I got sent this very cool link to a face transformation site today, (if you've been watching my del.icio.us feed, you would have seen the link entry there). I figured that I would test it out, so I threw in a picture of a bearded me from early last year. The end results are a bit like a Michael Jackson video. I'm particularly impressed with white-boy Hiren, it looks about right. The drunk Hiren it generated looked amazingly accurate, but alas too scary to put up on the web.

For those of you that have been unfortunate enough to be around me for the past few months would have been following a personal life-decision saga that I've been tormenting myself with. So for those of you who are sick of it already, you can stop reading. For those of you unfamiliar with my saga, read on.

I've been gainfully employed by Protoeme Systems now for four and a half years. That's a long time (for me) to be in one job, so sometime last year I had this crazy idea that I wanted to go and do a PhD somewhere in Europe. Crazy for two reasons - the first being that no-one in their right mind chooses to do a PhD, and secondly, I was most likely going to end up in a country where English wasn't the primary language (and God knows I have enough trouble getting people to understand me in English already). So it only makes sense that I decided to start researching the options for doing a PhD. I have long since given up trying to understand the reasoning behind me choices, and spend more time dealing with the fallout from my choices.

Really dumb decisions seem to come in clumps for me, and I decided to go on holiday to Cuba at the same time as cementing my resolve to do a PhD. I visited MIT, Imperial College and DKFZ in my search for a PhD position. The forerunner for a PhD position after this trip was the DKFZ, located in sunny Heidelberg. The PhD position was part of the EuroCarbDB consortium, which covered a number of institutions in Europe.

During this time, a job opportunity came up with the EMBL at Cambridge, working in the same project, so I naturally applied for it. After a lot of to and fro, I didn't end up getting the job - it ended up going to Matt. Given that the job wasn't going to materialise, I focused my efforts on getting the PhD up and running. A few months later, I'm now in a position to say that I'm definitely going to Heidelberg. I've handed in my resignation letter, about to book some flights, and set a date to go to Germany. It's all getting quite scarily real now.

Interspersed with this logistical work to get my PhD happening, I spent a fair bit of time thinking about running with the money. It seems that finance pays really well - like really well. As Andrew puts it "You want to be close to the money". However, there seems to be something irrational about those people who undertake science as a profession. Either people are in it for the love of science (and an innate curiosity), or there is some hand-waving about how somehow having a PhD makes you immediately richer. Right now, I'm not too sure which of those two (or even a fictional third) camps I'm in.

So anyway, now that I've finally come to a decision - this is a big thanks to everyone who sat down and listened to my whinging and questioning, and helping me to get to my decision.

And as a special bonus - your new word of the day: Lexicolon (Update - The definition has been approved now! Update x2 - This word was coined by international man of mystery, Liquidcoooled).

You might notice a few small changes here and there on the main page. For those of you still on Internet Explorer, it might appear as severe breakage of the main page. For the rest of you, you'll see two links in the bottom of the navigation bar at the left. I've added a new style for this main page - you can switch it on by clicking on the link saying "Ice". It will remember your choice, so if you like the style, you can stick with it. If you're a conservative at heart, just click on the "Clean" link and all will be back to normal. Some pages will not actually display with the right style, since I will have to republish those pages to get them working. I'm giving this a few weeks on the internet before I switch the style across to "Ice" permanently.

Since I now have Safari RSS to play with (thanks to everyone's favourite big cat) I've also added in the Atom feed autodiscovery link.