Blessed by the Potato

I shocked the BEMs community at the conference this year when I grabbed the microphone after the student awards ceremony so that we could bestow a gift on Shin, who was so helpful in guiding us around, getting us together, and keeping us happy. They finally tracked me down, and asked for a “one paragraph” description of the student experience at BEMs this year, and what lead to that unexpected gift ceremony for the newsletter. Here’s what I sent them:

We had received a few emails from the organizers in advance of the conference that an attempt would be made this year to have some sort of student function during or before the conference. I know two requests came through and nobody from my lab volunteered. Luckily, Shin, Alice, and Marylene stepped up and organized the small, low-key student meet after the main opening wine and cheese.

Each student took a minute to introduce themselves to the group, and then we played a few hands of poker for poster pushpins as we got acquainted. All too soon, a few people had to leave, and we thought we had to leave the room we were in, so the rest of us headed off to find a pub. With the help of some locals, Shin found us the “Apres” bar, close to the Hotel Excel Tokyu.

After getting to know each other outside the bounds of the conference, the students made more of an effort to get together during the evenings and downtime that we had. We all went on a walking tour of Kanazawa, mostly lead by Shin (who could read the tourist placards, written in Japanese), and Julia (who had actually read her guide book on the city).

When the social event ended early and was found to be lacking in the dancefloor department, again the students (and the registration desk girls) headed off to the “Apres” to stretch the evening out.

Of course, _the_ thing to do while in Japan is karaoke. Shin went above and beyond and spent a good portion of his time (possibly over an hour, depending on who’s telling the story) calling a bunch of different karaoke places to find one that would be good for us (private booths, multilingual song selection, good price, and walking distance). At the end of the conference, to thank him for all his help in guiding us around the city (which, it should be noted, is not even his city: he’s from Kyoto), we each chipped in 100 Yen to buy him a shirt. While I jumped up to the mic after the student awards were presented to make Shin’s give “official”, it was Dave (and Alice) who thought of giving him a gift, organized the money collection, and went out to shop for it.

All in all, it was one of the more enjoyable conferences largely because of all the fun student interaction. Typically at these events people stick close to their research groups or countrymen. Of course, there is mingling and discussions take place with all kinds of people, but those invisible connections and groupings can always be seen, especially when it comes around to dinner time. This is the first time I’ve ever seen this kind of interaction with students from all over the world, regardless of research topic or supervisor.

“Sorry boss,” one might say “but we can have dinner together any time back home.”

Unfortunately, we didn’t manage to include all the students in the largely unplanned events. But that leaves us with room to grow for San Diego!

[Note that it ended up being slightly longer than one paragraph]

It’s been a hectic time at work lately. We’re scheduling an upgrade to our MRI system sometime in the winter, and to get ready for that the hospital is going to cancel all research time to get caught up on the clinical backlog (since the upgrade is going to mean weeks to months of downtime). That, of course, is extremely painful to someone who needs research time on the magnet for their PhD. To add to the pain of it, we only found out about this plan two weeks ago, so we begged and pleaded to get at least some of the time we need to actually finish a study or two… and we did, sort of. A solid block of 31 consecutive hours on the long weekend. Whee! Sure, we could technically do about 25 subjects in that time, but realistically? Even if I did hypercaffeinate myself, it’s pretty difficult to convince someone to come in for a scan (a sober scan) in the middle of the night on the long weekend… I think we’ve got 4 or 5 people scheduled, and that was damned near miraculous (and involved a lot of begging, pleading, and favours called in). Heck, I can’t even convince my immediate family to come down (“well, maybe, if you really want to graduate this decade… and if the weather’s bad at the cottage.”).

