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CUBIC period is over
The end of the CUBIC has come, and so did the end of my 1-year postdoc in the group of Christoph Steinbeck. It would have been much better if the group could have continued for one or two more years, so that we could harvest the fruit of the work done in the past years. Only having been group member since April 1 2006, I mostly contributed work to Bioclipse (doi:10.1186/1471-2105-8-59), CMLSpect (submitted), and integrating Miguel’s mass spectrum prediction toolkit into SENECA (doi:10.1021/ci000407n) for structure elucidation. The latter topic is rather exciting and when the method shows powerful enough, this will have a major impact on the field of metabolomics.
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ACS Chicago - Day #3
Tuesday promised to be an interesting day: an interesting ‘Scientific Communication’ CINF session in the morning and early afternoon. And, rather important to me, the Blue Obelisk dinner that night, just after another CINF party, where I chatted with a few others about options of a chemistry equivalent of the Google Summer of Code; who knows what happens this summer, but start thinking about ideas on how to increase the web experience of chemistry journal web pages.
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ACS Chicago - Day #1
I was happy to notice just a minute ago that the first blog items covering the ACS meeting are popping up: C&EN has set up a dedicated blog about the meeting, Nature’s Sceptical Caterine wrote she has reached the meeting too, Richard wrote about the scent of bugs in wine (or so), and Kyle won’t make it other than tomorrow. Additionally, Nature is running a coverage of the ACS meeting. On the reader side, Paul is hoping that Whitesides will be blogged about.
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Chicago (Bulls), here I come!
I had some fun today with making prints of reservations etcetera for my trip to the ACS conference in Chicago. Went over to the website to make a print of the location of the hotel I am in. (Intercontinental Chicago: in case you want to leave me a message to meet up over breakfast or so.) Anyway, so at the ACS website I found a notice that the ACS Housing people closed down and that I should contact the hotel directly. Fine, no problem. Oh wait, my hotel is not in the list. No worries, I just enter my last name and acknowledgment number. Huh, they don’t know me?? Already worried about which bridge to use as backup alternative, I emailed the organization which now takes care of it, being answered some 15 minutes later that they no longer do the hotel administration for that ACS conference anymore. That indeed rang some bell; I went over back to the ACS webpage, and this time found the correct ACS housing webpage. I had been using one from a previous ACS conference. Yeah, one of my finest hours :) Things are sorted out now, as I had already email the hotel too. Things are fine, and so my nerviness activity is back to normal. (If you care to reproduce, just go to the page for International Visitors linked from the Chicago conference homepage, scroll down to “Preparing for Your ACS Meeting Experience” and click the Hotel Information link. Makes sense, because the international guests already know how things work :) And, yes, I could have seen it mention SA in the subtitle, I know.)
