Friday, February 27, 2009

'cos I clearly need to read more

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after in the brackets of those you have read.
2) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
3) Tally your total at the bottom.
4) Put in a note with your total in the subject

1 ( ) Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 (X) The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 () Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 (X) Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 (*) To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 () The Bible
7 () Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 (X) Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 (* ) His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 (X ) Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

Pitstop Count: 6

11 (X ) Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 (X) Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 (X ) Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 ( ) Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 (X) Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 (X) The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 (X) Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 (*) Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 (*) The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 ( ) Middlemarch - George Eliot

Pitstop Count: 14

21 ( ) Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 ( ) The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 ( *) Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 (X) War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 (X) The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 ( ) Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 (X ) Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 () Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 ( ) Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carrol
30 () The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

Pitstop Count: 18

31 (X ) Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 (X) David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 () Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 ( ) Emma - Jane Austen
35 ( ) Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 () The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 ( ) The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 ( ) Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 (X) Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 ( ) Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

Pitstop Count: 21 Winne the Pooh. WHAT.

41 (X) Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 (X) The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 ( ) One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 ( ) A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 ( ) The Woman in White - Wilkie Collin
46 (X) Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 (*) Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 (X) The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 (X) Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 ( ) Atonement - Ian McEwaN

Pitstop Count: 27

51 (X) Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 ( ) Dune - Frank Herbert
53 ( ) Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 ( ) Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 () A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 ( ) The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 (X) A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 (X) Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 () The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 (*) Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Pitstop Count: 31

61 (*) Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 (X) Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 ( ) The Secret History - Donna Tart
64 () The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 (X) Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 ( ) On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 (*) Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 ( ) Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 ( ) Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 ( ) Moby's Dick - Herman Melville

Pitstop Count: 34

71 (X) Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 ( ) Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 (X) The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 ( ) Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 ( ) Ulysses - James Joyce
76 ( ) The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 ( ) Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 ( ) Germinal - Emile Zola
79 (X) Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 ( ) Possession - AS Byatt

Pitstop Count: 38

81 (X) A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 ( ) Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 ( ) The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 ( ) The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 (X) Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 ( ) A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 (X) Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 ( ) The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 ( ) Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 (X) The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

Pitstop Count: 42

91 (*) Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 (*) The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint EXupery
93 ( ) The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 (*) Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 ( ) A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 ( ) A Town Like Alice - Neil Shute
97 (X) The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 ( ) Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 () Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Roald Dahl
100 (X) Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Pitstop Count: 47

Saturday, February 21, 2009

Posting from Durham, North Carolina

Hmmm... So I'm at Duke for graduate school interviews!

It's been really...overwhelming, I suppose, talking to really great scientists and learning about their work. Having dinner with them is just. Weird... but really very interesting!

And housing is just so damned cheap.

Hopefully will get a place!

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

What I am currently learning

Behold.

The biology of a fencepost.

untitled

Zone C is the part which gets chomped away by fungi. Apparently a fencepost pseudo-transpires.

Remarkable.

Monday, January 05, 2009

Snow!

Snowing... and snow showers forecast for the rest of the day :)

Tuesday, December 02, 2008

Amused

Distinguishing mosquito transgenic lines using PCR.

Protocol:

1. Homogenize mosquito in 50 ul extraction buffer.

i.e., take live mosquito (my group's was larva, but some other people had an adult mosquito), drown it in extraction buffer, grab a pestle, and pound away.

Sunday, November 23, 2008

....very bad week.

So. I was drinking coffee. And the handle of my mug abruptly broke. Needless to say, I had a coffee flavoured room to clean up.

*shakes fist*

Friday, November 21, 2008

Sadly enough, the one thing that made this miserable excuse for a week bearable was a lecture on Plasmodium, the apicomplexan parasite that causes malaria.

The lecturer was a scientist from the Sanger Institute at Cambridge, and he talked mostly about Plasmodium life cycle strategies. I think he made me remember the reason why I want to do research. There are so many unknowns, even for a parasite that we've known and studied for so damn long. There are "?"s written on half the sentences I scribbled down-- not because I didn't understand, but because nobody understands. Yet.

After the lecture, I chatted with the lecturer a little bit about why male gametocytes are in such a hurry to produce gametes. Ten minutes inside the mosquito gut, and the thing has already multiplied its genome thrice and squeezed out 8 flagellated gametes. It's in such a hurry that it uses physical force to pull the chromosomes and bits of nuclear envelope apart, which leads to the production of many gametes with the wrong number of chromosomes. He showed the class a video of the process-- in his own words, it's like "a cat and a dog in a sack"-- the thing whirls and jiggles and bulges and generally looks like it's going to explode. He said he thinks it's sperm competition, rather than any factors in the mosquito gut or the blood meal. Fascinating.


Have some Nat Geo.

