Jul
26
So it’s been a while since I’ve posted on here (seriously? A month already?) so I thought I’d write a quick post about what’s been going on recently. I’ve been both busy and lazy, so haven’t had a chance to do much worthy of putting up here.
- Lab Work: I’m still working in the Lab, having just finished my fifth week there. The project is going really well. We’re starting to get mountains of data back from our GC runs. There are two weeks left on the project, most of which will be spent hydrolysing my esters so that we can identify the acids and alcohols present. Then, time and circumstances permitting we’re going to head over to SUERC in East Kilbride to take a look at Stable Carbon isotopes.
- Girvan Trip: Me, Emma and Emma’s mate John went on a short day trip down the coast between Ballantrae and Girvan (will be more on this later).
- Reading: I’ve got a fair bit of reading done, mostly about Zooplankton. But I also got to re-read one of my favourite books: Anathem by Neal Stephenson, and I’m currently cracking my way through The Code Book by Simon Singh.
- Gaming: Somehow we’ve spontaneously formed a new gaming group, which has let me get back into playing RPGs. We’ve had two massive gaming sessions so far; a D&D Scenario run by Chris and a WFRP game run by yours truly. We’re probably going to spin both of these off into full campaigns.
- Various Internet Nonsense: I’ve moved all my RSS feeds from Thunderbird to Google Reader, with broadly positive results. It saves a lot of time reading stuff on my iPhone while on the subway rather than sitting down to catch up on the days events in a oner. I’ve also started using Mendeley today. I haven’t really used the networking aspect of it at all (I think I prefer LinkedIn still at this point), but the desktop application is fantastic for organising the alarmingly large number of papers I need to read. Highly recommend checking it out.
So yeah, that’s what I’ve been up to. A full post on our Girvan excursion will follow in a couple of days, and a wrap up post about working in the lab will appear in a couple of weeks.
Tags: Gaming, Geek, Geology, Reading, Summer Project