It's Friday afternoon. In June. Research students are winding down for the week. They are probably wondering how much more they have to do before they can leave for the weekend. And faculty are probably wondering the exact same thing. While I was 'being productive' (aka surfing the web and thinking about things I could be doing but not really wanting to do them), I noticed we hadn't gotten a BITeS post up this week. I thought to myself, 'self, surely you can come up with something to write about.' Then I said, "I can, and don't call me Shirley!' That managed to kill time as I thought about all of the great laughs in the movie Airplane. And while I got a good chuckle out of that, it got me no further along in writing this post.

Then I got to thinking ‘why am I writing this post?’ And in answering that question, a BITeS post was born. In addition to things like lives, job related activities and research students; your VIPEr leaders are busy doing lots of things behind the scenes. Like what? Well, one sub-group is busy working on various bugs that have been noted on the VIPEr site. The site upgrade brought some wonderful new features, but it also brought some subtle problems that we are stilling trying to flush out. Another sub-group is busy getting materials ready for our workshop in July (https://www.ionicviper.org/2014-workshop-introduction). Nancy Williams just came back from a conference in Canada where she talked about VIPEr (http://abstracts.csc2014.ca/00001860.htm). While the workshop is going on in Chicago, Joanne Stewart and Chip Nataro will be making a second trip to Canada to present at the ICCE 2014 (http://www.icce2014.org/html/00000064.htm). And just a few weeks after that many of us are off to BCCE for presentations and workshops. We are also busy analyzing survey data and hope to be sharing that in the near future. All that and writing a weekly blog. Phew! I hope all our loyal readers and VIPEr users are enjoying their summer.