Happy Chinese New Year! It’s not often that this holiday occurs on a Sunday, and it’s even less often that it coincides with my birthday. With all the festivities stacked together, and with work taking a bit of a breather, I was able to enjoy the weekend feeling more relaxed than usual. On Friday, I celebrated my birthday with some friends over steaming Chinese seafood and spent some quality time with Melody over 8-ball at our now-regular hangout. Saturday morning, we woke up early to warm pineapple buns for the bus ride down to NY, where we spent the lazy afternoon lounging about before the super year-end meal. Finally on Sunday, I realized again the benefit of a large extended family as I collected pocket money for the next two months. Anyway, according to Chinese tradition, it’s important to stay happy and enjoy the new year because the rest of the year will follow the same way. To help you along, check out these two clips that are so outrageous you won’t know whether to burst out in laughter or cringe in disgust. The first is David Hasselhoff after an illustrious career with talking cars and bombshell babes. The second features the Dormitory Boys, the newest lip-syncing sensation since the Numa Numa guy. Enjoy!

You’ve guessed it – Jack is back! And since our favorite TV series returned to Fox last week, we’ve been hooked like Bubba on shrimp. This is perfect since I finally submitted the new manuscript to Neuron last night. It was ultimately a bit anti-climactic as two more first authors were added for political reasons. Overall, I’ve become quite disillusioned by the whole publication process, but as my friend told me, it won’t be long before I get to be disillusioned by medicine too! (Yay) Nevertheless, with this paper out of the way, I should get more free time in the upcoming weeks for more Jack, more CivIV, more Kaplan freelancing, and taking another crack at teaching Pharm again.

Wow! I made it through the entire day yesterday without touching Civ IV. I’m so proud of myself. =) Btw, check out this hilarious website based on the official game trailer (yes, even computer games have trailers too nowadays). On another note, it appears that I’ll be speaking at the New York Academy of Sciences in March, the details of which can be found here. I’m actually going head to head with a Yale prof, so it’ll be a bit nerve-racking. I’d invite people to go, ‘cept they’re charging a whopping 20-smackers per head! I only wish that I could get a cut of THAT sweet deal.

I have just gotten my hands on a copy of Civilization IV, and I’m quickly realizing that it may be even worse than crack itself. Just when I thought that I had matured beyond those college days staying up past 4am clicking away with my mouse, here comes the fourth installation of what was perhaps one of the most addictive games in the history of computer gaming. Created by Sid Meier back in 1991, the original version was a simple turn-based strategy game that simulated the evolution of a civilization from the stone age to the era of space exploration. After three incarnations, it now adopts a full 3D engine along with a whole slew of new implementations such as cultural borders, religion, and great people. This newest edition has cost me two nights of sleep, and deservingly earned Gamespot’s Game of the Year in 2005. So say goodbye to sunlight, and as the review suggests, “If you have even a passing interest in strategy games, world history, or getting LESS SLEEP at night, you owe it to yourself to give Civilization IV a try.”

Happy New Year from Sammy and Howie! For those of you who’ve been wondering about our rats, I’m happy to report that they’re doing very well (though we’re considering sending Howie to a weight-loss camp this summer…). It would be a bit hypocritical of us, however, as the holidays this year have been a fattening experience for all of us. I spent Christmas weekend in Stockton with Melody’s family, where we played lots of Scrabble and gorged ourselves with Chinese food. And the night before New Year’s eve, we pigged out at Capital Grille with crab and lobster cakes, lobster bisque, veal rib-eye, and kona-crusted sirloin. I guess our New Year’s resolution will be for all of us to lose some weight.

After all the primers, PCRs, digests, agarose gels, gel extractions, precipitations, ligations, transformations, colonies, innoculations, incubations, minipreps, midipreps, and maxipreps; the in vitro transcriptions, dig labeling, prehybs, hybridizations, washes, and development; cell lysis, denaturations, quantifications, polyacrylamide gels, coomassies, transfers, blocks, primaries, secondaries, ECL, films, and casettes; after filtering, autoclaving, thawing, splitting, counting, freezing, plating, transfections, cultures, and co-cultures; the co-IPs, protein purifications, equilibrating, loading, washing, eluting, and dialyzing; the superinfections, harvesting, concentrations, and titering, the perfusions, fixations, cryoprotections, cryosections, permeabilizations, and immunostaining, the dissections, triturations, immunopanning, purifications, counting, coating, plating, and replating; after the surgeries, anesthesias, incisions, sutures, injections, implantations, electroporations, hemisections, transections, and crushes; after making buffers, washing tools, and aliquoting solutions; the rinsing, washing, vortexing, and spinning … the box has finally been checked.

