Late Night Dip

This past week Mark and Carla both came to visit me in Vancouver, and wild times ensued. Mark has a talent for making me party harder than I usually would (especially on a work night), and also a talent for making girls swim naked with him. This I cannot explain. What I can explain is what happened in the picture above. Thursday night Mark, Katrina, Carla, and I were up late partying in the games room, playing some pool and attempting to do handstands drunk. After I lost about 9 games of pool in a row, we all walked Katrina to the bus stop (or what Mark referred to from the outset as "an adventure"). By the time we got to the bus loop and checked the schedules, we learned that it was too late and no buses were coming. We turned around and began heading back. Katrina, a UBC graduate, remarked that there were two things that she had never done at UBC: 1) sleep at a frat house, and 2) go swimming in the outdoor pool after hours.

Being as the pool was on our way back we dropped by to scope the place out. It looked nice and warm, with steam pouring off the top of the dark water, but it was friggin' cold out and there was a security truck in the area. After being super sneaky (i.e. running across the parking lot and looking to see if anyone was in the security

...from behind the bushes I heard a splash and girls giggling...

truck), we approached the pool. In the time it took me to urinate in the bushes I heard a splash and girls giggling. When I walked around the bushes to see what had happened I could see Mark swimming in the pool, and Carla and Katrina holding a camera and giggling (needless to say there are other pictures which I refuse to post on this blog, you can thank me later). The rest of us tore off our clothes (or most of our clothes) and hopped the fence to join Mark. After a quick dip and lots of laughing, we scrambled back to land and back over the fence. It was quite the adventure! Katrina did end up forfilling her other sin on her wish list, and ended up crashing on the couch at my place (which just happens to be a frat house). All in all it was an amazingly fun week!! A little sleep deprived, but amazingly fun just the same!

Raining and Pouring

It has been raining for the past week solid here in Van, and it doesn't look like it's going to stop any time soon. This has put quite the dent in my running schedule (I don't have a schedule, I just run when its sunny out and I have a lot of energy). I should just bite the bullet and go out for a run in the rain anyways -- right after I finishing writing this up. The only problem going for a run right now is that my night vision is REALLY bad. I need to eat more carrots or something.

I spent the last 2 hours working on this blog, and in the process learned a lot about blog layouts. I tend to do this with any presentations I make in public too: I spend about 30 minutes on content and ten times as much time on aesthetics. Some would think that suggests that the product is devoid of content, or perhaps the author is somehow vain. I think its more likely just the fact that I have partial obsessive compulsive disorder. There is this incredible desire in me to do everything to the best of my abilities, every single time. I have often wondered where this desire comes from. I used to tell myself I was just trying hard for everything just to get into medical school.

...just the fact
that I have partial
obsessive compulsive disorder...

But now that I'm in, I have no lesser desire to achieve. One possibility is that I am deeply insecure and thus I make an attempt to achieve perfection in hopes of masking these inner insecurities -- but I doubt this is the reason. My best hypothesis is simply that I inherited a gene for "obessive compulsiveness" from my father. My dad has the same work habit as me, only 10X more dedicated. When he gets interested in something (fishing, mycology, paleontology, etc.), he goes out and reads ALL of the available literature, becomes a local expert, and dedicates 90% of his free time to this activity! I am grateful to have received this trait. On the otherhand I most likely inherited my cleanliness and orderliness from my mother (while my dad is compulsive, he is definately not orderly). It is a combination of these traits which has allowed me to breeze through school, and I can only conclude that it is a result of these same traits which explain my current addiction to redesigning my blog. Ok time for a run.


P.S.

Make sure you check out the "games" links I put to the left!!

Fluorescence Microscopy

Here is a picture I made at work with some amazing technology. This is a sample of HeLa cells, which are human cancer cells derived from a cervical cancer from a woman named Henrietta Lacks some time in the 1950s (without her permission...). They have since devolved into a cell-line able of infinate self-replication (hence they are used in a variety of medical experiments). So anyways, to visualize these cells I have stained the nucleus blue and my protein of interest red.

...which absorbs the
emmited photons and then fluoresces
red...

