In the next six months, i will be going to Miami, Chicago, Washington D.C., Houston, France, and Boston. All meetings and grant reviews. Although Veronica has had the Society of Molecular Imaging meeting in Nice circled on her calendar for over a year now, so there will be some European vacation coupled with that trip.

My spring/summer/fall of airport hopping kicked off with a two day workshop in St. Louis at Washington University, a focus meeting on small animal conformal radiotherapy with the five or six groups that are currently developing the technology. My group, consisting of myself and my postdocs Hu and Manuel, left Stanford on Wednesday to catch our 2:37 flight out of Mineta Airport in San Jose. For better or worse, our noontime drive to the airport coincided with the second leg of Chelsea's Champions League semifinal second leg against persistent nemeses Liverpool. Tied 1-1 from the first leg at Anfield, we needed a win to advance, or a nil-nil draw to get by on the away goals rule. Being a nervous nelly, i was content to wait until 2pm and check the result on the internet. My plans were foiled however when we got through airport security and walked by a bar with TVs tuned to the match on ESPN2. The match had ended 1-1 and was going into extra time. Oh great ... déjà vu of past European failures against the Reds ... anything but penalties, please. I lingered at the bar long enough to see a fabulous Michael Essien goal waved off for offisde ... although Essien wasn't offside, and the players who were didn't seem to significantly interfere with the goalkeeper. But Chelsea's nerve wasn't shaken and a mere minute or two later, Michael Ballack was brought down in the Liverpool box, earning a penalty. Although Frank Lampard was still grieving from his mother's recent death, and had missed the weekend's match, he stepped up to take the shot and sent Pepe Reina the wrong way to give Chelsea a 2-1 lead. In the rampant celebrations that ensued he could be seen bawling and kissing his black armband. I then had to go board my plane, but was thrilled to learn that Frontier has installed DirecTV monitors on all the seats on its planes, and passengers can choose from 24 channels, even during the usual "electronics bans" during takeoff and landing. And lo and behold, ESPN2 is channel 4, and there's Chelsea! I got to see the climax of the match, with Didier Drogba getting a second in extra time before Ryan Babel netted a late consolation wonder goal. It ended 3-2 Chelsea, and we're off to Moscow for the final to face Manchester United! That victory along with our weekend win over United that levelled our clubs at the top of the Premiership table have given hope of a domestic and European double for Chelsea. With all the press naysaying (not to mention my own), the boys in blue have certainly put in a stellar effort to close the season.

My lab is one of the aforementioned few doing small animal radiotherapy work, as this subject was the goal of my first successful NIH R01 application last year. The St. Louis meeting was a bit of an eye-opener for me, a bioengineer and imaging scientist who has only recently segued into medical physics. I spent the first day worrying that i was speaking a different language than everyone else in the room, a sort of "radiation physics for dummies". Luckily, further conversations with my peers were greatly encouraging. All of our community's solutions to this problem have their pluses and minuses, and the group is very friendly and supportive, so we left the meeting feeling very reassured that we're going in the right direction.

The workshop lasted all day Thursday, concluding with a fixed menu dinner at the eclectic but tasty Savor, and Friday until 2pm when we adjourned. My trio's flight wasn't until 7:18pm, so we checked our luggage at the hotel and took the Metrolink over to the Arch for some sightseeing. I'd visited the arch back in 2004 for aother SMI meeting, but hadn't really taken in the Museum of Westward Expansion at its base. Following that, we headed back towards the Wash U medical center and our hotel, stopping briefly at Busch Stadium to have a look at the home of St. Louis Cardinals. They were facing off against the rival Chicago Cubs later that evening, unfortunately only minutes before our departure time so i couldn't attend the game. We then fetched our luggage and hopped on the Metrolink once more to get to the airport. A couple of flights and a brief stop in Denver later and we were back in San Jose.

Apparently i have to take multi-hour flights to catch up on email. By the time we landed at Mineta Airport, i had trimmed my inbox to a mere 20 messages and had an outbox of another 20 waiting for an internet connection in order to be sent.

I had two "firsts" in St. Louis. We arrived at our hotel at 10:30pm on Wednesday night, having eaten lunch hours earlier in San Jose. Dinner was in order, and i expected we would just hit the hotel restaurant. Which existed, and was open, buuuut ... was an Applebee's. I've remarked on numerous occasions about how i've never eaten at one of them, and was a bit sad to see the streak end, but food is food and i needed some. I had a steak, something i expected would be difficult to mangle, and it was acceptable. For whatever reason i couldn't manage more than an hour of uninterrupted sleep the first night, so on the second i passed out shortly after returning to the hotel after dinner. I was awoken at 1am to the sound of the headboard in the next room banging away, accompanied with the myriad of human sounds you might associate with that. Another something i'd never experienced before.

Just watched the last half hour of Liverpool versus Manchester City, the scousers final game of the season at home at Anfield. They won 1-nil, and dominated the portion of the match i saw and probably should've gotten another 3 or 4. Despite getting one last win for their home fans, Gerrard, Torres, et al. looked shellshocked at the final whistle. Another season of futility in the Premiership, lads? Despite his continued Champions League success (but not this year, heh heh), perhaps Benitez does need to go. Liverpool appear to only care about European competition ... they're a completely different team on Saturdays. I enjoyed his failed mindgames against Chelsea's Didier Drogba prior to our second leg, in which he called him a "diver" and claimed he had assembled a video dossier of Drogba's antics over the last four years. Whatever pro-Liverpool effect that was intended to have didn't materialize, as Drogba scored two nice goals during the match and appeared to be on a mission to make Benitez eat his words. That poor facsimile of Ferguson-esque mindgames, coupled with Benitez's curious removal of goal machine Fernando Torres late in the match as well as his strained relationship with Liverpool's owners, may have sealed his fate at Anfield.

After my return to Cali, i spent Saturday cleaning the house and then getting an oil change and a wash for my car. I then rewarded myself by picking up the recently released Grand Theft Auto IV for PS3 at Best Buy. I've gotten in an hour with it so far ... a pittance in the face of GTA's usual hundreds of hours of story. I'm not sold on the series' conversion from cartoony to gritty realism, but then in past episodes it's taken me a few hours to get past the introductory gameplay and into the addictive thick of things. It's certainly a beautiful game, with incredible draw distances affording cinematic views of the wonderfully detailed four boroughs of Liberty City.

My efforts to write a few programs controlling iTunes on the Mac concluded with the celebratory design of icons for the applications. I'm no Photoshop master but i'm pleased with my efforts to layer clip art on top of the standard iTunes logo. The applications, entitled "iTunesTag" and "iTunesEvents" respectively (perhaps the icons make more sense now), provide nice interfaces for expediting the addition of ID3 tag data to my music and for monitoring my playing habits by interfacing with a CGI script on my web site.