Apple Stores

This has got to be one of the most mixed up blogs around. I still can't on a consistent theme.

Anyway, today I'll focus on things Macintosh. The new Apple Store opened in University Village last night. I decide to drive down to check it out and maybe get the free T-shirt that was given to the first 1000 visitors. I just missed getting one--if I'd only been there 5 minutes earlier. There were several people coming out with more than one, but I'm sure they went in with someone! Anyway, it's good looking store--I had thought it might be two floors since the sport store that occupied the space previously had one. But it's on a single floor, displays of all the models, components of the digital lifestyle, and so on. The new 15 inch Powerbook looks great--it now has the same aluminum case that the 12 and 17 inch models have. All ports for plugging in USB, Firewire 400 and 800, video adapters and so on are located on the sides instead of the back. This part is not as clean looking as my Titanium but it does look easier to plug things into it.

But what I'm really "lusting" after is the new dual 2 GHz Power Mac G5. I'm thinking that I might get this with the genome grant. Hey, I'll need something fast for all that annotation and my dual 450 G4 is getting on in years (well, 2 anyway). Of course I could just upgrade the G4 to a dual 1.2 GHz G4 with an after market processor. These are pretty fast too. We'll see!

Oh, one more thing. It looks like the lamotrigine is working in controlling my focal seizures. They stopped a week ago after the dosage was increased to a new level. So far so good!

Government and trust...

I work for a government agency and I'm proud of what I do. The majority of people that I work with and around are bright, thoughtful, and motivated. We believe in the mission of the agency, and work hard to solve the problems we know are important to our constituents and for the preservation of our natural resources.

So why do I now feel a sense of depression with government, our government, in general? It's actually an easy question to answer, although it's been hard to admit it, until now. This week President Bush and other members of the administration are now acknowledging that no evidence has been found to link al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. They're saying this is what they meant all along. Yet, for almost 2 years members of the administration continuously linked Iraq with 9/11. This was the mantra used over and over again to justify our invasion. That and the fact that Iraq had WMD and wanted to use them, but that's for another discussion.

The backpedaling is so rapid that you have to worry that one of them might trip over themselves and get hurt. Is the change politically motivated? Of course. There's an election to campaign for!

Five months ago I was among the majority who felt there was sufficient justification for our invasion of Iraq. It now appears that I'm among the growing majority that feels the exact opposite. The loss of trust is beginning to run deep. The campaigns for 2004 have begun.

A mixed bag

There's an interesting series of notes in Macintouch on how to justify the use of Macintoshes in mixed computer environments and the rationale given by many network administrators to standardize on a Wintel platform. It seems ludicrous, particularly when such an attempt occurs in an educational institution, where choice and free thought is promoted, and in fact is supposed to be a fundamental tenet of our society. To paraphrase one post, it's time to turn the arguments around. When IT discusses the need to standardize, ask them for their cost-benefit analysis for the Windows platform. Make sure they don't forget to include the cost of installing security patches, cleaning computers of viruses, updating virus dats, etc. One university euphemistically calls this "remediation." Oh, good. Today Microsoft reported that they expect another worm/virus attack this week.

I've spent the last several days working out the last few details on the genome grant. For the sequencing phase we're down to working with my favorite university genome center (one of several built for the human genome sequencing project) or to continue to work with a commercial sequencing outfit. There are significant advantages and disadvantages to both.

The genome center is considerably cheaper which will allow my collaborators and I to carry out our original , have considerable experience in completing genomic sequence of high quality, they are close to me physically, and it will be easier to set up a collaborative agreement with them (instead of having to work on a huge contract. The genome center will also be slower (other concurrent projects), and at the quoted dollar amount, once they get to the hard part (gap closure), there may not be enough funds to cover it.

The commercial outfit will be faster, more integrated with our bioinformatics partner, and will give a high quality sequence. However, they will be considerably more expensive which will not allow us to complete some of the educational and annotation objectives, and at the budgeted amount, may not be able to actually complete the entire genome (no or few gaps) without additional money (contract is fixed for a certain number of base pairs).

Interesting process, and I'm learning a lot.

Budget disasters

I was in in Portland the past couple of days for a meeting of regional fish health pathologists and managers. The group is a committee that has been together for over 20 years, with bi-annual meetings to share notes, discuss individual problems, discuss policy, etc. What's been different and saddening is to see how deep various state and federal budget cuts are, cuts that impact a lot of good environmental science in the region. Because of the California budget crisis, state workers have been forced to absorb draconian budget cuts, furloughed employees, and a major reduction in the number of pathologists to cover the state. There's basically 3 left for the entire state, who must routinely travel to hatcheries all over the state in order to even carry out rudimentary inspections of fish hatcheries all over the state, some which raise Endangered Species Act-listed stocks. Sounds like a disaster in the making, not just for the loss of important services, but also because of the potential for a vehicle accident involving these hard-working and stretched to the limit people.

The entire situation makes our budget problems pale (although we may end up laying off many of our contract workers this fiscal year). More on this later.