Fixing DVD player

Vicky's DVD player is failed. The symptom is that the player shows "NO DISC" even if actually there's in it. Apparently the pick-up lens needs to be cleaned. So I took it apart and cleaned the lense with isopropanol, and also observed some other weired points: a few condensers had been leaking! ...but still, it came to alive after the cleaning, so now they don't have to use play station 2 for watching DVD now.

Enterobacter spp.

There're a few Enterobacter spp. in Vanessa's culture collection, but according to the record it's supposed to be in the chest freezer on the corridor whereas actually it wasn't. Eventually we found that theose cultures had been moved to PC2 lab. I'll recover Enterobacter aerogenes and Enterobacter cloacae this week.

Subculture from high conc. of honey

Advice from Ray about subculturing from high conc of honey onto agar plate: 1. make buffered agar plate (e.g. Tris-buffered TS agar); or 2. centrifuge bacteria down and wash the cells with fresh media.

The effect of pH on honey

Have a meeting with Peter this morning and showed him the result of the work on the effect of acidity on the antibacterial activity of honey. As there're quite lots of data and I hadn't finished analysing them, it was a bit mess when I showed Peter those results (Ah~~ what a shame~~), but still Peter looks to be pleased with the result. :)

Yumiko got burgled

Coming back from badminton, Gavin told me that Vicky'd went to Yumiko's place as she'd got burgled. As usual police wouldn't come within a few days (which is totally useless), and as Yumiko and Tatsuya (Yumiko's 6 year boy) were scared, they're gonna stay with us for a couple of days. BTW, here is the list of their stolen stuff: laptop digital camera Tatsuya's school bag ...and something other

Trapped by toilet..

...for about 1/2 hr (I guess) before going out for badmintonat around 20:00. What a shame... -.-;;

WEB days

Today and tomorrow are WEB days which is for demonstrating to 13 year old students what DNA work would look like. My roster is from 9:00-10:00 and 14:00-15:00. What we (demonstrators) actually did are to see those students get kiwi fruit pulp and add salt and detergent, water bath for 15 min and precepitate the DNA with ice-cold methylated spirit (hell, I didn't know that the spirit can be used in this way before). Meanwhile we also showed them how to use dispenser and autopipettor, and also let them try to load DNA sample (actually it's just a blue dye) into agarose gel. Overall the process was seamless, except those students were somewhat unorganized and the process was also a bit in rush. Oh, and I found somebody had dumped the used kiwi pulp down the sink. I hope it wouldn't get blocked... -.-; (not my fault not my fault...)