Ending the week with a chat with @nytowler aka Andy – it was way overdue. Hadn’t spoken to him in a while and it is great to be reminded what a great friend he is. Andy is one of the profs where I did my PhD. We had heaps of fun – and stayed in touch after I graduated. He connected me to the “net” (before there was an internet) and taught me electronics and programming. He has been a rock steady friend throughout all these years.
But the high point (other than catching up and having a few laughs) was discussing liberating some data that we had intended to analyse a long while back. So we discussed how we would do that. He is happy to put the analysis out on github, and I would try to do some programming in R for the analysis.
The motivation for this is that I signed up for a MOOC to learn R programming (two actually) and playing with this data would be a great opportunity for me to apply what I learn, and do it with someone that can help me solve any coding problems. And of course, the opportunity of working with Andy is just the cherry on the top, and to be honest the cupcake too.
We both had a laugh, because as we were chatting (online of course) I pointed him to a few online tools, and servers that he hadn’t heard of. What a great opportunity to tease him about how the tables had turned.
So, there will be more on that later. Right now my job is to create the repo on github, organise the data files, and start slowly trying to get things moving.
Oh and I got him to open a twitter account. So hopefully this will just be the beginning. Wish us luck!
lab interrupted 
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