FOMO Index at All Time High This Week

Business travel is always a two-sided coin.  On the one hand I enjoy seeing new sights and revisiting other favorites.  I've been lucky that I've fit some sort of fun into just about every business trip I've taken, even if it's meant riding a nearly empty cable car to a deserted Fisherman's Wharf.  Two exceptions were both day trips, but how I couldn't sneak in excitement at Monmouth Junction New Jersey or East Haven Connecticut won't exactly haunt me.  But I'm also torn about travel: home is where the dog is.  Also the spouse and F1.  

Conferences are also an exhausting rush; London Calling isn't as bad as AGBT in this regard as it is shorter, there's only a late evening one night and there's not afterparties or European friends defeating your well intentioned plans to sleep by bringing a bottle of port and fine Dutch chocolates.  But it's always intense trying to catch talks, make meetings, visit demonstrations and booths, catch up with friends you only see at a specific meeting and take notes to share with colleagues and have a shot at writing something coherent for this space.  I'm not complaining - I could always quit, but I won't anytime soon.  This year London Calling is three days of talks instead of the usual two, so a bit more of the thrilling grind.

And of course,  at least for the next several weeks, there's my current day job to attend to.  Conferences are great and often lead to valuable connections and information; at AGBT i even tried on a Business Development persona which seems to have yielded multiple legitimate leads four our enzyme discovery & engineering business. But in the end, the team I'm on plus myself would like to see progress on the projects I've taken on, and I'm many solar orbits past the age where I can conference all day and code all night.

This year London is also featuring a Diagnostics Day from Roche on Wednesday.  There have been persistent rumors that Roche will finally, over a decade since acquiring Genia and four years after acquiring Stratos, announce a nanopore sequencing platform.  Or maybe not.  But counterprogramming that against London Calling is downright annoying!

If you are in London for either event, the folks at Plasmidosaurus have announced a pub night on Thursday at The Court.   It's over near University College London, which isn't very close to Old Billingsgate where London Calling is, but it appears to be a simple tube ride around the Circle Line. 

There's a list of conferences I'd like to attend but the timing never works; the Biology of Genomes has been "I'll go next year" for two decades.  SFAF is higher on the list, given the location - I love the American West scenery and Santa Fe can be such a great launchpad for so many interesting adventures - plus it sounds like a great conference.  SFAF has a reputation for taking on more of the early stage commercialization technologies that don't have a strong home at AGBT anymore.   Last year it was bumped for the practical concerns of a college graduation, moving the F1 back home and a celebratory trip.  Now it's in conflict with London Calling and put off for another year.

If I'd stayed in Boston, I might have thought about catching  NextFlow Summit.  Understanding workflow languages is becoming critical in bioinformatics (don't ask if I've followed that advice), and NextFlow is one of the leaders.

Back home, PacBio has the Boston edition of their PRISMBoston edition of their PRISM series -- I caught it two years ago and the talks were very good, but last year some schedule conflict of another caught me.  Complete Genomics is having a grand opening celebration at their new "Customer Experience Center" in Framingham, the biomedically biomedically immortal Boston suburb. I won't begin to claim I've checked other geographies; I did see a Nanostring event in central Europe going on this week also.

So I'm off to Gatwick in under an hour.  It horrified my British colleague I mentioned this to - Heathrow does have cachet plus often great views of Windsor Castle on approach - but I pointed out she's the one who got me hooked on picking up delectables at Borough Market, and if you get off the train from Gatwick one stop early at London Bridge the market is almost under the station. I'll get there just around the time it opens - and it's a quite reasonable walk to my hotel near The Tower of London from there.  JetBlue made it even easier last year by sending my bag to Heathrow and then delivering it, but I can't count on such service on a regular basis!

Going to London Calling or the pub outing?  Look for my hat celebrating the birthplace of Taq polymerase and please do say hi!