Nearly Home from SF

I am writing this from the JFK airport while waiting for the final leg of my journey home from San Francisco. The flight from Oakland to JFK was my first experience with JetBlue's DirectTV consoles - it was very nice to be able to scroll through various channels and watch whatever I wanted. Another nice surprise was the fact that JetBlue supplies free wireless internet service here at JFK. Most airports have wireless internet, but will charge $5-10 for access.

The conference was great; it was wonderful to see old friends and interact with my future colleagues from Iowa State. My PhD advisor received a prestigious award plus I had the opportunity to attend a talk given my advisor's advisor (making him my grand-advisor) Ed Lightfoot, who is very well known in Chemical Engineering. On the way to San Francisco, I stopped in LA for the day and visited with both human and ape friends there.

While my trip was great, I am eager to get home, see my cats and get back to work. One of my coworkers at the University of Florida has been nice enough to feed and care for my cats while I was away. Check out this cool picture of Cleofus. He moved while I was taking the picture and it left a very ghostly impression. And speaking of my nice coworker, check out this great video of her daughter on youtube.

Happy Thanksgiving wishes to everyone. I'm very excited about the opportunity to celebrate with my family this year - it will be the first time to spend Thanksgiving (or my birthday) with my family in 7 years. It will also be my first time to meet my nephew Jacob, so I'm really looking forward to it. I'm not too enthused about turning 30 though.

Still Warm

Well, after the brief cold spell two weeks ago, it's back to warm weather here. It's still warm enough to be out at night in a t-shirt. Today has been particularly nice. I delivered some samples to the proteomics core in the Cancer/Genetics Research Building, which is a 15-minute walk from my building. The Veterinary Science area is between here and there, so it was a treat to stop and visit with the three horses they have pastured. I believe they thought I had some snacks for them in my ice bucket.

This Sunday I'll be volunteering at the Great Ape place; I'm really looking forward to it.

I've realized that my experimental work here won't allow me to go away for a whole weekend. A typical experiment takes about a week and needs to be tended to at least every 24 hours, if not every 12. I definately get more satisfaction out of killing my cell cultures (with bleach) at the end of an experiment now than I did with a typical 2-day experiment at UCLA. Another demand on my time here is the Gas Chromatograph (GC), which we use to determine the amount of ethanol being produced by our bacteria. The lab techs on CSI use a GC all the time and they make it look so quick and easy. While it is very to use, it is anything but quick. It takes 20 minutes to analyze each sample and there are 4 people using it and we each generate about 12 samples a day (that works out to 16 hours of machine usage). Add on the fact that the machine is old and needs to be "babysat", and it becomes a non-trivial matter. I'm really enjoying the fact that I live so close to campus and can easily go back and forth from the lab.

So I caved to cultural pressure and bought a video iPod last week. It's been enjoyable so far, but I don't see what the big deal is. I'll be traveling to a conference next week and I'm hoping to get more enjoyment out of it while I'm flying. I am really looking forward to the conference. The "American Institute of Chemical Engineers" (AIChE) has a meeting every fall. This year it's in San Francisco and this is my first year to attend but not give a presentation (I've done a presentation every year since 2002). My coworker from UCLA is presenting our work from there and I haven't accomplished enough yet in the new lab to warrant a presentation. It will be nice to see old friends from UK and UCLA and my future colleagues from Iowa State.

I'm reading an interesting book right now. It's called "A Natural History of the Face" and is built on the basic fact that while we are very good at identifying faces, we are very bad at describing them. For example, most of the time we are able to identify someone's gender based on their face but unable to explain which features distinguish male from female. An interesting tidbit: our blink rate changes according to the emotions that we are feeling/expressing. One of the reasons that bad actors are annoying is because their blink rate doesn't match up with what their character is supposedly feeling. I never would have thought about that on my own!

As a final note - early Happy Birthday to my dear friend Shannon, who turns **30** next week. I'll get to enjoy two weeks of still being in my 20's while she is in her 30's. We've been friends for over 20 years.