danny’s space

Yes, I should be writing up my thesis, but alas, I wanted a break of sorts. For the whole of Saturday morning to take my mind off how stuffed I truly am.

So looked around on Armor Games and Addicting Games, as you do, and started playing Storm the House 2. Played a few times before but never got too far because always was too greedy and bought all the weapons. Anyway, long story short, got to the end of the game and was ‘awarded’ with the magical weapon Fisty McBeefPunch (see picture). As luck would have it, Firefox crashed shortly after these screenies were taken.

I want to play Diablo II again, but afraid that if I start then absolutely nothing will get done. Hmm, maybe that’s a good idea…

I’m currently taking pictures on the confocal laser scanning microscope in the lab. Going to go shoot some DNA and gold into leek soon. Using the computer that’s hooked up to the microscope to control my laptop via VNC. Using the laptop then to control my mobile via infrared. Why don’t I just have my mobile next to me in the lab? Good point. But that would mean I couldn’t blog about all this remote control business.

Meanwhile the 180FM leaders are having dinner at Pent Thai in Epping, and I’m stuck at uni doing experiments. Argh!

Well, that’s not entirely scientifically correct, but doesn’t this look cool? We literally shoot DNA encoding green fluorescent protein from a jellyfish into leek which then forces them to make the protein, causing their cells to glow green. In nerd talk this is known as biolistic microprojectile delivery of a plant expression vector causing transient heterologous expression. And who said science isn’t cool?

Actually I said that today, but honours is my excuse.

That’s a bad thing, when it concerns honours and the time I have left to do experiments. A handful of other honours students were in as well, no doubt feeling the crunch. Argh!!!

In on Saturday again to finish off some stuff. At least I got to take a few pretty pictures of plant cells. See how uniform they are, fitting together so neatly. How well they were designed. That’s a microscopic view of leek by the way, one of the leaves, stained red with a fluorescent dye.

It’s the idea that this Sydney Morning Herald article proudly touts. According to a survey conducted by churches, there is a mass exodus by Aussie generation Y-ers away from ‘organised’ religion. Only 48% believe in any god at all, let alone the Christian God. And this number is probably going to decline as materialism, post modernism and the hedonism of society takes their toll on this and future generations.

What could be encouraging is that the article writes that even though the numbers are declining, those that remain with the faith tend to be more ‘genuine’ these days, rather than being forced to go along. Also, apparently 32% of the people surveyed are still unsure, which means that they could be just a few steps away from knowing the truth.

In other news, this Australian Democrats God and Government survey has been floating around the email for the past few weeks. I suggest you take a look at it and fill it out - it only takes 5 minutes tops, unless you’re really indecisive. The people who I’ve gotten these emails from suggest that Christians should take a stand and not let scripture in schools and general Christian thinking be trodden on by governments who increasingly want a separation of church and state. Take a look.

Let’s see if this works…

Warning - do not click if you have a fast internet connection and a weak heart.

Did you click it? It’s called Lightbox - it’s meant to make the parent page go dark but it doesn’t seem to work for me all the time. At least the image loads.

There’s so much good free software for net-based things on the net. Where do these people find the time to progam it all? I’m glad they do though.

And ahh, the reason the thumbnails look pixelated is because of the browser resizing a smaller thumbnail to fit a larger container - if you remove the width and height settings form the img tag then it’s right.

Woo just updated most of the blog photos into ImageManager and Lightbox form. Hooray. Looks semi 1337 now.

Did you know you can check flight arrival/departure information from the Sydney Airport website? Cool.

In other news, I’ve gone through a few plugins for inserting images easily and effectively into posts. I started with Sticky Image a year back when the blog first started, and then moved quickly onto IImage Browser which had an upload feature and was easy to use. I thought I had found the answer.

But unfortunately the upgrade to Wordpress 2 broke IImage, so I switched to Photopress. But after playing around with the wonders of Wordpress Widgets for a bit and struggling with the Wordpress support forum on this, I found out that there was a compatibility issue between Photopress and widgets, so I went looking for a better solution. Most of the plugins listed on plugin sites were awful - they were either missing an upload feature, an insert feature, resizing features, etc.

But finally this morning I came across ImageManager from a comment that someone had posted on the IImage Browser home page, saying that this ImageManager thing was so good and it actually worked with WP2.0. So I decided to check it out and voila, it works! Well, for the time being. And widgets likes it too. It’s got an upload feature, thumbnail creation, doesn’t have an unnecessary gallery element, and it even comes with an explorer-like interface. It’s just a bit tricky to install. Will stick with it for the time being until another issue comes up.

This calls for an image of Jaz to test this plugin out.

Ok well I guess the thumbnail creation isn’t that good - the thumbnails come out all pixelated. Hmm. But it’s got an inbuilt editing feature (which might be useless apart from the crop and resize features) and you can also delete photos without going through FTP. I think I can live with the dodgy thumbnails for the time being. At least it links to the full res shot which is normal quality.

Ah, wonderful smelly leek. How hard they are to study. Healthy leek is hard to come by in winter, but we need healthy, alive leek so that they will do the things with DNA we want them to. But supermarkets can store leek that have been pulled out of the ground in their storerooms for ages in winter without them going off, so it’s hard to find a good leek.

But the more healthy the leek, the harder it is to do another part of the experiment, even though the first part requires healthy leek. Also, younger leek are better because there’s more of a chance of seeing what we want to see, but specimen preparation is easier on older leek because the epidermis is hardier.

Hmm. Well, going into uni soon to keep playing with leek. It’s what my supervisor calls the ‘rescue plan’ - it’s gotten to that desperate stage in honours where we’re just clutching at straws, trying to think of anything to do to rescue the thesis from the depths of failure.

And the leek’s not helping.

Gave up on cloning last week, since I apparently suck at it and nothing ever works for me. Spent 4 months trying to clone 3 things, only got 1, and that was using a sneaky method.

Cell biology is more my thing I think. Plus it gives you pretty results, if things work. Might be meaningless, but pretty. Microscopy is interesting but tedious (and time consuming), but at least you get to see something as opposed to cloning where you add clear solutions into other clear solutions and a few weeks later you get some DNA sequencing information back and it’s contamination.

So anyway, here’s a pretty picture I took today. I can’t explain what it is - if I did I’d have to kill you.