I don't know if it's just me, or if there's a flood of spam across the whole internets, but I can't be arsed to delete two dozen comments a day. (And most of it porn, have you noticed? I have a depressing vision of thousands upon thousands of greasy pimply rejects hunched over in their smelly bedrooms, one ear on the doorway in case Mother comes by and only one hand on the keyboard. *shudder*)

Anyway, no comments until the spousal unit has time to upgrade the MT install for me, which could be a while because she has approximately six million better things to do with her limited free time and I am too damn lazy to do it myself.

The categories are all screwed up, the blogroll needs fixing (many good blogs not included simply because I cannot add them to my Bloglines feeds or I'd never do anything but read online), the bio needs updating (I have a new job, in cancer biology) and I want to add my del.icio.us links as a sidebar feed.

Resolved: must get to all that. Some time in next decade or so.

OK, hiatus over. One of the main reasons for taking a break was that politics was making me nuts, and I wanted to step back and find a way to cope. I didn't have time to cover all the political issues I felt were important, nor even time to do justice to the most urgent of those issues. Being unable to provide comprehensive coverage made me freeze up (again). I still don't have time to cover everything, but no one who wants to be politically well informed is going to rely on me as a news source anyway. For the most part, I'm just going to point to the most pressing issues, or the ones that press my particular hot buttons, and leave it at that. For everything else, see my blogroll. I chose the "primarily political" links with great care, and I really do think that between them they provide more comprehensive coverage than any mainstream news source, and I guarantee that they provide better analysis.

The other thing I'm going to start doing is passing on the various petitions and letters I sign. I'm on a bunch of mailing lists, all of which pretty regularly send me information about current issues and links to web pages where you can take some kind of action -- sign a petition, send a letter, and so on. Without exception, they also ask me to "tell a friend" (or five friends, or everyone I know, or whatever). It's clear that such networking is a powerful tool for political and charitable organizations. I'm not going to sign anyone up for these lists, which is of course what happens when you "just use this handy web form" to send emails -- but I will post the links here. I don't kid myself that I'm doing much by responding to these prompts, but I'm doing something, and that's better than nothing. Right?

(Oh, and I'll bribe the spousal unit to fix that thing with the spurious links too, but don't hold your breath 'cos she's plenty busy.)

I was going to apologise for the lack of updates, but the hell with it -- I don't do this for you. Stupid readers, who needs 'em? (That was a joke! A joke! Wait, come back...)

Anyway, the spousal unit has the basics, to which I'll just add that work is a lousy way to make a living. I am one fucked unit, and not likely to get any less fucked any time soon. If you're reading this, I probably owe you email too -- sorry about that, I'll do my best. It's not that I don't love you any more, I'm just nackered.

See yer in a few weeks then, when I'm in better form.

P.S. the linky weirdness below is a glitch that appeared when I (by which of course I mean the spousal unit) had to delete trackbacks; I was getting so much spam that it took down a server. Bastards. Anyway, fixing a little glitch on my site is not high on our list of priorities right now, so it'll be staying that way for a while.

Just a quick note for anyone sending trackback pings (hi, T, pericat!): they work, but don't show up until I rebuild the site. I have no idea why this should be so, or how to fix it, and no way am I upgrading asking the spousal unit to upgrade me to a later version of MT until the bugs are ironed out, so in the meantime please just bear with me. I get email notification of comments and pings, so I'll rebuild as soon as I see a ping.

Tangentially: Jay did a wonderful thing building MT-Blacklist and setting it free, and I'm appropriately grateful for all the time and hassle it's saved me; similarly, niggly bugs and all, I like MT. I haven't paid a dime for either product, so I can't -- and don't mean to -- complain here. But at the same time, I won't be paying SA for software that I can see in advance is substantially more problematic than the setup I have. I think the company's track record indicates that they will listen to feedback and solve the problems, so I'm just going to sit back and be a late adopter this time.

