The Luminosity of the Mind

It's 7:52am and I just strolled into work. I love coming in this early, when all the lights are still off, and everyone speaks in a low whisper. Today is my official "last" day of work at Brontes. I quote the word "last", because I will likely be back on a very limited basis when they need some graphics in a pinch. Nevertheless, I feel a little sad to be leaving since I truly love working for this company. At 4:00 I'll be hosting my first-ever and last-ever Friday social. Kerrie suggested an art theme, so we're going to play a few rounds of Brontes themed Pictionary. Should be fun.

Last night I was meditating on what the Dalai Lama calls the "luminosity of the mind." His choice of the word "luminosity" is interesting and I wasn't sure I agreed with it so I wanted to grok it. (Aside: This is my first ever use of the word grok, for which I thank Curran who introduced it to me.) The word luminosity flowed through my mind, picking up meaning, then dissolving, then being interrupted by other thoughts which in turn dissolved. I concentrated on transience, and then imagined the mind as a fire. Fire is luminous, so I liked the analogy anyway.

"Our consciousness burns like a fire on the kindling of our corporeal bodies."

Avoiding the illusion of self:
"Consciousness burns like a fire on the kindling of corporeal bodies."

There are certainly incongruities between the nature of how and why a fire burns, and how and why consciousness comes about, but the analogy still strikes me. It's a powerful image... people walking around with their heads on fire. A Buddhist monk, sitting with the tips of his thumbs just touching, and burning like a bonfire. An Alzheimer's sufferer blackened and charred with little more than a flicker left. How does the consciousness of someone in a coma burn? Is their mind merely a clump of red hot embers waiting to ignite? At any rate, I thought a lot about it, about what it is to clear the mind, to focus the mind, to sharpen the mind.

It all makes me want to paint again tonight.

"And when the world turns over, I'll keep my ears to the wall.
And when the world turns over, I'll keep my feet straight on the ground."
-NFG

Making My Own Lines

Just a few things worth mentioning.

Ashley is back after a week in San Diego spent with family and friends. I picked her up at Logan yesterday and there was definitely a bit of nostalgia for our long-distance days. I love the energy at the airport, it's addictive. Hopefully, April 19th will come quickly, and I'll finally be able to sit on the same plane as my girl.

Spring needs to hurry the hell up and start putting buds on the trees. I need it, the warmth, the beach sand piling up in my car. I miss wearing sandals every day. I miss surfing. Any excuse to get outside. With any luck, I'll be capping off the season with a bit of spring skiing in March.

I did a couple paintings today. Up top is wave study #3 (as it looks under a warm lamp anyway). There's just something fun and challenging about getting a wave just right. Being that this is only #3, I've got a long way to go before I get the hang of it. The one below is the first one I did a while back.

Today I finally bought the album The Fall by On the Surface. It's been so long since I've seen Heather, Anthony and Matt. I'm still bummed that I somehow missed their last show at the Middle East Downstairs. Their music has gotten so damn good since Freshman year!

"Everyone leaves their own path.
Everyone leaves their tracks in the ground.
So look back and step by step - by step - by step - by step we are found.

Every road has it's contour.
Every hill seeming too steep to climb.
And the paths around the hills are long and narrow
spinning they wind me 'round

You were the flatlands, but I saw you standing on mountains.
I feared farewell, but I have found I'm alone in my lines.
Alone in my lies.

And the stones that held the foundation have cracked and weathered with time.
As the storm it raged and crashed and struck with mighty lightning that shined.
So the darkness became my armor defended by shadows and thieves.
With each silent step by step - by step - by step I hid in the ripened tree.

You were the flatlands, but I saw you standing on mountains.
I feared farewell but I have found I'm alone in my lines.

I am the dryland,
let your river flow into my land.
We can't say hello again without goodbye, but all in good time.
We can't say hello again without goodbye, but all in good time."
-On the Surface

Convenience

I had a fire in my belly. I wanted to get out of this state, and do something new; to fly out of the country; to drive a thousand miles south, and watch the weather change gradually from cold and snowing to 80 degrees and sunny. Maybe I just wanted to do something that I won't forget to help me remember this exact moment in my life. In a short week, I'll be leaving my unstructured, freelancing ways for a full time work schedule. I'm excited to finally do so, but I want to make the best of what's left of it.

I don't mean to sound resentful, but the metaphorical fire in my belly has been metaphorically pissed on by pretty much everyone I turned to. Disappointment, I suppose, is what I'm feeling. It's unfortunate that we've reached the point in our lives when spontaneity is either impossible or inconvenient.

