This is my first entry so I would like to talk about what I have doing in the last few months. Firstly, I have been working tirelessly on my dissertation. Well, maybe not as hard as I should, but I have spent a quite a lot of time on it. My dissertation is pretty interesting. It is in the Bioinformatics area, and its main objective is to diagnose genetic diseases, and the way of doing it is designing an infrastructure for querying multiple specific-disease databases freely available on the web. This project is quite a challenge for me because I have to learn many biology terms and concepts, including some statistics’ topics, but I have always enjoyed reading these topics.

Now let’s talk about something happier. I went to St. Patrick’s Day on Dublin last month. It was an exceptionally beautiful parade with very talented performers. The streets were full of people wearing green or painted in green. And I was particularly impressed by the fact that no one was drinking during the parade, it was a very safe environment for families and kids. Another interesting fact was that all of the allegorical cars were not fuel powered, but pushed by people. I have attached some pictures below:

In the evening, we went to visit some pubs and to listen to folk music, we tried the famous Irish stew and the Irish coffee, but my favourite pub was Oliver St John Gogarty’s pub on temple bar street, because they were playing folk music with violins and guitars, so I immensely enjoyed this pub.

Among other things, I am participating in the Google Code Jam 2012 contest. I have passed the qualification round, and I am now officially on the first round (out of 4). I have to be among the top 1000 in the round in order to get to the next round. There is a $ 10,000.00 dollars price for winning the contest, and I could get a very nice T-shirt if I make it at least to the third round. It is a very fun contest I recommend it to all of you, even if you are not that keen on programming.

Thank you for reading me, now I have to go back to writing the progress report of my dissertation.