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Things that will likely make me happy
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wang's cubicleApril 02 anoter wormy dayAnother rainy day here in Waltham. And came with it is a bunch of earthworms. There were probably ten of them on the sidwalk on my way to work this morning. I managed to put a few back in dry soil. The unusual thing though is that this time, many of them were small... smaller than the average ones i normally see. Some were really tiny baby size in pale pink. Do earthworm give birth in the winter during hibernation like polar bears? January 07 my laptop is dead quietJanuary 06 boston warm dayIt's 68 degree today !!!...Considering it's mid winter Boston, this is ridiculously warm. But in any case, because of the warm weather, it rained last night (instead of snowed) and this morning there were a number of earthworms lying in the middle of concrete road. They probably came out to flee the over moist soil. Some looked like they were about to blow up from taking in too much water. In anycase, i took a few of them back to dry land on my way to the lab today. Hope they'll survive and thrive in the new place. And in return for the good deed, god has sent me a bottle of Harpoon today. It was sitting in the cold room .... tummy feels really warm right now. January 01 new year!It's 2007 and it's time for some change. A lot of
things happened last year for the good and the
bad and the ups and the downs. Life seemed to be on a roller coaster.
For this comning year, I'd like to tighten myself up and get back on
track and focus more on work. So, there shall be: No net shopping/online forums before 10 PM each day except for the new naruto. December 27 postdoc hunting and cd rippingWell, finallly it's the time to start applying for postdoc...and to start ripping my whole cd collection onto hard drives. First, postdoc. I just dropped a 'job seeking' letter in the mail to Prof. Kiaran Kirk to ask if he wants to hire me as a postdoc on malarial membrane proteins. I hope the letter, which took me a whole three days to write, arrives safe and well in in Canberra, Australia. 84 cents for postage. My fellow graduate student and millerite (as we call ourselves sometimes) told me today that our advisor Chris Miller once mentioned to him "There's no easier job to get than a postdoc" Maybe he's right. After all, postdoc is really a low paid job that not only requires a Ph.D but also hard work. We'll see if Chris is right (and I sure hope he is.) Kiaran Kirk's research focuses on malarial solute transporters and his recent discoveries of phosphate and isoleucine transporters strike me as a perfect balance between being 'clean' and 'physiologically interesting,' Neither does his research dwell too much on geeky 'structure and function,' nor is it pure pheonomenologically descriptive whole animal science. I hope I see him in the right light : ) Another move i decided to take is to transfer all my cds to hard drives. It seems computer audio has advanced quite significantly during the past five years and given my current lifestyle, time seems ripe for me to exploite the new technology. So here I am, ripping, stripping, compressiing, and archiving like a mad man my whole cd collection. I am also trying out a few new playback softwares. Particularly worth mentioning is a program called MediaMonkey which seems to do everything i want including flac support, ease of use, automatic tagging with album art search, easy to construct music library, gapless playback, etc and not much useless junk that plagues itune and windows media player. The only thing i wish now is that I have a better sound card. Perhaps, once money is available again, I can afford to build or buy some nice USB DAC to get the best sound out of my computer. December 24 three weeksI was about to lose count, I thought it was over..., until I dreamt of her last night. It used to be much easier to let go of someone. December 17 two weeksTime does seem to heal. Life is almost back to normal and day no longer seems so long... though that lukewarm feeling still recurs every time the train passes Waltham station. I'm doing better nonetheless. December 10 one week...Drink with me to days gone by Sing with me the songs we knew Here's to pretty girls who went to our heads Here's to witty girls who went to our beds Here's to them and here's to you. Drink with me to days gone by To the life that used to be .... ... Thanks Petch, Sup and J'Tik for last night and happy birthday to Petch. December 08 julia and malaria...Somehow, I woke up in the middle of the night. It was 3:30 AM. I was lying eyes open, and couldn't get back to sleep. So I grabbed my new Julia Fischer's Mozart cd, placed it in the cd player, put on my bedmate HD650, and hoped Julia's magic would draw me back to sleep. But boy, it didn't sound good nor was it enjoyable at all. I remember hearing the same exact recording on FM 102.5 half a year ago when I was strolling in a cemetary along the Charles river near Brandeis. I liked it so much that I snagged the cd (expensive expensive...) from amazon when it was on sale early this week. Somehow Julia's performance tonight was aggressive and rushed.
In anycase, an idea popped up while i was about to doze off. I've been doiing a bit of reading on malaria lately, particularly to find an area to land on as a postdoc after I graduate. So far, two particular topics interest me. One is how the malaria parasites, the plasmodia, induce solute permeabilities through the membrane of the red blood cell, a process which gives the parasites an access to neutrients in the blood plasma while residing inside the red cells. The second area I am interested in is a kind of membrane proteins called the rhomboid proteases. A couple of these proteases have just been suggested early this year to be operating during the plasmodium invasion of red blood cells by doing some necessary chop-off of other membrane proteins. There are a number of these membrane proteases in the plasmodium genome whose functions are yet to be identified. Perhaps, one of them is the elusive agent that creates the new solute pathways by modifying an RBC residential protein, making it into some kind of leaky channel? A speculation as far fetching as a dream, but something testable maybe. December 05 62 Hours.... a little encouragementOh my, oh my...my advisor said he would buy me a macbook pro if I get a 3.2 A dataset. You said it Chris. I guess there can still be something rewarding and worthwhile fighting for. Damn, i'm easy.... and cheap. 53 Hours afterStop talking to yourself, you stupid idiot. Go run your Ellman's reaction. December 04 46 HoursPerhaps it's the lack of unspoken understandings that makes a long distance relationship so difficult. 32 Hours, first snowDown comes the first snow this year. It's wet and it's still half rain. And there's no 'สาวน้อย .... look look. Outside the windows.' December 03 14 Hours after everything is gone. Life is empty, voidful, but I'll manage to start it over again.
July 09 2549 kaopunsaIt's the time of year again to make a pledge to myself for a period of three months. This year i wow to: 1) abstain from coffee/soda (again... i need to decaffeinated/carbonated myself) 2) abstain from alcohol 3) get up early and study for a couple hours without "headfi" before i go to work every weekday. |
list of my current headphones rotation
My brain is damaged. I can't stand novels, sorry.
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