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.