Happy things thread!

[Rounin Ryuuji]

That makes me feel all fuzzy inside.

[Travis B.]

zeptoforth 0.21.0 is now out, now with RP2040 (e.g. Raspberry Pi Pico etc.) support! As the RP2040 is a quite popular and, despite the Great Chip Shortage, easy-to-get chip at the present, this should attract new prorgrammers to it.

[Raphael]

Oddly enough, I seem to have started appreciating beetroots. I used to hate them, but I've somehow acquired a taste for them now. Sometimes it's the small things...

[doctor shark]

Student #3 here at the university with a funny name (and #5 overall!) just completed his thesis today and got a pretty nice score (8.5/10, which is, on the Dutch scale, quite high), so I'm quite a pleased daily supervisor. Also laid some nice groundwork for some future work regarding the topic he worked on, which I'm l looking forward to continuing.

I also had a very good trip back to Luxembourg, my first in 1.5 years. Hung out with 85% of the people I wanted to see (give or take, both uni- and gaming-related), saw a lot of what I missed, stocked up on stuff from Luxembourg that's hard/impossible in general to get here in the Netherlands, had good food, and was able to cheer my friend on to successfully defend his Ph.D. thesis (which also coincided with one of his/my/our papers finally getting accepted and another having only minor revisions needed!). Apart from some nasty/painful bits in Belgium (a motorway roundabout near Liège; construction hell in multiple places, including a detour on my return that sent me via Namur; a 90-km/h road that certainly wasn't appropriate to go 90 on, much less 60...), the drive wasn't that bad, either: only 3.5-4 hours! If I owned a car, I'd probably be going back quite frequently now that I have a stab pass and don't have to worry about quarantine.

Also got to see a couple of guys I have crushes on, so bonus points.

[Nachtswalbe]

Made progress at work and IDed errors for three boards that had components removed on purpose ahead of schedule even though I was slightly confused about whether to do end-to-end runs for certain boards.

[doctor shark]

Getting a handwritten letter from a dear friend in France always feels nice.

[Nachtswalbe]

Getting a handwritten letter from a dear friend in France always feels nice.

Congrats!

[Nachtswalbe]

zeptoforth 0.21.0 is now out, now with RP2040 (e.g. Raspberry Pi Pico etc.) support! As the RP2040 is a quite popular and, despite the Great Chip Shortage, easy-to-get chip at the present, this should attract new prorgrammers to it.

Apparently the Shortage is affecting car prices

[Raphael]

So I had planned to do all kinds of things this week, and, except for some initial hiccups with setting up my new cellphone, they basically all worked out exactly as planned. Nothing big or important (unless you count the flu shot), generally just a series of minor errands, but it's still quite nice that everything worked out as planned.

[doctor shark]

Publication not only got accepted on Wednesday (not just provisionally, but finally), but my ex-boss asked me to prepare some cover art for the journal we submitted to... and the art was accepted for a supplementary issue cover. Should be online soon, but feels quite funny how much art some of my work has involved...

[Vardelm]

Publication not only got accepted on Wednesday (not just provisionally, but finally), but my ex-boss asked me to prepare some cover art for the journal we submitted to... and the art was accepted for a supplementary issue cover. Should be online soon, but feels quite funny how much art some of my work has involved...

Congrats!

Just think of the art as a side hustle.

[hwhatting]

Congratulations!

[Raphael]

Thirded!

[Travis B.]

Fourthed!

[doctor shark]

Thanks, all! And, in continuing the publication train, another publication just got accepted without revision, which, if you're familiar with academic publishing, is about the equivalent of a double rainbow.

Nicer is that, with these last three things, my outstanding/remaining publications with my Luxembourg work are finished (barring a possible final one from my thesis, but, I'll be honest, I don't see that happening any time soon).

There was also a preprint that just got uploaded, but that's a pre-submission rather than an actual publication because of my boss's grant application; we'll try to submit that mid-November, once my boss is through his NWO Vidi proposal submission. This year's turning out to be exceptionally productive: five accepted publications, with a nonzero chance of a sixth!

Just think of the art as a side hustle.

It's a side hustle I devote seemingly more and more energy to (not counting my banknote and money design, which is more truly a side hobby), but one I like, so I don't mind. Really comes in handy for publication preparation. :)

[Man in Space]

I have taken, and passed, the CAMS certification exam.

[Vardelm]

I have taken, and passed, the CAMS certification exam.

Had to look that up. Cool.

And 'grats!

[doctor shark]

Took long enough, but this finally went online. This is the article with the cover art, but since the issue hasn't yet been "published", the cover art hasn't yet been made public...

[Raphael]

Congratulations, doctor shark!

You've mistyped your link, though; try this.

Combined with what I've seen of your earlier scientific work, this makes me wonder, though: do you mainly work with living or lifeless matter?

[doctor shark]

Congratulations, doctor shark!

You've mistyped your link, though; try this.

Combined with what I've seen of your earlier scientific work, this makes me wonder, though: do you mainly work with living or lifeless matter?

Thanks! (Fixed the link in the original post.)

Me, right now, I mostly work with non-living systems, generally polymers and not-very-biocompatible liquid crystals, but they're often bioinspired as well (lipids, membranes, By training, I'm a physicist, probably somewhere between soft matter physics (polymers, liquid crystals, microfluidics...), biophysics (membranes and biosensing), surface physics (especially interfaces), and physical chemistry (miscibility and mixing), but current boss is a synthetic biologist, so a number of my more recent projects are in that vein.

(It's also extremely difficult to do work on living things due to ethics clearances and paperwork, so... synthetic and non-living things are much easier. I'm doing some stuff with living organisms, though that's either plants, cell lines, or a gray area; more on the gray area later.)