I have a job. And not just any job, but the most perfect job I could possibly imagine.

( excessive squee )

The next three weeks is going to be really really interesting. And the next three years after that. I am not sure when I will next have time to sleep, let alone socialize, though!

Please comment at Dreamwidth or read comments there. You can use your LJ address as an OpenID, or just write your name.

I've been wandering round the UK since Sunday evening, including two interviews, and I'm now chez parents.

( 4 days in the life )

The lecturing job said they would let me know that day or the next, but I've heard nothing. This is leading me to suspect that I'm their reserve candidate, and they are waiting for confirmation from their first choice before they turn me down. I shall nag them tomorrow, but I'm prepared for disappointment. The research job said they are intending to do most of their interviews at the end of May, so I won't hear for a few weeks anyway. So now I just wait and hope.

I won't make it to the Carlton as planned tomorrow, since my parents sort of randomly invited my sibs for dinner without consulting me first. I'm slightly annoyed at having my plans changed on me, but I am very happy for the chance to see Thuggish Poet, so I don't mind too much. OTOH I do intend to show up to the Pembury for doseybat's party on Saturday.

I'm really glad that siderea made a post at some point explaining that intelligence and avidity are different things. This semester I had a class of six students, three boys and three girls. It soon became clear that the girls range between fairly and very avid but aren't very bright, and the boys are reasonably to highly capable but are just coasting. It's always a little worrying when a group divides precisely along gender lines like that, but I'm fairly certain that it's just a statistical blip and not a result of my making biased assumptions.

( more teaching notes )

After finding the class slightly frustrating, I do feel good about the outcome by the end of the course; I made some real connections. Yay teaching!

I've been horribly, horribly avoidant about looking for jobs, because I am scared I won't get any, and because I don't have a clear idea what I want to do with my future. Stay in academia or get a real job? Stay in Sweden or go back to England, or find a new country to explore? I managed to get started this week, deciding that I'd apply for everything I could find that looks vaguely suitable, and not agonize over every word of my applications, just get some out there.

( mainly for my record-keeping )

In other work mightiness news, I was pushy earlier in the month, with the result that we've managed to get our paper back to the journal with corrections completed, and two others in the group have submitted manuscripts, and there are two more in the pipeline. So I'm reasonably proud of that. And I can leave tomorrow for my long-awaited Christmas vacation with a good conscience.

On the less positive side, I have a stabbing headache, and have done for several days now. It's not bad enough to stop me getting on with things, but I would prefer it not to be there.

I didn't want to count up my nano words because I knew I'd not kept up with it in the last week of November. But actually now I've done it, and it's not as bad as I thought: 47391 words of meaningful communication in the month of November, so only 5% short. And that's partly because I didn't write anything at all over the weekend when cartesiandaemon was here. Chart, as much for my own reference as anything.

I feel pretty good about that, even if I didn't technically win. 50k words felt like just the right level, it was enough to be challenging, but it would have been vaguely possible if I hadn't got cold and depressed and disorganized. And it had the intended positive effect of keeping better in touch, even if I'm still short of where I want to be.

In other good news, I gave a very successful talk to the department today. I cut it finer than I'd like to finish writing it, but once I got up in front of an audience everything was peachy. And I got lots of interested questions which implied people had listened and taken it in, so yay. Also, today I made tasty tomato soup. All in all could be a lot worse!

I've had one of those weeks, a bit. I was idly checking my email on Monday morning, and realized that I had an extra committee meeting Monday evening, and a lecture Tuesday evening which I'd agreed to do ages ago and then forgotten about, on top of my usual class Thursday evening and running a service with Joanna on Friday. So it's been a bit manic, especially fitting all that round work commitments, but so far seems to have come out ok in the end.

( misc diary )

Graah.

( miscellaneous whining, nothing serious )

This is exactly the situation for my luxury hot chocolate mix that deborah_c gave me for my birthday, I feel.

So as I mentioned I succumbed to irresistable gadget lust and bought me a teeny tiny eee.

( geek wurbling )

I've named the computer Little list (cheers for the witty suggestion, emperor!) There doesn't seem to be a way to tell the computer its new name, but that's minor. So, yesterday and today, Little List got its first field trial, in the form of a couple of days at a small local conference I got roped in to attending.

