James and the Giant Corn Genetics: Studying the Source Code of Nature

November 17, 2008

A Good Day

Filed under: Campus Life,Electronics,research stories — James @ 9:16 pm

I got up at 7 am this morning and got to work by eight.

I wore real shoes (not flip-flops) for one of the first times since I moved to Berkeley.

I work in a goverment building, with sign in sheets, and ID badges, and filters on the internet.

I didn’t even get the chance to talk to my new PI today, but I had the e-mail he’d sent me about my rotation project, so rather than sit around and waste time I started to work on it.

Did you know FT has 13 homologs in rice? And I found even more homologs in maize and mapped them on to the tree of rice genes using reciprical blasting.

The other people in this lab are really nice too. Two post-docs and one other grad student.

When I got home I realized I was babbling at my roommate about my exciting first day. We tend to be introverted around the apartment most of the time. I hope she doesn’t think I’m going insane.

To celebrate I cooked delicious pseudo-monty burgers (two plain patties left over from stuffed burgers on saturday, fried in a pan with a whole lot of extra spices.)

I also got an internet server working on my low power linux computer! It required a bit of tinkering to get around using the standard http port (most ISPs block connections on this port for residential costumers to discourage people from hosting web pages at home (like I just did!)). The page itself is just a proof of concept… I still haven’t figured out what I want to host at home (rather than using the hosting account I use for this blog) but it’s another advantage of an always on computer.

And for the record…I was able to bypass the filters at work. There’s no reason to, since I really don’t need access to facebook at work, but the point is, I can. And apparently people there have been trying to for over a year. (Some people really need their facebook.)

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