Wiknic STL and Genomez

Last week I moved to St. Louis. Last last week I was camping in the Allegheny mountains/forests and this week I'm working for the Human Genome Project, but more on that later. Last week I moved to St. Louis.

I drove with my parents from WV with a few pounds of items, besides the 3 mountains of clothing I've accumulated throughout high school and college. Maybe I'll make my own mountain in these flat areas. I miss the forests and mountains, or at least used to, until I walked across the street from my apartment into Forest Park. Including the historic district, DeBaliviere, near my 3rd floor shower-needs-replaced-apartment, and Forest Park, I have several thousands of acres of exploring space. Forest Park has forests too! So having just come from the forested Allegheny region, it's no wonder I'm spend all my free time biking, walking, and napping around the forests of Forest Park.

Lets not focus too much on forests though since the people who are bothered by woods would never come to visit me. Forest Park also has a free zoo, free art museum, free history museum, free interactive science museum, not to mention the many way-beautiful islands, architectural feats, and ... ok forests, all free. Don't think this is all though! I'm just a new resident and have no idea what most of the attractions are I'm sure, but last week I moved to St. Louis.

So this week, actually today, this Monday, I started my first real job with the Human Genome Project. It was raining ballz of water in the morning so I slept for an extra hour and a half to avoid the thunder at 7am. At least I hadn't been asked to arrive until 10, but it was still raining ballz then too. I got super drenched on my way to work, along with my supposedly water proof second hand Spyder jacket. My bike helmet was dripping so I just left it hanging on my bike in the downpour. On the bright side, because of the rain, I biked really quickly and arrived with half an hour to dry off. Plus no one seemed bothered that I was wet since they were too.

At work I met tons of people, many more than those I remember off-hand: Jim, Scott, Tom, Chris, Ian, Tiffany, Stevan, and Donna. There are actually 300+ employees with a nice stalkerweb page showing names and faces - just like my college's stalkerweb but without personal details. I spent plenty of time configuring computer stuff but I'm very impressed that I didn't have to create any accounts. There is a single sign-on for everything. One user name and pass lets me edit the wiki, sign into email, IM, SSH, etc... all in linux. The entire system is built on Ubuntu and during interviews they apologized for a legacy windows box hooked up to a proprietary chemistry machine.

I've been working on this post for awhile now with many interruptions so *INVOKE TURBO*

• arrive/lunch/leave whenever is convenient for me as long as I hit 40 hours a week
• discouraged to stay beyond 9pm
• free metro (bus?) pass for being an employee of washington university
• stevan next to me is familiar with magic the gathering card game (I've held tournaments at my college)
• talked about metasploit at subway with other recent-hires and interns
• attended a large meeting on cancer research (lots of cancer meetings on mondays)
• going to begin ramping up into real work soon, now that I've read many wikipages of documentation

And farther in the past:

• Met Elonka at a Wikipedia picnic, who worked with Dan Brown in writing the Da Vinci Code
• Invited by Elonka to participate in the STL Game Jam (overnight game programming competition)
• Oogled at medieval weapons and armor at art museum
• Adventured through many a small crevice in the City Museum with Harry
• Survived off campfire food for three days at Plum Orchard Lake in WV last last week