For all you out there who’ve been waiting so long and patiently for my scintillating updates, I’m happy to report that I’ll be rolling out with a new and improved version of my website tomorrow morning. While the new site retains most of the cosmetics of the original design, the basic structure has been fleshed out to incorporate a heavily-modified version of a freeware PHP script called CuteNews. This overhaul was initiated mainly in response to suggestions from friends, though I’ve been putting this off for a while to avoid the headache of writing all the necessary codes. But thanks to our friends at CutePHP, I’ve been able to add several new features to my site with relatively little effort. The most important but probably least noticeable is the ability to post comments for each of my updates, which will finally make this page a true blog. Both new and archived posts will no longer be stored by html, but in data files to be accessed by PHP scripting. I’ve also converted the old forum back into a guestbook, and have added a text search function to look up archived postings. And just to add a bit of pizzazz, I designed an animated version of the logo for the welcome page with Adobe ImageReady. Anyway, since it’s been more than a month since my last update, I’ll have more to report on life in my next post. In the meantime, feel free to post any helpful suggestions, bug reports, criticisms, or just random thoughts!

While walking to the cafeteria in Children’s Hospital yesterday to grab a quick bite for lunch, I ran into this gizmo wandering down the hall. It appears to be an automated cleaning machine with proximity sensors to navigate the hallways, and a smiley face and colorful headlights to attract small children into its path of destruction. In other news, my brutal lab schedule continues to take its toll on my day-to-day life. Last week, I fell asleep while waiting for a pot of pork stew to cook, and for those of you familiar with this Chinese recipe, you can probably guess what happens to hard-boiled eggs when left on the stove unattended – they explode. When I woke up, I beheld the awesome view of pieces of burnt eggs and pig flying in every direction, with splatters along the kitchen walls and ceiling marking the target of their trajectories. It would’ve been a great addition to Glenn’s Believe-It-Or-Not gallery of camera-phone captures (bomb-squad, ducks, etc.), but I was too busy scrubbing the kitchen and cursing myself to have considered such an idea. Adding to the insult, my garbage disposal also decided to conk out last week, which wasted me a good hour before I figured out how to manually turn the flywheel with an allen wrench and remove this doodad, which I can think of no other word to describe, nor imagine how it came to be inside in the first place. In fact, I’ve been spending so little time at home now compared to lab that when I walked out the back door last week to dump the trash, I walked right into a spider web! Stumbling away from what I was sure would have sealed my doom, I left home wondering if that daddy-long-leg we shot at the week before had other eight-legged-friends in high places (high as in the food chain). Gotta keep my eye out for these bloody entrapments in the meantime…

SUNDAY: Slept in late, made myself a large pot of Thai beef curry for dinner while partaking in the joy of doing taxes…   MONDAY: Dropped off my tax returns in the morning along with two fat checks for that blood-sucking organization, had curry for lunch, left lab at midnight, had more curry for dinner, and wrote QBANK questions for Kaplan until 4 in the morning…   TUESDAY: Got a bag of Glenny’s Soy Chips from my roommate which tasted a bit like cardboard and should not be associated with my name in any way, had curry for lunch, edited some stuff for my PI, left lab at 1:30am, and finished off the night with more curry for dinner…   WEDNESDAY: woke up late but squeezed in some curry for lunch, split 50 plates of cells, did a 24-well AP-binding assay, 6 ligations and transformations, 3 maxipreps, 2 minipreps, and dissected DRGs from a chick embryo in a pear tree, left lab at 4:30am and had my last bowl of curry for the week…   THURSDAY: had lunch with Bob who just passed his PQE, had dinner with Jeff who just completed his HST thesis defense, and on the way caught some ducks crossing the road with my camera-phone, left work at 11pm, and tried to shoot down a daddy-long-leg in the apartment, but without success…   FRIDAY: Too early to tell, but the annual MD-PhD revisit weekend guarantees a delicious course of fancy catering, live jazz, welcome speeches, name tags, and smug-sounding roundtable schmoozing, Schmaaaarvard-style … Bon appetit!

Forget my last post. Check out my more recent work hours:

Fri    04/02   11:00am – 03:00am
Sat    04/03   09:00pm – 06:00am
Sun    04/04   07:30pm – 04:30am
Mon    04/05   02:00pm – 03:00am
Tue    04/06   12:00pm – 06:00am

It’s funny looking back at the last sentence of my post from 03/04. I should’ve been more careful of what I wish for. Now if there were only a Lab Ironman competition…

It’s no Guinness, but last night, I set my personal record for the longest work day in lab at 17 hours. Between the PCR reactions, digestions, ligations, transformations, immunocytochemistry, westerns, co-immunoprecipitations, transfections, and neurite-outgrowth assays, I found only one break for lunch at noon and no dinner until 5am in the morning! Fortunately, having heard about this crazy schedule of mine, my mom and dad drove up from NYC this past weekend with loads of frozen home-cooked meals to stock up my freezer. I also took some time off to shop for some clothes and groceries to prepare me for the many late nights that now lie ahead.

