Answers to life's many questions

Only 2+ weeks after his post, I found that I was tagged by Calvin; so here it goes:

Four jobs I have had:

Soccer referee
Bookkeeper
Door-to-door driveway-sealant salesman
Automotive plant worker

Four movies I can watch over and over:

Wayne’s World
Snatch
Top Gun
Catch me if you can

Four places I have lived:

River Drive Park, Ontario
Kingston, Ontario
Brisbane, Australia
Ottawa, Ontario

Four TV shows I love to watch:

Gilmore Girls
The Daily Show
The Block
House

Four places I have been on vacation:

Havana, Cuba
Le Gros-Du-Roi, France
Town of 1770, Australia
London, England

Four websites I visit daily:

University of Ottawa, Centre for Mediated Teaching and Learning
The Medical Post
Pubmed
BBC

Four of my favourite foods:

Sushi
Green curry
Olives
Cottage cheese

Four places I would rather be:

In the same city as my wife, wherever it is
On an evening ferry in Brisbane
Soccer training camp
The deck of the boat, anchored in shallow water somewhere

Four Bloggers I am tagging (all the blogs I read are already tagged, so I am tagging three people that don’t really have blogs but rather have MySpace pages):

Brittany McLeod
Courtney McLeod
Matthew Fletcher (trying to coax him back)
Tim Smith

Shameless self-promotion (but also a quick commentary on research science)

This was a pretty good week to say the least. After one-and-a-half years and a near-scoop by a competing lab, the work I participated in during my Australia research stint has been published in Science (March 30th advance of print at http://www.sciencemag.org/sciencexpress/recent.dtl).

I am happy just to finally get something to print, but for my first paper to be in Science makes me ecstatic. And relieved. The pressure to get some good, publishable work done has been mounting on me as the months passed with no results from my Australia work. As someone looking at a prospective career in academic medicine, the empty space on my CV under publications was glaring at me. I know my competence and suitability for a research career cannot really be judged on anything but this all-important category; however, I also know that getting good scientific results sometimes requires a bit of luck, and it was worrying me that I needed some luck soon to help me fill this blank.

You see, I feel that in all of my research endeavours I have laboured equally and put an equal amount of thought and preparation into the work I was doing. However, the results have been widely varying. This may be due to a combination of factors, but more than anything I feel it probably wasn't due to anything at at all except pure dumb luck. You need the right project, with the right supervisor, with the right support staff, at the right time, and you need to bring the right skills, the right knowledge, and the right ideas to this project. This is exactly what happened in the case of my Australia experience, but I don't think it is anything that anyone could have planned out to make sure it happened the way it did.

I'm glad that I've always been lucky.