The Legendary Adventures of Rian D. Adams

Rian was proficient with many weapons and languages

It is time the world knew of the many perilous adventures of Rian D. Adams!  Tales of her bravery abound, the only problem is – they are all made up based on speculation.  She may be even mightier than her legends suggest!  Or, she could be less-so.  But let’s not focus on that, for the purposes of my post, she is incredibly awesome and thus her name shall live on.

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Buildup to a Pull-Up

About five or six months ago, I decided that I wanted to train to do a pull-up.  I have never been able to do one before, but all of a sudden it was something that I wanted to do.  I figured that all my climbing must have already prepared me to do pull-ups.  But no!  Upon trying to do one, I looked absolutely weak and pitiful.  Climbing and working out a lot has also made me gain a lot of weight.  Mostly muscle, so this weight does help my climbing, but still.  And thus began my battle against muscle gain so I could do pull-ups.

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ARB Comics!

This is an almost completely true account of me using ARB today.

Using ARB can be dangerous.

Apart from discovering the button that kills people in ARB, today was the first day that I thought about the absurdity of using 3 different alignment programs to get my work done:

  • I use SeaView to align my sequences and to view already-aligned sequences.
  • I use Clustal primarily for its “range information” function, to trim my sequences at my conserved trim targets.
  • I use ARB to import the alignments and make phylogenetic trees.

Perhaps one day, there will be one aligner program that does everything I need it to.  Do you hear me, you bioinformaticists out there??