For me, this year is just about to get started, and so February is not too late to make goals for the new year. I have two:

1. Excel at work: The past few years in my life have been characterized by me spreading myself too thin between my interests. This year I will reinvest countless hours spent studying into work at Broad. What's more is I will finally be getting paid for it. Research and work are now one and the same.
2. Spend waking hours alive: There are 112 waking hours in a week. 40 of these will be spent at work. This leaves me with 72 hours to live my life however I want. My goal, is simply not to let convenience influence my actions too heavily. If I want to travel to Niagara Falls with Ashley, if I haven't spent much time with friends, if I suddenly feel like catching a swell in Florida, I'll do it.
   

168 hrs/week - 40 hrs work - 56 hrs sleep = 72 hrs living

"Plan B: Operation East Coast USA!!!"

I'm sitting in the Eggroll Cafe. A big guy named Ian is playing the Ukulele and singing about having adventures in a fantasy land inside his cubicle.

I spent the better part of the day at Brontes. Kerrie convinced me to finally create a digital version of the company mascot I created months ago on a whiteboard, a lady dinosaur called the Brontesaurus. She's a cutie. Still, all I could think about was doing something drastic before I start work at Broad.

I was up late last night trying to find a partner in crime to drag with me to Europe, or on any adventure for that matter. So... Plan A: Operation Amsterdam is looking pretty bleak right now without a posse. Hence, I have formulated "Plan B: Operation East Coast USA!!!"

"Plan B: Operation East Coast USA!!!"
Step 1) Pack surf gear, clothes and a shit-load of cliff bars in my car.
Step 2) Drive to Florida (tonight?... tomorrow?)
Step 3) Surf JAX Beach
Step 4) See the Gulf of Mexico
Step 5) Get home by Monday morning.

The Undiscovered Music Genome Project

I had an idea for a website. Pandora, also known as the Music Genome Project, has been a musical blessing to me. I've found so much new music there that I never would have found otherwise, so I can't help but think about how to extend it to new purposes. Ergo, my idea.

I do not pretend to know anything about the music industry, but it seems that there are a lot of bands who would like to be signed and few record labels looking for talent. Maybe the problem is that many of the labels, since the advent of Napster, are falling off the wave. I digress.

Anyway here's the idea, make a website dedicated to giving unsigned and indie artists the exposure they want: the Undiscovered Music Genome Project. Everyone is encouraged to submit their music. For each song they submit, they include a survey of it's musical characteristics, and each submission is QC'ed to Pandora standards before admission. The functionality would be mostly the same as Pandora except that voting would be 2 fold: "I like/dislike the sound", and "I like/dislike the artist." This way people and talent scouts can more quickly find the type of music they are looking for. Another idea would be to filter music by location so you can find local talent.

Two challenges would be: (1) Filtering and validating all the submissions. (2) Maintaining a database filled with fresh music (perhaps songs have expiration dates).


Just another idea. Someone go and make it happen.

Hi, I Have a New Job, Let's Go To Amsterdam!

As of 2 minutes ago, I am officially accepting an offer from the Broad Institute, and will be starting work there within the next few weeks. Waaaahhoooooiiieeee!! To say that I am stoked would be quite an understatement.

Part of my excitement from this prospect has me seriously considering some impulsive behavior. Lemme 'splain. In talking about potential start dates for work, Anne (the Imaging Platform director) had suggested taking a week off before starting work. It's not a bad idea considering (1) the time I've been spending job hunting and working at Brontes, and (2) how much time I will be spending working at Broad in the weeks to come.

That said, I've found round trip tickets to Amsterdam for$438.00 (direct flight, tax & fees incl.). Madrid, Paris, Rome, Venice, and Athens are only slightly more expensive.

So who's in!? Wednesday, Feb. 27th - March 3/4/5/6...?
(Note, these tickets are $2,000-3,000 on any other day.)

[Correction: Feb.28th would be departure date as I am marching for babies with Ashley on the 27th. Without the science that this charity supports, I may not have a brother today. Chris was born 2 months premature, and lucky to make it out of the hospital after a month of in the NICU. I've never done a charity like this so I've set a modest goal of $50 to raise (compared to Ashley's $500.) So that means that you can help me get 20% closer to my goal by contributing just $10 to save babies that will ultimately look like this.]

PS: I just watched a lunar eclipse. Is that a sign?

Cute Little Robot Dream and Nick's Birthday

Because I feel compelled to write about my wacky dreams...

