Long couple of nights, but then a relatively early finish last night by the Red Sox. Hopefully they will wrap up with a victory in Game 6 on Wednesday. It is also the halloween season. We vividly remember the days when our boys were little. In the last minute, they used to come up with ideas for costumes that simply didn’t exist in stores that you could buy. My wife used to work her magic to make them happen. The happiness in them for the few hours that they wore the custom costumes were priceless! It is like the customization that we are asked to do at work on a regular basis. No, I am not saying that our collaborators are like children!
At the entrance to Clapp library you will see the “Halloween Desk” inviting you check out one of the thrilling books. I saw them setting this up yesterday evening. The work we do every day is “thrilling” in some sense. The excitement as well as anxiety associated with any project rollout is amazing. The thrill comes from the fact that we have collaborated and contributed to something that is typically exciting. But the anxiety is real – “How well is this going to go?”. In case you have not heard about a couple of recent technical debacles, such as the rollout of signing up for the affordable care act, you must be living in some other planet. You can view the Saturday Night Live version of this here. In some sense, all of us in this business worry about issues such as the website performance for Obamacare in a much smaller scale. This is why comprehensive testing is critical. You have heard me say this several times before – that it is impossible to predict all the variations in the theme up front even if you do comprehensive testing, but that does not mean you shouldn’t test. In other words, no matter how comprehensive a test you perform, you will always encounter issues. You want to make sure that these issues are more of an outlier than the norm and that you have a plan/strategy for handling the outliers.
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I went to bed last night around 11:30 when Red Sox took the lead, but I was unable to sleep. Reminded of the hard loss the night before, I had to watch till the end. Of course, I was up until 12:40 and I will pay for it today! It is the Nobel Prize season and this morning we found out that the prize for Chemistry went to Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel. As they say, it is about time that the importance of computer simulations in understanding large biological molecules is recognized. Needless to say that as someone who did my graduate work and postdoctoral work in the mid-80’s these very familiar names. My thesis mentor Prof David Beveridge knew them all, so we have had the fortune to meet them and hear them talk in several occasions. As early users of a software called CHARMM that was developed in Karplus lab, we have met him and his group a few times.
We have tried to keep the community informed of the accomplishments of LTS staff through the annual report. This year we wanted to try something different. We have used infographics to convey some key points. You can view the entire report here. But, I have attached a few highlights below. Whereas the annual report celebrates some of the key achievements, it sometimes fails to capture all of the hard work that goes on behind the scenes. So we always have to make some judgement call on what to present.
This semester is off to a rocky start and it is an unsettling feeling. We have identified some network issues (relating to Macs and broadcasts) that affected the classroom connectivity and wireless issues in certain dorms. For those affected by these issues, many questions remain and they want the problems resolved quickly. We have been trying very hard and have many of the issues under control. It is frustrating all around, but we will keep at it until the issues are resolved. Of course, then something else will pop up.
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After many days of great weather, today is a dreary day. It was pretty bad last night that I had to watch Texas vs Detroit play in ALCS. I recognized very few players and besides I didn’t care about the outcome. While watching that and this morning, I heard about the dismantling of the administrative structure of Red Sox (as well as players feeling unhappy) after several successful seasons.
I also noticed that a Google Engineer “accidentally” shared a communication written primarily about the bad management practices at Amazon and then about Google. I have “accidentally” in quotes because I am always suspicious when smart people claim to do things like this or lose a “to be released” iPhone in a bar accidentally, so I think it was intentional. On the other hand, what do I know?
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