A not so cold fridge

This afternoon Katherine noticed that one of our fridge is no cold. Look at its temperature gage and alas! 20C ?! When we were wondering why is this, we once thought that the fridge might have been out of action. Then I suddenly noticed another shocking matter – the power point for that fridge had been turned off!! Who the hell did this!!?? Those stuff such as blood agar plates, chocolate agar plates, honey samples and other chemicals in the fridge may have been off!! Kerry was also stunned when I told her some idiots had turned the fridge off. Well, we've had some idea who may have done this though... # Fortunately I'd moved all my charcoal agar plate into another fridge before...:P

A new comer

A stranger comes to our lab with Peter this morning. “She is from France and will be staying here for the next six months”, Peter said. Sounds like another Katherine.

No Internet yet :(

The internet in this new house is supposed to be get through on Friday, but apparently the internet company (Slingshot) hasn't connected it. Vicky, you should give them a yell on Monday (I mean, a BIG bloody yell).

Film making

When Peter told us we were going to be photographed by somebody, Katherine and me didn't realize what it exactly means, what the scale would be, and what it would exactly look like; and today, they finally gave us the answer. By the way, I'm not doing too many lab works this week as I'm focusing on my full research plan which should be submitted by the end of this month. What I'm doing for my lab work is no more than checking the purity and vitality of my Campys – a kind of routine task, and shouldn't take too much time to finish it. Anyway, those people are supposed to arrive at 3:00pm, but actually they didn't show up until 3:30pm. When they came into our Honey Research Unit, I was stunned by the scale – there are roughly 6-7 camera workers, technicians and assistants (?) and come along with several huge bags with their cameras and RAILS in them. As soon as they came in, some of them started to set the rail on the floor and others turned off the light or talked to Peter WHAT we were going to do and WHERE we should be located at – a typical film making. One of them wanted to lit my Bunsen burner but never succeed. After litting it up for him, he asked me if I can get more orange part of the flame and get it closer to me and Peter – he must have mistaken Bunsen burner is not for LIGHTING... They also wanted Katherine to sit at biosafety cabinet, me at bench top and Peter to stand beside us, and to pretend that we.were working while the camera was moving around us. Hey, Sir! Don't you know the Bunsen burner is very hot? But before that... How would you take responsibility of my Campys for staying in air for such a long time!! Finally the film making finished, but it's not all – we are asked to stay for “a few minutes” to take still pictures. Actually I felt this took us longer time than the film making did. The photographer tried several times to tune the angle and light of the scene, and asked us to move some stuff (Bunsen burner closer, oxygen generator and microscope away...), face my agar place toward the photographer, and even wanted Peter to lower down his body...!! As with Katherine, she had to hold 8-ch pipette with left hand and pretend working on serial dilution.-.-;; Finally (yeah, this time it's real final) the work finished. We all were showed how the still pictures look like. Hm...it's not too bad but how come the main point – the persons – are not in the center in those pictures?? Anyway, after all of them left away, I got my Campys into “CampyHouse” (candle jar) as soon as possible, incubate them and went home. They are really killing my Campys, really. I actually have a feeling that my Campys had been dead... Peter said they'd send us the film we took today within DVD. Who knows...

Move

Having had some hassles, I finally move to a new place which is closer to campus. To move to new place, I need someone to give me a hand to move my stuff, and Allan and Yuki did help moving them to the new place.(Thanks, guys!) The new host, Vicky, is a Maori, and they're having a BBQ party when we arrived there. It's quite surprising there're so many friends (and their kids as well) came to join the party. Roughly 20 people, I guess. By the way, it's really stupid of me to leave my laptop in Allan's car and didn't notice that until they'd left! :P Anyway, I met lots of Vicky's friends tonight.

M$ vs Symantec?

Microsoft Anti-Spyware Deleting Norton Anti-Virus (on WashingtonPost.com) Looks like M$ considers Symantec is odd as well... :P

Trees have something to do with greenhouse?

Scientists question trees' role in global warming (on ABC Online) Plants revealed as methane source (on BBC News) Quite a shocking information...I hope there won't be some sort of odd groups claim that cutting forest would help reducing global warming...

Looking for new accomodation

There're 2-3 boards still renting, and one of them is quite close to our building, which might be convenient for me to be there. Unfortunately the host seems to be out when I rang the number on the advertisement. He/she might be on out for holiday. I took a few minutes to walk around the area. It is exactly close - actually just in front of our lab and would take just 5-10 minutes to move between the area and our building...but there is a quite steep slope on the road. I would have to go up this big slope to work - Hmm...a good warming up exercise before start working huh? I have no idea how about the other 2 houses at this moment, but it's really time to make decision since Jason's host is unwilling to have a long-periond student to stay with them (she's gonna back to America soon, after all)

Identify more Campy

I met Peter unexpectedly when I was going to get autoclaved stuff this afternoon. I told him that the Campy's results are quite disappointing - most of the Campy samples are NOT exactly Campys. Take those unsurviving Campys into account, my samples have reduced from more than 100 (149, I think) to merely 36! The species variety is also limited - most of them are Campylobacter jejuni (more than 2/3) and followed by C. coli. No C. fetus or other species are detected. Peter advised me that I may do PCR with Sarah's (a student before) Campy samples and see what species they exactly are. ...Hence I'll have to do some more Campy samples in the following weeks...I hope I may finish Campys THIS MONTH~~~~!!

Campy mPCR (x46 isolates...!)

1. Looks like most of them are Campylobacter jejuni which is followed by C. coli, and there are rare of C. fetus. I may have killed all of C. fetus "unconciously" (when I raised the temperature up to 42C). 2. The high concentration of primers cause primer dimers. 3. The 23S bands don't show in each well => may not correlate with Campy very well 4. A few of "suspected Campys" are actually not campys. Although they grow on selective agar and in microaerobic condition, they're unlikely to be Campys from genetics viewpoint. (no wonder I felt they grow unusually faster than they're supposed to be)