One of the nice things about commuting (apart from, say, the gorgeous scenery) is that I often get blog ideas on the train. I can develop these while I walk to the office.

But the trick is remembering those perfectly-crafted phrases, while waiting for Windows to log me in. I had time this morning, after entering my password, to go and make coffee, flirt with the MD, walk all the way back to my desk and ask loudly for a new hamster, mine is buggered, before I could start typing.

Thank God for iPhones.

There was a do about iTunes U the other evening. Interesting stuff, cool gadgets, lots of Kool-Aid, wine and canapés. USyd probably won’t do anything though—UNSW are already on board so we can’t possibly. Which is a shame: central admin have no bloody idea, even though the Faculties of Science are actually pretty keen on this kind of thing (they’re paying for me to go to this, for example).

Anyway, the important thing is that I scored a cool freebie:

Woohoo!

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:

Structure of the N-terminal Mlp1-binding Domain of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae mRNA Binding Protein, Nab2

Boo-yah!

My current cow-orkers: