How many cityrail personnel does it take to close a train door? 6 apparently, if the display this arvo at Central was anything to go buy. Amidst much swearing from the guard, and kicking from a Central staff member, and a few other official-looking dudes, the train finally chugged off adorned with a door-not-operational sticker.
In other news, Taiwan’s done it again. It’s hit the headlines with another display of respectable parliament antics.
Alas, the timer is irreparable, at least with my dodgy electronics skills. The guts are shown.
In other news, this Photopress plugin for Wordpress is quite good. Many options to play with, upload feature, automatic thumbnails, the list goes on.
Just got my lab timer back. From the autoclave. I accidentally left it in the tray with my media and bottles when I took things down to the autoclave. I thought I had forgotten something but started the autoclave anyway, and then half an hour later when I was trying to figure out when to stop a reaction, I realised the timer was missing, and lo and behold, it was roasted a golden brown by the autoclave. Well, at least the internals are sterile. Also surprising is that the LR44 battery didn’t explode. Cool. I was imagining this toxic clump of plastic melted onto the tray, but it’s surprisngly intact. Also, it looks like the circuitry inside is intact as well - might go fix it.
Perhaps going to uni 7 days a week isn’t a good thing.
The everyday office-bound person sitting in their cubicle in front of a computer may flick their hand accidentally and spill coffee all over the keyboard or their papers.
Today I flicked my hand accidentally (wasn’t really awake…) and spilled genetically modified bacterial waste over my lab book and bench. Spent the next half hour trying to frantically decontaminate everything, shoving my lab book under UV to surface sterilise the thing and spraying ethanol everywhere.
My friend previouly spilled radioactive isotopes over her lab coat. I’ve heard stories of a chemist spilling a precious compound he spent a few months making onto his pants, and ended up decomposing his pants to recover the compound.
Cool huh?
Honours has entered a new stage. Today I went into uni to smudge some bacteria and to put on some overnight cultures for processing tomorrow.
Today was a Sunday. How sad. Uni is pretty much deserted on Sundays. There’s still people around on Saturdays, but virtually is a ghost town on Sundays. Yes, I went in on Saturday as well. It so doesn’t feel like Sunday now, and another week is about to begin. Great.
In other news, the new server is going well so far. It’s webhostingbuzz.com. There’s been quite a few bad reviews about them, but you can’t beat their price. I have no complaints so far, but this is only 1 day in. Thankfully they have a 30-day money back guarantee, but hopefully I won’t need to use it.
Finally got Wordpress working on the new domain name. My blog is now hosted on quantumspark.net instead of quantrix.net. I’m not sure what my fascination is with names that have ‘quant’ in them.
Should have told myself that before instigating mass community advisory on the Optarse tower matter.
Some people reckon it has the potential to get huge, involving countless meetings and debates. Of course I don’t have time for that - but I thought that all it would involve would be answering a few emails and getting something small together. Well, okay not that small, but not that big either.
Now that the community advisory has been distributed, there comes fear of repercussions and leadership-o-phobia - fear of being put on the spot as being the one in charge of this ‘massive’ community whinge. So add in some act-before-you-think from members of the family, and you have yourself a confusing, backflipping mess that threatens to tear a hole in the very fabric of existence.
Maybe one man can do something. But what if that one man is time starved already? Is it about priorities? Is it about delegation of responsibilities? Is it about everyone for themselves? Should the original heralder of the dark tidings be the one to pull it all together? What if the heralder was going overseas (very timely, I know) for the next few weeks.
Laziness sucks. So does action.
Our neighbour has walked around a bit and talked to other neighbours and also the school, childcare, and retirement village surrounding the proposed site of installation. Obviously, everyone is unanimously opposed to the construction of the mobile phone tower. I’m not sure if the council is much help - the elections I think were held a month or so ago, so obviously they won’t be looking at the community for another 3 years. The mobile phone company and the contractors are also not much help, giving only patchy information and even not responding to requests. The local paper has been tipped off about this. We’ll see what it does.
The scientific data regarding health effects of mobile base stations is patchy. It generally seems like there isn’t any proven link between base stations and direct health effects, but it isn’t unproven either. People living around base stations do complain of depression, sleep deprivation, anxiety, and that kind of stuff, but it might all be psychosomatic. But that doesn’t mean it’s not important.
A useful resource is the Stewart Report, and even though that’s for the UK, the basic issues still apply here. Things like sneaky phone companies not properly consulting the community. Things like children absorbing more radiation than adults (I’m sure the parents of the kids that go to the childcare centre and the primary school will be stoked to hear about that). Things like telcos erecting phone towers in the middle of the night.
We’ll wait to see what happens. In the meantime, a letter is going out to the households around the area informing them of this situation. A petition is being circulated as well, and even though they don’t have any legal power, because it is 10 months to the state elections, perhaps the local state member will do something about it.
Nothing works. Science sucks. There, I said it. Molecular biology hates me or something. I just got back home after a whole day at uni. At 5:30pm, on a Saturday.
Everything seems to be going wrong at once. The printer breaks. This Optus thing comes up. My 6th attempt at cloning fails. My supervisor leaves for China. I need to come up with ways to make youth group studies more exciting.
I can’t take much more of this.
Our neighbour told us yesterday that he had received a letter from Optarse outlining the construction of a new mobile phone tower at the BP opposite our house. In addition to the one that’s already there. This one will stand tall and proud, irradiating the passers-by on that busy road.
Why is this a problem, apart from the fact that it’s yet another radiation emitter? Optarse failed to send us a letter letting us know about this, and, typical of these project proposals, the time for objection had already passed by the time we found out about it. April 27 was the last day to object. That was 3 weeks ago. We found out yesterday. Great.
Shows Optarse’s concern for the community. And far be it for the owners of BP to complain - they don’t live there. Plus they can charge Optarse insane amounts for not one but two telecommunications towers that bask its property (and the families around it) in its healthy glow.
Living so close to a petrol station that has trouble with fume escape when refilling its copious tanks, plus the presence of 2 mobile phone towers, must be so conducive towards good health. Plus the thousands of cars that jam on that busy road every day. I can see the house price rising already.