Jonathon Rothberg's paternity leave

I've been home with my new baby a fair bit, and when he's asleep I've been working on projects around the house.

I've got the band back together, pretty much, except I've bought a cheap USB-Midi cable and a Midisport 2x2, and neither of them can cope with my Kawai K5000 sending a regular midi clock message and an Active Sense (the midi equivalent of phatic utterance) message. So I've also spent a lot of time shopping for a usb midi device that actually complies with both usb and midi, but I have a huge block against spending around $50 for a single midi port - it's about the simplest piece of transliterating hardware you can have.  I've downloade a bunch of free vst effects and synths.

I've put two new hard drives in my MythTV machine.

I've tried (but failed) to get the MythTV machine to provide both Samba and Netatalk shares simultaneously so that I can have TimeMachine backups there.

I've also switched my fstab over to UUID, because my motherboard registers the hard disks in the mythtv machine in random order.

I've put polyurethane on the Bench.

I watched a little bit of TV too - including 'The Neanderthal Code' about Neanderthal science and the effort to get a genome together.  They talked to Jonathon Rothberg, founder of 454 Life Sciences, which is doing the sequencing work.  When his son was born and there were some complications, he realised there was a need for immediate and complete medical information from a persons genome.

So Jonathon Rothberg spent two weeks of his paternity leave working out how to put a genomics lab on a chip, and patented the technology with which the first full individual human genome (James Crick's) was determined and published.