Monday, November 17, 2008

Schmetterling VS Sink Drain

Round 1: Sink Drain 1, Schmetterling 0

Round 2: Sink Drain 0, Schmetterling 1

Round 3: Sink Drain 0, Schmetterling 1


AHAHAHAH I WON.


I hate clogged sink drains. I had to chuck a whole can of baking soda and a whole bottle of vinegar into it before it would clear. Eurgh.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

I meant to write something about necrotising fasciitis, but we'll save that for some other time.

....now I can't remember what I wanted to say.

...oh yes. The mounted police go past the apartment complex every day on their patrol rounds. And the horses ALWAYS poo right in front of the front door. -_-

In other news, I forgot to bring my student card today.

Thursday, October 30, 2008

FREEZING.

IT IS OCTOBER. IT IS HAILING. I AM FREEZING. GOODBYE, WORLD.

In other news, I attempted to make daosa bao. They were yellow. But at least I had daosa.

Sunday, October 12, 2008

GRE

Verbal: 800/800

Quantitative: 770/800

Me: Satisfied :)

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

I feel a migraine coming on

The Week So Far

Monday

Grew cells on coverslips for immnofluorescence microscopy. I had four plates of cells on a tray ready for transfection with DNA. I went to incubate my plasmids and when I came back, all ready to add the DNA to the cells, THERE WERE ONLY THREE PLATES.

Nevermind, I transfect three plates instead.

Tuesday

THERE WERE FOUR PLATES ON MY TRAY. ;ALDSKFJA;DKJF;LAKJDSF ??!


... I didn't think the mysteriously disappearing and reappearing one was usable, so I discarded it.

I incubate a portion of bacterial cells overnight so I could make competent cells for transformation.


Wednesday

SOMEONE TOOK MY CELLS OUT OF THE INCUBATOR/SHAKER.

I didn't know how long they'd been out of there, so I just stick them back in for an hour or two. Fine, just carry on as usual.

THEN THE TABLETOP CENTRIFUGE KEEPS TELLING ME MY TUBES ARE UNBALANCED. When they are the same weight. Exactly. I weighed them. Sooo it only starts to work after lunch -__-

Thursday, September 04, 2008

Ew,

Too many ingrown hairs are uuuuugh. NEED SCRUBBING BRUSH.

Or something. It's really very, very disgusting.

Friday, August 29, 2008

SUCCESS

ALL 16 OF THE TRANSFORMED COLONIES I PICKED HAVE THE CORRECT DNA INSERT.

ARE MY CLONING SKILLS AWESOME OR WHAT?

... Looks like the 45 sec heatshock (as opposed to the usual 60 sec one) seems to work better.

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Oh Hi.

Life is busy.

I am lazy.

Therefore, no recent entries.

Saturday, July 19, 2008

Adventures in Australia: Part I

So. I went to Australia.

First, I was in Melbourne with random HCCO guanyue people.

The cherry pie and lemon tart dizi duo.

Lemon Tart and Cherry Pie

The smug bastard Aleckx.

thieves!
(Ignore his accomplice and the petty theft going on)

And the driver paediatrician-to-be with unique prescriptions for bawling babies.

Examining a tree

Melbourne can be summed up pretty much in one word:

Coastline.


More Coastline

Melbourne coastline

The Blowhole

Sunset at Brighton Beach

Of course, there was also Godly Lighting (tm)

Twelve Apostles and Godly Lighting

And the obligatory black swan.

Obligatory Black Swan

That is all for today.

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Meme.

ow to Play

1. Put your music player on shuffle.
2. Press forward for each question.
3. Use the song title as the answer to the question even if it doesn’t make sense. No cheating.
4. With the answers, give your own comments on how it relates to the questions.
5. Tag 5 people.


How are you feeling today? Tritch Tratch Polka (Johann Strauss Jr.)
Something like that. Busy and running all over the place, but still cheerful.

Will you get far in life? 阳明春早
? Spring gonna come early for me?

How do your friends see you? Close to You
Okay?

Will you get married? Song of the Black Swan.
Er... I'll take that as probably not :D

What is your best friend’s theme song? 梅花引
That's nice. A guqu. Though why is it a sheng piece?

What is the story of your life? Clementine (Pink Martini)
Er?

What was high school like? Andaluza (Granados)
Maybe yeah. Generally happy and bouncy? But with minor key parts.


What’s in store for this weekend? 夜来香
It would be nice cos the gutters are clogging up from all the rain and stinking.