This took place in Tammsvik conference centre, which way over on the other side of town, and near inaccessible by public transport. So I had to get up unpleasantly early Thursday morning, and take a 50 minute train ride to the end of the line, where I missed the only bus (it runs only twice a day), but luckily was able to share a taxi with some colleagues who were also aiming for that bus. Using Little List on a crowded train is slightly uncomfortable (I had to hold it on my lap with my palms, while typing with my fingers, not very ergonomic!) but certainly doable and much easier than using a full-sized laptop. I conclude it's not worth getting out the baby computer for my usual ten minute commute, but for any longer journey than that, it's very useful to have. And it felt really nice to be able to dash off short catch-up notes to a couple of friends, not a daunting task like settling down to write a long, properly composed email.

Tammsvik is very pretty, traditional buildings (some are genuinely at least quite old) looking out over Mälaren lake and beautiful forests. But it's otherwise very poorly set up. We were a group of a hundred, but the facilities would have been barely adequate for 20. There were three toilets for the whole group. The sound system was utterly dire. They somehow concluded that there were only four vegetarians, though to be fair they were generally helpful when we pointed out the error, apart from one frazzled waiter who yelled at the fifteenth person who asked for a vegetarian meal long after they'd run out. There were several groups using the facilities at the same time, meaning that we felt rushed and crowded a lot of the time. The meeting ran from 9 on Thursday to 4 today, but we were only allowed to check in after 3 pm and had to check out before 9 am. Outside those times, we had to leave our bags in a tiny little cloakroom which didn't really have space for a hundred coats, let alone a hundred overnight bags. Part of the problem was that the meeting itself was overscheduled; the toilet situation would have been less acute if we'd been allowed more than a 5 minute break in a four hour session, and the checking in situation if we'd been allowed more than half an hour for a hundred people to go through reception, take their bags to their rooms and come back to the meeting. Networking, ostensibly the point of the meeting, was pretty difficult with so little unscheduled time. But I did get to catch up with RS, who is now working at Stockholm and I hadn't done very well at keeping in touch with her since she left our department.

The centre has wireless, for which you buy 8 hour passes. That's 8 hours of time, not 8 hours of actual use. They had provided the group with some of these passes, but again, not nearly enough for 100 scientists. I decided not to bother trying to use Little List to take notes, as there were no extra power points in the room and the battery wouldn't last all day. But I did get my paws on one of the coveted wireless passes, so in the evening I was able to catch up on email and LJ from the not very comfortable comfort of my narrow, hard bed in a cold, draughty room.

Apart from the logistical crap, and the overscheduling, the meeting wasn't too bad. There were some good talks, and my own talk, first thing this morning, went pretty well even if it wasn't the greatest triumph of my career. I had thought of testing whether Little List would seamlessly talk to the projector equipment, but I decided I'd better not inflict that experiment on the audience at 9 am, and anyway, the SCSI cable needs a converter from its small socket to the standard sized one, I think. However, I was able to open my Powerpoint presentation in Open Office, in order to read it through and check that I knew what I was going to say.

I think even after the novelty wears off, having a tiny computer will make a positive difference to my life. I'll likely still need to carry a book wherever I go, because I get fidgety if I have to wait five minutes for a bus, but that's not long enough or comfortable enough to get a computer out. But it will be good to be able to use longer travelling or waiting around times to catch up on emails or LJ posts, to be saved for when I next get online. And it was so lovely to be able to get online while staying away from home, and I expect other conference centres / hotels will have better power and internet facilities than Tammsvik.

Of course, it may tempt me to spend money I don't have; I can't really subscribe to mobile internet, because there are so many different providers that it would be a waste of money. But if I start paying for one-off wireless access on the move, I will soon find that the costs mount up. But generally, yay tiny computer!

I hate living in a world where I have to specify this: but I'm not in any way affiliated with Asus, and I'm not getting any payment or consideration for writing a largely positive review of the eee.

This is actually something that happened a few months ago, but I didn't blog about it then because I wasn't sure how public the information was. Anyway, my former Boss S, who supervised me during my PhD, showed up in Stockholm. I went to hear her talk, being curious to know what had happened to the project I started after I left. And it turns out that she's achieved some pretty stunning stuff.

