Dravid is back and the Ashes

I am a big Rahul Dravid fan and I am glad he has got back into the ODI sqaud. The only reason for this is the dismal performace of our young talent, Rohit Sharma, Raina in holding the middle order together consistently. With Yuvraj no longer a spring chicken, the next wave of youngsters need to step up and start making big scores.

In other cricket news, I shall be listening to Blofield, Agnew and Boycott on Test Match Special starting Thursday. Can't wait. Its been a pretty exciting Ashes mainly because of both teams playing really badly. I only hope they both play their best cricket in the final Test and we get a really exciting match. Might even stand in line for a ticket at the Oval!!

The answer to my questions

This does answer all my questions in life. I especially like the one about "Why water is wet?" and "How much does the sky weigh?"

Updates

Not much to say except that the move to London has been made. A small, expensive, quaint flat has been found and rented near the Kensington Olympia station.

A salary is forthcoming allowing me to contribute to the UK economic recovery.

I am no longer in full-time study, a feeling I have not experienced for 29 years!!

I walk 1.5 hours everyday, through Hyde Park to work.

I tried giving up chocolate...

I didn't succeed.

I have piles of work to finish, but have just heard my grant proposal was unsuccessful and don't really feel like working.

I have moved from working on mosquitoes, rat urine to swines. What next in my career menagerie?

Great idea for vaccine

Take stem cells from a person at birth.
Grow them into APCs/DCs with peptide in them
Immunise
Ideally only the peptide vaccine response should be elicited

The sluggishness continues

Didn't get as much done yesterday as I had planned or as I should have.Well...people take months to write the damn thing and here I am trying to finish it in a week. Wasn't really realistic, was it?

In other news, today was spent by taking another exam..My written driving test. I barely passed. One more wrong answer and I would have had to take the exam again. there were 36 questions and you needed 30 correct to pass. I got exactly 30!

My other rant today is about the inefficient and useless banking services in the US. They ply you with cards and leaflets but in terms of services they are terrible.

Firstly, it takes them 5 working days to make an international bank draft! HSBC Uk - 5 hours.
Secondly, their currency exchange counter has no board/screen/information about exchange rates. They assume that you don't care what rate they offer as you will have to take it or else they experience great pleasure in making you wait in a line for 15 minutes simply to ask them the exchange rate for the pound. Remarkable.

Oh..sorry, what really annoyed me was that they could take up to 3 working days to change my dollars into Indian Rupees. Three days, you cannot be serious!

To top everything off, I keep getting calls from Bank of America requesting me to purchase their fantastic life insurance offer. Bah, Take a hike, Vamoose, In your dreams are all choice phrases that come to mind.

Useless day.
I woke up early. Spent the morning doing PH250C. The whole afternoon was spent in mental masturbation as I tried to get over my Ch.5 stumbling block. Afternoon and evening whizzed by as no writing got done.

Its 5am and all I have to show for staying up close to 21 hours is:
1. Introduction to Ch.5
2. Jump over stumbling block.

Will spend the next three hours before I hit the bed on finishing all the figures for Ch.5 and 6.

I also think I have wound myself up so tight about getting this done by Tuesday that my body is experiencing some weird symptoms, i.e. I might be ill without actually being ill.

today, for the first time in my conscious memory (pre-senile dementia affected) , I was unable to finish a chocolate Brownie. I couldn't take more than two small bits of it before I began to feel nauseated and sick. It was my stomach revolting against any thing heavy...

Scary. Can you imagine me not being able to eat sweets and chocolate? I don't think I could live like that - might just be easier to commit suicide and go to Cadbury's heaven.

POA for today

I have a new reader..JM who is going to keep track of me from the land of the Amazon and favelas.

Anyway, didn't do much work yesterday except to write a draft of Ch4. discussion. I think I have it sorted except that I want to make it interesting and have lots of ideas for which I need to find papers that can back it up.

Its noon already and I have achieved a little bit. Finished my PH250C Final exam and subletting my apartment.

To do today:
1. Write Ch4 discussion final
2. Sort out figures of Ch5. (stumbling block needs to be hopped over)
3. Write up results and introduction of Ch5
4. Write up methods chapter (cut and paste mainly from transfer report and journal articles)

Its an all nighter today because tomorrow is packing and socialising day. The last time I moved, I had a wee bit of help from Mother and Little One. Any chance you want to fly out for two days to help me with packing again?

ok..now that I have spent five minutes procrastinating with this post, its back to Adeno/MVA.