Does anyone have an awesome template for making excel bar graphs look beautiful. I am would like to get away from the standard "white background, gray chart, blue bar" automatic settings. Excel has options for choosing your own colors, but I fail as a data interior decorator.

I googled around, but didn't find anything in my 2 minute perusal.

Some days life sucks. And other days you get your research published* in Nature Genetics!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (Guess which day it is for me ( Read more... )

At book club I was talking about why graduate school is totally insane. Here is an example: right now I am in my office at Waksman trying finishing up a take-home midterm. I thought it would be a good quiet place to work on a Sunday (when no one should in their right mind be at work...) however there is no shortage of people here: in fact ( Read more... )

Today I drove my friend Pinal to the Indian Consulate in manhattan (near central park, 14 blocks south of the Metropolitan Museum of Art). Pinal's father passed away Tuesday morning, and her passport expired 8 days ago. She asked me to go with her via train, but I thought it would be faster and simpler to drive. Pinal is new to the area and was ( Read more... )

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I have had a series of anxiety dreams the past four nights ( Read more... )

I finally figured out what I want to be for Halloween: An ear of corn!!! Stay tuned...

Listening to John Lennon, debugging my Python code ( Read more... )

Stacy and Clinton from "What Not To Wear" are in my building today, they are filming in my old lab (because it is empty). One of the girls in the neighboring lab was submitted by a cousin.... and they surprised her at work.

Weird. The place is crawling with film crew types.

I have a new badass computer. It is a 17 inch MacBook Pro with 8 G of RAM. And it has a solid state hard drive (which means it boots immediately). I inherited this computer from my previous boss who spent money like crazy before leaving for industry. When it was ordered, the PI basically checked every possible option for it. It cost $4,000. ( Read more... )