20100924
20100920
Heads up
Don't know how many people checks what but: if you received an email from my yahoo account this weekend. That is a virus / spam. Don't click on any links. Avoid opening it if you can. I did not send that and I'll be debugging my account today. Sorry about that.
20100915
Like something very squishy
It's a shame that my clearest reflection over what happens and should be happening, these days, happen in the morning in the bus ride to school. Back in the days evening was my thinky time. Now I find myself missing chunks of time -- by which I mean I find myself going from the bus stop at point A to the stop at point M with no memory of what happened in between. The time as I was falling asleep these days -- well, I'm usually so far gone then that there's no way to logically assess anything. Instead my mind usually wonders to inconsequential things that are related to the day, and most of my thought processes at that point, will make no sense if I'm actually awake.
It makes blogging in the evening a bit more difficult, as I realized yesterday. There's a lot of staring blankly at the screen, thinking "I knew there was something else I want to mention" involved. By now, for instance, I forgot what I was going to write about to begin with. If I had to summarize my day in bullet point format, it would go thus:
- campus-wide grad student orientation is today, met international students looking for directions on the bus
- lost a person I was supposed to practice my presentation on, due to scheduling conflict, so I'm down one
- got email notifying me of gigantic mess up with my mice at the other vivarium. Flailed at PI, flailed at vivarium staff. Hopefully this will never happen again or I will go mad. Or cry. Or both. The two are not mutually exclusive.
- helped labmate update lab equipment software, as she uses a mac and the equipment runs a Dell desktop
- directed people to the right exit during lunch
- gave a practice presentation
- went to lab meeting, which was blissfully short; there were cookies
- three new litters of baby mice born today!
- forgot I had a gel running -- all my samples ran off
- Ivy's bios got corrupted again and I couldn't repair it at lab
- went home early to fix Ivy; fixed Ivy
... - sleep
It makes blogging in the evening a bit more difficult, as I realized yesterday. There's a lot of staring blankly at the screen, thinking "I knew there was something else I want to mention" involved. By now, for instance, I forgot what I was going to write about to begin with. If I had to summarize my day in bullet point format, it would go thus:
- campus-wide grad student orientation is today, met international students looking for directions on the bus
- lost a person I was supposed to practice my presentation on, due to scheduling conflict, so I'm down one
- got email notifying me of gigantic mess up with my mice at the other vivarium. Flailed at PI, flailed at vivarium staff. Hopefully this will never happen again or I will go mad. Or cry. Or both. The two are not mutually exclusive.
- helped labmate update lab equipment software, as she uses a mac and the equipment runs a Dell desktop
- directed people to the right exit during lunch
- gave a practice presentation
- went to lab meeting, which was blissfully short; there were cookies
- three new litters of baby mice born today!
- forgot I had a gel running -- all my samples ran off
- Ivy's bios got corrupted again and I couldn't repair it at lab
- went home early to fix Ivy; fixed Ivy
... - sleep
20100914
Unexpected problems
1) Guys, I can't turn off my cell phone.
No, really.
I even checked the manual and held down the key all the way until the screen went dark due to inactivity. The phone won't turn off. I'm going to try the battery-out and battery-in strategy later but really, this was not a problem that I would've expected.
2) Went to dentist, discovered two cavities on their way to eating through my enamel. Am scheduled for two appointments (I was told they will be around 30 min ea -- which strikes me as really short) for fillings. Now I am googling what "white filling" is and trying to figure out what the dentist is going to do to me, as that I've never had a filling before and the vague notion I've had of anaesthesia and drills scares me. Just a little.
(I was also informed that I don't have upper wisdom teeth. Just the lower ones, which was confirmed to not to need to be removed, thank God. This strikes me as strange. Must remember to call parents to see who I got this bit of luck from.)
3) The undergrad who borrows my reagents and then forgets to put them back. It's not that she does it on purpose, she's just careless by nature and is in the habit of forgetting to put chemicals / equipment back where she got them from in general and although I'm not in charge of her, it occasionally gets really annoying. Especially when I need something within two minutes in a time-sensitive experiment and my stuff aren't where it's supposed to be.
