July « 2006 « www.arareko.net

Not in the right mood?

Beto and I went to the training wall this morning. It has been a couple of weeks since the last time we trained together. We only had enough drive to climb 1½ laps. Not that we have lost our fit, but I guess that we weren’t into the right mood to train as in the old times.

Well, it doesn’t matter. At least we enjoyed our obligated cup of coffee and a city tour by motorcycle…

Back in Mexico City

Well, I’m back in the “big monster”. Back to my usual activities and to my regular visits to the office. The weather here is very comfortable (compared to Miami). I hope to get back soon to “normal” training mode. I’ve been eating too much lately…

Life in North Havana

I’ve spent the past few days in the extremely hot city of Miami, Florida. I’m visiting Yahoo!‘s office here and all of its personnel. All of them are really great people!

From engineering, I met with some of my old-known friends: Daniel, Lucas and Gerardo; from Toronto’s office, I met Karen and Ambles; and from Mexico I was (again) with: well, you know who… On production’s side, I met Santiago and Martin, with whom I work closely while developing the Sports sites for Latin America.

To me, life in Miami is not as attractive as to many other people. This is an extremely hot and humid place, but must of all, is a flatland of terror: zero mountains in the whole state of Florida! Well, lets be honest, I managed to spend a few great days (and nights) here, enjoying something different, but that’s all…

The bioinformatics career path

Neil Saunders posted some interesting thoughts about the career path of biologists which turned into bioinformaticians.

Some stuff is so familiar…

El Eiger cae

El montañismo se produce en las montañas y algunas llegan a ser símbolos. Una de ellas, el Eiger, está cayéndose por la desaparición del permafrost causada por el calentamiento global. El anuncio de que una gran placa de roca caería, atrajo la atención de todo mundo…

UNAM – Montañismo y Exploración: El Eiger cae

The Big Picture in Microbial Genomics

Much of the history of genetics and molecular biology was built using microorganisms such as Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus. Yet these species are the exception, not the rule, in microbiology: Unlike the vast majority of microbes, they can be cultivated in the laboratory, grown in pure culture, and thus, dissected biochemically.

Studying the unculturable posed a problem. In the 1980s microbiologists began using 16S ribosomal RNAs to catalog and enumerate such species in the environment. But this approach says next to nothing about the species themselves. This issue’s two Hot Papers represent the next step forward. Jill Banfield, professor of earth and planetary science at the University of California, Berkeley, and J. Craig Venter, head of the eponymous Institute, independently published in early 2004 two studies employing metagenomics to survey and reconstruct genomes from two very different microbial ecosystems…

The Scientist: The Big Picture in Microbial Genomics

Interview with FreeBSD Developer Greg Lehey

Interview with FreeBSD Developer Greg Lehey…

bsdtalk: Interview with FreeBSD Developer Greg Lehey

Misty evening

Güero and I went for another great evening run. This time we took a route that goes half the way down to Mahuiztlán and returns to Coatepec via a dirt road in the middle of the coffee plantations. There was a light mist in the air but the weather was very comfortable.

Nostalgy

Poli and my uncles went back to Mexico city today. We decided to spend the rest of the day resting at the apartment and enjoying the breeze of a stormy and nostalgic evening…

Touring Veracruz

The past 3 days have been great. Poli and my uncles are visiting us in Coatepec and we have been touring around many places. On Thursday we spend the whole afternoon in Coatepec and just before twilight we visited my parents in Xico.

By Friday we returned to Xico to have lunch with my parents and after work we visited Texolo’s waterfall. It was a rainy afternoon but that didn’t stop us from having a walk in the forest to enjoy the beautiful canyon. The river had a lot of water and its flow roared like a heavy thunderstorm.

After Texolo’s waterfall, we returned to Coatepec and had a 12km-long nightly hike all the way down to Mahuiztlán. We returned by midnight but extremely happy of having such a relaxing walk. This reminded me of our great childhood in Agua Blanca.

Today we went close to Xalapa and visited El Lencero, a mexican hacienda which was home of Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, a long-term president of Mexico from 2 centuries ago.

The gardens and buildings of the hacienda are extremely beautiful and very well conserved. A place worth visiting once in a while.

After visiting the hacienda, we drove all the way down to the city of Veracruz and had a fabulous seafood lunch at one of Boca del Río’s best restaurants. We spent the rest of the evening walking in the downtown and enjoying the end of a great weekend…