Random Conversation with a Friend

Setting: After drinking two beers and eating three slices of pizza for lunch, I bought a Snickers ice cream bar.

Friend: Can I have a bite of that?
Me: Yeah. You should have gotten one too.
Friend: Naw, then I'd get all fat and shit.
Me: Well, I just ate one.
Friend: I'm pretty sure it's impossible for you to gain weight, no matter what you eat.
Me: That's kind of true. The only thing that happens is I grow a bigger ass.
Friend: Let's go get you another one of those ice cream bars, then!

Fuck you, Ebay snipers!

I had a bid on a Sigma 24mm f1.8 wide-angle lens on Ebay. No one bid on it until I did, 1 hour before the auction was supposed to end. I was the highest bidder, until someone sniped me at. the. last. minute. Seriously. Auction closed at 9:17, and that's when their bid was posted.

Goddamn you, bidding robots.

At least the flash I bought for $150 ($280 new) off Ebay will be arriving on Friday. That mollifies things a bit.

Struggling with Incompetence

I'm still waiting to do things I should/could have been doing a week ago. The stupid UCSD Core Bio Services still hasn't delivered the DNA polymerase I ordered a freaking week ago.

The point of the core is that they're supposed to keep quantities of frequently used reagents and things on hand, so that we can order something and expect it to arrive the next day, or sometimes even the same day. The problem here is that they're super disorganized. The UCSD Storehouse (where we get things like paper towels, etc.) has their shit together. When you go to their site, they tell you how many of each item they have on hand, how many are spoken for, etc.

It would be extremely helpful if the Core Bio Services would do the same. I ordered this polymerase from them because I was expecting to get it the next day, and not to be sitting here a week later still waiting for it. If I had known they were out of it, I would have ordered it from EMD Biosciences myself, because it would have been here by now.

Sigh. I hate incompetence. I have my shit together, why can't everybody else?

Everyday example of the people I have to work with

Apparently over the weekend a post doc in my lab celebrated his birthday. The rotation student (read: first year graduate student who hasn't found a lab to permanently work in yet) who is working with him found this out, and this morning she came in with a mother-freaking balloon hat. Seriously, are we still like, 8? And the kicker is, he asked her where she learned to make them, and she said she took a class for it back in Hong Kong. Whoa.

This is the same person who referred to her cat as "my son." And she was drop-dead serious about it too.

But to top it off, being a scientist as she is, she put the damn balloon hat on the windowsill. You know, where it would sit in the light all day long and get hot until it burst. Which it just did, almost scaring the shit out of me. Genius. Or, as they say in the Guinness ads, "Brilliant!"

Dammit I'm grumpy today. I can't do half my work because the core facility doesn't have the enzyme I ordered last Wednesday and they neglected to tell us this until today, when we called and specifically asked. Awesome. I love it when people suck at doing their job.

Harrisburg Photo Blog

I didn't have enough time to wander around Harrisburg as I thought I would. Although, really, I don't know the city well enough to wander around it. I haven't spent more than three weeks at home since I left for undergrad at the age of 18. And even when I'm home, I rarely have the desire to go into the city. Maybe I've just turned into a city snob, but there's not much there for me. No music scene to speak of. A handful of interesting museums, but that's about it. I did spend a few summers during high school working at my parents' office downtown, so that's really the only corner of the city I know well. And, fittingly, that's the only area of the city that I took photos of on my trip home.


Display window of my parents' office downtown. This is why I have sweet musician's earplugs for shows.


Roxy's Cafe. I used to get food from here almost everyday that I worked for my parents back in high school.


The State Museum of Pennsylvania. It's actually a lot more interesting inside than it appears outside - I only wish I had had the time to go in and explore.


Marquee for a gay nightclub. See, we're not completely backwards!


Lame cities have lame graffiti.


I love alleyway details.


Where do you suppose these doors go?

Rest of my photos are here.

But as much as I hate on Harrisburg, there's something to be said for bars that have last call at 1:58AM and actually let you chill out for awhile after they've stopped serving alcohol. Also, Palumbo's pizza being open until god knows when (I think we left around 3AM). And I love the open space surrounding the city. It honestly makes me nauseous to fly back into San Diego. You come over the mountains, and all of a sudden, there are people and houses everywhere. I start getting a massive sense of claustrophobia (compounded by the fact that I've been sitting in a plane for hours) and anxiety. But then we fly over my house and Balboa Park and I start to feel a little bit better. Then it's over the Casbah and I remember why I put up with all the overcrowding.

Book review: The Orchid Thief - Susan Orlean

I don't know shit about orchids. I had a friend in undergrad who loved plants and knew things about them, but that's as close as I come. Plants just don't like me. They have a tendency to die on me, and to aggravate my allergies out of spite.

What I do know is that I saw the movie Adaptation several years ago and I liked it. So when I saw this book, in Costco of all places, I decided to pick it up. See, the book was the "inspiration" for the movie, even though the movie doesn't really follow the story in the book at all. What it does follow is the sense of passion that the author tries to portray in her book.

For this book is the story of obsession. It's the story of people (real people, not fictional) who will spend thousands of dollars on one plant, who will breed plants and then wait 7 years to find out if they were successful. People who go to all ends of the earth and risk unimaginable hardships just to find plants that no one has seen before. People who will risk alligator and snake attacks to get into the Everglades just to see these plants in rare bloom.

Orlean's writing is compelling - she managed to pull me in to a topic that I have never had any real interest in. She manages to create sympathy for characters when other people may just look at them as being crazy. But more than that, she is able to tie this passion for orchids to other passions, so that the average reader, while maybe not caring about orchids at all, is able to understand through the eyes of their own obsessions.