Last night my father got our family two new pets, a golden retriever puppy, and a little robot! The puppy was adorable, but the robot was equally endearing. On Halloween, it put a little white sheet over itself and trucked around the house pretending to be a ghost. I nearly tripped over the little bugger since he was only about a foot and a half tall. "Awww, how'd you get so smart?!" I said.

On Saturday Ash and I celebrated Nick's birthday with him back in Salisbury. We went out to dinner at The Grog. Nick suggested seats near the bookcase where we found Scrabble and played a game before our meals came. I ended up with some pretty decent words for someone buzzing like a fool off a beer on an empty stomach. After dinner we headed back to Nick's where we had dessert with his family, and my parents swung by. Great night all-in-all. Welcome to 25 Nick!

Paper Hearts

I got the job! I was at Brontes on Friday when the imaging platform director called me and told me that they'll be making me an offer first thing next week. Even as I write this I still can't believe it. If I take this offer, I'll be spending forty hours a week coding; forty hours applying what I've learned in the past six and a half years to build an amazing piece of visualization software for biologists. This may be the best entry point into the industry I could have asked for.

Switching gears completely. Valentine's Day was great. I spent the entire day and previous night working on a Valentine for Ashley in the form of an installation piece in her room. I cut out, wrote on, and hung up over two hundred construction-paper hearts, turning the ceiling into a big, dangling rainbow. Ash blew me away by singing a song she wrote that completely captures the essence of our unique relationship in a folky beat. I love it, and I love that she's still surprising me with her talent. If I only played the banjo! Haha! Anyway, we capped the night off with sushi, chocolate covered strawberries, and champagne. Delicious.

Today we went for a long walk to Salem State and came back along a bike trail. Tim and Rae joined us for the rest of the day. We all went bowling, shopping, and saw a movie. It was the longest impromptu double-date ever.

Ash heads back to San Diego tomorrow. I don't know what to do with myself this coming week besides work at Brontes. Maybe I'll paint.

Magic Carpet Dream

Last night I dreamt I found a magic carpet. I was flying over some foreign landscape that seemed to be a cross between the Barcelona coast, Tamalpais Valley (north of San Francisco), and Neverland. The carpet was more like a blanket that functioned like a ram-air parachute.

SO MUCH fun!

Broad and Brontes

I took the train into Boston/Cambridge yesterday morning for an interview with the imaging platform at Broad. Things started around 9:00, and I got to interview with 6 different members of the group up until 3:00. The thought of giving a presentation had me pretty nerved up on the way in, but it actually went pretty well. I was posed a lot of really good questions, and learned a good deal about the general setup and workflow: Who does what, how Cell Profiler Analyst (CPA) works, and so on. Right off the bat, I found myself comparing it to the UVP and JyVis, but the people interacting with it would be experimental biologists. The star feature of the software is a machine learning algorithm that lets biologists teach CPA to classify the cells as positive or negative for a particular phenotype. Overall, it's an extremely powerful (and useful) piece of software that needs an overhaul and some streamlining. Ideas were practically leaking out of my head.

Last night I headed to Salem for a little celebration with Tim and Ashley at the Beer Works. Then this morning, school was delayed at Bates so Ash and I got to sleep in.

I worked at Brontes for 9 hours today. Designed some new icons for VAMM, and ended up getting pretty good at drawing teeth on the Wacom tablet. The key being to keep in mind how many cusps are on each tooth and where. What ended up taking up most of my time though, was starting to clean things up and write some documentation for my eventual replacement. I wound up writing a UI Design Guideline reference. Once I started losing steam on that, I started another document to highlight current challenges and goals in the UI, and who to talk to when designing certain types of components. It was quite the mind clearing exercise. What's nice about this is that even if I'm still working at Brontes a month from now, I'll be able to build a stronger foundation of documentation and guidelines which will ultimately help the UI group standardize implementations for each widget. The more they can do that, the more they can automate, and the more they can automate, the more they can start thinking about more interesting things like implementing motion design and pushing the implementation of drag and drop functionality.

*sigh* It'll definitely be sad when I finally hand this all over to another designer. At the interview yesterday, I was asked whether there were any large scale projects that I took from start all the way to completion, and it feels like this is the only one. The ground we have covered in a year and a half has been tremendous, but there's still so much more I'd like to see done.

More Coding, Interviews, and Academics

» Yesterday I spent a couple hours to a program that visualizes (in 3D) the differences between pdb files. This is handy to see how my MD system compression script works.

