It's been awhile since I've posted because of all this traveling. Last week I was in Rockville/DC where we shared the booger experience together. No need to thank me, I know you're grateful.

I am left pondering why it is that I get these booger harvesters and many of my coworkers don't. I am sure that it's just that other people don't notice. They have the same rate of nosepickers, but their detection system is insensititive to all but the most blatant of excavation activities. I recognize that my measurement device is quite sensitive, and like a good neural network with adaptive learning capability, becomes better attuned to subtle variations in methods for digging concealment. Perhaps I can get a job with some super-secret intelligence agency finding and rooting out terrorist booger-depostion activities. You know, track down where terrorists are wiping their boogers off in public places, like underneath seats at airports, on commuter handloops in subway trains, things like that. But it would be dirty work.

This week I flew out to San Jose, CA (as opposed to San Jose, Colombia-- where I nearly boarded) for a conference. I gave 3 presentations: a half-day course and 2 50-min paper presentations. But the most exciting work I did was over coffee and lunch with an old grad school friend of mine I make a point of visiting whenever I'm in the bay area. He's one of those rare clever types who appears to have an inexaustable supply of neat ideas. We spent some time talking about a paper idea (actually, 2 ideas) that we could collaborate on. I need friends like this, who come up with ideas for research papers that other people might be interested in reading. I can be a great workhorse when I have the time to devote, but my ideas usually entail finding the hard way to do something, such as coming up with a new test statistic that is less efficient than what's already implemented in the software, and by the way you have to program your own matrix language code to get it, but gee, isn't that neat?? I know you're itching to hear more, but I don't want to be scooped, so I'm keeping the details to myself. Because I know you were all just waiting to scoop me. Dianaverse is aways trying to steal my research paper ideas and publish them in some tier-2 journal where she can use the puppy-pornography data example. And kiltman does worse than that-- he takes my ideas and comes up with better titles than I can come up with and so everyone reads his version of the paper instead of mine.

This whole silly mood I'm in must be from jet lag or something. I'm currently in the kitchen at my BFF Lizard's house in San Diego. Thursday night I flew down here to spend the weekend, and SNG flew in from RDU. We've been having so much fun. The weather here really is a pretty as everyone says, but (I think I've posted about this before) the traffic here is really nuts. Not quite Chicago-traffic-crazy, but I think it's worse than Atlanta traffic. Which is also really bad. But the weather is the least of the reasons we're here. Lizard has been stationed and otherwise occupied all over the world in very hard-to-reach places most of the last 10 years, and until she and her SO moved to the mainland this year I had seen her a grand total of 1 time in 10 years. This is the person I used to smoke ciagarettes and eat big-grab chips and mini-muffins with in my car before school started every morning in high school. She was the other half of prom double-dates. She was the maid of honor at my wedding. And not even having a coffee with her for years at a stretch? It's just not right.

Anyway, so now I'm having a cuppa at her kitchen counter, and SNG is sitting here waiting for me to take him for a jog.

Better run. We're going to the zoo later! Yay! If I get any good pics I'll post them when we get back.