Definitely a good read, and very informative about the subject. Even if you walk away from the book still not caring about orchids, as I did, you will come away with an understanding, and maybe some empathy, for the people who do.

An argument from earlier this week, which I resoundingly won

A certain friend and I routinely get into an argument about beds. However, in this exchange that occured earlier this week, I think I may have settled the matter once and for all.

Friend: "I know you like your bed, but it's way too short. See, my bed is long enough for my feet to stay on it. It's an adult bed."

Me: "...Isn't that a futon?"

Friend: "... ... ... yes."

Playing the mad scientist

Today, I found out that I successfully mutated some DNA.

Not to do anything cool. Basically I have some cDNA for a gene that was sent to me by someone else, and it contained three mutations that make it different from the wild-type (normal) gene. This is a problem because it messes up the protein sequence that is made from this gene, which can screw up the protein's function. And considering I'm studying that protein's normal function in a cell, mutations are not cool.

So I had the task of mutating those three nucleic acids back to what they should be. It's not really as hard as it sounds, because a kit exists for it. What you do is order some short stretches of DNA which contain your desired mutation and that will sit down on the DNA sequence that you already have. You mix those with your DNA, along with an enzyme that synthesizes DNA from an existing copy and some free nucleotides, which are what the enzyme puts together to make the bigger pieces of DNA. Then you let the enzyme work its magic for a number of hours (this involves multiple temperature changes, but fortunately we have machines for that).

Once you have this replicated DNA, you get it into bacteria by opening pores in their cell membranes (by heat or electricity). Since the DNA forms a complete circle and contains all the elements necessary for more replication, the bacteria who uptake this DNA will produce more of it every time they divide. It's also possible to have multiple copies of your DNA in each bacterial cell. So then you grow the bacteria in food (we call it media) containing some sort of antibiotic, because the DNA you inserted into them also contains a resistance gene for that antibiotic. So only the bacteria containing your DNA will grow in the presence of this drug. Finally, you grow up a bunch of the surviving bacteria, extract lots of DNA from them, and send it to be sequenced. And hopefully you find that the resulting DNA contains your desired mutations.

All of that almost makes up for the fact that my right wrist strangely hurts today, in a sort of carpal tunnel kind of way. Repetitive motion injury from too much pipeting (aka moving around small volumes of liquid)? Ugh.

Missed Opportunity

Goddammit, the sun actually comes out today, breaking the usual June gloom, and I don't have my camera with me. Damn damn damn damn damn.

Ah well. At least I had a 4.5 hour incubation and got to go swimming. I'm also in the process of going through all my concert photos in order to pull out the best ones for my portfolio and trying to come up with ideas for a new photography website design. I wish I knew more about graphic design, etc. That would come in handy right about now.

On a totally random note, why is it that the lobby of the building I work in smells like sulfur (i.e. rotten eggs) every once in awhile? What exactly was this building built on?

Back to the Dark Ages

I just bought about $120 worth (after shipping costs) of chemicals and other various necessities to develop black and white film in my home.

Why, you may ask, when I have a digital SLR camera, do I feel the need to return to the darkroom of yore? Isn't film a dead medium?

Bullshit, I say. For one, I like the feel of tangible film over digital ghost files. There's something to be said about laboring for your work, doing things by hand, actually spooling the film onto the developing reel and then pulling it out, all wet and slick and so concrete.

Secondly, I just feel that black and white film gives much more depth to an image than simply converting a digital image from color to black and white or vice versa. The image was meant to be shot in black and white, and I feel like that adds a certain weight to it. It's not switching to black and white because your image was underexposed, or because there are too many distracting colors in it. You actually looked at a scene in color and had to convert it to black and white in your head before making the shot. It's a totally different way of viewing a shot. It's ignoring color and looking at light. And I love it. I haven't shot black and white film in over a year, and I'm itching to get back into it.

And yes, there's a darkroom on campus that's fairly cheap to join if you're a student ($76/quarter), and it is open 24 hours. The downside is that I no longer live close to campus and the latest I can stay without being stuck here overnight is 9PM, which is when the last shuttle to Hillcrest leaves. And driving in is expensive, not to mention bad for the environment. Plus parking's a bitch. So it's not really so much of an option, although if I want to eventually make prints from my negatives I'm going to have to join, or buy an enlarger for myself. But that's a whole 'nother level to this hobby. For now, I'm planning on scanning the negatives into my computer and dealing with them digitally from there on.

Another cool thing about black and white film - I can get ISO 3200 film and maybe try using that to shoot some concerts. It gives fantastic grain and works really well in low light, so it'll be cool to see how it works out. And that's even better than my digital camera, which can only be pushed to ISO 1600.

Something else that I forgot to mention previously - I have my dad's old Canon AE-1 fully manual camera, which uses a type of lens that is pretty much obsolete (FD versus EF lens mount). You can't use these lenses on any camera made after 1987. But you can definitely still find them, as glass that is well taken care of can last pretty much forever. What does this mean? EBAY!!! I just bid $10.50 on an FD lens whose homologous EF lens costs over $300. Hells yeah.

Next up after this adventure - learning how to develop color film. That should be interesting...

A Much-Needed Separation of Church and State

Whereas Church=music and State=personal life.

I have a music blog at It's Too Sunny Out Here. It used to be a mostly music blog peppered with personal observations and photos. But I've decided to divorce the two, making It's Too Sunny Out Here strictly music, and this site a dump for all the other stuff.

Other stuff include travel photos, or any photos that don't have much to do with music, political rants, personal thoughts, and science posts.

We'll see how it goes managing two blogs. It could get complicated...