» I also checked out Curran's JyVis platform from sourceforge and started tinkering. I have an idea to extend parallel coordinate visualizations to emphasize outliers, by clumping similar records. This marks my first experience with sourceforge and CVS. It's all easy-peasy with Eclipse! :]

» Today I decided to pay off my remaining 4 car payments before the final. I almost own my car!

» BioTeam contacted me this morning to set up a phone interview!

» Apparently I didn't fill out my graduation clearance form last semester, even though I thought I filled out a D.I.G. Therefore, I have to wait until this spring to get my M.S. degree. I'll also be paying $85 to keep "in status." Uhhhggg!!!

» The Lowell Winterfest Photo exhibit opens tomorrow. It feels so good to finally have those prints matted and framed.

» Tuesday I'm setting sail for Cambridge to take my first steps inside the glorious Broad Institute and interview with the Imaging Platform group. I'll be the first to interview for this position, so let's hope I leave a lasting impression. *crosses fingers* ...still, I'm not sure what work I'll present to them.

» Dr. Catherine Plaisant will be in Lowell on Wednesday holding colloquium on "Visualizing Patterns: Repetition patterns in text, and temporal patterns in Electronic Health Records." I met and worked with Dr. Plaisant at VAST 2006 in Baltimore and she left a good impression on me, so I'm looking forward to hearing her French accent again.

Career Search 2008 Kicks Up a Notch!

Ashley and I celebrated our 4/3 anniversary (that is, our 16th monthiversary) yesterday by going out for a groovy dinner at Sylvan Street Grille. This, of course, was after doing an hour of P90X plyometrics which left us completely starving. We had some good conversation anyway, then headed home to an early night's sleep since Ash had to get up at 6:00 for her new job at Bates Elementary.

Make no mistake, I slept in this morning until around 8:30 when I got up and headed to Jaho to work on a job application for a Bioinformatics Software Developer position at Codon Devices in Cambridge. This one looks very interesting, so I'll probably call tomorrow if I don't hear back from them.

Tim met me at Jaho for breakfast around 10:30, then we headed to his place to transfer all of his photos for Winterfest into my car so I could bring them back to the lab. (Note to self: use adorama for next batch of large prints.) The poor bastard was up last night until 6:00am matting and framing photos. Effff thaaat!

From Salem, I headed back to Salisbury to pick up a ton of frames I had left at home. I gave Chris a ring, and he and I grabbed lunch together at Subway in near where he was working in Seabrook. The line moved painfully slow since there was only one woman there handling the whole lunch rush. We talked about OSHA, "Remember Charlie", and commercial/industrial electrical contracting agencies vs. small companies like the one he works for now. It's always good times with brother Chris.

Anyway, I got back home with plenty of time to spare before my second phone interview with the Broad Institute Imaging Platform. I killed an hour or two doing more Test Driven Development (TDD) in Eclipse (freakin rad, seriously). By the time 3:45 rolled around, I had worked up a good nervous tick, and felt completely scatterbrained. I feared the interview would be a disaster. Then the phone rang.

I was at ease from the moment she started talking to me about the research group and her position. It was awesome to hear someone so passionate about her work. I felt like I could have finished her sentences for her. When she told me about how the system uses a machine learning algorithm that is essentially trained by the biologists to phenotype cells, I knew exactly how I would have done it, and that's how they did it! I was ecstatic and confident at the same time. We ended the call with the plan to schedule an in-person interview... I'll even have to prepare a presentation of my work as a sort-of ice-breaker for the group. This definitely puts the pressure on, hopefully in a good way.

Last, but not least, I spent the remainder of the night, from 5:00 until midnight in the photo lab matting and framing. Monika made flyers with my photo on them, and left them all over the place. I even got a compliment from Missy's mom! Haha, nice! It just occurred to me how long this entry is getting. Suffice it to say that I'm done for now unless I can find cheap 20x24" frames and matte board.

*sigh* ...what a day.

Toaster Strudels Eclipse Harvest Moon

Slow day today. I spent the morning poking around for jobs online, had some cereal and a couple Toaster Strudels (mMMMmm). Visited some people up in the research labs in Olsen around 11, then spent a good part of the day at Eggroll Cafe learning to use the Eclipse IDE for Java development. So far, I'm loving it. Finally, after a couple good conversations with Joel and Zach, I headed to the photo lab where I spent the remainder of the day and night working on a photo exhibition with Monika. I've got about 20 prints picked out for the show, and managed to matte 10 from my Harvest Moon series. So far, so good.

The good: I have a phone interview with the director of the Imaging Platform at Broad Institute on Wednesday.
The bad: So many applications, so few interviews.
The ulgy: The Patriots lost Superbowl XLII to effing New York.