Work continues to eat away at me as we gather more data and the prospect of a paper looms on the horizon. Even as we’re approaching the holidays, the atmosphere at lab has gotten more tense as our boss enters his hyper-abusive “You can’t get this experiment to work in TWO days?!?!?” mode. A friend actually called me last Friday night because he was surprised that I would actually miss out on free pool at the recent HST TGIF. Fortunately, Melody’s been taking good care of me with lots of tasty recipes. I also got a good laugh when I received a copy of my new book from Kaplan. This book project was essentially an all-in-one STEP I study guide designed to compete head-on with the popular First Aid series. I spent some time over the summer writing several chapters for them, and among the list of contributing authors, I was listed as “Glenn Yiu, MD”. Hehehe – and to think that I’m working my butt off to get a PhD when I can already be a doctor! =D

Between teaching class and juggling several projects at lab, not much time has been left for anything interesting in recent weeks. Melody and I ended up spending Thanksgiving this year sittin’ at home watching a movie and eating napa-pork (my mom’s recipe for a delicious napa cabbage and ground pork stew). We did bus down to NYC over the weekend to visit home, taking the opportunity at the same time to do some window shopping and also to be disappointed by yet another sub-par ramen experience. Otherwise, work’s been the same old hell that continues to dominate my life. Until my upcoming thesis advisory meeting in 3 weeks, I’ll probably be immersed in experiments up the wazoo.

Who would’ve thought that a bunch of scientists at the Dalai Lama’s lecture would fare no better than teenage girls at a pop idol concert? After yesterday’s poster session, I arrived outside the lecture hall about an hour before the scheduled talk. Thinking I was actually early, I instead found thousands of students, post-docs, and professors already lined up to see his holiness’ speech on meditation and neuroscience. Attendance was over 25000 at the conference this year, but there was only room for 7500 at the lecture. Over the course of the hour-long wait, the lines slowly degenerated into disorderly mobs as people pushed and shoved their ways through. Realizing the chaos, I ended up leaving the crowds to find my own way. By the time I discovered the security check and entered the lecture hall, I found it only half-occupied. The crowds had been so lost that people ended up waiting in lines that led nowhere. It was somewhat disappointing then that the speech itself actually didn’t have much substance, and much of his broken English was impossible to decipher. But it was still interesting hearing the Dalai Lama’s response to such controversial issues as animal testing, use of antidepressants, and the role of religion in education. Afterwards, I met some friends for dinner at a cute little tapas place and crashed early for the night. Apparently, the only airport shuttle available this morning left at 5:30am. And so I’ll be waiting here at the terminal for another several hours before my 9am flight back home.

My trip to the SFN Neuroscience meeting in DC this year began Friday with a flight scheduled for departure at 3pm and arrival at 5pm. Sounds like a piece of cake… or is it? Let’s take a closer look at my actual itinerary:

1330 After a quick lunch, Melody began driving me to airport

1400 Arrived in airport for check-in

1415 Arrived at gate; found out flight was delayed half-an-hour

1530 Boarding began another half-hour behind schedule

1550 Plane finally took off and I proceeded to catch some zzz’s

1700 Plane actually arrives on-time! Began walking to main terminal

1730 After a looooong walk, found SuperShuttle and began waiting in line

1800 Finally reached receptionist and paid for a shuttle bus to my hotel

1900 Read papers for another hour before shuttle was actually ready

1930 Shuttle leaves airport after waiting another half-hour for other passengers

2045 Shuttle drops off all 9 other passengers before finally finding my hotel

In total, my trip down took more than 7 hours – not much less than if I had DRIVEN from Boston! Part of the problem, it turned out, was that my hotel was new, and neither the receptionist nor the driver actually believed it existed. I was curious when I got to the hotel, and asked the attendant when they actually opened. The girl looked at me and said, “Oh, we just opened 4pm this afternoon.” Yes, this hotel is so brand-spanking new, in fact, that the swimming pool has not yet opened, the wireless network is still down, and the hotel restaurant is still running training exercises. Fortunately, our suite turned out to be quite modern, complete with a plasma TV and a chic-looking kitchenette. I ended my long day with a hearty meal in nearby Chinatown with a post-doc from lab. Now I’ve got to catch some shut-eye before Dalai Lama’s talk tomorrow afternoon.