She's hot for a fattie!

This thing is the bomb. It came in on Monday and it has had my full attention since. It holds 16 racks of 13 one hundred slot boxes in it. And the best thing, the liquid nitrogen is in the hull and not on your samples so you don't burn the shit out of you as you try to extract 1 of your 20,800 stored cryotubes. She eats liquid nitrogen like a hog though, static loss is expected to be around 9L a day. However she can auto-fill herself to desired liquid levels that I set. Christmas come early. I going to hug her today before I leave.

Thank goodness for wifi

I'm stuck at my local garage and am waiting on my car to get fixed. Somehow by slamming on brakes yesterday and not T-boning and potentially killing some asshat woman (not knocking female drivers, just stating the individual had a pair of ovaries) who pulled out in front of me, I fucking destroyed my left front wheel hub. This comes not two days after having to get a new set of tires after getting a flat (was planning on replacing them in a few months but it sucks to get hit unexpectedly). So I've dropped a grade on my Jeep in four days. Oh well at least I'm stimulating the economy although it could have been further stimulated if I would smashed that bitch's car.
Can '10 get here soon enough. And the folks are looking at me strange as I am on the phone to my lab manager reading her a sequence of oligos that I need to get ordered ASAP.

Happy 60th Birthday...

to the published discovery of enzymatic photoreactivation! You da man Albert Kelner. He discovered this phenomena while at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory studying post-irradiation survival with E. coli. He noticed that the samples that he left out in the light seemed to have better survival rates.

So even though your gone big Al, thanks for your work!

I'm holding up the 11th Commandment

I'm done with finals for the semester and only have one more academic class to take! This is good as I'm still trying to get my lab back up online and plan out some aggressive experiments for the spring. And fuck me do I mean aggressive, I need to go ahead and start meeting with the core facility and get them on board with whats going on. Also I'm generating an assay for a postdoc to use so I'm kind of pumped about that too.

Also I'm trying to put some work in on this review article.

And I won the SciBlogs NFL Challenge for this week (sorry I had to gloat one more time).

So I'm keeping the pimp hand strong.

And now for some serious hardware

Beautiful for spacious skyes,
for amber waves of grain

I finally freaking won a week! This win is a little diminished by the loss of my Panthers. However I shall take it.

Still Alive?

One exam down, one to go!

Moving Redux

So we are now in our new lab space. We are still in the unpacking stage and probably will be for the next week but I have to say the new space is pretty swanky. The biggest difference is our tissue culture facilities, we were working with at best a room the size of a walk-in closet. This was a pain as there was only 1 hood and having three people wanting to get into there took some serious scheduling. The new space is probably a space of 25' by 15' with two brand spanking new digital hoods (with ergonomic foot rests!) and gives us adequate space now for us to use all of the TC incubators (including a quarantine incubator we did not have the luxury of because of previous space problems).