On the plus side I have:
1) Heard back from PI #5 and the Exam of Doom, as Lucy had dubbed it, will be on Oct. 1st, and I will NOT have to present twice which is awesome. I am contemplating my original plan, from back in winter / spring quarter, of getting the Exam of Doom completed before fall quarter classes start. Getting it done one week after it started is, all things considered, pretty good. Assuming that the stats I'm trying to run on some of the data doesn't drive me nuts and that I actually PASS, of course. Otherwise I'll just be sad.
2) We're getting a rotation student! Which is always exciting. I remember when I was a rotation student. Tempus fugit, indeed.
........
Though considering all the troubleshooting and editing and things not working out that I'm experiencing these two days, I'm feeling pretty happy and content with life right now. Isn't that weird?
No, really.
I even checked the manual and held down the key all the way until the screen went dark due to inactivity. The phone won't turn off. I'm going to try the battery-out and battery-in strategy later but really, this was not a problem that I would've expected.
2) Went to dentist, discovered two cavities on their way to eating through my enamel. Am scheduled for two appointments (I was told they will be around 30 min ea -- which strikes me as really short) for fillings. Now I am googling what "white filling" is and trying to figure out what the dentist is going to do to me, as that I've never had a filling before and the vague notion I've had of anaesthesia and drills scares me. Just a little.
(I was also informed that I don't have upper wisdom teeth. Just the lower ones, which was confirmed to not to need to be removed, thank God. This strikes me as strange. Must remember to call parents to see who I got this bit of luck from.)
3) The undergrad who borrows my reagents and then forgets to put them back. It's not that she does it on purpose, she's just careless by nature and is in the habit of forgetting to put chemicals / equipment back where she got them from in general and although I'm not in charge of her, it occasionally gets really annoying. Especially when I need something within two minutes in a time-sensitive experiment and my stuff aren't where it's supposed to be.
On the plus side I have:
1) Heard back from PI #5 and the Exam of Doom, as Lucy had dubbed it, will be on Oct. 1st, and I will NOT have to present twice which is awesome. I am contemplating my original plan, from back in winter / spring quarter, of getting the Exam of Doom completed before fall quarter classes start. Getting it done one week after it started is, all things considered, pretty good. Assuming that the stats I'm trying to run on some of the data doesn't drive me nuts and that I actually PASS, of course. Otherwise I'll just be sad.
2) We're getting a rotation student! Which is always exciting. I remember when I was a rotation student. Tempus fugit, indeed.
........
Though considering all the troubleshooting and editing and things not working out that I'm experiencing these two days, I'm feeling pretty happy and content with life right now. Isn't that weird?
20100911
Well, that could've gone better
My new resolution to update more regularly crumbled in the face of the discovery that The Exam will (most likely) be on Oct. 1st, due to various scheduling conflicts with the different PIs. However, I'm still waiting to hear back from one of them...which actually doesn't make that much of a difference given that with the current four that I have scheduled there is only ONE day when everyone has time free. (They were given the entire month of October to choose from, November being off limits for other activities and December being the No Man's Land of scheduling and fall quarter being the recommended time for The Exam.) So I might need to present twice. Oh joy.
Damnations. I just ran out of tea. Must go make more.
It's close enough to 3pm that I should probably switch to de-caf stuff. Not like I need more reasons to twitch, right? I've opened another bag of the caffeine-free tea that Christine got me. It's called "Caribbean Breeze" and smells like strawberry cough drops. (Tastes a lot like that bright red tea Lucy gave me with the pomegranate and the hibiscus and possibly rose.) And while I'm on the topic I would like to note that the darker of the two green honey sticks left does not taste like apples, but it does taste like some kind of fruit that I can't identify. The lighter of the yellow sticks left tastes like honey, which is very ordinary and surprising that I had to re-examine it but -- well -- it looks very normal.
This is probably going to be a very long rambling post. Forget labels, what blogger really needs is one of those LJ-cut like functions. Since that is clearly not going to happen right now...onwards!