She's found two drugs with clinical potential, and one of them turns out to be an inhibitor of something called a sirtuin. Sirtuins are super, super trendy right now; they're involved in marking the DNA at a level which is termed epigenetic. They also seem to play a major role in ageing, as well as being master controllers of which genes are expressed.

She's got a very nice paper in Cancer Cell which comes out this week. Unfortunately Cell Press are still operating on the model of making people pay to read articles, so you'll only be able to see it if you're in an academic institution. But anyway, the point is that it's very satisfying to feel that the work I did was the starting point of a project that has real, practical results, that may even help to make patients better.

Boss S' career is going very well at the moment, with this work and some other impressive achievements in the past few years. There's a possibility she might take up a position here in my institute, which would be rather cool, especially as she'd likely be working with the people I collaborate with anyway. I managed to feed her dinner and catch up on some of the gossip from Dundee, so I'm pleased that worked out.

Thinking of this has given me a motivation boost to get on with the stuff I'm supposed to be doing at the moment. So I'll leave LJ and get back to that.

I had a busy schedule today, but still didn't do a great job of getting out of the house.

( mild work whining )

It started sleeting heavily some time mid afternoon, and the yucky weather continued. I'd dressed for the spring which appeared to be firmly here when I got up this morning, so I was a bit cold and miserable coming home.

On the way, I overheard two women having an earnest discussion of Latin verb conjugations.

I got home at 10:30, and completely failed at putting chocolate spread on a cracker. It turns out that the state of "oh look, I appear to be covered in chocolate" doesn't have many fun outcomes available when you're on your own.

Well, at least I've got a fair bit of experimental work done. And now I have tea, and don't have to deal with today any more. So that's positive overall, I think.

Things that are pleasing:

1. I have given my two lectures with a degree of success. That was believe it or not the first opportunity I've had to give university-level lectures in my own professional subject. A good group, tiny (officially 6 people but not all of them show up), but really keen. That meant that the lectures were more or less large tutorials or small seminars, but I got lots of good and interesting questions. I'm generally proud of myself.
   
   
2. This means I can now catch up on sleeeeeeeeeep and start attending to the rest of my life.
   
   
3. I had lovely friends supporting me through the painful process of recovering from the worst deadline mismanagement I've ever committed. Thank you all so much, especially darcydodo and cartesiandaemon and rysmiel, for holding my hand and for refusing to accept that needing my hand held makes me pathetic and worthless.
   
   
4. I am blessed with a particularly wonderful beau, who is very cuddly and fun to talk to.
   
   
5. I have lovely, accomplished, enthusiastic bar mitzvah pupils, and generally an excellent Jewish community.
   
   
6. I have booked flights to come to England for Pesach.
   
   
7. Teeeeeeeeeeea

( whining about unpleasing things cut )

Author: Linley Erin Hall

Details: (c) 2007 Linley Erin Hall; Pub Seal Press 2007; ISBN 1-58005-211-8

Verdict: Who's afraid of Marie Curie? is informative and sensible.

Reasons for reading it: I know the author, linley. This is slightly weird, actually; I've read books by people I'm connected with via LJ before, but none by people I actually know personally. I'm going to try to write a review that isn't influenced by this, but obviously, Linley will need to decide whether to read my comments or not. I'm rather relieved that I have nothing strongly critical to say.

I probably wouldn't have bothered with the book if it weren't for this personal connection, but that's mainly because I read very little non-fiction (outside work, at least) and certainly don't buy new pop science books the day they come out. I am interested in the topic of women working in science though, for fairly obvious reasons!

How it came into my hands: I bought it from Amazon, because when I was doing my big book buying spree darcydodo reminded me that the book had been released that very day.

( detailed review )

Just as I was reading the book, there was one of those silly privilege lists doing the rounds on LJ (I might talk about that more in another post). The combination of the two reminded me that I did indeed have a very helpful upbringing, both in terms of giving me the best chance in general and in terms of helping me to become a scientist specifically. WAMoC suggests that fathers should encourage their daughters in scientific and technical play, noting regretfully that althought it would be great if mothers did so to, in practice there are few mothers who themselves have the confidence. Well, my mother was in fact trained as a scientist, and did very much get involved in scientific play with me throughout my childhood. Not to mention that my grandmother was a doctor and in general I had at least as many female role models in technical fields as male. And on top of the kind of cultural advantages of a family that believe in education and are decently well-off, I also had the emotional advantages of sane and reasonable and loving parents, something the list doesn't cover at all.

