"poor etiquette" day

We dunno what happened ... but in both my lane and Lynn's lane this morning, people somehow lost their minds and we doing all kinds of boneheaded things.

So, here are some tips to absolutely infuriate your lanemates:

4. If the person in front of you is doing backstroke and you are doing freestyle and want to pass, be sure to swim right over top of them as they are pushing off the wall on their back. They'll appreciate the surprise.

3. Don't worry about giving a little tap on the person's foot you want to pass. Just go storming by them. And, do it with an aggressive look on your face, just to add to the atmosphere of the sport.

2. Just to make it a little interesting, swim in the middle of the lane for the whole time. That way you can give a little nudge to everybody as they pass by. They'll surely enjoy that.

1. Best of all, grab the person's leg you want to pass. They'll like that. And, if that doesn't work, just casually tell them to "stop there" until you get by.

Nothing like a little sport-rage to start your day ...

the humbler ...

just finished my first "bike specific" training week ... meaning i do an extra ride during the week and a long long ride (150k in this case).

tough day on the bike though ... 75k in the pack, nice and easy ... followed by 75k into the wind by myself ... the rest were either doing 100k or 180k ... was in a world of hurt (to use gideon's terminology) for the last 50k of it. there was lots of other "carnage" on beach road coming back into the city ... lots of people in the same boat. ouch.

at least it was dry though, the past 4 weeks have been rainy and cold. i'll take wind over rain any day.

Google stalking ...

I wonder if they counted Google stalking ... and if so, how many men Hetti would have accounted for ...

1 in 10 Canadians stalked in last 5 years, feared for safety: StatsCan

Actually, I don't mean to make light of this. It's pretty serious stuff.

Predicting cancer prognosis ...

(It's been awhile since my last post, so I'd thought get a little techho here)

My Ph.D. project ...

In short, the goal is to figure out how to get a better handle on disease prognosis (i.e. predict outcome -- survival or death, remission or recurrence, how long someone might expect to be in remission, etc.). Specifically, I'm collaborating with a group that are experts in gastric (stomach) cancer, though we would hope our methods could be applied in other illnesses.

In the clinic, once it has been established that a patient has cancer, there are a number of indicators of how far the cancer has progressed. These indicators give doctors some idea of what treatment (or how harsh of a treatment) to use. But, these indicators are not very good for some cancers. It is unknown what patients respond to what treatments. And, gastric cancer is the second leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide.

From a panel of tumours collected over the last decade or so, for which clinical information is also collected, we are trying to find molecular "markers" (roughly speaking, gene or protein expression levels) of disease progression or of response to treatment. Of course, my angle is from the data analysis side, where we get the data, apply an appropriate statistical method and feed back candidate molecular markers back to the collaborators. They do further validation to determine whether what we find could make biological sense or eventually be used in a clinical setting.

There are a lot of challenges simply in processing and interpreting the data (some of which are fairly abstract), not to mention the challenges involved in validating a marker well enough to be used routinely in the course of treatment. The added potential benefit is that we can identify some interesting biology that also may lead to increased understanding and better treatments.

Should be challenging, fun, and hopefully useful some day.

P3: 650s or 700s?

OK, can anybody give some comments on whether I should salvage a bunch of 650 parts from my old Cervelo ... or entirely bail on that and go to 700s?

Any comments, concerns, novel points of view welcome.

Yeah, CSC is looking good. Too bad about Zabriskie ... that hurts in just about every possible way.

The sleepwalking begins ...

Hi all.

Well, the Tour de France has started and much to the chagrin of Lynn, I have become a sports fan again. I stayed up until 3am to watch the individual time trial. It seems that I am following not only cycling, but footy. My excuse is that I'm tipping ... meaning I'm in a pool. I'm also in a "Le Tour" tipping contest with the local bike shop (http://www.cbdcycles.com.au/letour). Go Cervelo!

Anyways, in a totally unrelated note, here are a few pictures of Williamstown, officially a suburb of melbourne, but you have to take a ferry or long (~20k) train ride to get to it, even though it is only a few of kilometres from the city centre. Picturesque and touristy, but the ice cream wasn't particularly good. Still haven't found any people in Melbourne.





Ostrichs and lemon trees, who knew?