In the reminder of this week I have discovered a way to make myself depressed in under two minutes -- by reading people's comments under the news articles in yahoo, discovered that the other, other post-doc's wife is having a baby (and he didn't even tell us! We saw his wife and figured it out because she looks pregnant) and was helpfully reminded that now, in our lab there is only me and the other post-doc who haven't procreated yet. (They're not counting the undergrads.) ...yes, that's a lot of babies. (Three since January, and I've never even been to a baby shower before the one we threw for the post doc a year ago.) Christ. BABIES. One's due in October and one in November and I really need to go and shop for presents because the lunch-thing we (the lab) are planning on is before The Exam and the weekend before The Exam is off-limits. (For anyone who's curious, that's three boys and one girl. We're in a genetics lab and I'm thinking of ordering this -- yeah? Yeah?)
While we are on the subject of reproducing (and of the remaining babyless post-doc who told me to not worry because I "still have lots of time") I find myself revisiting my stance on dating. As in I really don't actually want to, nor do I want to get married, nor get pregnant and have a baby so why am I doing this again?
After considerable thought, it strikes me that wanting to make friends and go out occasionally is a questionable sort of incentive for dating. The length of time it took me to reach that conclusion makes me feel a wee bit demented.
G2G and SG aren't really doing anything any more (in terms of people messaging and so on) so I'm closing those. I don't want to deal with OC, but I have to admit, the people who have a matching score of 90% or above are really fun to talk to and I think are / will become really good friends (sadly I don't want to date any of them, though they are very nice), so while on one hand I want to just close that account too and say, to heck with it, it's not worth the effort of dealing with all the rest of the people and the messaging, those few people ...might be worth it?
Though with The Exam looming on the horizon, this is not a particularly good time to do anything about it or try to come up with a new strategy. Lucy's introduced me to MeetUp.com so, you know, maybe. Some day. When I'm no longer going insane and pondering whether or not I should make yet another cup of tea.
First years are arriving for orientation next week!
(And I'll be presenting on Friday but I'm trying hard not to think about that.)
Damnations. I just ran out of tea. Must go make more.
It's close enough to 3pm that I should probably switch to de-caf stuff. Not like I need more reasons to twitch, right? I've opened another bag of the caffeine-free tea that Christine got me. It's called "Caribbean Breeze" and smells like strawberry cough drops. (Tastes a lot like that bright red tea Lucy gave me with the pomegranate and the hibiscus and possibly rose.) And while I'm on the topic I would like to note that the darker of the two green honey sticks left does not taste like apples, but it does taste like some kind of fruit that I can't identify. The lighter of the yellow sticks left tastes like honey, which is very ordinary and surprising that I had to re-examine it but -- well -- it looks very normal.
This is probably going to be a very long rambling post. Forget labels, what blogger really needs is one of those LJ-cut like functions. Since that is clearly not going to happen right now...onwards!
In the reminder of this week I have discovered a way to make myself depressed in under two minutes -- by reading people's comments under the news articles in yahoo, discovered that the other, other post-doc's wife is having a baby (and he didn't even tell us! We saw his wife and figured it out because she looks pregnant) and was helpfully reminded that now, in our lab there is only me and the other post-doc who haven't procreated yet. (They're not counting the undergrads.) ...yes, that's a lot of babies. (Three since January, and I've never even been to a baby shower before the one we threw for the post doc a year ago.) Christ. BABIES. One's due in October and one in November and I really need to go and shop for presents because the lunch-thing we (the lab) are planning on is before The Exam and the weekend before The Exam is off-limits. (For anyone who's curious, that's three boys and one girl. We're in a genetics lab and I'm thinking of ordering this -- yeah? Yeah?)
While we are on the subject of reproducing (and of the remaining babyless post-doc who told me to not worry because I "still have lots of time") I find myself revisiting my stance on dating. As in I really don't actually want to, nor do I want to get married, nor get pregnant and have a baby so why am I doing this again?
After considerable thought, it strikes me that wanting to make friends and go out occasionally is a questionable sort of incentive for dating. The length of time it took me to reach that conclusion makes me feel a wee bit demented.
G2G and SG aren't really doing anything any more (in terms of people messaging and so on) so I'm closing those. I don't want to deal with OC, but I have to admit, the people who have a matching score of 90% or above are really fun to talk to and I think are / will become really good friends (sadly I don't want to date any of them, though they are very nice), so while on one hand I want to just close that account too and say, to heck with it, it's not worth the effort of dealing with all the rest of the people and the messaging, those few people ...might be worth it?