So in fact, most of the challenges mentioned in the book don't really apply to me. Not only did I have extremely supportive and non-sexist parents, but I went to a strongly academic girls' school which gave me a good scientific background. I have never had a problem with academic confidence, or underestimating my abilities or being too much of a perfectionist to actually produce stuff. I have always had very good and not at all sexist teachers and supervisors, including if it matters a high proportion of women. I am not intending to have children or put my career second to a (thoroughly hypothetical) husband's. I'm also not American and generally live in a much less sexist milieu than that described in the book. So I would say that I have equal advantages to any male colleague, and I'm still not completely convinced I can hack it as a career scientist.

I've spent this week learning how to be a better microscopist. ( microphotography )

Not a particularly major event, but something to note: Making Light posted a link to kd lang singing Hallelujah. If you haven't heard this already, you really should; it's the first time I've been motivated to find software for saving YouTube videos (though really I only want the soundtrack, the video is just of a concert at Sidney Opera House). I am a purist about that song; I care too much about Leonard Cohen's original to like most covers. And I don't generally like kd lang all that much. But this performance is seriously awesome. And then there was some discussion about Cohen covers and I found out that the Jennifer Warnes cover album Famous blue raincoat has been rereleased. And it's even on eMusic, so now I have a copy of Warnes' duet with Cohen himself, Joan of Arc, where she sings Joan and he sings the fire. rysmiel played it to me when I was in Montréal in 2005, and it is just about the most emotionally powerful song I have ever heard.

On the planning front, well. I tend to stress about travel more than is really required, and in this case I'm not nearly as pre-organized as I would like to be. However, I have booked all the travel from here to London via Finland, Estonia, Germany, Holland and briefly Belgium, and all the accommmodation I need at the stopover points. That's the important thing. I reckon once I'm in England I can be flexible and if some of my planned meetups don't work out, well, it's a pain that I don't get to see people I'd hoped to see, but at least I won't be stranded. And I haven't planned what I'm going to do in any of the cities on my whistle-stop tour of northern Europe. But if I'm only going to be in each city for between a few hours and a day and half, I think I can get away with just wandering around and soaking up the atmosphere, rather than going to specific Tourist Sites. (I have to do it all on a 64Mb camera memory, which should be an interesting discipline, as apparently they no longer make the cards that fit my camera.)

Not connected to anything else at all, but while I'm posting, have a link to the writer Catherynne M Valente's thoughtful and personal essay on porn.

I've been feeling horribly in a rut again this week. ( mostly boring whiny stuff )

Oh well. I'll bring shabbat in early, I'm not going to wait until 10 o'clock. And tomorrow I'm going on a trip with the international researchers people, so that should be a much-needed change of scene.

I've been meaning to blog about this for ages: just before I visited England, the rabbi asked me to be a witness for two women who were converting to Judaism. ( being a witness )

Talking of contributing to the community, ploni_bat_ploni and I have agreed to take over the running of the egalitarian / alternative service, which has been organized by the same two people for 7 years and they understandably want a break. We volunteered for this before the results of the vote when the community decided to be completely egal anyway, which somewhat diminishes the need for this alternative setup. But we both want some worship where the congregation participate directly and create a nice atmosphere, as opposed to the very formal setup of the main service, and I'm pretty sure we're not the only ones who feel this way. This Friday night was our first experiment in this direction, and it went very well indeed. There defininitely seems to be enthusiasm to make this a regular event.

( lovely shabbat )

And in a different context of contributing to the community, in the lab we've all been agreed for a while that it would be very sensible to start having group meetings again, so I decided to be the one to bell the cat and suggest this to my boss. His reaction was pretty much: sure, you go ahead and organize it! So I did so, and we had a preliminary meeting on Friday, in the course of which we learnt that our dear absent-minded professor has published two papers and bagged us a share in tens of millions of Kronor worth of funding, and never got round to telling us about it... So that's another way for me to feel more like a productive member of society rather than a pointless newcomer, anyway.

