EOWANE continues ...

(Eating Our Way Across New England)

Today we left Lowell, Mass., connected with I95 again and headed north.  Of course, we didn't do that before we had a chance to have breakfast (complete with a cup of coffee).  The weather was again better than ever.  We had some initial traffic leaving Mass. (construction work on a bridge) but after that it was pretty smooth sailing.  We swapped seats once we got to Maine and I took a stint at the wheel.

Maine is beautiful.  Lots of water and trees.  A few of the trees are turning, but most of them are still wearing summer greens.  Now, on to the important information...

We stopped for a late lunch.  In fact, we had one false start.  We walked into a little cafe in a quaint Maine town, moved over to a table to sit down and just as we moved into position, one of the waitresses came over to point out that it was after 2pm and they weren't serving lunch any more.

A few miles down the road we found the sandwich shop in the next picture.  The food was good and we enjoyed a peaceful, mid afternoon (3pm) lunch.  It seems like we have some kind of deficit.  The acronym by which today's lunch place wants to be known is obvious from it's name: Market on Main's sandwiches.  After lunch we crossed the street to a toy shop and then next to the toy shop for a used book and coffee shop.  (What lunch is complete without a cup of coffee?)

What kind of vehicle are we cruising the coast in?  Here's a photo of the Chevy HHR we're in:

Of course, the pairing my new 175W power inverter with Joel's laptop and an FM wireless transmitter to the car's radio provides access to Joel's entire (and legal) music collection.  I took a picture of the laptop, but it's not really newsworthy.

Around 6pm we got into Bar Harbor and our motel.  As you can tell, we've got wireless internet in the room.  Joel's tapping away on his keyboard as I do the same on mine (with SciFi running in the background).  After checking in and getting our stuff into our room we headed for town.  After walking around and stretching our legs a little, we headed to the outskirts of town and Jack Russell's Steak House and Brewery.  The beer was good and so were the steaks.

Tomorrow we're going to hike to our heart's content and our legs sorrow.  Can't wait to see Acadia National Park. 

It must be vacation!

I flew this morning to LaGuardia airport in New York City.  Joel picked me up in the car he had just rented (this sounds like a plot from Ocean 11 or some such conspiracy movie).  We headed north and out of the city.

After driving for awhile we realized two things 1) the traffic was no longer like the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago at 7am and 2) we were hungry.  Given both need and opportunity, we took an exit into Connecticut and ended up at the location you see in the first photo -  (D'Angelo's Subs).

Recovering our Fahr-drang (very loosely translated "driving drive"), we raced onward, crossing state after state lickety-split (which isn't so hard, when the states are roughly the size of an overgrown Illinois County).  (Okay, so we went from NY to Connecticut to Massachusetts.)  Our onward surge only spent itself as we neared our destination for the evening, Lowell Mass.  (Famous for a variety of reasons, including being mentioned in a James Taylor song about a single mom with three kids who worked in a mill.)

The next step in this year's "Eat your way across New England" was a restaurant called "Mama's Italian Grill" in Chelmsford, Mass.  (See next two pictures...)

The "Mama" who waited on us was kind enough to take a picture of us shortly before we ate too much.  Unfornately, she thought she had to back up just about into the next room so that she could be sure she had us both in the same picture.  A side effect of this approach was that the center of the picture was not on the table or one of us, in fact, not even in the same building.  The Staples sign is almost in focus, which is more than can be said for the good food on the table or the two smiling faces bracketing it.  Hmm... I guess you can get a sense of the ambience at any rate.

I should add that Mama's was an interesting place.  When we got there (about 7pm), things seemed to be quieting down.  There was what appeared to be a group of regulars gathered around the bar (which was very clean and not very dark).  However, as the evening wore on, the size of the crowd gradually increased, giving the lie to our assumption that the evening was on the down swing.  But we were on the down swing, and so we swung ourselves out of our booth and trudged slowly to the car ... which really deserves a blog of its own.  Just a teaser:  it's a Chevy HHR with about 1000 miles on it, so really new.  More on that some other time.