How’s your life going? 打枣

打棗》是一首以嗩吶為主,配合使用口弦卡腔二種樂器演奏的獨奏曲,取材自河北的民間音樂,許多嗩吶演奏家都曾根據自己的演奏喜好,編寫該曲的不同板本,一般版本都有打擊樂器或作為伴奏。曲子內容在描寫北方果園收穫時節,大家採收紅的情景。

這是一首很具舞臺效果的樂曲,獨奏者除以嗩吶演奏主要弦律之外,用嗩吶、卡腔和含在喉中的口弦模仿各種人的叫聲、笑聲及說話聲音,演奏者必須熟練於三種樂器之間的快速轉換,以達到不描寫不同人物彼此對話的效果。是一首在演奏會經常使用的嗩吶曲。

Ok lah drama maybe.

How can you get ahead in life? Lohengrin (Wagner).
No, please, no.

What’s the best thing about your friends? Prelude Op. 28/15 in D flat major 'Raindrop'
They patter around nonstop? :|

What song will they play at your funeral? Fantasía para un gentilhombre: Villano y Ricercare
Why so happy and peaceful? :|

How does the world see you? Magical Lasso (Phantom of the Opera)
Am I that scary?

Will you have a happy life? Le basque
It sounds cheerful.

Do people secretly lust after you? Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G major BWV 1048, Adagio
No. (only 0.11s) :D

How can you make yourself happy? Cante e Dance (Pink Martini)
Sing and dance! :|

What should you do with your life? Symphony No. 6 in F major Op. 68
"As the composer said, the Sixth Symphony is "a matter more of feeling than of painting in sounds" "

Will you ever have children? Scene in the Country (Hector Berloiz)
I'll have...sheep instead?

What song would you strip to? Mozart's "Jupiter" Symphony Finale. Molto Allegro
-_-"

What does your mum think of you? I Got Rhythm
I suppose maybe the bo chap, I can deal with anything attitude.

What is your deep, dark secret? Clair de Lune (Debussy)
Ya. I suck at playing this.

What is your mortal enemy’s theme song? Mozart Symphony N)40 in G minor KV 550
Strangely appropriate? Though I like it.

What’s your personality like? Agnus Dei (Cherubini)
Yes. I'm the Lamb of God. Ger can laugh.

What song will be played at your wedding? Ti Amero (Il Divo)
You something. *shrug*

Thursday, April 03, 2008

The Many Faces of Geraldine Leow





















1. Blank















2. Intent
















3. Falsely Studious























4. Nasal Congestion












































































































Friday, March 07, 2008

HC Night (Extremely belated post)

Spot Schmetterling! Also, Nicholas from HCCO pipa is there somewhere... and various other assorted people that I feel I should know but really cannot remember.




This was our table setting. They didn't seem to get the memo that this wasn't a V-day event.

Back to virology lab report.



Monday, February 25, 2008

The Very Intelligent Conversation I Had With Geraldine

You know, when you pick a friend, you've got to find one who's able to hold an intelligent conversation with you. Or at least be on the same wavelength. I guess that's why I'm such good friends with Ger.

We're both equally insane, you see.

It started with me being disgruntled about lab today.


Schmetterling blogged says:
oh


Schmetterling blogged says:
today me and my lab partner were the last ones to leave


Schmetterling blogged says:
the stupid lecturer made us do the control experiment as well as the main one

Schmetterling blogged says:
*dies*


Ger says:
tell him his protocol sucks

Ger says:
hhahaaha

Schmetterling blogged says:
and he talks like a football coach

Ger says:
lol!

Ger says:
tell him to coach the england team then

Schmetterling blogged says:
and dresses like one, when he's not in the lab coat

Schmetterling blogged says:
LOL


Ger says:
they probably need some help

Schmetterling blogged says:
they'll all die a tragic death


Schmetterling blogged says:
he'll make them run gels instead of laps

Ger says:
lol

Ger says:
that's.... sad

Ger says:
for the gels.

Ger says:
imagine rooney peering at a slab of agarose

Schmetterling blogged says:
with a big cartoon question mark

Ger says:
-pokes-

Ger says:
where's the band?

Schmetterling blogged says:
and then it disintegrates

Ger says:
and then he starts looking like a bulldog

Schmetterling blogged says:
...

Ger says:
in anger

Ger says:
ladidaaa

Schmetterling blogged says:
and then the coach makes him do 200 pipette push-ups as punishment

Ger says:
omg.

Ger says:
and then on the 157th one

Ger says:
he breaks his thumb

Schmetterling blogged says:
lol

Ger says:
we need a life

Schmetterling blogged says:
agreed.


Schmetterling blogged says:
i'm so posting this on my blog

Ger says:
...........................................

Ger says:
i shall stay awake to see it

Schmetterling blogged says:
The Very Intelligent Conversation I Had With Geraldine

Ger says:
............................................................

Ger says:
my excuse is that it's 1.15am in the morning

Ger says:
what's yours?
says:

Schmetterling blogged says:
I just drank coffee


Which is as good an excuse as any, eh?