Xephalon.Net has found a new home! As of this past week, I’ve switched my hosting company from Register4Less to Digitalibiz. The new service will provide a lot more hosting space, an extra subdomain, CGI/Perl/SSI/PHP/ASP support, individual POP e-mail accounts and aliases, and even a MySQL database! I will be adding some more components to the site over the next couple of weeks, though I’ll try to keep the core of the website as simple as possible. I’ve also added new pictures, modified some links, and added a new archive page. Check it out!

Just got back today from Bethesda after a 2-day mentoring conference hosted by the NINDS, a branch of the NIH dealing with neurological disease and stroke. I had originally signed up for this for the free trip, though I was sure it was going to be boring and a waste of time. Contrary to my expectations, the meeting turned out to be quite informative, with a clear presentation of various career and funding options from the government and academia. It was refreshing to meet clinician-scientists in the neurosciences who have successfully made that connection from bench to bedside (pardon the cliché). We even got a chance to meet other Neuro MD-PhD students and rub elbows with a couple of NIH bigwigs as well. The best part was the fact that we were given a per diem food allowance on top of the free meals, free hotel, and free plane ride, so I actually ended up MAKING money this weekend! I’m glad my tax dollars are finally being put to good use! LOL

It was my turn to present at lab meeting today, and given the amount of time I’ve been slacking off in lab, it was pretty hard trying to crank out material to talk about. I ended up pulling two all-nighters in a row this week, and even then, was not able to generate as much data as I had hoped. I left lab at 1pm yesterday afternoon, after having stayed up all night to do experiments. One of the post-docs who had just come in that morning actually asked me why I was leaving early. I didn’t bother to dignify that with an answer… I ended up using my lab meeting as a chance to get my co-workers to help troubleshoot my problems. After the meeting, my PI made a comment which I didn’t know whether to interpret as a compliment or an insult. He said, “You gave a great presentation today … even though you really had no data to present.” It goes without saying that the next few weeks will be crunch time for little old me =(

My dear Melody finally took off for sunny California with her parents this afternoon. During the past few days, I barely found time to get any work done in lab as we scuffled back and forth between helping me settle into my new apartment, and getting her packed for the big move back home. And on June 5th, despite countless threats of rain from weather forecasts all around, her Commencement ceremony went smoothly without a hitch, and my girlfriend formally became a doctor. I even got a chance to join her family for her graduation dinner that night at East Ocean City, which despite my fears of its becoming a panel interview, turned out to be very pleasant and stress-free.

So in case word hasn’t gotten around to you, Melody and I are officially going out now (Yay!). It actually came as a surprise to both of us as well, and it wasn’t until the last couple of weeks that we discovered our feelings for each other. The tragedy is that she’ll be heading off to UCLA for her residency in a matter of days, so I’ve been trying to spend as much time with her as possible during the last week. After she returned from her California road trip last weekend, we took a short trip down to NYC to visit my home and my high school. I think she was most astounded by the Stuy building itself, a 10-story monolith set in the financial district of downtown Manhattan, certainly a world apart from the outdoor suburban high school setting of Northern California where she came from. Yesterday, we went to the New England Aquarium to pay homage to Myrtle the turtle, along with some of her friends. To top it off, we went to watch the new animated feature “Finding Nemo” the very next day, but not before a bunch of us took her out for some yummy pork ribs at B B Wolf as a celebratory graduation dinner. The movie turned out to be a pleasant surprise – probably the best flick to come out of Pixar Studios so far. Every character in the movie captured amazingly well what we had imagined those creatures would be like anthropomorphized (go S.A.T. vocabulary!).