Tomorrow we're off to Bar Harbor, Maine (affectionately known as BaHaBa, and not to be confused with BaHmBg).  Should be great - weather is stellar and BaHaBa is on the same peninsula (or was it island?) with Acadia National Park.  Can't wait to see it.  Tomorrow night we stay at a Best Western in BaHaBa.

The "currently listening" is what we used for road trip music today.  Tomorrow we have Joel's laptop, an FM transmitter and my inverter (nothing like a bit o' tech to spice up a road trip) to provide music for us as we rocket through a couple more states.

Why is it that an approaching vacation invariably results in late
nights?  Trying to get things done before being gone for a few
days, I guess.  Reached a temporary goal in one project last night
and almost another for a different project tonight.  Still need to
proof read and go back and verify results.  One of the greatest
frustrations to a writing team is to have the results changing again
and again as a result of small errors (flies in the ointment).  It's worth it to invest the time to repeat analyses
until the chance of having bad code or a copyist's error approaches 0.

Why is it time and content seem to intersect on Saturdays?

Whatever the reason, I did have a minor success with my PowerMac and R
yesterday.  I have been limping along with R on the Mac, using
only precompiled library code.  And since one package I tend to
use a lot (Hmisc by Frank Harrell and friends) didn't work right, I
have been hampered by having to export datasets to my PC workstation
and run things there that run under Hmisc.  So what was the
success?  I figured out:

1.  How to run the source code compiler for R on the Mac.
2.  I discovered that the compiler for R needed an implementation
of g77 (I know, that's not as good as g95, but it's what was required
by Hmisc).
3.  I figured out how to load up the latest g77 code.  (I really like the website hpc.sourceforge.net.)
4.  I got Hmisc compiled and running - hooray!

Of course, this sucked up about an hour and a half, but it was worth it.

Let's see ... it's been about two weeks since the last blog
entry.  A couple of people have asked me (in person) about the
lipid stuff I was working on.  It was encouraging to be reminded
that there are other "story junkies" out there, who find no peace until
they've completed a book/movie/etc.

Well, time for the first disappoint:  I don't have the answer
yet.  We did get a download of additional data that was more
detailed than the standard lab reports (thanks to the generous sharing
of the lead science officer at the company doing the lab tests). 
The results we saw using the more detailed data were provocative, but
unfortunately the 400+ number of people in the current study is just
not enough to answer the question we are asking. 

(Sidebar:  it will likely be enough to answer whether or not there
is added benefit to the people taking the drug being studied, but not
enough to answer this tangential question.) 

(Second sidebar:  In astronomy, if you can't see a particular
asterism, say the whirlpool galaxy for example, you get a bigger
telescope.  The equivalent in the statistical world is the number
of people in your study.  If you can see a difference between two
groups but the difference isn't significant, you probably need more
people in order to see the difference.)

We got to the point on 9 September, recognizing that we couldn't pin
down the effect with the current study, and so we turned our attention
to other things.  However, I did mention to the head of science at
the company providing the lab test info that, if he came across a
larger study that would let us examine the question again, let me know.

Not quite end of story.  The next Monday I get an email from my
new friend at the company that does the lab tests.  It seems he
was just given permission to use the dataset from a larger study that
his firm has been providing with lab tests.  He normally works
with a statistician friend who is at the CDC, but that fellow is
currently swamped.  So, he wondered if I would be interested in
helping him.  He has a specific target in mind and part of what I
would get out of the partnership is an opportunity to chase down the
effect I saw in a larger study - about 1600 people this time.

Obviously, there is a lot of "hand waving" going on here.  No
names, etc.  It's the nature of the beast that you don't talk
about people or companies without their permission, at least not until
the joint work appears in press (and is obvious anyway at that point) -
which tends to take months to a year.  But life goes on and you
realize that God is much more in control of the overall process of life
and research than you are.