. My list is now (from west to east): Berkeley, Stanford, UWashington, UWisconsin, UMichigan, UNC Chapel Hill, Duke, and Harvard. Eight seems like a good number, enough that at least a few committees will say yes but not enough to require thousands of dollars in applications fees and drown me in a dozen schools to choose from. My first deadline, November 8 at Duke, is coming right up!
On Saturday, I met some friends down at the Boston Vegetarian Food Festival and had a great time wandering around the expo hall, sampling various delicious meat-free concoctions and chatting with booth attendants. This may have been my first quinoa experience, which was tasty. There was a lot of dessert, though… the way I do vegetarianism involves lots of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean sources of protein, and healthy fats with the occasional piece of dark chocolate. My stomach, post-expo, contained about six chocolate samples, two flavors of coconut milk ice cream, aloo chole and rice, a few granola bar bits, some fresh natural peanut butter, and various hemp seed or other spreads. Salads aren’t even remotely as sexy as spicy dark chocolate, but they work for me most of the time.
Saturday was also, of course, Halloween, so I donned my pirate pajamas and eyepatch from last weekend and headed over to the BU West area to attend a friend’s party on Babcock Street. While I was at BU, I usually attended little parties for Halloween (or had mono, a popular alternative), so it was fun to wander around the streets with hordes of costumed college students and hang out at a big, informal college bash (where I actually recognized and knew a surprising number of people). After hanging out at the party for a while, we stopped at T Anthony’s to enjoy some pizza and judge the costumes coming in through the door. Good times.
Operating on 4.5 hours of sleep today, so I’ll be taking it easy and getting some low-level stuff done. And napping. There will be napping.