Because proteins are too small to be seen with microscopes I had to be tricky to be able to see this particular signalling molecule. First I added an antibody against my molecule (so basically I made a large protein which will stick selectively to my protein), and a second antibody against my first antibody with a luminescent protein attached to it (derived from a phosfluorescent jellyfish protein!!). In the solution is a fluor which absorbs the emmitted photons and then fluoresces bright red under the proper wavelength. I then took a picture of these cells and imaged with the red wavelength, revealing that my protein is indeed in the cytoplasm of the cell (i.e. not in the middle of the cell). The blue staining was a similar process, except staining for DNA in the nucleus. I then imaged a second time under a blue wavelength of light, which allowed me to see the nuclei of the cells only. Using the computer that controls this microscope I was able to merge the two images to create the picture above. Fun, eh?

New Stylish Blog

Well I just put in a couple hours on this blog template and I like what I've done! I made the "alphageek" logo on a pretty cool website: typoGenerator. You just type in a word and it randomly generates a logo. Another cool site I found was ACME Label Maker which allows you to make labels from a bunch of nice fonts. I think the best find of the day, however, was the Mandarin Design page which is full of amazing CSS tricks. People who change their blog templates every other week (Dana) should definately check this site out!

In other news, I am having a great time at work lately. Although this is the exact same research position as last summer, I seem to be much more relaxed and carefree this time around. I think its a combination of being more comfortable with the lab equipment and staff, as well as not being in the process of applying for med school and not wanting to screw up letters of recommendation :)

...in other news
I am having a great time
at work lately...

Either way, I'm having a great time in the lab: getting lots of experiments done while still being able to chat and crack jokes with my co-workers. Our lab is investigating the cell-signalling involved in the FliC (a protein from E. coli which makes up its flagella/tail) and human TLR5 (a cell receptor in the gut which recognizes the tails of bacteria and then causes inflammation) interaction. I get to play with all sorts of cool equipment including fully mechanized fluorescence microscopes, digital cameras which cost 1/4 million dollars, -80 degree freezers, tons and tons of E. coli, human cancer cell lines, insect cell lines, and all of the protein/DNA purification you can shake a hat at.

Well thats all for now, hopefully it will stop raining soon!

Long Time No Post

Wow, it's been a while since I last posted. Lots of things happened... I'm trying to think about which ones to write about....

Well first off, the reason I haven't posted in a while is that the Med2008 website went down. This website has been my source of photos which I've been posting on this blog. So I just kept telling myself that I would post again as soon as some photos came back online, because I know there are some good pics out there. Alas, the photos are still not back online, so I'll just have to describe events with my remedial english/journalism skillz.

In summary, I finished off my first year of med school concluding with a nephrology (kidney) exam, a thorax anatomy bell-ringer exam, and a couple of practical patient-interview exams. All went well. I think...

The day of the last exam (also known as my birthday!) was awesome. Quite a sense of relief.

...I find it
incredibly difficult to not
discuss exams...

Immediately after finishing the exam (in fact while some of my friends were still writing), a bunch of us went out for lunch at Earl's. I find it incredibly difficult to not discuss exams after I'm finished writing them. I find myself constantly asking people what they put for question 27, how many "C"s did they put on their answer sheet!? But now that classes are pass/fail I should stop stressing myself out like that.

After lunch I went and bought a "victory cigar" with a couple of buddies. From there we went down to a local park where a med barbeque was happening, where we were able to fill up on free food and play some soccer with the boys (the girls played in net, with approximately 11 goalies per team).

From there, Zac, Ryan, and I drove around getting fancied up for the evenings. While at Ryan's place his mom fed us, so we stayed for a while sipping red wine and watching a bizarro animated film: Waking Life. This film is basically a series of lucid dreams in which the main character discusses a variety of philosophies of the mind with the people he runs into. The animation was amazing! Very dream-like. They filmed the whole thing live action and then painted over every single frame. Be warned though, its a very abstract movie.

After this was the bar scene. The meds had arranged to all meet up at Halo downtown Edmonton, which was the strangest bar atmosphere I've ever been to. The music was somewhat random, including: The Beatles, Elvis, Sublime, various Punk. It seemed like somebodies random MP3 player playlist, not much of a club scene at all. The people hanging out at this club were all of the "alternative" type. Dressed all grunge/punk style and not interested in dancing (hence the non-dancefloor areas were absolutely packed).

From there the night becomes a bit hazy in my mind, but basically involved taking off to a different club (with a tip that there were tons of med students there), only to find a couple of med students there making out in the corner. So the 3 other people I was with just danced the night away with me until the place closed and we wandered home.

Ok this post is too long. I'm stopping now.