Catching up with life.

Another update after four weeks of silence. I can't help it. The life's been keeping me busy lately... I guess it beats having nothing to do. I won't be updating much for the next few weeks since I have to attend the Synthetic Biology conference 4.0 in Hong Kong, stop by Korea, possibly Osaka, and see my much missed family members. Not that I'm complaining. I love traveling.

Despite my lack of update on the web, I've been writing a lot. I think I filled up about three notebooks with writing in past few weeks. Most of them are lab journals, and most of the writings are of technical nature, of course. There are some more contemplative/creative its thrown around in there somewhere though. It's only that I can't find the time to update all my physical writing into the digital form, and typing on the computer is not always available despite the 7in compact laptop I've been using (extensively) for the past few... Months. Maybe I'll post something of more substance once I finally get some time to waste.

I've been using the friendfeed and twitter service extensively for the past few months, and I must say that I quite like it. Both services are practically tailor made for community oriented professional networking, between scientists and other such people who need to communicate wide variety of ideas and informations on a moment to moment basis without spending a whole afternoon blogging about it. It's true that most of the stuff on those services are rather without substance (what they're eating for breakfast etc), but as long as you know how to subscribe to the right kind of room/people, the amount of valuable information/insight that opens up to you is enormous... It's interesting to note that the vast majority of the scientific community presence on friendfeed/twitter tend to be those of biological background. I guess that's the impact of bioinformatics and increasing prevalence towards treating living organisms as chemical information processors (of sort). What happened to all the physicists and chemists though? They should all wake up and smell the cupcake, I think.