Fixie Up!

My one goal this evening was to make the fixie right again. All I needed was a front brake. Dumb

Fixie Up!

My one goal this evening was to make the fixie right again. All I needed was a front brake. Dumb Champaign bike guy gave me a rear instead of a front brake, so I went to Velocipede with intent to trade. Beth, the Wise One, warned I would have trouble finding a modern short reach sidepull in the boxes of old brake parts, and she was right. No dice. So I hightailed it to Joe's, where yet another adorable bike monkey took pity on my plight, and rummaged through the parts drawer for a proper brake. The one he found was too bulky and would have torn my tire to pieces, so he came up with an ingenious solution (and free to boot) - replace the back nut with a longer one so that it would fit through the drill hole in the fork (which is wider than the drill hole in the back, standard on most bikes). Ten minutes later I am Good To Go. I buy a bunch of tubes as a thank you to kind cute bike monkey, and rock on outta there, stopping at Whole Foods for some staples (milk, raisin bran, strawberries, ice cream). Dinner and then brake cable installation and barwrapping and shazaam! I am all set.

Of course, the new bars and stem are a tad long for my reach, and the Brooks seems a lot less comfy now than it was in the spring, but it's all about readjusting, yeah?

First ride tomorrow...can't wait.

Driving and Metro

Left work at 4:55.
Got in car 5:05. Downtown traffic heavy but moving.
Got to 395 at 5:30.
Parked at 6:05 in Forest Glen, two blocks from 495, for free!
Reached SAIS 6:40 (or would have, if had not run into very person I had been putting off phoning for work stuff; fortunately, was able to talk about all necessary business in 20 minutes).

Class was kind of useless - "what's an intervention"?

Return:
Out the door at 9:00.
Got on train 9:20.
Back to car at 9:55.
Hit 4 lane to 1 lane merge nightmare at 10:15. 45 minutes for two miles.
Got to MLK/downtown split at 11:05. Took downtown/83 home (next time will compare to MLK).
Home at 11:20.

Start the Day without Coffee

And end snoring on your desk over a draft toolkit.

Bad Dream

I had a dream last night that my boss and I were in Zimbabwe and crossed over the border to visit the National Malaria Control Program in Tanzania. Jeff Sachs was there lecturing within the NMCP to a bunch of exchange students. He saw us and got mad that we were saying he was a dumbass, and started yelling and grabbing my arm, so I pushed back and we got in a small fight. I think I said his ideas were too simplistic, that we can't just give everyone a bed net, that not everyone has access to ACTs even when they're free, and he said we were trying to kill people. Eventually it calmed down and we went back across the border to Zimbabwe.

Vaccines, useless

I had a really nice dinner with Djimde from Mali and Eili, from Princeton/RFF. Then we went to the vaccine session and I wish I had gone the way of the clinicians, because none of them were there. The super-exciting vaccine news was um, yeah, it's complicated; hey I tested this irradiated attenuated version on myself and it seemed to work so now I expect to have it ready in 8 years; and something about the molecular chemistry of something where the binding site is opposite the polymorphic part means Sweet, we could try to make a vaccine out of this!

At least I know for myself that I could care less and of course I wish all the vaccine people the best of luck.

The conference, as promised, was really really good, and quite fun most of the time, and extremely useful. Of course I wish I had talked more with a few people in particular but sort of made up by the people I talked to anyway. Now it's back to the grindstone and I have a sheaf of documents to review on the plane, so the two (ok five) movies I brought with me will have to wait until, hm, maybe Thanksgiving to be watched.

I have to say, too, it's really nice being surrounded by highly motivated people, especially highly motivated Africans. Might be just the kick in the ass I need.

The answer to the previous

is gay (or else he was sashaying to keep his noisy shoes from clacking on the wood floor?). Had an interesting muse on the evolutionary biology of women's gaydar. Hypothesis: women's gaydar should be more highly developed than gay men's gaydar, since we have reproductive capacity with our preferred partner.

Other discoveries this evening:

1) Resistance modeling is very complicated, but the models are very simple.
2) You need a lot of tools and effort to monitor large-scale malaria control programs, and even then, you might need to resort to massive drug administration to get the results you want.
3) Test kits for insecticide resistance will revolutionize program planning, if only Liverpool can produce them
4) Paul Eggleston is a master at explaining mosquito transgenic technology. I can almost explain to you how it works! Not that I think it's a great idea, however.
5) Mwanza, Tanzania has been out of SP for IPT for over six months, and none of the presentations at this conference know anything about how to fix that.
6) Matt Damon may become our newest malaria advocate.

Tomorrow are my favorite sessions, so I am skipping the bar and sleeping instead.