Today I did something I've never done before: I laid tefillin in public. There are a number of reasons why I haven't done this before, and a number why I decided to do so now. I am not going to discuss them until I've got over being deeply embarrassed by the whole thing.

I didn't have a chance to get all introspective over this, though, because a really amazing visitor turned up to synagogue. An elderly Lithuanian Jew who decided to stay in Lithuania after the horrors of Nazi occupation, waiting patiently through the equally horrific Soviet period for some Jews to come and find him so he could tell his story. The Jews who eventually did so happened to be Swedish, and brought him to Stockholm to bear witness. He was speaking in Yiddish, partially translated by the community into Swedish, both of which are languages I can vaguely guess at but no more than that, so I only got the rough gist of what he was saying. Family and friends murdered by Russian troops... viewed the Germans as liberators at first... Jews more frequently shot on the spot in Lithuania and buried in mass graves there rather than sent to the death camps... Jewish tombstones dating from the 14^th century used as building materials... surviving family now in Israel and South Africa. The community asked him to lead us in the mourners' prayer, the Kaddish, which he did, somewhat stumblingly, and he commented afterwards that it was the first time in fifty years that he had prayed with a Jewish community.

Then I went to work and had a good knock-down argument with my boss. In some ways I had a similar sort of creative relationship with boss S back in Dundee, but my current boss is less likely to need reminding that he isn't my mother. So now I'm all buzzing with ideas and plans. I also discovered a note that someone had found the incubator broken on Friday and rescued all my cells, for which I am deeply, deeply grateful.

I really wanted to spend the train journey home reflecting on all this, but ran into Milo so I had to be polite to him instead. And I've spent what was left of the evening buying and preparing food so I can feed ploni_bat_ploni tomorrow.

I should probably talk about how I spent the weekend too, but I'm overwhelmed and also tired. Oh, I'm really getting into ellen_kushner's Swordspoint at the moment.

The guy I share a cell culture room with opened a conversation with Do you know much about mycoplasma? and it got worse from there. Turns out he thinks he may have an infection but he doesn't plan to do anything about it because it's a hassle and he's read that the parasite is present in a large proportion of cultured cells anyway. Actually, he's pretty sure he does have it, because he's seen things moving in his cells when he looked at them under the microscope.

Aaaargh. Mycoplasma is highly, highly infectious stuff, and nearly impossible to eradicate, and it's mostly asymptomatic except that it makes cells prone to die catastrophically if you stress them. I am so not impressed that my cells are neighbours to cells belonging to someone with this kind of attitude.

While I am distracting myself from the fact that it's another four hours before I can have a cup of tea, I also discovered a noise more unbearable than nails on a blackboard: putting dry ice into a metal scoop, which then contracts very rapidly due to the cold and makes a truly infernal squealing noise.

Shout-out to all the bioinformatics people out there, specially rysmiel.

I am trying to find reagents and information about a particular protein, which unfortunately has the same name as another totally unrelated protein. Mostly it's relatively easy (for a human who knows the field!) to disambiguate, but some of the automated tools I'm trying to use, such as searching the catalogue of commercial websites, are having trouble. Returning results for the wrong protein when I carefully specified that I wanted the right protein, and then not having adequate descriptions associated with the catalogue item, so I have to email customer support to get a definite identification... things like that.

But I can definitely see that the situation is a lot better than it might be, considering the mess that is biological nomenclature. And I can see that it's improving very rapidly. And I am really grateful that it's even possible to do these automated meta-searches which make life so much easier. Anything I'm working on, there's a good chance I can find out fairly rapidly and without needing to know a lot of bioinformatics myself, what other scientists have already discovered about the topic. And that's really important for making research useful, rather than merely of intellectual interest to the particular scientists who do it.

So yay for bioinformaticists. They're behind the scenes people, mostly, they don't get big headline grabbing breakthroughs. But this scientist at least appreciates them very much.

So I'm reading a review about c-Myc and the genes it activates, and I come across the phrase This Laodicean response does not reflect some intrinsic property of the ODC gene. This piqued my curiosity; ok, the review writer is blatantly showing off here, but I consider myself to be as classically knowledgeable as the next biochemist, and I have no idea what he is referring to. I tried Wikipedia, and it tells me that Laodices is an alternate name for Elektra, or any of several minor queens, and that there are several places called Laodicea named after said queens.

So does anyone have a clue why a relatively weak gene response might be described as Laodicean? Other than that the author got over-excited about looking for synonyms for weak in his thesaurus! In some ways it's kind of cute, I must admit, but it's annoying me that I don't recognize the reference.

Yes, I know you all know this, I've been going on about it for more than a month. But now I actually have the official letter saying that there is money for me, and mentioning me by name. My boss is lovely because he scanned the official letter and emailed it to me; I appreciate his understanding that I needed to see that with my own eyes.

I have made progress towards sorting out somewhere to live too; I have an email saying:

Dear Rachel, The landlord in A_____ say ok and welcome you as tenant

So that sounds pretty definite!

*breathe* I really am going to Sweden next month.

I have a job! I'm to start on 24 April at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. It's for two years, basically (though if it's disastrous it may be only one and if successful quite likely to be extended). And I'll be working on some fairly abstract questions about how the different parts of a cell are coordinated when cells grow. Stuff that might have some relevance to cancer ultimately, but it's a lot more pure intellectual research than what I was doing for my PhD.

I'm keeping this post locked until I'm absolutely sure I have the job, like at the level of a contract in my hand; apparently there are still some formalities to be worked out. But I've been offered the job and have accepted; the fact that I'm old-fashioned enough to be a little nervous about an exchange of emails with nothing in writing is almost certainly just paranoia. Anyway, assume this post is liable to become public, so please don't refer to the details of the job where Google might find it.

Edit: Now public, please be careful.

Thank you to everybody who gave me useful advice when I was considering whether to take this job. I really, really appreciate your support, and you did help clarify my thinking. *hugs all round*

( what I need to do in the next 8 weeks )

I'm finding it a bit hard to believe that I'm actually going to go through with this!

My brother (Screwy) is here, yay. He's just come from Israel, and was planning to spend the night and then head straight off to Leeds, but they don't need him in Leeds any more so he's here. Yay. It's good to see him, and hang out with him, and argue with him.

Also, I have encouraging noises that aren't quite a job offer yet from another quarter (German p53 factory, and I shan't be more specific in a public post). It's probably the job best matched to my skillset of any job in the whole of science, so I was fairly certain my application would be favourably received. But it's still gratifying.

On a further happy note, greengolux is very, very funny.

So the journal have sent me final proofs, which is kind of exciting because now the stuff I wrote looks all formal and ready to print and professional. On the negative side, they sent the proofs at 2 pm on a Friday, and want them returned within 48 hours. Apparently the 48 hours thing is standard practice, but 48 hours when 45 of them are weekend seems a little mean.

Anyway my printer has decided it won't play ball, so I'll need to go into work to do this. And I'm not going to do that in the last half-hour before shabbat so I'll end up doing this in a panic on Sunday. I need to get signatures and authorisations for payment, too, which is going to be hard to do during the weekend.

Also, I've never proofed anything before so I don't really know what I'm doing, which is kind of scaring. Then again, I'm on the verge, the very brink, of being an actual published scientist, so that's pretty cool!

Now, imagine for a moment that you are the IT department supporting a sizeable medical faculty. You have several hundred medical and research students relying on your server. You decide to move everyone to a new server, implying quite a bit of downtime and a change in the login path. What do you do to minimize the consequent disruption?

A) Send a circular email informing people that they need to change their login in order to be able to check email

B) Wait until sufficient chaos ensues that angry students storm your office demanding to know why they can't check their email, access their files, or even access desktops on most computers in the department (because obviously it's really important for security reasons that no-one should be able to use computers at all when the network server is down). Then tell the angry students to "spread the word" about the changed login

C) Refuse to tell departmental sysadmins what's going on, because after all they're not directly employed by the university, so obviously they're the scum of the earth

D) Actually take some sensible steps to inform people what's going on. Like, maybe, print out a notice and display it in a prominent place

Guess which our lovely department chose? Oh yes, got it in one: a mixture of A, B and C. Grrr!