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    April 29

    Deutsche sprache, schöne sprache

    Well, recently i have joined the Ultimate Frisbee team here in Saarland. Its an initiative by the University and hence has an air of discipline and seriousness about it, which was missing in Dresden. To develop your game and nurture your talent its sometimes useful to listen to the pros....well it must be good for those who listen to the pros ;) "not talking about myself here". Anyways, the group consists of about 20 people, mostly Germans, and hence comes the question of listening !! Its a good exercise for me to finally test my spoken and heard German...and i would say i am doing quite well....well i get the jist of what they want me to do ;) The only problem i face is when they overestimate me and start speaking very fluent and colloquial German....An example would be...Woher kommst du ? means where do you come from...and the other day someone asked me...wo bist du hier? which means the same, but was quite new to me...so i blabbered on for 5 minutes, answering to...why are you here....finally somebody had to shut me up by bursting my bubble. In any case, the team here is younger and faster...of course i miss the experienced players and their long throws from Dresden, but still i think, based on pure power and passion, my current team has the potential to defeat my mates at Dresden...
    April 04

    italian movies

    Well after more than a year i am back at this blog. During this time a lot has happened. I have completed my masters course at TU Dresden, and am finally doing my phd at Saarbruecken. The in vivo computing, formerly known as dna computing more or less works. We are still pursuing that dream. Definately we are a step closer.
    So, forgetting what lies in the past with this entry, lets talk about the present. My newest passion is italian movies. After having watched Cinema Paradiso and Ladri di biciclette (the bicycle thief), i am completely awestruck by the shear intensity of italian cinema. The movies are closer to life, they portray human emotions that not many computer generated movies of todays era can not even think of. When you watch these movies, you laugh, you cry and you sit at the edge of your seat !!! The bicycle thief is the story of a poor man in Rome whose cycle is stolen and how he himself is forced to steal a cycle at the end. The movie can be explained in one sentence but every part of the movie makes you feel. This is the true power of cinema that somehow has been forgotten or ignored by the current overpaid current directors. Recently i also watched "crash", well a truely remarkable, in your face movie, that makes you think. Go and watch and fall in love with the cinema....old or new, colored or black and white...
    April 12

    First glimpses of GFP

    Since last time, i have been to the FACS machine twice and both times, the results have been really good. Although not everything is working, still we have enough results to be happy about. We can see a clear distinction between the two states and a gradual increment from 0 to 1. Hope that everything keeps working fine ;)
    April 09

    Zero

    Apparently, Ethanol interfereces with GFP.. so the last time i could only see a big zero with FACS. Since then, i have done Fluorescence and AFM with my samples and could see and confirm GFP coming from E.Coli like structures. Hopefully tomorrow at FACS we will be able to see some 1s as well.
    March 29

    First child ...

    The first genetic circuits are ready to be tested. By next week, it will be clear if the last 4 yrs and 1 month were wasted or not. Still, a positive result would mean that the next 5 months will be even more strenuous.....
     
    Like giving birth to your first child i guess. Excitement, Anxiety, Fear ...
    January 14

    Weight of water

    Though they go mad they shall be sane.
    Though they sink through the sea, they shall rise again.
    Though lovers be lost, love shall not,
    And death shall have no dominion.
     
    Dylan Thomas
    January 05

    Rizzzz

    These comments that you always see are from my friend Rizwan Ali...Believe it or not: He is doing his PhD here....(Might not be evident from the smartass comments he always manages to come up with). Anyways, he is from Karachi, Pakistan and a very good cook...And although he lives only 4 floors below me, he still chooses this indirect way of communication over conventional ways of human interaction...
     
    I have an exam in Microsystems tomorrow...I should start now ;)

    Master Thesis

    After a lot of meetings and convincing atleast two Dekans (Deans), i finally have my master thesis in the field i always wanted. I will be dealing with DNA Computers. Starting from really basic gates, hopefully we will have complex circuits coming sooner than later.
     
    Atleast i know what i will be doing for the next six months.
    December 24

    Christmas

    Trust me, christmas or any other festival without family and friends is not a happy occasion. Nobody is supposed to remain alone on days when you see people coming back to their families. You try to enjoy and flow along the tide of people going to buy presents for someone, but then once in a while, you have to stop and think, where am i going. What will i do when all these people go back and i too have to go back to an empty room and look for the only two friends i have left here in Dresden? The thought is scary but this company of only a few friends is all that you need to cheer you up.
     
    Enjoy what little you have and even if you know that its transient, this is more than a lot of people will have tonight.
     
    Have a merry christmas and a happy new year. God bless us all.
     
    Could we bestow the gifts we get,
    And keep the ones we give away.
    December 19

    MPI Presentation

    The presentation went fine. I had to try too hard to look enthusiastic and energetic. And i know that even though i tried, the complacency was quite visible. To me this just shows that i am still to reluctant to be enthused by such researches which deal with pure molecular biology. I must say that i was well prepared and i really liked working on my presentation, somehow, it lacked that kick. Perhaps, just because it was such a huge occasion and i just have to get used to the way biological papers are presented. On the whole i am happy that i had the oppurtunity to present at MPI and i really learned a lot.
    December 16

    MPI on monday

    On monday i will present a paper at MPI for molecular cell biology and genetics at Dresden. For some it might be an insignificant, routine event, but for me its a dream come true. MPI seminar by a computer engineer. This just proves to me that my decision to be a Molecualar bioengineer was not wrong. Things are going in the right direction.
    December 11

    What if the room at bottom runs out ?

    Towards DNA computing: Dont act as if you definately know that this is not going to happen. Dont be too prejudiced to think that the future of nanomachines is bleak. It took God billions of years to make the most complicated human forms. We will definately be faster than him. No i am not commiting blasphemy. Its a fact that God started from the premordial soup of life that consisted of single atoms. Perhaps we humans, who always start in the top-down fashion cant fully understand the benefits of starting bottom-up. In this section, i will share my dream for last three years towards DNA Computing.