I understand that you're trying to help, but I can't help but feel a little insulted by your last remark there. I don't pretend to be an expert biologist by any stretch of the imagination, but I did spend three years as a bioinformaticist at IDT, have had a couple of bioinformatics publications, and spent most of last year working in a proteomics group.

That said, I'm proud to be an amateur. My ultimate goals are exploration, learning, and lowering the barrier to entry for other people. I'm also fundamentally an autodidact. Some of my projects will fail. Some of them will succeed up to a point and get no further. And, frankly, I'm okay with that. Hell, Real Scientists(tm) have that problem too. (Being a Real Scientist(tm) in another field, I feel I can say that with authority. ;) )