It’s been another week of intense lab work, but I did manage to take a little break over the weekend with some pool and poker. On Friday night, I left work around 11pm and headed over to Jillian’s with Mike for several rounds of 8-ball. Slept in on Saturday, and spent the evening with friends for some take-out from Dok Bua while watching Rounders, followed by a night of intense 5-card Draw and Texas Hold’em. Fortune smiled upon me this time (actually, for the first time) and I came out on top … not by much, but enough for lunch money for the next several days.

Today marks the infamous day when the fate of my 4th-year med school friends, at least for the next several years, was determined. Yes folks, it’s Match Day 2004! The good news is that all my friends, including my roommate, matched into their top-choice program! Unfortunately, the very concept of residency for me still lies far in the distant future. Incidentally, my old high school friend Sara was also up here in Boston this evening, so we attended the HST Forum together, where we dined over some good food and fine company.

That’s what I learned from work this week. I was starting to get frustrated several days ago when my first round of subcloning yielded no positive colonies as shown by restriction digest. After consulting with another post-doc in my lab, he suspected a strange phenomenon known as BamHI star activity. Apparently, under certain conditions, this restriction enzyme can exhibit a relaxation of its specificity, leading to non-specific digestion of my product. The two lanes shown in the picture, believe it or not, were digested with the same enzymes! (If you had to know, it was NotI and BamHI) I just repeated it the second time using less enzyme and over a shorter time, and voila! behold my beautiful clone! Yes, it’s sad that the only thing I have to report is from work, but that’s pretty much what I’ve been up to all week.

Last night, Bob and I went out to see an advanced screening of Starsky and Hutch starring the dynamic duo of comedy Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson – a hilarious movie to brighten up my day following yet another depressing lab meeting. In other news, today marks my last day as a Pharmacology class TA. It’s always sad to leave ’cause I enjoy teaching a lot. The good news is that I’ll have much more time to focus on work now.

Vive la France! Maybe because it was our first trip together, or perhaps there is indeed some merit to the cliché notion of Valentine’s in Paris, but despite our complete lack of French language skills and the bitter cold that overtook the city, Melody and I were nevertheless left with the fondest of memories for this week-long vacation. Our trip began on Sunday the 15th, with a tour of the beautiful cathedral of Notre Dame, followed by a stroll through the Latin Quarter, a visit to the Pantheon, and finally concluding with a cold walk down Rue Mouffetard to a small cozy restaurant for a steaming bowl of soupe d’oignon au gratin. Still a bit jet-lagged, we woke up late Monday afternoon to tour the endless corridors of the Louvre, and finished the evening with a stroll down the garish and bustling Champs-Elyseé, but not before stopping at a local diner for some mouth-watering confit de canard and braised skate. On Tuesday, we awoke early to beat the crowd to ascend the Eiffel Tower, spent the afternoon in Musée Rodin, and by dusk was fast asleep back at our hotel room. By the time we realized that we had missed dinner, it was already 3am! Luckily, the sleep afforded us the ability to wake up earlier on Wednesday to spend the morning in scenic Montmartre, beginning with a view of the intricate mosaics in Sacre Coeur, followed by a stroll through the fairy-tale land of Amelie Poulain, passing street artists hounding us to sketch our portraits, the Moulin de la Galette featured in Renoir’s painting, and last but not least, the Moulin Rouge. After some Thai curry for lunch, we hopped over for a peek into Box 5 of the infamous Opera Garnier, the inspiration for the Phantom of the Opera, and from there, walked to the Jardin des Tuileries for a short break, then back to the Louvre to cover what we missed from our first visit. We devoted the next day to Versailles, which despite most of the gardens being closed for the winter, still retained its lavishness and magnificence. On Friday, we visited the impressive collection at Musée D’Orsay and stopped by the Jardin de Luxembourg before our flight back to NYC the next day. Having spent so much quality time with my dear Melody, it was tough returning to lab on Monday and made for a slow week at work, which explains why it took me so long to put up this update. Fortunately, the best news is that the BI has offered Melody a residency position here, and she has decided to accept the offer! It certainly made for an easier farewell, knowing that she’ll be coming back for good this summer. Be sure to check out the travel page for additional photos from our trip! Oh, and happy leap day!