On Sunday, I walked around the Paseo del Bosque, which is a park area near the zoo. It is a nice area to walk around, with a lake that you can rent paddle boats and lots of nice trees. There are also several interesting statues to look at (despite all the graffiti).
That last statue is of Carlos Gardel, Argentina's most famous tango singer.
On Monday, I gave my bioinformatics presentation. There were about 15 to 20 people in attendance and it seemed to be well-received. It lasted about 15 minutes more than the allocated hour, but I knew beforehand that the presentation was a little long, but I just couldn't figure out what to leave out. The were several questions at the end of the presentation and a few people stayed afterwards to talk one-on-one. One person asked me for contact information since he was doing research on protein folding.
The rest of the week was spent in the lab, as usual. Just so you don't get the wrong impression, almost all my time is spent there during the week doing research. It's just not a very interesting place to take pictures. The only time I have to spend outside the lab (other than going to government offices in pursuit of the elusive student visa, which we wasted another morning on) is on weekends. That's when I am eager to take pictures. You'll have to look at Simone or Ingrid's blog for pictures at the presentation venue, since I didn't bring my camera there. Anyway, here's one picture of me and a coworker at the lab.
Research progress into grid computing has been slow this week. I've still been trying to join a virtual organization, and have not yet succeeded. I was scheduled to get help on Thursday from some others at UNLP, but I came down with a bad stomach virus, and had to reschedule it for next week. Also, there doesn't seem to be much progress on getting LAGrid access from FAU. The admininstrator there is trying to coordinate with FIU to make that happen. Fortunately, now that I have internet access from my apartment again (since Tuesday evening), even though I was out sick, I could work from the apartment (as long as I was within easy reach of the bathroom). With help from Dr. Gustavo Rossi, I have been in contact with a couple of biology researchers at another university in Argentina, the University of Quilmes. They are frequent users of bioinformatics and we have been able to exchange ideas and information and I may plan on trying to help them improve the execution time of their molecular docking applications.