I've just found out the terrible news that Bill Bug has died unexpectedly; this has come as a shock to the community. Bill was a phenomenon and the sort of person that you need in science; he was interested in everything, had ideas and opinions about it all, topped with an almost childlike pleasure in it all. He was a good scientist, a motivation and a reminder why most of us got into science in the first place.

His emails and their length were legendary. He was hard-work — you had to fight through the morass of ideas — but well worth it. I only had the pleasure of meeting him once; I was looking forward to meeting him again, something that now will never be.

Yesterday was the board of studies. Day before was the board of examiners. Conclusion: today is the first day of summer, an opportunity to apply myself, mostly fulltime, to research.

So, what have I done today. Erm, teaching. Almost all day. Life can be hard at times.

Today is the kick-off meeting for ONDEX. This is a new project which is doing something that I've wanted to do for ages; in a nutshell, it's a large, graph-based datawarehouse. It's rather similar to a proposal that I wrote with Mark Wilkinson from BioMOBY a few years back, with one important difference — the system actually exists, produced at Rothamstead over the last few years.

The new project involves integrating some other bits of technology — taverna, text mining and so on, and a couple of specific biological examples. I think it's going to be a pretty cool project, and we should get some useful biology out of it.

Two things that I have learnt today: firstly, what "Ondex" actually stands for is not actually sure and, secondly, some varieties of willow are dodecaploid. Why would any plant need that many genomes?