Something bad seems to have happened to my images, but since I have all the technical chops of Mr Computer I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for it to get fixed. "Wait!" I hear the anguished voices cry, "doesn't your spousal unit make her living from that dire species of satanic voodoo known to decent, CPU-fearing folk as "computer stuff"?" Well, yes, but if I bother her with computer stuff too much, she kicks me in the nuts. It hurts, you know, but I figure I deserved it. Those of you who live with tax accountants or lawyers or doctors or any other useful professional, you'll understand. After all, it's not like the SU set me up this site just so that she could spend her precious minutes of free time hacking code (where I come from, a hacking code is subthig you see a dogtor for, but I just love to use jargon I barely understand) in response to my twittering. But Respectful of Otters is now in Rocket Scientists where it belongs, and I haven't forgotten about the teeny-tiny text in the comments boxes either (hi, P!). There are other things to fix, too: front-page links to my bio and copyrightanything notice, and a bunch of sites I don't read by RSS but to which I do want to offer linky props over there on the sidebar somewhere.

So I'll get to all of these things eventually, but please be patient. My nuts thank you.

That's me, more or less. I took that shot about a week ago; the spousal unit says that if it were all you had to go on, you'd recognise me easily enough. What's left of the hair is mousy brown, the beard is reddish where it's not grey, and the eyes are blue: standard WASP-y hybrid. (Another photo here.) Born Papua New Guinea 1969, moved to Australia 1976; high school here, university here; Hons with this bloke, PhD here on vaccine candidate antigens in this disease with this bloke (photo here, works here), just before he moved to Tulane. First post-doc in HIV replication with David Harrich, to whom I owe an enormous debt and not just for all the science. Met wife online Nov 01, married Aug 02, moved to Portland OR Nov 02. Until June 2005, worked with Caroline Enns on the molecular basis of iron homeostasis in humans, with a particular emphasis on haemochromatosis. Now working with Peter Hurlin on cancer biology, specifically the roles of the Max network of transcription factors.

Anything else you want to know, just ask.

Update 041207: no one asked, but for Google juice and because I never actually meant to be anonymous (I keep the handle because it's how most of my online friends know me): Bill Hooker. Search here for "Hooker CW" to see most of my scientific publications.

Have I mentioned how much I love Bloglines? I just sent them this via the contact form:

Dear Bloglines,

I would like to be able to see the public subscriptions of people whose blogs I like. Currently, this requires knowing whether they have a bloglines account and, if so, what name they signed up with. Would it be possible to annotate each blog's entry in the directory with a link to the owner's bloglines account, if they have one?

Also, when the ads start, please please please make the paid service ad-free. I'll happily pay a reasonable fee for bloglines, which I think is the best thing since sliced bread, but not if I can't get rid of ads.

I'll update this post when I get a reply.

One other issue, not under Bloglines' control: too many people have crappy feeds that show only the first few words, or just a headline. When I am trying to keep up with 126 sites, I want to be able to skim, and headlines-only feeds make that difficult. That's what the new "full text feeds please" folder in my bloglines account is for: I'll be quarantining those sites for now, and probably only checking them "by hand" once a week or so.

(The post title? "Full text feeds please" reminded me of Chomsky's famous phrase. Perhaps you had to be there me.)

Update: it's been pointed out to me that there are bandwidth issues with providing full feeds (although I think those are minimal if you only feed text), and, more importantly, that presentation is stripped bare in an RDF format. Full-text feeds are nice, but I am also happy with enough of an excerpt to give me a good sense of the post. I didn't mean to demand that other people's designs should be subordinate to my convenience, so I've changed the folder title to "longer excerpts please", but I've let the post stand to remind me what happens when I post without sufficient thought. (I generally won't delete anything, and I'll always make original versions available.)

Update the second: Bloglines' reply to my email:

We'll be adding a directory of public feeds soon. And we currently are planning on having a no-ads version available when we do start running ads.

As I expected, it's taking me longer than I expected to get the rest of the site (bio, non-blog writing, etc) up, so I thought I should address the issue of copyright. I've just gone back and added links for all the unattributed pictures except the Hubble one (I can't remember which news story I got that from, but it's almost certainly a stock beauty shot from the telescope's home page). So without further ado:

Copyright Notice
Case 1: If I didn't make it, it belongs to someone else and you should respect their rights and wishes. I certainly will: all legitimate requests regarding intellectual property and the content of this website will be speedily obliged. By "legitimate" I mean either "made by the owner of said property" or "reasonable, as determined by me".
Case 2: If I did make it, take anything you want, and do with it as you please. I reserve no rights bar this: if you alter something I made in any way, do not identify me as the author of the altered work. I'd love to hear back about anything you do with something you found here.