By chance or design, Wayfare’s parents came to visit last weekend (when I had another, fairly inconvenient, smaller block of time on the scanner) and I scanned her dad. He was thrilled to get a CD with pictures of his brain on it to show the people at work, something he’ll treasure long after his hand has stopped aching. Of course, we tried to go out for lunch beforehand, but had a heck of a time with the logistics of that. Wayfare’s had her eye on the new french restaurant just a block from our place (“Red meat, red wine, etc.” is their motto). We went by at 3 pm, and they were closed until dinner time. Moving on down the street, we tried the Village Cafe, which was closed for a catering event. Some clowns walked by on the sidewalk, in full clown makeup. “It’s like we’ve passed through a vortex into a universe where restaurants are closed on saturdays and clowns walk the streets.” I suggested we try Bertoldi’s or Symposium next, but Wayfare hasn’t been impressed with Bertoldi’s the last few times we went, so we settled on TJ Baxter’s, which was close. They met us at the door and sat us down, but other than that they might as well have been closed too. The patio was mostly full, but we were the only ones sitting inside, so it wasn’t all that busy, yet we had to wait about a half hour for our food to arrive. “Perhaps we should run across the street for a quick lunch to hold us over until they get dinner ready here…”

Well, the conference has ended, I’ve taken a nap, won 3rd place in the poster competition, and now I have to figure out what to do with myself for two days. About half our group is heading to Kyoto, perhaps to climb mount Fuji, and the other half is already in Tokyo. Presently, I’m leaning towards going to Tokyo, if only to make my trip home an 18-hour one instead of a 24-hour one.

Tonight, we went looking for dinner down one of the many long, winding alleyways. We found yet another, smaller, dodgier alleyway off of that one, which was barely wide enough for 3 people to stand abreast, and where the roofs were below Dave’s head. So far we’ve done okay ordering off menus with pictures, even where English was completely lacking. At the end of that alley though, we weren’t feeling quite as adventurous, so we went to another place on the main street that was kind of interesting. Before going in we thought it would be sushi and the like, but instead they had a variety of other things. I ended up getting fries with a strange spice/flavouring on them, while my travelling companions Dave and Carlos got large shrimp, chicken, seaweed (plus lettuce and some other stuff) salads.

The last day of the conference was quite interesting. I got to participate in a live demonstration of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), and watched as my motor cortex was involuntarily stimulated and my hands jerked. It was especially interesting because I had read somewhere that the scalp nerves were painfully stimulated at the same time. I mean, it just makes sense that that would be the case, since the induced fields that are activating the brain are even stronger in the scalp… but surprisingly, it didn’t hurt at all. When my arms were being stimulated, it felt like being electrocuted (I’ve never been seriously electrocuted, but we did have a short in the lab that sent a bit of a tingle up my arm, and I have touched the electric cow fences in PEI).

I’ve been using Thunderbird as my email client for a while now, and it does pretty much everything I could want an email client to do, and does it pretty well at that.

One thing I’ve really wanted is the ability to redo the subject lines of emails other people send me. Is there any email client out there that will let me do that, or an add-on to Thunderbird? I know it’s open source, but I’d hate to have to try to figure out the programming on that myself. Plus, it is a little unkosher to edit emails other people send you, but I have several very good reasons:

1. Our email server appends a {Spam X.X} score to suspected spam, we can then set a threshold for sorting… but that tag still stays there. I’d kind of prefer to remove it on one or two important emails to make them easier to find (my eyes are trained to skip over messages with spam at the beginning).
2. I have about 50 emails from my supervisor with the unhelpful subject line “to do”.
3. I have about 100 emails from my supervisor with the unhelpful subject line “fyi”.
4. I have about 300 emails from my supervisor with the unhelpful subject line “sdarticle.pdf” or “fulltext.pdf” or “Entrez Pubmed”.

So there were some break-ins at work two days ago, and a few computer systems were stolen. The offices were locked, and security had the building locked down to just one (watched) entrance (as they usually do on the weekends/evenings), but the locks were simple handle locks that weren’t installed properly, so one could get in with a credit card. Then, with incredible audacity, the thieves came back last night with a crowbar and tried to get into some of the more secure labs and offices, making off with more equipment.

Today was spent trying to lock the place down a bit more. We’ve been looking into some sort of network security alert, such as having our PCs ping the server every 10 minutes, and sending out an email when they don’t report in, but I don’t know how much progress the network guys are making on that. My supervisor had us running around writing down serial numbers and service tags, and making sure all our data was encrypted for a chunk of the day. He thinks that if there is a theft, we won’t be able to get new computers unless we have the serial numbers handy. I’m pretty sure he’s wrong on that — yes, it is handy to have them for the long odds of retrieving them, but the insurance should pay out without them, especially since we have all the purchase orders on file.