Helicobacter contamination (still)

My helicobacter looks still contaminated by other cutlures; from the gram's stain, many gram positive cocci can be seen (I guess enterococci). Now I'm using urea agar (columbia agar + serum + HCl + urea + phenol red) and trying to get single colony for recovering helicobacter, but honestly I don't expect too much on it now... :( Ray told me that I could add vancomycin to get rid of enterococci. Actually this has been included in the urea agar plates, so give them a few more days and see what'll happen. If these stock cultures are still unrecoverable, I reckon I'll need to re-order another copy of helicobacter type strain from ESR. In the photo Ray said the faint pink organisms (the gram negative ones) should be helicobacters but I doubt it; they look too fat as helicobacter.

Medical examination

The (stupid) immigration had changed their rule of applying student visa last year, thus now I got to do full medical examination every 2 years (Geez...). Today is the day I have the examination. The medical centre: Victoria Centre (abbreviated as VC) Examed items: X-ray Blood Urine Eye-sight Height, weight Physical checks (?) Fee: ...expensive Waiting before proceeding examination: > 40 min Result: need 4 working days (i.e. Tuesday week)

Laptop batteries fire (...how many time is this anyway?)

Flaming LAX laptop was a ThinkPad (on CNET.com) Lenovo probes Sony laptop battery fire (on CNET.com) Lenovo...IBM...Sony... :( ...and here is a topic which may have something to do with Japan: Japanese fret that quality is in decline (on CNET.com)

Huh!! Laptop explodes!

Don't get me wrong...it's not mine. Dell battery explodes at Yahoo HQ, hundreds evacuate (on engadget.com) ...and the laptop looks disastrous: When Laptops Explode, side view It doesn't say where the battery is from, but I guess...sony again?

OpenOffice Template/Clipart Creation Contest

OpenOffice.org is holding the Documentation Project/Worldlabel Template/Clipart Competition recently. It's from September 13, 2006 to October 13, 2006. (Ouch! It's been running for 1 week) and the awards will be announced on November 1, 2006. It looks interesting, and also the prizes are quite attractive: PRIZES FOR TEMPLATES: 1st Prize USD750 2nd Prize USD300 3rd Prize USD250 4th and 5th Prizes USD200 100s of Tshirts and other Openoffice.org goodies for templates which will be part of the Documentation Project. PRIZES FOR CLIPART: 1st Prize USD750 2nd Prize USD300 3rd Prize USD250 4th and 5th Prizes USD200 100s of Tshirts and other Openoffice.org goodies for clipart submitted which will be part of the Documentation Project. I may try to submit some of my works. :)

Battery recall (again)

Toshiba recalls 340,000 Sony laptop batteries 340,000 batteries from Sony in Toshiba boxes...who's the next?

Soulseek

Jesicca asked me to help sorting out her computer thing - to make a program called "soulseek" work on Vicky's computer. The problem she's got is that she couldn't get soulseek connect onto its server. After 2 or 3 times try, I decide to try on my computer as I suspect there're something wrong with Vicky's computer (I'm pretty sure the computer has got heaps of problem). By the way, Jessica said she wanted to download music with thie program and it was downloaded by Christle. As I know nothing about soulseek, I proceeded a few search before I really try it on my computer, and hell, I found some virus would spread through this P2P (peer-to-peer) program. Having some prevention work, I tried this program on my computer and found it did connect to its server flawlessly. Hm, looks like it's really got some problems with Vicky's computer. Of course, I deleted the program from my computer within a couple of minute (this includes installation, trying, and uninstallation). I've also told Jesicca and Gloria not to use this program anymore. It is always good to be paranoid when it comes to computer security. :)

Night sight-seeing

A party held on campus; everyone dressed very formal. I saw many of them also got mask on their faces. Masked dancing?

Arghhhhh~~~ My Helicobacter...!!

