Monday, December 31, 2018

What's Happening?


After over a year of radio silence since Cora's birth, I thought it would be appropriate to put an update here before the end of 2018.  You might think, from my propensity to post a lot of interesting small projects, that I've stopped doing anything of note at all and spent all the time with the little muffin pictured to the left.  While being a father is hard, it's nowhere near as hard as a PhD program and with my extra time I've been focusing my time on a smaller number of much larger projects, one of which I can report on now.

One of those projects is a startup called Stratus Medicine, which I co-founded with some former colleagues from Sage Bionetworks.  At Sage Bionetworks, there was recognition that the medical field has a lot of data that remains hidden away from the rest of the word--for legal reasons, or for compatibility reasons, or just for the value of the data set.  Data that might be used to save lives is stored in EMRs or labs and isn't even easily accessible to people that should have access to it.  The three of us, Dave, Erich and myself, set off to solve that problem.  Updates on Stratus Medicine will be provided on the company website, and I won't say any more here lest I accidentally divulge sensitive information.

Aside from work, we moved to Columbus in the summer for Simiao's first job out of residency.  Somehow, I never would have guessed that Columbus is the 15th-largest metropolitan area in the US.  I definitely miss things about Seattle and Chicago, but Columbus has a lot going for it too.  I'd say that the biggest problem with it is that it's completely surrounded by Ohio.  A lot of our non-work time has been occupied by renovating the house, which is still a work in progress.  I took a few before and after pictures just now.  Apologies for the clutter--like I said, we're still working on the renovations, my brother in law is visiting so we set up a table in the office for him, and dinner was in progress when I took these.  A lot of the progress has been stuff you don't see:  we had the entire house re-wired, we added first-floor laundry and a new bathroom, the ductwork was all re-done with smart dampers, inadequate ceiling beams were replaced, a lot of the plumbing was re-done, the whole house was wired with CAT6, drainage was added in the basement, and a foundation crack fixed.

The master bedroom:

Before

After


The living room:

Before

After

The kitchen:

Before
After
Before

After

The office:

Before

After

The basement:

Before

After

Finally, as a peace offering for so few updates, I have some great unlisted videos of Cora on YouTube.  We started a jug band, we tried pop rocks for the first time, we stood strong against the leaf blower, we tried white truffle for the first time,  we love chocolate buttons, and we learned to creep.

Hope to update you with some exciting news soon!  Thanks for checking in, and happy 2019!