Nothing Kinda much

Nothing much to say, and that's a text from my wife saying she's on the way to Sainsbury's! So time to leave work and go shopping!

Quick blog

Nothing much to blog about. Busy kinda day. Fire alarm in the building went off at 11:30 which was nice. Got to stand outside in the cold for 20 min and not know why. Fire brigade turned up after about 15 min. Rapid response or what? Maybe they were finishing watching something on TV before they came out.

17:30 so I'm going home now.

Wii-kend

Had tremendous fun at the weekend at a friends flat playing lots of Wii Force Unleashed, and Star Wars Lego, both of which are tremendous fun. Being able to force grip an enemy and then throw your lightsaber at them and impaling them was particularly satisfying! I only found that the cable that connected the controller to the nunchuck was too short, as I kept whipping myself while doing force repel. All Nintendo need to produce now is a glove to be worn on the non-lightsaber hand that could detect the movements in the hand for force chock, push or lightning, now that would be really cool!

Quite day at work really. Forgot that we have a Systems Biology away day tomorrow, so I can't really plan anything today to finish tomorrow. So I've spent the day reading papers and planning experiments. Going to an open lecture tonight at Waterstones about science in society, and the public's understanding of science. I hope it will be quite interesting. Then hopefully I can catch the end of Liverpool vs Everton.

Friday

Busy day. Lab meeting this morning. Quick lunch, then 24 protein extracts to make followed by 10 yeast transformations.

Now I need to get out of here so that I can go and catch the train to Elgin at 17:18. Weekend in Lossie playing Force unleashed and watch DVDs with friends. Cool.

With the highs come the lows

Well, after I was really happy that I got my final clone on Tuesday, it was only natural that yesterday would be crappy. Western blot was completely blank, not even the positive control worked this time! Ah well, onwards! Growth experiment today, 7 hours worth, Schön! This is only the third time I have done this total, I hope I get some worthwhile samples out of it this time.

RAM story so far: having switched out the two new RAM modules I found that the computer is happy with one of them, but not the other (the one hard up against the video card). I guess I should contact crucial, see what they say, and whether it's likely that they sent me bad RAM. At least I can play Star Wars Battlefront at the moment!

Right, need to go and right up my lab book for meeting tomorrow.

Sequencing

Yeay, I have finally got my inserts into my pAC98 plasmid (geeky science talk eh?). I started all this on 21.08.08, and finally today I got the sequencing results back for my final construct SAL4-18, the final and most awkward of the 8 constructs. The other 7 clones were not nearly as bad, with successful clones being #1 or #2, perhaps #7 in a screen for the correct plasmid. But good old SAL4-18 waited until clone #27! I can do some proper experiments now!

Well that's the most exciting thing that has happened today!

09.01.09 Blog

First week back at work seems to have gone fast and slow at the same time. Each day has gone by quite fast as I have been quite busy, but at the same time, the week has seemed long, and so I feel that I have got lots done. It will just round the week off nicely if my sequencing results come back this afternoon with the correct sequence for pAC98 SAL4-18 in the correct orientation!

So to the weekend. Off down to Glasgow tomorrow at the chirpy time of 07:30! We are going for a Chinese lunch to celebrate joint birthdays for one of my wife's cousins and her Mum (so Auntie). Cousin is 30, Auntie is 60. It should be a good weekend as they are all really great people, it just sucks that we have to get up so early on a day off!

Bit off late night shopping last night, reasonably successful. Wife bought clothes, I got new headphones for mp3 player, and train tickets for going up to Elgin next weekend (visit friends to play Force Unleashed on their Wii! Their idea not ours!). We then had an impromptu dinner at a wee Italian restaurant, very nice. Pizza and Calzone (not both mine!) and some wine. Not particularly cheap, but then it's not very often that just the two of us go out for dinner.

Put new memory into computer last night, I have a lovely 3GB of RAM now. It was a bit of a fiddle as usual. I really love the way in the instructions of how to install memory it tells you to push down with even pressure until it clicks into place with a clear diagram of someone with their hands directly over the module pushing easily. Of course in reality there is no such space, just wires everywhere that poke in the wrong place, one of the clips hard up against the graphics card so it wouldn't open fully, and absolutely no space to manouver at all unless you have hand the size of a three-year old! Still we did it, and then after my computer decided it needed to reboot itself twice, it worked.

Anyway, some of that work. Western blot, transformation, plates to pour (which I should go and do now instead of blogging!), and hopefully sequencing to check. Mmmm quite busy!

Wednesday

Western blot, plates out of incubator and reading papers. Not a particularly action packed day. So I'll sing a song instead.

O let the sun beat down upon my head, stars fill my dreams,

I am a traveller of both time and space, to be where I have been.

Kashmir, Led Zeppelin

New Year

...and first day back at work. Actually the day went really quickly, and after not really looking forward to the first day back, I had forgotten that I actually really enjoy my job. Still really happy that we got the grant at the end of last year!

So I got straight back into things, from where I left off. Hopefully I'll be able to get a goodly amount of stuff done this week before the Honours students start in the lab next week! Looks like I'll be closely supervising one of them so I should really discuss with the boss what we're going to do with them!

Mmmm earphones on mp3 player seem to be getting a bit bust. I guess they've had a good stint, looks like I'll have to fork out for some new ones.