As always, things continue to percolate along. Work continues on WEC's instrument; he and his wife are still yelling about instrument repair and citing specifications that they have been told repeatedly do not apply to their instrument. In brief, the new turbo pump (takes instrument to very high vacuum) is having the same problem as the last one. They're screaming that it needs to be replaced. Instrument company stance, and I agree with them, is that it has to be something else if replacing that particular part didn't fix the problem.
Funny story of the week: colleage Doogie was entering the building at the same time as Wile E. Coyote. We have to swipe our badges to enter the building. WEC was trying to swipe his badge on the phone that's a couple of feet over from the card reader.

How does this guy even function? Seriously.
You may recall that one of my favorite software companies asked me to give a talk at their users' meeting. In the course of that conversation, they asked me about using data from our most recent publication (technically RR's data, but I'm first author on the paper) to test the new release of the software. Since the data files are in a public repository they're fair game as far as I'm concerned. I gave them the index number for the files and told them to have fun. Didn't mention it to RR because, well, the data files are publicly available. I received another phone call yesterday from my friends at the company, asking my permission to use the the results of their analysis in their poster at the upcoming professional meeting. I told them that it should be okay since it's public, but they should really ask RR if they felt the need to get permission. A nice bit of courtesy but unnecessary IMO. They did. She insisted on being senior author on their poster. I'm 2nd author, over several people in the company. This just gets all over me. What the hell work did she do in developing their software? They took information that was publicly available from our paper and reanalyzed our data files in order to show quantitative data. This happens all the time, but other investigators do not insist on being included in publications resulting from data in a public repository. They could maybe include me because I chatted with them about some stuff, but I certainly shouldn't be 2nd author. Acknowledgments would be fine. (rant over) Am I over-reacting, or does this seem a bit off to anyone else?
Most people say that is it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character.
-- Albert Einstein