Brlog - stories from a teen grad student

Another day in the life of blackrabbit. Okch.

I'm going to Hong Kong on the 10-12th of October for a conference. Is anyone going to be there during that time?

And look what I found (or rather, what was sent to my email and I read it): An UoA Alumni Reception. During the time that I'm in hk. The probability of this happening was about 0.008. Makes me wanna go.
They're holding one in HK, Beijing and Shanghai. No Taiwan >.< Lame.

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And the lack of updates recently was due to me doing so many wet lab experiments from day till night. Sometimes starting at 7am (though mostly starting from 9am), and most of the time ending around 11pm. Twice last week, I had to stay overnight at far uni because my experiments took too long and I had missed the last bus. The first time I stayed overnight at any uni, and even twice in one week! I hadn't even done this back at UoA.
Oh well. I've learnt a lot. Kinda know better what things to watch out for and which things you have to do with extra precaution and precision.
And I'm moderately awesome at PCR now (not that there's much to it anyway) because I was trying to "P" out this gene and failed like 9 times (and it wasn't because I did it wrong). And depending on the length of the gene you're trying to "P," the whole PCR process could take anywhere between 4-6hrs (that is, including gel electrophoresis).

My English is getting worse and worse. Sometimes I miss stuff when proofreading nowadays, and also I don't speak as smoothly as I used to. Some of my iGEM teammates asked me to speak English with them (as to improve their English) and I kept getting stuck every now and then thinking of what word I would use >.<
Actually I find talking about biology stuff easier in Chinese except when using biology jargon that I don't know the Chinese words of.

Funny that, ending sentences in prepositions.

Anyways, I'm off to do more experiments again. PCRing a different gene this time!

A woman, without her, man is nothing.
A woman: without her man, is nothing.

Happy Chinese Valentines Day

Sometimes deliberately missing a bus to catch the next one gets you to your destination faster. Of course, this would probably _never_ work in Auckland.
The theory goes like this. If there's so many people waiting for a particular bus/route, then catch the next one if you know it's not too far behind.
Many times at the MRT station, I have deliberately missed a bus (where I would've had to stand) for a bus in 2-10 minutes, which I would get a seat. Worked a few times. Sometimes, even the bus I was sitting on passed the bus I would've caught. But this journey from the MRT station only takes 10-20mins, so I was willing to experiment.
But wtf happened today. The bus which I catch to far uni (which takes 75min average) actually got passed by another bus with the same number around 15mins before the destination. wtf -_- So that means if I had waited another 5-10mins I would've gotten there 5 mins faster???????????????
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The internet was down this afternoon Far uni was moving their DNS servers, so that killed our internet access for a while. To mitigate that, we changed our DNS's to HiNet's one. But then it seemed they disconnected the DHCP server (is there such a thing?) for a while too, so no Internet after I foolishly restarted my computer (something to do with XP parallelDesktop and macs). But found one person's computer was still working, so I jotted down it's details, and then manually assigned my computer's ip address, subnet, DNS, and router's IP and it worked. Hax.

Tonight's iGEM discussion took 4hrs. So caught the last bus home again. The discussion was very informative to me though. Got to learn a bit more about the planning and the theory of experiments. Also got a bit further on how we're going about testing our components. The most current problem now is how to check whether or not a small promoter has been ligated to a plasmid.

I touched openGL again yesterday. It didn't really take that long for me to pick it up again. But my normal's are still wrong. Damn normals. Perhaps I just forgot to normalise them? XD

hm... gotta wake up in three hours to get to far uni before the rush hour again to attend the morning meeting, in which I have to present a progress report (about my research) that I not fully prepared for.


.... actually after three days of staying holed up in my room, I went out, and to my suprise everyone I saw was asian! It only took three days of not going outside, to make my mindset not that of being in an asian country. O.o

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The past week for me:

Fig. 1: Inside near uni.

These drinks were drinks I actually like and this time they had free things on them! But this time it tasted so ... diluted >.<

Fig. 2: Drink

Random lunch bento:

Fig. 3: Bento close.

Fig. 4: Bento Open!

A physical map of λ phage.

Fig. 5: Unreadable photograph.

DNA on Paper!

Fig. 6: Blobs of DNA on paper. It's pretty cool. They sent us a whole folderfull.

The teacher treated us to dinner on Friday night. After some of us iGEM people were still in the lab on a Friday night. Yep.

Fig. 7: Breadcrums, Mayonnaise and lettuce. So delicious!

