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?

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.

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.