Relief

I got a good look at my NMR results yesterday, and the feeling of relief was huge. It was getting to the point in my trip where I didn't have anything concrete to show for my time here, and I was getting very stressed. Like, really, really stressed. But the good news is that I have useful results by the truckload, now I just have to work out the right questions to ask to extract what they mean. Happy days.

A rushed update

My laptop has 29% of its battery, so I've given myself until it runs out to do this update. Cricket sucked, basically. It was decided that seeing as I was from the southern hemisphere that I had to be good at cricket, and so was given the opener's spot. My fellow Combat Wombats (our indoor cricket team) will know that while I am not a complete retard, neither am I especially talented. Nonetheless, I was more than a little disappointed to get a first ball duck. I didn't bowl but fielded ok, but on the whole I think I would have been much better off going to the Beer Festival, which I didn't end up going to at all. Boo.
23% remaining. Saturday was an OK day. I woke up late and spent a few hours reading the paper and drinking tea, then headed down to the climbing gym. I climbed for a few hours with Thomas, a South African bloke, and Helen, who is an undergrad here who hales (hails? - dunno, too little battery power to check) from up near Wales. It was good. We made up a few new problems, then went to the pub for a beer. Good times.
Sunday was spent in the lab, as was Monday morning (Monday was a public holiday over here), then I went climbing again in the afternoon. Helen invited Thomas and I to formal hall at her college, which as far as I can work out is some kind of formal dinner, which I have been told I should definitely try and attend at least once. Not being particularly formal at the best of times, there is a question about whether I will be able to look sufficiently dressed-up, but I'll do my best and see, I guess.
18%: Science stuff continues. The guy who was helping me with mass speckory is going on holidays, so I pretty much have to sort myself out lipid analysis-wise. Still, I think I will be able to get at least some useful results out of it. NMR stuff is finished, so I can start analysis on that data, and meeting with Johan Thevelein is confirmed. I am a half-arsed individual, but stuff seems to fall together for some reason.

As an aside, if podcasts are your thing, check out Frenzie's Groove Therapy radio show, which is broadcast at lunchtime in Sydney on Friday's on 2SER, or available as a podcast from here.

12%.

Dirty work at the crossroads

My plan to attend the beer festival tonight have been foiled because I've been drafted into the Cambridge Biochemistry Department XI. No doubt my slow leg cutters and text book off-drives will see me through. Actually, probably not.

Posts like whoa

Three posts in as many days. Outstanding. I'm kind of at a stand-still on the lab-work front for the moment. We run my final NMR samples on Thursday, and the first of my lipid test samples on Friday, and until then there is no wet-work that I need to do. Which is not to say that I have nothing to do, quite the contrary. I have a bunch of stuff to do for my diploma - I am so far behind on that that it really isn't funny. I need to organise getting to Leuven and meeting up with the guys in the lab there. Vince is entirely down with the fact that I'm pretty much just hitting up the dude for a job and has said that he'll pay for the whole malarky, but I don't really think that's fair, especially given that I'm going to go to the continent anyway. I also have to put together the data for the ALD6 paper manuscript that Ryan from UWS was preparing in February. I think it's unlikely that he'll read this, but I'm going to apologise anyway. I think we'll be able to add some of the data that I've generated here, so I'll add emailing Ryan to the list of stuff to do. Finally, and most importantly, I have to write a thesis at some stage. I've been reading Ant's introduction and working out what needs to go into mine, but it's going to be epic. Given that Mat told me that his has been craziness, it's time to put pen to paper so to speak. All this shit to do has been keeping me awake at night - not in a "holy shit everything is fucked I hate my life" kind of way, but more of a "how can I most efficiently get all this shit done" kind of way, which is good, and entirely unlike me.

Having sold out by getting an iPod, I've started to use Last.fm. When I originally looked at it it didn't support the Creative media player (as far as I could see), but now that I'm a iTunes using sellout, it works fine. I don't really see the reason for it other than to show off just how fucking rad my music collection is, but that's reason enough for me. Sure, I get a few links to occasional stuff that I hadn't heard of, but I'm so goddam underground that I'm practically in China anyway. Anyway, my user name is duncan_donuts. There was an article in the Guardian tech section about keeping all your Last.fm, flickr, facebook, etc stuff in one place. No doubt Joel has been using something that does that for the last seven years - maybe he'll twitter about it.

