Back to what I know

So it has been a week. A week of reading papers and textbooks and trying to learn what the different cell lines and genes and tissues are. I've had some success - yesterday I attended the MIPS (Molecular Imaging Program at Stanford) seminar, and I actually understood a few of the things the speaker said. Not much of what he said, but it was a comfort to see I had made some progress.

Enough is enough. My brain is melting and I can't read any more papers and textbooks. At least, I can't occupy 8 hours a day with it. While I feel like I've fought to have my new "research life" look very different from my old one, I can feel myself going back into the same pattern. I need to go back to what is comforting, what I know. Unfortunately, this also is what will piss me off: computers.

Now, the slide already began a few days ago. The Stanford MedWiki (my group has their internal site on it) is done in Confluence. So I set up a personal space to take notes on all of the stuff trying to force its way into my brain (and complained about the lack of plugins). Now I'm spiraling further down. First, I'm upgrading my laptop. Sure, I used to be one of the first to upgrade. Then I realized how much time I was 'wasting' configuring my laptop. It is time for some upgrades, file clean up, and configuration! This will kill what, 2 weeks?

Truly, what I am after is simulation software. I found a medical suite using GEANT4 that I wanted to start playing with. I wanted to try to radiate some stuff and see what happens. My initial plan was to run everything locally, so the simulations would take some time - I could still do some reading while all of this is going on. GAMOS has a binary for Ubuntu 10.04, which is why I'm upgrading.

So I go back to the land of computers. Since I have to wait 1.5 weeks to get my animal training and over a month to get my radiation training, this was more-or-less inevitable. Hopefully bricking my laptop isn't...