6-27-2011 Bike Ride

As my last ride for my three week vacation to Utah I did my 'Mama Bear' loop. 'Baby Bear', my 20 mile loop, was getting all my attention. Mama bear is almost 28 miles. Maybe in August I'll introduce you to 'Papa Bear'. Side Note: according to this site, I am burning as many calories on this ride as a healthy individual exercising three times a week should intake. No wonder I am ALWAYS hungry!!

6-20-2011 Bike Ride

I am now biking three times a week. I usually do my 18 mile loop. If you include my ride into lab its actually 20 miles.

ACA 2011

I spent this last week in New Orleans at the American Crystallographic Association (ACA) conference. I was there with my awesome lab mate and new roommate, Christopher. This is the same conference that I went to in Chicago last year. The conference happened two months earlier this year due to the international crystallography conference that happens this summer. The ACA conference is meant to get scientist in the crystallography community together to share their research. This really is a prime way to learn what others are doing, develop ‘research relationships’, and bounce ideas off one another. I feel that these conferences are an essential component to scientific discovery.

Getting to New Orleans happened to be a bigger deal than one would have anticipated, but we had a few lucky breaks and got there only a few hours later than expected. When Jane, my PI, picked us up, it was raining very heavily, the kind of rain that simply doesn’t occur in Utah. Getting out to the car was enough to get my feet soaked wet. On the way to the airport we drove out of the storm and I thought we were going to be in the air soon enough. When we got situated at our gate another portion of the storm rolled in and set up camp over the airport. Pretty soon they had to delay all in-coming and out-going flights due to lightning. The airport was shutdown for about three hours. It quickly became apparent that we would miss our connection. The agents were very busy trying to help passengers sort out their missed connections so we had to wait quite a while to talk to sort out our connection. The agent

confirmed us on a flight from Atlanta to New Orleans in the morning and put us on stand-by for a flight later that night. She told us that Atlanta was already backed up from the same storm system and we’d likely have to spend the night at the Atlanta airport. Long story short, a very nice agent in Atlanta put us on priority stand-by and we made it onto the later flight. We were in New Orleans only a few hours later than scheduled.

I have to be honest; in my humble opinion New Orleans is not as cool as Chicago but pretty neat nonetheless. My biggest complaint was that the city seemed dirty to me. Christopher had a fair point when he mentioned that it was an old city and old cities generally looked dirtier. They had garbage bins on every curb, which I thought was odd. As I looked around though I realized how cramped the city was, especially in the French quarter, where else could they put the trash? The food was great. We went to Red Fish Grill on Bourbon Street, it was by far the best food we had there. We also went to Johnny’s Po Boys where I got the New Orleans original, the Muffaletta (See picture). Of course, we had gumbo and jambalaya.

Red Fish Grill

Johnny's Muffaletta

On the last night we were there we went to a Thai restaurant which was on the opposite side of the French Quarter from our Hotel. We walked down Royal Street all the way to the restaurant. My pineapple-fried rice was yummy. When we were done we decided to walk the entirety of Bourbon Street. By this time the sun was setting and things were getting started on Bourbon Street. Suffice it to say that two devout Christian men were educated. The live music in every bar was neat, live music is always pretty cool. Other then that I have nothing good to say about that street. I can say that women are prettier with cloths on and the adult superstore does NOT sell adults. I don’t plan on making that stroll ever again.

We spent most days in the conference listening to talks and interacting with other scientists and even a few legends in the field. Wednesday we decided to go to the local aquarium, right next to the Mississippi River. After going to look at the river and take a few pictures we went into the aquarium. It was a very neat attraction! I could go on about the variety of colorful fish, the sea otters or even the penguin exhibit. I’ll spare you and tell you my favorite creature there, the jellyfish! They were small but I think I like them best that way. They move so gracefully and are simply beautiful.

On Thursday I had to give a fifteen-minute talk. I talked mainly about recommendations made by a task force that Jane was on. It was on validation of crystallographic structures deposited in the PDB. I also talked about a new tool that I created called MolProbity Compare, which allows the user to compare two validation reports of two different models. Unfortunately my talk was in the afternoon on the last day, a lot of the participants are gone by that time. Further, there were other sessions that were happening simultaneously that I had to compete with. I frankly was surprised at the 10-15 people in the room who listened to my talk.

There you have it, New Orleans in a nutshell.