After a loooooong time incubation, I went over my lab and see how Helicobacter is going. As soon as the "HP castle" comes to my eyes, I nearly drop dead - the tape for sealing the "HP castle" flipped over and hence it's not air-tight any longer. Needless to say, those Helicobacters have been dead and I'll have to recover another copy of Helicobacter from -70C stock. Oohhhhhhh~~~~shocking... T_T

Peter is back and Kerry is gone

It's Kerry's time to go abroad - actually it's her long holiday. She'll have a big trip in Europe from 4 Sep to 7 Oct. By the way, she is not going to see Katherin although she might get through Germany.

Battery recalls

Sony is used to be thought as the first choice when purchasing IT products (audio, TV, laptop, etc) a few years ago, but apparently this has been a passed history. Recently a number of battery recalls have been announced; each of which are associated with the batteries manufactured by sony. DELL recalls 4.1 million batteries: Dell Announces Battery Recall (14/Aug/06, on DELL.com) Dell takes heat over battery recall (on CNET.com) A week later, iBook and PowerBook from Apple (1.8 million batteries)... Battery Exchange Program iBook G4 and PowerBook G4 (on Apple.com) Apple recalls 1.8 million batteries (on CNET.com) ...and now Sony VAIO from Sony itself: Laptop Bursts Into Flames - Owner Says Laptop Was Charging Looks like MIJ is not necessarily trustworthy any more.

Golf

Peter to abroad

Peter is going abroad to give presentation during the next 3 weeks (13 Sep till 31 Sep). The destinations would cover Japan, Hongkong, Malaysia and Taiwan. However he's a bit nervous about his powerpoint slides as the slides keeps breakinig as soon as he fixes the powerpoint file - the position of pictures moves away from where they are supposed to be, the size of text fonts varies, the animations behave oddly , and the most weird thing is that the powerpoint file size goes up to more than 200MB! I'll have a look on the file and see what the hell is the problem with it.

M$ Excel inadequates for statistical analysis

Key words: Excel, inadequate Using Excel for Statistical Data Analysis Report in 1999 (pdf) Spreadsheet Addiction Problems using Microsoft Excel for statistics (pdf) Is it practical to use Excel for stats? Statistical flaws in Excel (pdf)

Unknown contamination

The subcultured plate looks quite yuck: Apparently they've got capsule on them and they're also hemolytic (beta-hemolytic). Due to the capsule, the colonies are so sticky that I've got trouble with making slide smear from its single colony. The Gram stain of the "unknown contamination": Sticky colony, clogging cells. Looks like these Bacillus-like cells indeed have got capsules on their cells. Strangly, the thick capsule somehow can't be seen on some of them.

AMD + ATI

AMD has announced that the company and ATI will join together. Presumably ATI will no longer manufacture the chipset for Intel based products, but who knows? Anyway, I'm more curious about how they'd rename their new(?) company... "AT&A" ?!

2 days after subculturing Helicobacter pylori

The subcultured HP seems to have formed some visible colonies now, and since 5 days incubation looks too long for them (not quite sure though), I'll subculture them tomorrow (i.e. 3 days) again so that their colonies may not be too sticky.

Day 5

Unfortunately, after opening the microaerobic jar I noticed that some of the agars had been contaminated by other bacteria. I was using BHIYE agar (x2), BHIYE-chocolate agar (x 2) and CHBHP agar (x 2), among them BHIYE agars were heavily contaminated by unknown species. I'll check what they are with Gram's stain some time. Apparently I do need antibiotics for inhibiting those contaminants. I'll add vancomycin, polymyxin and trimethoprim into the agars next time.

Day 3

I can see some spots on CHBHP; must be Helicobacters. That's quicker that I've imagined!

Culturing Helicobacter pylori

As we've expected, my columbia agar plate and defibrinated horse blood arrive today, so now I can get onto work...but wait! How come the expiry date of the two bottles of horse blood are this weird?? "20/05/06" and "??/??/07" ...anyway, I'll check what the hell is wrong with this next week, but I just use one of them for making my CHBHPs, and inoculate the Helicobacter type strain and incubate them as soon as possible. I feel the colonies quite sticky, just like the feeling that I felt when Campys are dying...but I hope this won't be true...