One down, one to go

So I've finished a draft of the mammal phylogeny paper and sent it off to the Z-man. Yay! Now he'll probably ignore it for a while and then read it and make comments about the charts and graphs or something like that. It needs more polish, for sure, but that part is not my job.

So I'm done with that and can move to the FastME paper with Olivier. I've got the protein alignments and their respective distance matrices, so it's time to build trees, trees, and more trees. This is pretty easy to automate.

On the job-seeking front, I had a meeting with a guy at State today who I know from my college buddy, let's call him Perv until he shows up with a different name. Perv is one of the big reasons I left Georgetown, namely because he's so much smarter when it comes to policy issues than I am. So I figured I had to outflank the wonks of the world by learning a little math.

I may have taken that strategy a wee bit too far. Huh huh huh.

Anyway, I got to meet a guy named Fernando at State which was good because it made it a bit more real to me that these jobs are out there. Unfortunately, not at State, at least not in the fashion of "knocking at the door". They only get their scientists through the AAAS fellowships, which I've applied for twice with no result. Well, it's just like running in a sense: the hardest thing is to start running - once you have a bit of momentum it's easier to keep moving.

Ginger on the wrist

What does it say about me that I'm typing this with Ginger resting comfortably on my left wrist? I wish I could take a photo of this - I'm going to count on somebody with a digital camera doing this sometime in the near future, so blog readers can understand how much Ginger likes it when I type at the computer.

return of Ikea Boy

So I made another trek down to College Park to get some storage furniture: a bookcase, some extra shelving, a bureau, and a TV stand so I can use my coffee table as a coffee table or whatever else I want to use it as.

The extra shelving possibilities were 80 cm or 40 cm. 40 seemed too short for the Ikea bookcases I already have, so I went with the larger size. But I got home and I think what I already have are 60 cm wide, so I'm going to have to find a saw somewhere or give up on this idea.

And let's face it: finding a saw would be more fun.

The divergence paper is close to done and I should finish the draft today or tomorrow, unless I'm really slacking. The FastME paper is nowhere near done, but I'll deal with that later.

And then there's job-hunting. Well, as they say, avoidance isn't only a river in Egypt. I did find a nice possibility at AAAS in Cambridge (Mass, not the poncy place in East Anglia). But I'll treat it as a long shot.