Hey Rohit, what’s happening NOW?
So a website with a link that says “now” goes to a page that tells you what this person is focused on at this point in their life. For short, we call it a “now page”.
Note: Periodic updates from this NOW page can also be retrieved by finger rohit@rohitfarmer.com
Location
North Bethesda, Maryland, USA
Non-tech/personal
On going thoughts & status
These statuses are toots from my Mastodon profile at https://mindly.social/@ro
Periodic updates
April 1, 2024
March was eventful. We were healthy, then ill, then healthy again, which required several doctor trips, but everything worked out. While we were healthy and kicking, Elsa and I went for our first Geocaching run. I recently bumped into Geocaching, an outdoor activity akin to treasure hunting. I highly recommend it for people of any age, but it’s especially fun with kids. I will soon write an extended blog post about it for outdoorsyindians.com.
We also attended the St. Patrick’s Day parade in Gaithersburg at the Rio. It was a small parade but lots of fun for the little kids. It was the first parade for Elsa and Eva, and they both enjoyed it immensely. After the parade, we went to a newly discovered restaurant in Gaithersburg called Miyaji that serves Nihari over the weekends. We had been craving Nihari for a long time and found it a blessing.
March is also the month for Cherry Blossoms in Maryland, and even though Tidal Basin is a famous spot for them, there are other places in Maryland that are also a must-see. One of them is Kenwood, a Bethesda residential area with over 1,200 Cherry Blossom trees planted throughout the neighborhood. We have been going there for the past three years.
Elsa started losing her teeth and has already lost three of them. Sibyl bought tooth fairy coins for her, and I got some one-dollar coins. First, I was surprised to know that one-dollar coins exist and then that they are hard to find. My bank on the work campus had only four on a different branch. However, I was lucky to get two from the kind cashier in my cafeteria. Elsa was pleased to find two coins per tooth, but she liked the fake coin more than the dollar. The fake coin is also made of metal, with a fairy embossed on one side and her castle on the other.
We ended March with a lowkey Easter celebration at our church. The worship was great, and the band sang one of my favorite songs.
Tech/professional
On going thoughts & status
These statuses are toots from my Mastodon profile at https://fosstodon.org/@swatantra
Periodic updates
April 1, 2024
In March, I worked on implementing the Exhaustive module for host genome subtraction from microbial metagenomics dataset in our PathSeq (generic name for pathogen calling) workflow. We have an in-house pipeline and we also use CZID, and for both, we are testing Exhaustive from Rob Knights’s paper. So far, implementing the code has been difficult, even though the methodology sounds great. It’s also very slow and compute-intensive.
In the journal club, I presented this paper, “Sustained software development, not number of citations or journal choice, is indicative of accurate bioinformatic software”, which I found interesting. It raises some key questions on what determines accurate software for bioinformatics analysis, and the conclusions were that sustained development and incremental changes over time correlate strongly with accuracy. Generally, perceived criteria such as journal and author prestige are unreliable metrics and do not correlate with the software accuracy.