Though with The Exam looming on the horizon, this is not a particularly good time to do anything about it or try to come up with a new strategy. Lucy's introduced me to MeetUp.com so, you know, maybe. Some day. When I'm no longer going insane and pondering whether or not I should make yet another cup of tea.
First years are arriving for orientation next week!
(And I'll be presenting on Friday but I'm trying hard not to think about that.)
20100906
Good weekend until yesterday, I guess
Dear Diary,
Over the course of this weekend I have
a) put the finishing touches on my powerpoint (though now I noticed the video clip doesn't work and so I will fix that today, yes I will).
b) fixed Daemon, because the issue turned out to be software after all.
c) spent six hours talking to a friend that I haven't really spoken to in a while who is in the middle of planning her wedding, who now left me with the impression that perhaps the candidacy exam is less scary than a wedding.
d) finished watch the season of DW (11th with Amy) which had more fall-through in plot and science than a sieve has holes, but somehow was still spectacular.
e) cooked pork chops for the first time.
f) made cookies from scratch.
g) scrubbed out the kitchen thing.
Now it's Labor Day and I'm in lab, waiting for the media to warm up and trying to figure out how to schedule The Exam.
Well, at least there's free parking today.
Sincerely,
Yrs Trly.
Over the course of this weekend I have
a) put the finishing touches on my powerpoint (though now I noticed the video clip doesn't work and so I will fix that today, yes I will).
b) fixed Daemon, because the issue turned out to be software after all.
c) spent six hours talking to a friend that I haven't really spoken to in a while who is in the middle of planning her wedding, who now left me with the impression that perhaps the candidacy exam is less scary than a wedding.
d) finished watch the season of DW (11th with Amy) which had more fall-through in plot and science than a sieve has holes, but somehow was still spectacular.
e) cooked pork chops for the first time.
f) made cookies from scratch.
g) scrubbed out the kitchen thing.
Now it's Labor Day and I'm in lab, waiting for the media to warm up and trying to figure out how to schedule The Exam.
Well, at least there's free parking today.
Sincerely,
Yrs Trly.
20100905
Lovely morning
Daemon is fixed. It turned out to be a software problem and not hardware, as I'd originally feared (and which I would not be able to fix). I'm still not entirely sure what was wrong so that the network card got permanently stuck on "disabled" but it works now and given I'm not from IT, that's all I care about.
And I updated to Fedora 13 (was previously running 11). As you can see from the screenshot, the new theme is star based and very pretty. I'm also going to use this opportunity to cheer on Lili (short for Linus Live) USB Creator that allows you to make a live boot USB stick (so you don't have to burn the .iso to a CD and thus allows you to save the environment from some more plastic). It is, for one thing, the shiniest thing ever. The user-interface is very aethestically pleasing, very intuitive, and automatically verifies your iso (in case of downloading errors). It's small enough to be a fast download even on my bandwidth, easy to install, and it's fast in what it does. I don't have a screenshot of it since I'm currently on Daemon and Lili is a program that I ran on Zen's Window's XP, but yeah, after years of checking hash and CD writing I'm a little bit in love with this USB image burner.
(Though there was this one "pick your source file" window that came out in French and that was very very strange.)
Right. Now I'm going to make sure I have all the right updates, install them along with OpenOffice, mplayer, and IDEA (why I took the time to fix Daemon this weekend, to be honest -- and yes Daemon's specs is not quite up to par...it's getting to be quite a geriatric laptop now, but I think I can find a way to manage).
I'll figure out the tablet thing next weekend, but that's supposed to be one of the improvements in the newer version, I think.
I now have the strangest urge to watch West Wing. Also, it's time for lunch!
20100904
I believe in updates, I do, I do
Another insane (quite) week has passed. In lab we sorted through stuff in the freezer, tried to figure out what to do with the sodium acetate (trihydrate) that's solidified into a chunk, and watched the PI pretend to be a handyman. (He screwed back in a part of the autoclave and failed to fix a chair. The first few moments of watching him come by and methodically flip chairs over -- with no explanation--was very surreal.) There was also the moment when PI Dearest compared my metazoa-wide cloning attempts to collecting Pokemon cards (i.e. "gotta catch'em all" and that one of them might be "magical"), which resulted in the moment where both Wendy and I stared at him like he was insane (aside from the undergrads who weren't there, and the tech who away doing something else, we were the only ones young enough to get the reference) (the lab tech was the other person besides the PI with kids who might be old enough to get the reference). Magic clones. Right. I think I'll go back to my miniprep now. (He also managed to wheedle me into presenting during orientation. How does he do it? I hate public presentations.)
