One of my favourite websites, the Online Guitar Tab Archive, has been taken down again by foolish action by some lawyers. This has happened befor — in fact, OLGA itself only came about as a result of legal action. It's sad though, that some individuals are so threatened by others helping each other freely. I don't necessarily blame the copyright holders, who are just trying to make a living. But you have to wonder about a system which requires people to fight in such a ludicrious manner.

The IPR laws are getting increasingly insane. They continually block new ways of using technology. I am starting to think that IPR and communication are necessarily conflicted. I wonder which will break first.

People tend to look down on TV serials as compared to films; I think it's the notion that good art must be weighty and large. There are occasions, however, when you see a serial that really is astonishing. I've been lucky recently to see three of these. Some night, I shall watch all fo these in a row. To confirm the prevaling opinion that all scientists are trekies, the first one was "Sarek" from Star Trek—The Next Generation. The high point is that it allows Patrick Stewart to be terribly actorish on stage. It also features a bar fight and Wesley Crusher getting slapped my his mother; he could have done with more of this.

The second was a Hamish Macbeth episode that mentioned earlier, called "Wee Jocks Lament". It has everything that makes the series great — humour, sadness thrown together in a bizarre way.

Finally, and new to me, I saw "Aurora Borealis", which was the last episode of the first season of Northern Exposure. I've not seen this one before — I don't know when I started watching the programme. It's a masterpiece though. Three subplots tied together deftly and one of the most strange dream sequences of all time. Highly recommended.

Went out with two old friends from back when I did my degree. It doesn't seem that long ago, but I guess that it is. Mike Aird lives in Newcastle, so I've seen him a number of times since I got here, but I probably haven't seen Mark Dixon for a decade or more. So, I was reasonably looking forward to an evening of slightly fatter, middle aged blokes reminiscing about old days; but both of them are thin as rakes. Never try and chase up your past, it might tell you rather more about your present than you want to know.

Was a good night, though. Mark seems to be doing well, has accidentally managed to become called Chris, and does something engineeringy.

Just got back from two weeks in Brazil. I've never been to Brazil or, even, South America before. All in all, I had a great time. Fortaleza, in the state of Ceara, is a relatively small town, and is very much centred around the beach — I saw a lovely newspaper headline one day saying "Ceara looses 7m of beach a year". It's not a place to go to for cultural highlights; I like this about conference holidays, though: the holidays you end up with are not ones you would have chosen, so it can be a surprise when you enjoy yourself. We had plenty of time for lying on the beach (although not for too long due to the sun and heat), went swimming and eat food. The beach in town (Praira do Meireles) is indifferent. It's long, but a bit grotty. Still, it's very shallow, so would be good for the kids. Outside of that, we got to Praira do Futoro which is long, golden, with lots of beach pools that are warm and swimmable for the kids, while the actual sea has quite a heavy swell. Great fun but only for good swimmers. We also went to the beach park for the conference do — the park itself looked chessy, but as they only let us onto the beach and feed us free food and beer, no one minded this.

Food in Brazil is reputed to be poor for the veggie; actually, I didn't think that this was so. It was boring sometimes, but, in general, I eat okay. And even if the dinner was dull, it was often more than made up for by the fruit juices which were fabulous and in enourmous variety; only tempered by the odd Brazillian custom of watering them down (a little bit of water in some, like mango, makes sense, but just a little bit) and adding sugar. As well as all that, you can get "um coco por favour", for about 30p and sit in a barraca sipping coconut milk.

I really enjoyed it. I'd love to go back again, although the chances are that I never will.

Don't quite know why I ordered this DVD — I guess mostly because it's a bit of a cult classic and I wondered why. On watching, it became fairly obvious. It's gots lots of wobbly, hand-held camera moves (sorry, this still make me travel sick, even if they are cool), loud and occasionally intrusive background music, some cartoon segments. The premise is an old one — what if things were slightly different, pick your own alternative ending.

As a film, it's not bad; it's quite watchable, even exciting at points, but in the end, I felt that I was watching a music video rather than a film. It has become a modern, cult classic — I doubt that it will become just a classic.

Pretty much as expected, ISMB was small this year as it was sited in Brazil; while those of us who got there really enjoyed the place, I think it put many people off. The small size of the conference made it very friendly and easy to find people, which was good. The centre itself was excellent in most ways, with the only really problem being the air con, which was fairly noisy and somewhat overwhelmed the AV.

BioOntologies took a particularly heavy hit in terms on submissions — most people needed a main conference publication to justify the travel. It was lucky that we had merged with BioLink for the year, or we would had to have cancelled the day. Hopefully next year will be better, as this is our 10th anniversary meeting — a long time for a SIG to be going.

The main conference was quite good; it's noticable that the days of the microarray normalisation and sequence searching talks are largely over; thank god for small mercies. The ontologies section was quite interesting as two of the three papers were heavily biological in content — Katy Wolstencrofts paper was excellent (okay, I am an author which makes my biased), while Larisa Soldatova gave a great talk on their experimental ontology, EXPO, written for the robot scientist, the videos of which were entertaining. The last paper, on a ontology of function was more theoretical, being about an upper or middle ontology. It seemed sensible at the time, but these things need to be tried out in reality — it's hard to make a critical judgement in the short term.

Next year is Vienna. It should be better attended, but I do wonder about ISMB. Bioinformatics has no reached a point where it is part of most biologists lifes. Those with a more theoretical bent are moving off in a systems biology route — this gives them lots of opportunity to argue and discuss which probably explains why, 3 years on, no one has a decent, clear and consistent definition of systems biology. Perhaps, Brazil will mark the ending of ISMB's day in the sun?