Ah! There is a point to all this.

Despite being a Monday, today was a productive day at the office. I did a fair bit of useful coding, ran some analyses for the Pinnacle Diabetes Project and tracked down the 2nd HapMap QC dataset to start cooking it up as a side project.

But what was even better than that was the discussion I had with Mark while walking over to the Genome Center for the weekly HapMap meeting.

Whenever I get feeling run-down and useless at work it always helps to talk to Mark or David, because they're both excellent at grasping the big picture. I guess that's what makes you a success in upper-academia.

Anyway, this particular discussion was mostly about the loose ends I need to tie up before leaving Broad for Oxford in the fall. I need to make the documentation for Haploview way more self-sufficient, especially if Bioinformatics accepts my Application Note about same. Plus this is possibly my last chance to do a large update, which means fixing several bugs, patching what I'm 80% sure is a memory leak and adding one or two new features. Beyond that I've got more work to do for Pinnacle, some additional HapMap work before the next big meeting in September and coauthoring the ENCODE analysis paper. Finally, the most exciting summer goal is to start reading up on some of the work my future labmates are doing and dive into some hard-core statistics studying so I'll be ready to go at Oxford.

The bottom line (for those of you still reading) is that the conversation made me feel like there was a point to my work and helped to motivate me to push hard in the next few months in preparation for my big leap across the pond.