Right, time to do something constructive.

Phone mission completed

So I just called Vince, and he is unable to come over to Belgium due to teaching commitments. So the plan is for me to go and visit Johann Thevelein on my own, which does kind of make things a bit easier. It also means that I can start organising stuff post-Cambridge. Excellent.

As a postscript, I have no idea why the first paragraph of my previous post is in Times while the rest is in Arial, but whatever the reason it has resisted my attempts to fix it. Clearly it's just happier in Times, so who am I to argue?

Now, where is the Eurostar website?

Same ol', same ol'.

Updates are becoming fewer and farther between, mainly because I'm not doing an awful lot other than working in the lab, climbing in the terrible climbing gym and watching dvd's. Unless you're interested in the minutiae of lab nerdery, then there isn't much to report. Acetyl chloride is fun; here's an exert from it's MSDS:
"Corrosive - causes severe burns. Harmful if inhaled or swallowed, and in contact with skin. Contact with water generates phosgene - very toxic! May cause permanent eye damage if splashed in the eyes. Ingestion may cause serious burns to mouth and stomach."
And that's what I'm working with today. Good times.

What else? I had a good session at the climbing gym last night. I made up a bunch of new problems with a guy called Dan who is often at the gym at the same time as me. A girl called Beth moved back in to 67 Glisson Rd (where I live) after a trip to Sydney, coincidentally enough, to interview people about innovation. I'm interested to find out more about that. The Cambridge Beer Festival is on this week, which should be good fun. I think we're going to head down as a lab on Thursday. Mmm, beer. I also picked up some tasty beverages this week when I went to try and find some Coopers Pale and some good Australian wine as presents for when I leave - Founders English Ale is very tasty.
I still haven't spoken to Vince, despite buying a phonecard with about a thousand hours worth of talk time on it, but will do so tomorrow and hopefully sort out when I plan to return and also when I'll be in Belgium and Germany. I sent an email to Franz, also known as Captain Chaos, and he finishes his exams on June 12th, which is perfect timing for me to go and visit. He lives in the vicinity of the Frankenjura in Germany and heaps of other climbing, plus he's a champion. I anticipate good times in the future.

Out.

Flags of all nations

People in I meet in Cambridge rarely seem to be from England, or even the UK. Last night I was at the pub with a Lithuanian, a German, a Sri Lankan, a Dutchwoman (Netherlander?), two Turks, a Spaniard and a guy from China. They were fairly impressed that my PhD., at least nominally, is about beer. I was much more interested in the work they're doing on characterising the steps involved in stem cells becoming committed to becoming certain types of cells. It was pretty cool, sitting by the river watching drunk people in punts while talking shit. It's also been interesting to find out that even people who are demonstrably astoundingly good worry that they may not be very good at this whole science business.

I have almost finished my epic metabolite extracting mission, and will be able to move on to sorting out this lipid analysis method. So yeah, I feel like I am actually achieving stuff, and may not end up working at Liquorland when I'm done. More than that, I may actually be done at some stage. Now there's a reassuring thought.

Oh the humanity...

Back in high school, I remember Jesse complaining about what The Specials did to the Toots and the Maytals classic Pressure Drop. That's nothing compared to what this guy does to it, and The Pioneers' classic Kick De Bucket.
From the link: "For the technically interested: all songs were tracked by Dubmood on the Atari 1040 STfm in maxYMizer, made by gwEm, using the YM2149 soundchip. That is, 4bit sound on 3 channels, one squarewave generator and one noisegenerator on a 16bit 8mhz machine with 1mb of RAM and no samples used!"
Jahtari are yet another one of those interesting German labels, who call what they do "digital laptop reggae". Best known for the 2007's astoundingly good Foundation Bit from Disrupt, some of their stuff is a bit hit and miss. I'd say Dubmood's stuff is a bit more miss than hit...

More science

A brief update: we ran some NMR samples yesterday and confirmed not only my ability to carry out the method in a repeatable way, but also that there are significant differences in the wild type and my double mutant. Which is a good thing. And I sourced some cholesteryl heptadecanoate.

Can I get a booyah?