Friday, April 3, 2009

April the Third

So... that bike ride never happened. I ran into a prospective student on my way out, and I put the hour toward a tour of the place instead. After that I tutored physics and got half-price dinner at Pita Pit, and planned to finish off the night with a physics lab. Unsurprisingly, I got distracted in Fenske... and ended up spending ~5 hours teaching material balances and thermodynamics to a group of students that had gathered.

It's almost 5am again... and probably a good time to look at tomorrow.

A Full Day

1200-1400 Tutoring (organic chemistry)
-- Lunch and coordination with home --
-- Review Session planning --
1640-1730 ChE 340 Review
1800-2300 Ag Ball

The Weekend

-- Review Session Coordination --
1400-1800 OChem Review Session
-- Apartment Redux --

The Further Weekend

-- All day reserved for biochemical engineering --

Thursday, April 2, 2009

April the Second

This morning I got caught up with some organizational stuff in my apartment, and ended up skipping my first class (along with my last two classes as well!) I managed to sort through all kinds of junk from home, and filter out a good many useful things that I had lost (gloves) or didn't know I had (a million pens). Feeling very well-armed for the day, I DID make it to my second class almost on-time.

Speaking of filtering... apparently bovine serum albumin is used as a stand-in for antibodies in viral filtration studies? BSA is a model protein, but it binds non-specifically to lipids, other proteins, and itself, thanks to hydrophobic patches on the outside of the molecule. Nothing indicates to me that anything learned from BSA would carry over to actual monoclonal antibody production. This is something to look into.

After class, I spent a solid two hours on my network sync project, helping it along by manually transferring files on a 300GB removable hard drive. All of my stuff is almost sync'ed! Once it is, I can begin the long, slow process of organizing everything and doing manual 'version control', culling out the junk that's outdated or no longer useful.

As part of my file management, I've taken to re-learning some Windows command prompt stuff: http://commandwindows.com/command2.htm
Very useful, for anyone who does anything remotely administrative.

My internet domain is almost completely set up! Obviously this account transferred without a hitch, but my Logical Extreme site is also going along as planned: I have Google Apps installed and working on it, and I have all of the FTP and DNS stuff worked out so that my own content uploads and displays correctly. The plan is to use this as a model to show the utility of this hybrid Google/Custom HTML system for managing teams (more specifically, for dealing with the complexities that arise when a single academic research project has active members that are separated by distance and time). Could this turn itself into a business? Dunno if the market is large enough, but it's always worth a shot.

More after the break... weather is just too nice, and it's time for some cycling before I tutor and prep for tonight's physics lab.