A city in decline

Budapest is a city that speaks of better days. There is some magnificent architecture and quite beautiful scenery, but most of the city seems to be slowly falling apart. The facades are peeling and crumbling in many areas, graffiti is everywhere, windows are boarded and neglect is apparent all over, from city parks to downtown office buildings. Coming in to the city was akin to passing through a war zone in many respects, with rubble from torn down buildings and vacant bloc apartments lining the road. Once in the city, there was a strange mix of intricate and beautiful architecture alongside nondescript and unimaginative concrete boxes. The level of visual pollution was also striking to me with McDonalds signs on top of what look to be historic buildings and every other combination that seems possible.

The city is not without it's charm, and the beauty is redeemable. With care and management, the city could be revived to the grandeur it had to once have. Evening brings out the sidewalk restaurants with shops and open air dining everywhere. I sat alongside the Danube and had a nice meal with a great local brew. The people I spoke with were patient with my english and generally quite nice. It is a easy to walk city, with many great sites an easy walk from one center point.

Budapest

The conference went well and I got a solid response on my talk. The morning talks all pointed toward foundational needs for deploying these solutions and set up the discussion quite well.

Today, I caught a talk from Nico Adams, of Cambridge University, regarding the Semantic Web. It was a good talk and what really got me was that this was a follow on to a great talk by Randy Julian, CEO of Indigo BioSystems, at the AAPS earlier in the week on a very similar note, and also followed on the meeting I had with Jim Karkanias at Microsoft regarding their information strategy and the thinking behind the Amalga platform. While they are all on different paths, they are headed in similar directions and the thinking trend is toward data management at the atomic level. I am looking forward to seeing where this goes.

Sunday Talk at AAPS

The talks went well Sunday for my session with Joel Usansky from Thermo, Jeff Tishler from IDBS and Randy Julian from Indigo BioSystems. The first two talks were predictably product focused, with some tie in to Ligand Binding Assays and general Bioanalytical work flow. When Randy stepped up, he led off with a slide contrasting vacuum tubes and transistors, highlighting the need for something new, as opposed to optimizing the current systems. He then went on to talk about linked data as opposed to the standard static schema architecture of our database systems. He lost a good portion of the audience as evidenced by some of the questions, but the talk was spot on and tied together several ideas talked about earlier.

I am looking forward to following up with Randy when I return from Europe to compare notes.

Sea Critters

The Fembot Killer Duck Eye

 

If the fembots were killer ducks... Taken in Seattle at the City Center Park.

AAPS - Update from Seattle

The speakers dinner last night was enjoyable and informative. The challenges coming out of the ligand binding labs are the same as those faced by the rest of my clients and center around key information exchange challenges.

As a deliverable set from yesterday, the group discussed several key focus areas, several of which resonated with me.

Data exchange was a hot topic with a desire for standardized information exchange so systems could talk to each other with minimal work. There is already work in the industry on this topic and I pointed to several of the current and emerging transport standards.

Instrument and software validation and the easing of the process was a highly debated topic as it represents so much of an impact for the GLP labs. The options and discussion ranged from validation accelerator packs to FDA recognized validation standards that allow a vendor to certify, reducing the customer level validation to the 20% or less of customization or configuration.

Also discussed was the desire to have a standardized "plug and play" infrastructure for instrument hardware. This spurred a number of discussions around the implications, not the least of which is the need to implement bidirectional communication in the hardware and software layers of the instruments to make this possible. The lack of common standards to build to and a governing body to work with makes this all the more challenging. My suggestion to the group was to not take on this as an outcome, but rather take on a paper with requirements and standards recommendations, that can then be used as a foundation for discussion with the key players. We need to get on the same page with respect to what it means to have integration at the hardware and driver level before we can get to the level of discussing implementation in detail.

All in all, it was good discussion and I am looking forward to my session later today, discussing the ELN and LIMS roles in these and other areas.

Helpful tools for image work

I enjoy photography, and I like playing around in photoshop a bit so I run into a need for a few additional tools

• I need a good batch editor that can copy my RAW files from my D-90 to JPG with a high level of control.
• Meet IrfanView, the most simple, powerful FREE tool I have found.
• Knowing what fonts you have and what they look like at a glance is a huge timesaver and I looked a while for this one.
• I settled on AMP Font Viewer, and you can check it out here.
• To browse my galleries of images and launch the target images directly in photoshop, I like the integration of Windows Live photo gallery.

There are a handful more I will post about later, but it's amazing what's out there for free. I have an older version of photoshop and am looking forward to one day soon upgrading to the latest suite, but for now, this is working great. Here is the latest work in progress, I am making a poster for my son who is a Lacrosse (LAX) defense man.

I got the quote from looking around the net for lacrosse terms, and I got the Wildcat logo using a logo from one of the U13 sites as a base, then cloning it and making it vector art so I could scale it, selecting the resulting skeleton and dropping in the red fill. If I was a better free hand artist like my sister, I am sure I could have whipped something cool up, but this will do I think.

What does it mean?

Beach house for rent!

Check out the beach house blog! It is available for rent so if you are considering Sea Isle, visit the blog and consider this location.

Surgery a Success!

We got the word that the Surgery was a Success! Tommy came through well and may come home tomorrow, while Mark had an incident with his spleen getting nicked but seems to be recovering well.

Tommy Logsdon

We got the word - barring any major complications, Tommy goes in for the transplant this week! I sure am hoping things go well. Prayers are needed - for Tommy and Mark and for the whole family.

Traveling...

Philly to Seattle, Speak at a conference, meet with people. Seattle to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Budapest. Speak at a conference, meet with people and see the city. Budapest to Frankfurt and Frankfurt to Philly - home again. A lot of time in the air is in my future this month!