I've twisted my ankle a while ago and, although it didn't seem that bad after the hell that was day two, for some reason I'm still limping a little. This is the main reason (the other one being the gloomy weather) why I had to keep slashing my plans to go visit the beach. Instead I've been puttering around a lot indoors and re-organized all my music files. Sadly, this also led to my discovery that A) I have more music than I thought because for some reason my mp3 player just doesn't play some of the mp3 files (the entire folder of the DW fanmix will play on my computer by not the mp3 player and I haven't the slightest clue why) and B) my mp3 player eats files, and then spit out versions that NOTHING will play (I have no idea why this is either). I've managed to figure out what's missing and what's usable though, for the most part, and that I have at least three copies of "Watch the Sky" in different folders. (It's one of my favorite songs but yeah, that's waaay too much.)
In the progression of the week I've also gotten a parking ticket for forgetting to move my car during the Wednesday every month where I can't park on the street (always inconvenient since I leave / return at a time where all the cars are parked and there is no free spot), received my copy of DS CDs that I ordered in the mail, and discovered that all the worms in the worm bin have perished out of neglect (read: further proof of why I should not be allowed to have pets during grad school).
Lastly I should mention I submitted my first draft of my advancement to candidacy exam to my PI yesterday and he has given me his blessings to schedule the exam in October (also introducing me to Doodle, whose name first made me think that he was making some kind of weird joke again). Given that no one from my little protein group has asked me for a copy of the presentation that I've promised them two weeks ago, does anyone want to volunteer their time some time within the next three weekends to hear me present a much longer version (30-40 minutes), so that I can polish my presentation enough to withstand the 50 minutes (I kid you not) of verbal grilling during the exam? Putting together this bit of fun has been what I spent all my spare time doing this week during lab, and then it's onwards to carrying on the tradition of being twitchy and mad every fall....
Well, time to hit the list of chores.
I've twisted my ankle a while ago and, although it didn't seem that bad after the hell that was day two, for some reason I'm still limping a little. This is the main reason (the other one being the gloomy weather) why I had to keep slashing my plans to go visit the beach. Instead I've been puttering around a lot indoors and re-organized all my music files. Sadly, this also led to my discovery that A) I have more music than I thought because for some reason my mp3 player just doesn't play some of the mp3 files (the entire folder of the DW fanmix will play on my computer by not the mp3 player and I haven't the slightest clue why) and B) my mp3 player eats files, and then spit out versions that NOTHING will play (I have no idea why this is either). I've managed to figure out what's missing and what's usable though, for the most part, and that I have at least three copies of "Watch the Sky" in different folders. (It's one of my favorite songs but yeah, that's waaay too much.)
In the progression of the week I've also gotten a parking ticket for forgetting to move my car during the Wednesday every month where I can't park on the street (always inconvenient since I leave / return at a time where all the cars are parked and there is no free spot), received my copy of DS CDs that I ordered in the mail, and discovered that all the worms in the worm bin have perished out of neglect (read: further proof of why I should not be allowed to have pets during grad school).
Lastly I should mention I submitted my first draft of my advancement to candidacy exam to my PI yesterday and he has given me his blessings to schedule the exam in October (also introducing me to Doodle, whose name first made me think that he was making some kind of weird joke again). Given that no one from my little protein group has asked me for a copy of the presentation that I've promised them two weeks ago, does anyone want to volunteer their time some time within the next three weekends to hear me present a much longer version (30-40 minutes), so that I can polish my presentation enough to withstand the 50 minutes (I kid you not) of verbal grilling during the exam? Putting together this bit of fun has been what I spent all my spare time doing this week during lab, and then it's onwards to carrying on the tradition of being twitchy and mad every fall....
Well, time to hit the list of chores.
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