Hi, rpg.

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My first email address was something memorable like lady0266@ermine.ox.ac.uk. Then, when I started my DPhil, I managed to grab rpgrant@molbiol.ox.ac.uk. Not very cool, but much more memorable.

On leaving Oxford I was saddled with a ‘professional’ email address of rgrant@cmtech.co.uk, which I never liked (I rapidly went off the management in that company too, so was only stuck with it for two years). About that time I registered a yahoo.co.uk, with username rpg14. That still works, although I seldom check it. When I left ‘cmtech’ and went to work at the MRC-LMB I was fortunate enough to obtain ‘rpg’ as my username. ‘@mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk’ was still rather a mouthful, but at least ‘rpg’ was pretty memorable.

I went through quite a few ISP-based email addresses at that time, Tesco, Waitrose, Flyer, NTL . . . before bothering to register rg-d.com. Naturally, ‘rpg’ at that works, although I’ve switched off the ‘catch-all’ facility because it gets spammed to buggery. I also got an invite to gmail.com (thanks CK!); and although ‘rpg’ was taken, ‘rpgrant’ was free. I belatedly realized I should have tagged ‘rpgmail’, so missed out on some coolness there.

On arrival at Sydney Uni, changing my login ID from rgra3423 or whatever it was became a priority, and I was able to reserve ‘rpg’. rpg at usyd . edu . au thus became the coolest email address I’ve ever had, if not the shortest (rpg at rg-d . com is short, but not incredibly memorable. rpg.com is taken, of course). rpgrant @ my Australian ISP is also mine.

But two weeks ago I found out that the University of Sydney have pulled a real swifty, and created a memorable alias (that is bound to piss off the Yanks, but hey; .edu, as .com and .org, should never have been country-specific).

Ladles and gentlespoons, short and sweet:

Rather gratifyingly, a post I made over at Nature Network (yes, that Nature) garnered more than a few comments from the editorial staff (among others) and made it onto Maxine Clarke’s ‘official’ Nature weblog.

Even more ego-strokingly, I appear, directly or indirectly, three times in that one post.

Fame! We’re going to live forever!

Um, nearly got carried away, there. Sorry.

make your own rpg website without going through all the coding

Fantastic. 

You can get them to write beer recipes and post them to a weblog (passim), but they’ll never pick up dead roaches and slugs from the laundry floor.

I am planning a little stunt for Rachel and Sophie.  So I need to link to a treasure map.

Gmail has a sense of humour:

Still in testing, but basically we’re all set. I have to fiddle with the sidebar some more (the font is screwed up) and all the redirects and slight oddities I was struggling with last night seem to have mysteriously resolved themselves.

That’s a little bit worrying, but I’m sure I can live with it.

As you might have seen over the last couple of days, and as you can probably tell by now, the BioLOG is now WordPress powered.  Hopefully this might mean I’m inclined to write more.  The old stuff is still available — see the links to the right.  If you don’t like anything, let me know! 

 Enjoy!