Thursday, January 13, 2005
Tiny.Com suck!Well, being back at work after 3 weeks holiday doesn’t appear to get any easier – I’m knackered! I spent most of the day in front of the computer choosing restriction enzymes for the southern blot I have to do. There are so many factors to consider. I need an enzyme that can cut the DNA surrounding the marker gene that I want to study. It needs to cut either side of the gene but not within the gene. It also needs to work at 37C, not require a weird buffer or pre-treatment and mustn’t cost an arm and a leg. I am studying 7 different genes at the moment and the whole process is tedious in the extreme. Nevertheless, it’s finally completed and I’m simply awaiting the delivery of the enzymes I chose.
I have the date for my next “progress” meeting with SWMNBN. Obviously I knew that the meeting was in the offing, but confirmation of the date still put a dampener on my mood and I’m already starting to obsess about what I am going to say and feel defensive about my recent progress. It’s definitely going to be a hot topic in my upcoming career development talk.
“Celebrity” Big Brother.
The arrival of the Bride of Frankenstein aka Jackie Stallone, in the BB house has caused a serious stir. It’s rare that I feel any sympathy for the publicity-seeking inmates of the BB house, but I do feel that placing Brigitte Nielsen’s former mother-in-law in the house with her was a real low blow. It’s obviously deeply upset Brigitte and is very cruel. As funny as it seemed at first (and it has to be said that Jackie is very funny in a “howling at the moon, inhabiting her own planet” kind of way), I have started to change my mind. As Brigitte pointed out, it took her many years to get over her divorce to Sly and the press are going to have a field day raking over 20 year old wounds.
The stunt was the straw that broke the camel’s back for Germaine, who finally walked. Shame really, she was certainly one of the more interesting housemates. John has broken his sulk however, and is back to his outrageous self. However, he ably proved to be utterly without a sense of self-ridicule after the boys played a practical joke on him, pretending that BB had locked his hard won diet coke in the fridge. To their credit, Jeremy et al refused to back down and accept that the joke wasn’t funny. I suspect that John may feel even more humiliated when he watches the videos back and sees what a twat he has been. On a related note, Jeremy’s lack of presence in the house seems to be helping him – he is now the bookies favourite to win.
I’ve broken my new toy :-(
I’ve .owned this laptop for 6 weeks – and already I am having to get it ready to send back to Tiny for repair The network card has inexplicably stopped working. Unfortunately, being a laptop I am not allowed to open the case and have a play inside. Fortunately, the wireless card still works, so I have set up a temporary peer to peer network in the lab to allow me to share the internet connection of one of the lab’s other laptops. Rather annoyingly, I don’t have administrator privileges meaning that I can’t change the power saving settings, so the work machine keeps on going into hibernate mode and I keep on losing the connection. Grrrr! At the moment I am communicating with Tiny via email since I refuse to pay £1/min (including 15 minutes on hold!) to arrange for their shoddy workmanship to be repaired. Having my own laptop has revolutionised work. No more fighting over the sole computer with quantitative PCR software installed and no more need to use Pegasus Mail, the shittest excuse for an email client since the telegram. Say what you will about Microsoft, but Outlook pisses on the competition. It is also compatible with my smartphone, so I can keep all of my contacts and calendar items synchronised by simply charging the phone.
# posted by SaneScientist @ 1:57 am
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