What an amazing few days

Firstly, Eid Mubarak! The holy month of Ramadhan ended, and virtually everyone seems to have celebrated Eid-ul-Fitr, the festival of the fast breaking, on the same day (since the Islamic calendar relies on a lunar calendar and on people sighting the new moon, people can disagree on whether the new month has started or not).

On that same day, I decided to go into work and hand in my thesis! I paid extra to have it bound more quickly. They look awesome. I can't express how happy I am to get to this stage. Even if I fail my viva, at least I got here and submitted something!. Now all I have to do is wait for my examiners to read my 200 page thesis before we decide on an examination date so we can meet and they can spend 2-5 hours tearing it to shreds and reducing me to tears. In Ukraine, PhD examinations are in public, with the institute and your friends and family as audience members!

Now that I am a man of leisure, I decided to... go back to work for one last experiment, which gave good results. It was an expression construct I had made, basically a piece of DNA to make cells create a protein they wouldn't normally make. It works, so maybe my lab can use it after I leave in future experiments! Other than that, I have been enjoying myself at last. I ordered a new Xbox 360 slim from the Microsoft store which went missing so I got fed up and got a refund, and got an xbox bundle from HMV instead. They delivered the xbox and game fairly quickly, but still haven't delivered the second game, 3 weeks later. The new xbox is awesome. It is a lot smaller than previous models. It DOES still get rather hot, which is worrying. At least the fan is a lot more quiet. With its impressive 250GB hard drive, I have started saving games to the hard drive, so that the machine doesn't have to work as hard and there is reduced risk of scratching the game disc. So far I have been replaying Mass Effect 2 on Hardcore.

I also attended the Lost Marathon at the Prince Charles Cinema. They decided to show all 120 hours worth of six seasons of the show Lost, back to back. I got there on Monday at 8am, expecting a huge queue of people. The queue consisted of about 10 people waiting forlornly. I was on my own so just struck up conversation with some of them. Nerds are good at making friends with each other :) In the end only about 50 or so people went in. I didn't think I would get in and had only planned to stay a few hours. I nonetheless stayed for 24 hours, which took me through season one and into the first 3 episodes of season two. Seeing Lost on the big screen was incredible. I have never really rewatched any of the episodes, so I had forgotten a lot of season one events. It really struck me just how brutal and harsh their life was on the island! The cinema showed the episodes in 4 hour blocks, with 15 minute breaks. I had no change of clothes, and no sleeping bag. I decided I would go mad if I stayed there longer so I left. I nonetheless got a goody bag, consisting of Season 6 DVD set, a poster, a tshirt and an Artifacts booklet with snippets from the upcoming Encyclopedia. I almost wish I had stayed until The End on Friday morning, but I think I would have become as deranged as Claire by that point.

I've been working

That's my excuse for no updates recently. But the stats say people are still visiting occasionally, so I oughta at least say hi!

I took some time off at Christmas to write up. The only problem is, that I got very little writing done. Partly this was because of writers block. Ask anyone who has done their PhD. It's insanely difficult to get started on your thesis. It just looms over you, like an unborn monolith.

Of course, realising I hadn't as yet finished playing Mass Effect on the XBox 360 had nothing to do with it. This is the first game, not the recent sequel. I actually purchased it over a year ago, but got bored fairly quickly. I decided I ought to give it another shot, especially since I'm too poor to buy any new games at the moment. Once I got into it, I actually really enjoyed it. You control a character named Shepherd (first name, gender and appearance can be chosen at will; there are also quite a few options in picking his/her past history which influences how other characters relate to you). It's a scifi RPG, where you basically play a soldier who has been chosen to represent humanity at a very high level in galactic politics. It's your job to figure out why a highly decorated alien supersoldier has gone AWOL. As you progress through the game, you can pick up allies. Each mission lets you take two such allies along, allowing you to pick which sorts of skills you want to complement your own. You can either follow lots of side plots, or carry through the main mission, which follows a standard plot of uncovering the history of an ancient alien race, wiped out by an even more powerful and ancient alien race. It's still v gripping and exciting. I did find driving the MAKO allterrain vehicle incredibly annoying, and all the bases and derelict ship interiors look identical. The romance subplots were amusing.

Still, I am now finally in the groove of writing my thesis. Of course, I promised my supervisor I would hand in the first three chapters by today - I've only handed in one, half finished the second, not even started the third. Eek!

I'm still working in the lab, so here's a treat for you. This is an important figure from my future thesis. I'm interested in investigating a certain protein, which we shall call X. In order to see how X works, it's useful to know what other proteins X plays with. To do that, I am using antibodies that recognise X, in a reaction called an Immunoprecipitation. Basically, you take cells grown in cell culture labs, break them up to release all their proteins, and then incubate them with your antibody which is stuck to tiny little beads. You then remove the cell proteins and keep the beads. Hopefully the antibody on the beads has grabbed your protein out, along with all other proteins that interact with Protein X. You then spread them out on an acrylamide gel, and use silver to make them visible.

The pic shows in the right hand lane a very dark band representing my protein, and lots of lighter bands, representing potential proteins that work with my protein X.

New Year Resolutions

Ok so they don't have a good press. Plus why pick that date; the Islamic New Year technically started a few weeks ago. Regardless, I'm going to pick this opportunity to make some goals:

1) Get my thesis done on time. That's not a goal really, that's just a matter of survival - September 2010

2) Stick to training even when I'm distracted and stressed at work. More specifically, I want my weight back to go past my previous heaviest (74.5kg) and up towards 80kg. I want to beat my squat and deadlift pb of 95kg and 120kg for reps, respectively, and to get my bench to something almost vaguely respectable, let's say 75kg. I also want to commit to regular stretching and mobility work (Eric cressey kinda stuff).

3) Be organised and efficient! Go to bed earlier, turn the computer off by 22:30, be in bed by 23:00. Get things for the next day ready the night before so I'm not tripping over stuff trying to find them in the morning.

4) Eating enough food every day. Not rushing through breakfast. Getting plenty of water in. Making more of an effort to get a serving or 3 of fruit EVERY day.

5) Start writing more on this blog, even if it's just a training log.