Fig. 8: It's 紅茶 (red tea) but it's Black tea -_-

Fig. 9: Mains was baked rice! With CHEESE! :D

And there seems to be another typhoon approaching. It hasn't even been 2 weeks since the last typhoon.

Fig. 10: Another typhoon approaches. Probably'll hit around tomorrow.

That's pretty much all that's happened this week.

Fig. 11: The view of the sunset from the far uni lab

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[posted on 2008-07-27]
Went for a 21km hike near the outskirts of 桃園 (Taoyuan). We walked from there to 烏來 (Wulai).

Since this place was a bit far away (three hours by bus), I had to go stay at my aunt's house for the night.

Fig. 12: Passed dahu park again.

I got to 士林 (Shilin) too early, so I went and walked to the next MRT station 芝山 (Zhishan) and back which took 30mins. That's how I generally kill time (by walking).

Fig. 13: Map display at the two MRT stations.

The view the bridge crossing between Shilin and Zhishan.

Fig. 14: The view from atop the bridge.

While I was waiting by the Shilin map at the MRT station, an American couple was trying to find directions. I was going to ask them if they needed help, but they asked me first XD They just wanted to know how to get to the night market, and I where that was ^_^
I was observing the way I was talking English and found that I sounded bored (monotonous voice) even though I wasn't >.<
After my uncle came, we went to have some jap. I had some extra two helpings of salad (which are not shown), since extra salad and rice is free.

Fig. 15: Jap chicken curry.

Then we went to my aunt's house, and I ended up watching tv. Swing girls was playing!

Fig. 16: Swing girls! - She's saying "It's not my problem!"

In the morning, we had to wake at around 5-5:30am-ish to get to somewhere near Taipei main station to catch a bus there by 6:30am.

Fig. 17: Near Taipei Main Station.

The bus took about 3hrs and we got there and started walking around 10am-ish.

Fig. 18: Entrance to the mountain.

Fig. 19: Mountain side! My phone cam can take a decent pic in the day.

hm... lets see, during the hike, we took breaks at 3km (10mins - random resting place), 7km (lunch 30mins), 13km (10mins), 17km (5mins), 19km (3mins). Making a grand total of 405mins including breaks to travel the 21km. Makes my hiking speed about 17mins/km or around 3.5km/hr. I didn't drink any water during the whole hike, because once you start drinking, you can't stop.

At the end there was an ice dessert store. I was the fourth one out of the group of 44 people out first. The next batch of people came out after 1/2hr then the next after another 1/2hr. Then some others came out after some random times.

Like last time, this time, they also did some cooking. This time, due to the amount of people, they cooked three pots of (different kinds of) noodles.

By the time we left it was already 7:30pm. Took another 1.5hrs to get back to Taipei Main station. All in all, I got back around 11pm. A very tiring day.

more hiking pics available at:
140.109.169.79/paxxcy/photos/?hiking

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Since when did it become this way? I think this is the first time I'm actually having fun researching. Yesterday on the bus trip home I was eagerly reading papers, whereas I would just normally read them nonchalantly.

Although the thing I'm researching about currently is not my research, but research for our project in the iGEM competition.
And yea, I get to participate in experiments now ^_^ We did transformations yesterday.

I've been waking up around 5am for the past three days to take the bus before 6am ...

Fig. 20: The view from the window at 5:48am

A few more food pics from this past week (I didn't go anywhere, just got takeaways).

Fig. 21: Various takeaway food.

Looks like the typhoon's gonna past right on top of us by midnight. It's already raining hard right now and I gotta go out and get stuff done, like getting my hair cut amongst other things (no I'm not going to style it this time either).

Fig. 22: Typhoon again.

Gonna be waking up around 5am to get to uni for an experiment starting at 7am ...
And it's gonna be pouring down in buckets >.<

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They went gmail five days ago, and I gots myself one. Awesome. Another email to add to my ever growing email checking list.
Seems like I had 7345 emails at the time of migration, and about 39% of them were just "Topic reply notifications" from the three forums I had been skulling around during my years at compsci XD How nostalgic.

I just did a quick check, and it seems you can't access the account directly from gmail itself. Which kindof sucks :(
nuuuuuuuuu I just checked, and my old upi at gmail.com has already been taken, so I created another one to mirror it instead. But I just checked the mail headers: if you sent it from the UoA address, it says it was sent from UoA, and not from gmail. So I can't completely mirror it. Sucks.

And it also seems like that http://www.aucklanduni.ac.nz/ is not going to mirror the auckland uni website? O.o