TGIF, people!!

Well, after a long week, the week’s end is here. I’m going to be doing a volunteer gig tomorrow and I’ve got to get up even earlier than I would for work to attend this function. I’ll try to make this a staple of my weekends. Not the morning thing, but some sort of volunteering activity. I figure it will increase my physical activity as well as allow me to meet more people. Matt gets all the ‘fun’ at his workplace. lol. Anyhow, next week will be packed and I may not even have space to breathe. I bought a calling card that I haven’t even used yet and I apologize. The calls will be forthcoming.

 Several hours after I wrote the first paragraph, I’m at work and it’s a painfully slow day. I wish I had the gall to ask if I could leave early, but I don’t want to make a bad impression. I’ve got a simple SDS PAGE experiment running, but that’s about it. I’ve got a schedule or run-down of how next week will go and I’m looking forward to the actual procedure of growing and classically purifying a protein. I’m working on an ortholog of said protein and will eventually be doing a large scale growth and purification of said ortholog. Further down the road, we (I) shall be making mutants of original protein and doing another large scale growth & purification. The eventual goal is perform surface plasmon resonance (SPR) with these proteins. Now, SPR is a nifty little trick that I’m reading up on. You can detect binding of one protein to the other in real time and determine how strong their interactions are. Or even use it to find novel interactions. I’ll talk more about this in a later post. This is just to tell you all that I’m alive and breathing. And loving my job.

Some volunteerism in my life

I’ve found a worthy cause to volunteer my time to. The location is anywhere with the only caveat being high speed internet. I’ve got that and now, I just hope that I pass their rather rigorous screening process. The website belongs to Sage Leadership and the position is that of a Global Economy Associate and has several themes an associate can work under. They believe in a lot of things and Open Source, which is music to my ears, is one of those things. The ‘job’ requirements include knowledge of audio editing software (such as Audacity which I’ve tinkered with before, but now, I have Nero‘s WaveEditor) as well as becoming skilled in using a voice recorder. Score for me on both counts! 🙂 Now, I just need to find a way to channel all the goodness I have to give into an astounding cover letter. They also require knowledge of things such as blogging software and they use Vox as their example. Well, I’ve been a WordPress user for the longest while and just switched to Drupal as my content management system so I guess I’ll have to sign up with Vox and see how it stacks up. Interesting thing about Vox is its owners: the company (Six Apart) that owns LiveJournal, Moveable Type and Typepad, but Vox is being billed as “social networking” site (1). They ask that individuals be familiar with things like wikis and I’m up for the adventure. Now, let me get back to writing that cover letter.

  1. Vox Lifts Off and You’ll Love It Techcrunch.com 10/26/2006